http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/waiting_for_the_barbarians_201611271
Waiting for the Barbarians
We await the crisis. It could be economic. It could be a terrorist attack within the United States. It could be widespread devastation caused by global warming. It could be nationwide unrest as the death spiral of the American empire intensifies. It could be another defeat in our endless and futile wars. The crisis is coming. And when it arrives it will be seized upon by the corporate state, nominally led by a clueless real estate developer, to impose martial law and formalize the end of American democracy.
When we look back on this sad, pathetic period in American history we will ask the questions all who have slid into despotism ask. Why were we asleep? How did we allow this to happen? Why didn’t we see it coming? Why didn’t we resist?
Why did we allow the corporate state to strip away the rights of poor people of color and force them to live in terror in mini-police states? Why did we build the world’s largest system of mass incarceration? Did we not see that the rest of us would be next? Why did we agree that those defined by the state as terrorists could not only be deprived of their rights but be assassinated? Did we think the state would restrict itself to persecuting and murdering Muslims? Why did we remain silent as the state arrogated to itself the right to detain and prosecute people not for what they had done, or even for what they were planning to do, but for holding religious or political beliefs that the state deemed seditious? Why did we stand by and permit the state to torture? Did we not see that once rights became privileges the state would one day revoke them?
The failure of our capitalist democracy was collective. It was bred by ignorance, indifference, racism, bigotry and the seduction of mass propaganda. It was bred by elites, especially in the press, the courts and academia, who chose careerism over moral and intellectual courage. Our rights as citizens were taken from us one by one. There was hardly a word of protest.
Where were the lawyers, judges, law professors and law school deans who should have ferociously defended our rights to privacy, due process and habeas corpus? Why didn’t they challenge Barack Obama’s signing into law Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act? Section 1021 overturns the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibited the military from acting as a domestic police force. The section also permits the military to carry out extraordinary rendition of U.S. citizens, strip them of due process and hold them indefinitely in military detention centers.
Why didn’t the legal profession fight against the Obama administration’s misinterpretation of the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force Act as giving the executive branch the right to order the assassination of U.S. citizens? How did lawyers and judges allow the misuse of the Espionage Act to target and imprison whistleblowers? How did they permit the Supreme Court to define unlimited corporate contributions to electoral campaigns as a right to petition the government or a form of free speech? Why did they allow those branded as terrorists by the state, and allow poor people of color, to be locked for years in solitary confinement or special detention centers without fair trials? Why were they silent as the state built “black sites” around the globe, including in Chicago, to torture? Why did they permit the state to impose special administrative measures, known as SAMs, to prevent or severely restrict prisoners’ communication with other prisoners, attorneys, family, the media and people outside the jails, crippling any possibility of an adequate defense? Did they not know where the erosion of the legal system would lead?
And where were all the economists pointing out the absurdity of the neoliberal ideology that told us that human society should be governed by the dictates of the market—that is, until the market collapsed in an orgy of fraud and corruption and needed the government to bail it out? Why did the political scientists chase after “value-free” data, carry out quantitative projects and seek an unachievable scientific clarity? Why didn’t they and others warn us about the dire consequences of eroding democratic institutions? Why did they stand mute as money replaced the vote and lobbyists authored our laws? Where were they when constitutionally protected statements, beliefs and associations were criminalized? Why didn’t they protest when dissidents, even those who broke no laws, were stripped of their rights and imprisoned without due process? Why did they continue to speak and write as if the fiction of our democracy was real? Why didn’t they illuminate our constitutional crisis? Why did those in academia commit intellectual treason? They traded their intellectual integrity and autonomy for tenure, publishing contracts, lecture fees, research grants and coveted deanships or college presidencies.
Why did the press render the poor and the working poor invisible? Why did it walk away from its role as the investigator of corruption and abuse of power? Why did it become a courtier to the elites? Why did it measure the success of its broadcasts and publications solely by the profits produced? Why did it refuse to give a platform to critics of corporate capitalism and imperial war? Why did it serve as an echo chamber for the arms industry and Wall Street? Why did it hide behind the fiction of neutrality and objectivity? Why did it debase reporting to quoting establishment experts—most of whom lied—in order to stay within the narrow confines of opinion sanctioned by the power elites? Why did the press obscure the truth?
Where were the great moral and religious truth tellers? Why did they use the language of identity politics as a substitute for the language of social justice? Why did they refuse to condemn as heretics those on the Christian right, which fused the symbols of the state with those of the Christian religion? Why did they collaborate with the evil of corporate capitalism? Why did they retreat into churches and synagogues, establishing exclusive social clubs, rather than fight the injustice outside their doors? Why did they abandon the poor? Why did they replace prophetic demands for justice with cloying political correctness and personal piety?
The desiccation of our liberal institutions ensured the demise of our capitalist democracy. History has amply demonstrated what was to come next. The rot and political paralysis vomited up a con artist as president along with an array of half-wits, criminals and racist ideologues. They will manufacture scapegoats as their gross ineptitude and unachievable promises are exposed. They will fan the flames of white supremacy and racial and religious bigotry. They will use all the tools of legal and physical control handed to them by our system of “inverted totalitarianism” to crush even the most tepid forms of dissent.
The last constraints will be removed by a crisis. The crisis will be used to create a climate of fear. The pretense of democracy will end.
“A fascism of the future—an emergency response to some still unimagined crisis—need not resemble classical fascism perfectly in its outward signs and symbols,” Robert Paxton writes in “The Anatomy of Fascism.” “Some future movement that would ‘give up free institutions’ in order to perform the same functions of mass mobilization for the reunification, purification, and regeneration of some troubled group would undoubtedly call itself something else and draw on fresh symbols. That would not make it any less dangerous.”
Our ruling mafia will use the crisis much as the Nazis did in 1933 when the Reichstag was burned. It will publish its own version of the “Order of the Reich President for the Protection of People and State.” The U.S. Constitution will be in effect suspended. Personal freedom, including freedom of expression, freedom of the press, freedom to organize and freedom of assembly, will be abolished. Privacy will be formally eradicated. Search warrants will be unnecessary. America’s emergency decrees will cement into place what largely exists now. When they come, the loss of freedoms will be openly acknowledged and made permanent.
Anyone who is not white or “loyal” will be attacked, first verbally and then physically. Everyone will be constantly watched. The prisons will swell. Militarized police will no longer be confined to operating in marginal communities. Lethal, indiscriminant force by the state will be common. The courts will condemn with little or no evidence. The press will utterly unplug itself from reality and speak to us as if we lived in a functioning democracy. Academics will burrow deeper into their holes of obtuse jargon and quantitative irrelevance. The last remnants of our labor unions will be crushed. Religious institutions, as silent about the evils of corporate capitalism as Goldman Sachs, will take the safe route of spirituality and piety rather than social justice. The lawyers, courts and law schools will serve the law even when the law overturns our constitutional rights by judicial fiat and is a tool of naked repression. Hollywood and the rest of mass entertainment will churn out the usual tawdry fare of sexually explicit and violence-drenched spectacles. The military “virtues” of hypermasculinity and patriarchy will be celebrated.
There will be rebels. They will live in the shadows. They will be the renegade painters, sculptors, poets, writers, journalists, musicians, actors, dancers, organizers, activists, mystics, intellectuals and other outcasts who are willing to accept personal sacrifice. They will not surrender their integrity, creativity, independence and finally their souls. They will speak the truth. The state will have little tolerance of them. They will be poor. The wider society will be conditioned by mass propaganda to write them off as parasites or traitors. They will keep alive what is left of dignity and freedom. Perhaps one day they will rise up and triumph. But one does not live in poverty and on the margins of society because of the certainty of success. One lives like that because to collaborate with radical evil is to betray all that is good and beautiful. It is to become a captive. It is to give up the moral autonomy that makes us human. The rebels will be our hope.
Sunday, November 27, 2016
Saturday, November 19, 2016
SC138-5
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article45863.htm
Stay Alert America - The Worst Is Yet To Come
“Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
— George Santayana
Stay alert, America.
This is not the time to drop our guards, even for a moment.
Nothing has changed since the election to alter the immediate and very real dangers of roadside strip searches, government surveillance, biometric databases, citizens being treated like terrorists, imprisonments for criticizing the government, national ID cards, SWAT team raids, censorship, forcible blood draws and DNA extractions, private prisons, weaponized drones, red light cameras, tasers, active shooter drills, police misconduct and government corruption.
Time alone will tell whether those who put their hopes in a political savior will find that trust rewarded or betrayed.
Personally, I’m not holding my breath.
I’ve been down this road before.
I’ve studied history.
I know what comes next.
It’s early days yet, but President-elect Trump—like his predecessors—has already begun to dial back many of the campaign promises that pledged to reform a broken system of government.
The candidate who railed against big government and vowed to “drain the swamp” of lobbyists and special interest donors has already given lobbyists, corporate donors and members of the governmental elite starring roles in his new administration.
America, you’ve been played.
This is what happens when you play politics with matters of life, death and liberty.
You lose every time.
Unfortunately, in this instance, we all lose because of the deluded hypocrisy of the Left and the Right, both of which sanctioned the expansion of the police state as long as it was their party at the helm.
For the past eight years, the Left—stridently outspoken and adversarial while George W. Bush was president—has been unusually quiet about things like torture, endless wars, drone strikes, executive orders, government overreach and fascism.
As Glenn Greenwald points out for The Washington Post:
Beginning in his first month in office and continuing through today, Obama not only continued many of the most extreme executive-power policies he once condemned, but in many cases strengthened and extended them. His administration detained terrorism suspects without due process, proposed new frameworks to keep them locked up without trial, targeted thousands of individuals (including a U.S. citizen) for execution by drone, invoked secrecy doctrines to shield torture and eavesdropping programs from judicial review, and covertly expanded the nation’s mass electronic surveillance…
Liberals vehemently denounced these abuses during the Bush presidency… But after Obama took office, many liberals often tolerated — and even praised — his aggressive assertions of executive authority. It is hard to overstate how complete the Democrats’ about-face on these questions was once their own leader controlled the levers of power… After just three years of the Obama presidency, liberals sanctioned a system that allowed the president to imprison people without any trial or an ounce of due process.
Suddenly, with Trump in the White House for the next four years, it’s all fair game again.
As The Federalist declares with a tongue-in-cheek approach, “Dissent, executive restraint, gridlock, you name it. Now that Donald Trump will be president, stuff that used to be treason is suddenly cool again.”
Yet as Greenwald makes clear, if Trump is about to inherit vast presidential powers, he has the Democrats to thank for them.
A military empire that polices the globe. Secret courts, secret wars and secret budgets. Unconstitutional mass surveillance. Unchecked presidential power. Indefinite detention. Executive signing statements.
These are just a small sampling of the abusive powers that have been used liberally by Obama and will be used again and again by future presidents.
After all, presidents are just puppets on a string, made to dance to the tune of the powers-that-be. And the powers-that-be want war. They want totalitarianism. They want a monied oligarchy to run the show. They want bureaucracy and sprawl and government leaders that march in lockstep with their dictates. Most of all, they want a gullible, distracted, easily led populace that can be manipulated, maneuvered and made to fear whatever phantom menace the government chooses to make the bogeyman of the month.
Unless Trump does another about-face, rest assured that the policies of a Trump Administration will be no different from an Obama Administration or a Bush Administration, at least not where it really counts.
For that matter, a Clinton Administration would have been no different.
In other words, Democrats by any other name would be Republicans, and vice versa.
This is the terrible power of the shadow government: to maintain the status quo, no matter which candidate gets elected.
War will continue. Surveillance will continue. Drone killings will continue. Police shootings will continue. Highway robbery meted out by government officials will continue. Corrupt government will continue. Profit-driven prisons will continue. Censorship and persecution of anyone who criticizes the government will continue. The militarization of the police will continue. The government’s efforts to label dissidents as extremists and terrorists will continue.
In such a climate, the police state will thrive.
The more things change, the more they will stay the same.
We’ve been stuck in this political Groundhog’s Day for so long that minor deviations appear to be major developments while obscuring the fact that we’re stuck on repeat, unable to see the forest for the trees.
This is what is referred to as creeping normality, or a death by a thousand cuts.
It’s a concept invoked by Pulitzer Prize-winning scientist Jared Diamond to describe how major changes, if implemented slowly in small stages over time, can be accepted as normal without the shock and resistance that might greet a sudden upheaval.
Diamond’s concerns are environmental in nature, but they are no less relevant to our understanding of how a once-free nation could willingly bind itself with the chains of dictatorship.
Writing about Easter Island’s now-vanished civilization and the societal decline and environmental degradation that contributed to it, Diamond explains, “In just a few centuries, the people of Easter Island wiped out their forest, drove their plants and animals to extinction, and saw their complex society spiral into chaos and cannibalism… Why didn’t they look around, realize what they were doing, and stop before it was too late? What were they thinking when they cut down the last palm tree?”
His answer: “I suspect that the disaster happened not with a bang but with a whimper.”
Much like America’s own colonists, Easter Island’s early colonists discovered a new world—“a pristine paradise”—teeming with life. Almost 2000 years after its first settlers arrived, Easter Island was reduced to a barren graveyard by a populace so focused on their immediate needs that they failed to preserve paradise for future generations.
To quote Joni Mitchell, they paved over paradise to put up a parking lot.
In Easter Island’s case, as Diamond speculates:
The forest…vanished slowly, over decades. Perhaps war interrupted the moving teams; perhaps by the time the carvers had finished their work, the last rope snapped. In the meantime, any islander who tried to warn about the dangers of progressive deforestation would have been overridden by vested interests of carvers, bureaucrats, and chiefs, whose jobs depended on continued deforestation… The changes in forest cover from year to year would have been hard to detect… Only older people, recollecting their childhoods decades earlier, could have recognized a difference.
Sound painfully familiar yet?
Substitute Easter Island’s trees for America’s republic and the trees being decimated for our freedoms, and the arrow hits the mark.
Diamond observes, “Gradually trees became fewer, smaller, and less important. By the time the last fruit-bearing adult palm tree was cut, palms had long since ceased to be of economic significance. That left only smaller and smaller palm saplings to clear each year, along with other bushes and treelets. No one would have noticed the felling of the last small palm.”
We’ve already torn down the rich forest of liberties established by our founders. They don’t teach freedom in the schools. Few Americans know their history. And even fewer seem to care that their fellow Americans are being jailed, muzzled, shot, tasered, and treated as if they have no rights at all. They don’t care, that is, until it happens to them—at which point it’s almost too late.
This is how the police state wins. This is how tyranny rises. This is how freedom falls.
A thousand cuts, each one justified or ignored or shrugged over as inconsequential enough by itself to bother. But they add up.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, each cut, each attempt to undermine our freedoms, each loss of some critical right—to think freely, to assemble, to speak without fear of being shamed or censored, to raise our children as we see fit, to worship or not worship as our conscience dictates, to eat what we want and love who we want, to live as we want—they add up to an immeasurable failure on the part of each and every one of us to stop the descent down that slippery slope.
It’s taken us 200 short years to destroy the freedoms our founders worked so hard to secure, and it’s happened with barely a whimper of protest from “we the people.”
So when I read about demonstrations breaking out in cities across the country and thousands taking to the streets to protest the threat of fascism from a Trump presidency, I have to wonder where were the concerns when access to Obama came easily to any special interest groups and donors willing and able to pay the admissions price?
When I see celebrities threatening to leave the country in droves, I have to ask myself, where was the outcry when the government’s efforts to transform local police into extensions of the military went into overdrive under the Obama administration?
When my newsfeed is overflowing with people wishing they could keep the Obamas in office because they are so cool, I shake my head in disgust over this “cool” president’s use of targeted drone strikes to assassinate American citizens without any due process.
When legal think tanks are threatening lawsuits over the possibility of Trump muzzling free expression, I can’t help but wonder where the outrage was over the Obama administration’s demonizing and criminalization of those who criticized the government.
And when commentators who previously dismissed as fear-mongering and hateful any comparison of the government’s tactics to Nazi Germany are suddenly comparing Trump to Hitler, I have to wonder if perhaps we’ve been living in different countries all along, because none of this is new.
Indeed, if we’re repeating history, the worst is yet to come.
Stay Alert America - The Worst Is Yet To Come
“Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
— George Santayana
Stay alert, America.
This is not the time to drop our guards, even for a moment.
Nothing has changed since the election to alter the immediate and very real dangers of roadside strip searches, government surveillance, biometric databases, citizens being treated like terrorists, imprisonments for criticizing the government, national ID cards, SWAT team raids, censorship, forcible blood draws and DNA extractions, private prisons, weaponized drones, red light cameras, tasers, active shooter drills, police misconduct and government corruption.
Time alone will tell whether those who put their hopes in a political savior will find that trust rewarded or betrayed.
Personally, I’m not holding my breath.
I’ve been down this road before.
I’ve studied history.
I know what comes next.
It’s early days yet, but President-elect Trump—like his predecessors—has already begun to dial back many of the campaign promises that pledged to reform a broken system of government.
The candidate who railed against big government and vowed to “drain the swamp” of lobbyists and special interest donors has already given lobbyists, corporate donors and members of the governmental elite starring roles in his new administration.
America, you’ve been played.
This is what happens when you play politics with matters of life, death and liberty.
You lose every time.
Unfortunately, in this instance, we all lose because of the deluded hypocrisy of the Left and the Right, both of which sanctioned the expansion of the police state as long as it was their party at the helm.
For the past eight years, the Left—stridently outspoken and adversarial while George W. Bush was president—has been unusually quiet about things like torture, endless wars, drone strikes, executive orders, government overreach and fascism.
As Glenn Greenwald points out for The Washington Post:
Beginning in his first month in office and continuing through today, Obama not only continued many of the most extreme executive-power policies he once condemned, but in many cases strengthened and extended them. His administration detained terrorism suspects without due process, proposed new frameworks to keep them locked up without trial, targeted thousands of individuals (including a U.S. citizen) for execution by drone, invoked secrecy doctrines to shield torture and eavesdropping programs from judicial review, and covertly expanded the nation’s mass electronic surveillance…
Liberals vehemently denounced these abuses during the Bush presidency… But after Obama took office, many liberals often tolerated — and even praised — his aggressive assertions of executive authority. It is hard to overstate how complete the Democrats’ about-face on these questions was once their own leader controlled the levers of power… After just three years of the Obama presidency, liberals sanctioned a system that allowed the president to imprison people without any trial or an ounce of due process.
Suddenly, with Trump in the White House for the next four years, it’s all fair game again.
As The Federalist declares with a tongue-in-cheek approach, “Dissent, executive restraint, gridlock, you name it. Now that Donald Trump will be president, stuff that used to be treason is suddenly cool again.”
Yet as Greenwald makes clear, if Trump is about to inherit vast presidential powers, he has the Democrats to thank for them.
A military empire that polices the globe. Secret courts, secret wars and secret budgets. Unconstitutional mass surveillance. Unchecked presidential power. Indefinite detention. Executive signing statements.
These are just a small sampling of the abusive powers that have been used liberally by Obama and will be used again and again by future presidents.
After all, presidents are just puppets on a string, made to dance to the tune of the powers-that-be. And the powers-that-be want war. They want totalitarianism. They want a monied oligarchy to run the show. They want bureaucracy and sprawl and government leaders that march in lockstep with their dictates. Most of all, they want a gullible, distracted, easily led populace that can be manipulated, maneuvered and made to fear whatever phantom menace the government chooses to make the bogeyman of the month.
Unless Trump does another about-face, rest assured that the policies of a Trump Administration will be no different from an Obama Administration or a Bush Administration, at least not where it really counts.
For that matter, a Clinton Administration would have been no different.
In other words, Democrats by any other name would be Republicans, and vice versa.
This is the terrible power of the shadow government: to maintain the status quo, no matter which candidate gets elected.
War will continue. Surveillance will continue. Drone killings will continue. Police shootings will continue. Highway robbery meted out by government officials will continue. Corrupt government will continue. Profit-driven prisons will continue. Censorship and persecution of anyone who criticizes the government will continue. The militarization of the police will continue. The government’s efforts to label dissidents as extremists and terrorists will continue.
In such a climate, the police state will thrive.
The more things change, the more they will stay the same.
We’ve been stuck in this political Groundhog’s Day for so long that minor deviations appear to be major developments while obscuring the fact that we’re stuck on repeat, unable to see the forest for the trees.
This is what is referred to as creeping normality, or a death by a thousand cuts.
It’s a concept invoked by Pulitzer Prize-winning scientist Jared Diamond to describe how major changes, if implemented slowly in small stages over time, can be accepted as normal without the shock and resistance that might greet a sudden upheaval.
Diamond’s concerns are environmental in nature, but they are no less relevant to our understanding of how a once-free nation could willingly bind itself with the chains of dictatorship.
Writing about Easter Island’s now-vanished civilization and the societal decline and environmental degradation that contributed to it, Diamond explains, “In just a few centuries, the people of Easter Island wiped out their forest, drove their plants and animals to extinction, and saw their complex society spiral into chaos and cannibalism… Why didn’t they look around, realize what they were doing, and stop before it was too late? What were they thinking when they cut down the last palm tree?”
His answer: “I suspect that the disaster happened not with a bang but with a whimper.”
Much like America’s own colonists, Easter Island’s early colonists discovered a new world—“a pristine paradise”—teeming with life. Almost 2000 years after its first settlers arrived, Easter Island was reduced to a barren graveyard by a populace so focused on their immediate needs that they failed to preserve paradise for future generations.
To quote Joni Mitchell, they paved over paradise to put up a parking lot.
In Easter Island’s case, as Diamond speculates:
The forest…vanished slowly, over decades. Perhaps war interrupted the moving teams; perhaps by the time the carvers had finished their work, the last rope snapped. In the meantime, any islander who tried to warn about the dangers of progressive deforestation would have been overridden by vested interests of carvers, bureaucrats, and chiefs, whose jobs depended on continued deforestation… The changes in forest cover from year to year would have been hard to detect… Only older people, recollecting their childhoods decades earlier, could have recognized a difference.
Sound painfully familiar yet?
Substitute Easter Island’s trees for America’s republic and the trees being decimated for our freedoms, and the arrow hits the mark.
Diamond observes, “Gradually trees became fewer, smaller, and less important. By the time the last fruit-bearing adult palm tree was cut, palms had long since ceased to be of economic significance. That left only smaller and smaller palm saplings to clear each year, along with other bushes and treelets. No one would have noticed the felling of the last small palm.”
We’ve already torn down the rich forest of liberties established by our founders. They don’t teach freedom in the schools. Few Americans know their history. And even fewer seem to care that their fellow Americans are being jailed, muzzled, shot, tasered, and treated as if they have no rights at all. They don’t care, that is, until it happens to them—at which point it’s almost too late.
This is how the police state wins. This is how tyranny rises. This is how freedom falls.
A thousand cuts, each one justified or ignored or shrugged over as inconsequential enough by itself to bother. But they add up.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, each cut, each attempt to undermine our freedoms, each loss of some critical right—to think freely, to assemble, to speak without fear of being shamed or censored, to raise our children as we see fit, to worship or not worship as our conscience dictates, to eat what we want and love who we want, to live as we want—they add up to an immeasurable failure on the part of each and every one of us to stop the descent down that slippery slope.
It’s taken us 200 short years to destroy the freedoms our founders worked so hard to secure, and it’s happened with barely a whimper of protest from “we the people.”
So when I read about demonstrations breaking out in cities across the country and thousands taking to the streets to protest the threat of fascism from a Trump presidency, I have to wonder where were the concerns when access to Obama came easily to any special interest groups and donors willing and able to pay the admissions price?
When I see celebrities threatening to leave the country in droves, I have to ask myself, where was the outcry when the government’s efforts to transform local police into extensions of the military went into overdrive under the Obama administration?
When my newsfeed is overflowing with people wishing they could keep the Obamas in office because they are so cool, I shake my head in disgust over this “cool” president’s use of targeted drone strikes to assassinate American citizens without any due process.
When legal think tanks are threatening lawsuits over the possibility of Trump muzzling free expression, I can’t help but wonder where the outrage was over the Obama administration’s demonizing and criminalization of those who criticized the government.
And when commentators who previously dismissed as fear-mongering and hateful any comparison of the government’s tactics to Nazi Germany are suddenly comparing Trump to Hitler, I have to wonder if perhaps we’ve been living in different countries all along, because none of this is new.
Indeed, if we’re repeating history, the worst is yet to come.
Sunday, November 13, 2016
SC138-4
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/its_worse_than_you_think_20161111
It’s Worse Than You Think
Widespread social unrest will ignite when Donald Trump’s base realizes it has been betrayed. I do not know when this will happen. But that it will happen is certain. Investments in the stocks of the war industry, internal security and the prison-industrial complex have skyrocketed since Trump won the presidency. There is a lot of money to be made from a militarized police state.
Our capitalist democracy ceased to function more than two decades ago. We underwent a corporate coup carried out by the Democratic and Republican parties. There are no institutions left that can authentically be called democratic. Trump and Hillary Clinton in a functioning democracy would have never been presidential nominees. The long and ruthless corporate assault on the working class, the legal system, electoral politics, the mass media, social services, the ecosystem, education and civil liberties in the name of neoliberalism has disemboweled the country. It has left the nation a decayed wreck. We celebrate ignorance. We have replaced political discourse, news, culture and intellectual inquiry with celebrity worship and spectacle.
Fascism, as historian Gaetano Salvemini pointed out, is about “giving up free institutions.” It is the product of a democracy that has ceased to function. The democratic form will remain, much as it did during the dictatorships in the later part of the Roman Empire, but the reality is despotism, or in our case, corporate despotism. The citizen does not genuinely participate in power.
“It is very similar to late Weimar Germany,” Noam Chomsky told me with uncanny insight when I spoke with him six years ago. “The parallels are striking. There was also tremendous disillusionment with the parliamentary system. The most striking fact about Weimar was not that the Nazis managed to destroy the Social Democrats and the Communists, but that the traditional parties, the Conservative and Liberal parties, were hated and disappeared. It left a vacuum which the Nazis very cleverly and intelligently managed to take over.
“The United States is extremely lucky that no honest, charismatic figure has arisen,” Chomsky went on. “Every charismatic figure is such an obvious crook that he destroys himself, like [Joseph] McCarthy or [Richard] Nixon or the evangelist preachers. If somebody comes along who is charismatic and honest, this country is in real trouble because of the frustration, disillusionment, the justified anger and the absence of any coherent response. What are people supposed to think if someone says ‘I have got an answer: We have an enemy’? There it was the Jews. Here it will be the illegal immigrants and the blacks. We will be told that white males are a persecuted minority. We will be told we have to defend ourselves and the honor of the nation. Military force will be exalted. People will be beaten up. This could become an overwhelming force. And if it happens, it will be more dangerous than Germany. The United States is the world power. Germany was powerful but had more powerful antagonists. I don’t think all this is very far away. If the polls are accurate, it is not the Republicans but the right-wing Republicans, the crazed Republicans, who will sweep the next election.”
The repression of dissents will soon resemble the repression under past totalitarian regimes. State security will become an invasive and palpable presence. The most benign forms of opposition will be treated as if they are a threat to national security. Many, hoping to avoid the wrath of the state, will become compliant and passive. We, however, must fight back. We must carry out sustained acts of civil disobedience, as many have done in streets around the country since the election. But we must also be aware that the democratic space allotted to us in our system of inverted totalitarianism has become much, much smaller.
Trump, with no democratic institutions left to restrain him, will accelerate the corporate assault, from privatizing Social Security to exonerating militarized police forces for the indiscriminate murder of unarmed citizens, while he unleashes the fossil fuel industry and the war industry to degrade and most probably extinguish life on earth. His administration will be populated by the lunatic fringe of the Republican Party, men and women characterized by profound intellectual and moral impoverishment, as well as a stunning ability to ignore reality. These ideologues speak exclusively in the language of intimidation and violence.
Half the country lives in poverty. Our former manufacturing centers are decayed wrecks. Our constitutional rights, including due process and habeas corpus, have been taken from us by judicial fiat. Corporations and the billionaire class carry out legal tax boycotts. Police gun down unarmed citizens in the street. The military, under Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act, is empowered to carry out the extraordinary rendition of U.S. citizens within the United States, strip them of due process and hold them indefinitely in our black sites. We are the most spied upon, watched, eavesdropped, photographed and monitored population in human history. When the government watches you 24 hours a day, you cannot use the word “liberty.” That is the relationship between a master and a slave. And governments that wield this kind of surveillance power swiftly become totalitarian. Trump and his cronies have been handed by bankrupt elites the legal and physical mechanisms to instantly transform America into a brutal police state.
Rudy Giuliani; Newt Gingrich, who advocates stripping U.S. citizens of their citizenship if they are deemed to be terrorists; retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn and John Bolton—these men will not exhibit legal or moral restraint. They see the world through the Manichaean lens of good and evil, black and white, patriot and traitor. Politics have been transformed, as philosopher Walter Benjamin wrote of fascism, into aesthetics. And the ultimate aesthetic experience for the fascist, Benjamin warned, is war.
State terror and state violence, familiar to poor people of color in our internal colonies, will become familiar to all of us. Racism, nationalism, misogyny, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, intolerance, white supremacy, religious bigotry, hate crimes and a veneration of the hypermasculine values of military culture will define political and cultural discourse. The ruling elites will attempt to divert the growing frustration and rage toward the vulnerable—undocumented workers, Muslims, African-Americans, Latinos, homosexuals, feminists and others. White vigilante violence will be directed at those the state demonizes with little or no legal ramifications. New enemies, at home and abroad, will be manufactured. Our endless wars in the Middle East will be expanded, perhaps to include a confrontation with Russia.
There were some, such as Ralph Nader, who saw this dystopia coming. They desperately tried to build a viable third party and empower citizen movements to give the dispossessed working class a vision and hope. They knew that the longer corporate power had a stranglehold on the economic and political system, the more we seeded the ground for an American fascism.
The elites put up numerous obstacles—refusing to let Nader or later, Jill Stein, into the debates, making ballot access difficult or impossible, turning campaigns into long, money-drenched spectacles that cost billions of dollars, and skillfully using the politics of fear to intimidate voters. But the elites were aided by a bankrupt liberal class. In presidential election after presidential election, especially after Nader’s success in 2000, so-called progressives succumbed to the idiotic mantra of the least worst. Those who should have been the natural allies of third parties and dissident movements abjectly surrendered to the Democratic Party that, like the Republican Party, serves the beast of imperialism and makes war on the poor, the working class and the middle class. The cowardice of the liberal class meant it lost all credibility, much as Bernie Sanders did when he sold his soul to the Clinton campaign. The liberal class proved it would stand and fight for nothing. It mouthed words and ideas it did not truly believe. It bears significant responsibility for the phenomena that created Trump. It should have had the foresight to abandon the Democratic Party after President Bill Clinton passed the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, to build parties and institutions that defended the interests of the working class. If it had stood up for working men and women, it might have prevented them being seduced by protofascists.
The rot of our failed democracy vomited up a con artist who was a creation of the mass media—first playing a fictional master of the universe on a reality television show and later a politician as vaudevillian. Trump pulled in advertising dollars and ratings. Truth and reality were irrelevant. Only when he got the nomination did the mass media see their Frankenstein as a threat, but by then it was too late. If there is one vapid group that is hated even more than the liberal class, it is the corporate press. The more it attacked Trump, the better Trump looked.
Trump is emblematic of what anthropologists call “crisis cults.” A society in terminal decline often retreats into magical thinking. Reality is too much to bear. It places its faith in the fantastic and impossible promises of a demagogue or charlatan who promises the return of a lost golden age. The good jobs will come back. The nation will again be prosperous. The decrepit cities will be rebuilt. America will be great again. These promises, impossible to achieve, are no different from those peddled to Native Americans in the 1880s by the self-styled religious prophet Wovoka. He called on followers to carry out five-day dance ceremonies called the Ghost Dance. Native Americans donned shirts they were told protected them from bullets. They were assured that the buffalo herds would return, the dead warriors and chiefs would rise from the earth and the white men would disappear. None of his promises was realized. Many of his followers were gunned down like sheep by the U.S. army.
We face the most profound crisis in human history. Our response is to elect a man to the presidency who does not believe in climate change. Once societies unplug themselves from reality, those who speak truth become pariahs and enemies of the state. They are subject to severe state repression. Those lost in the reverie of the crisis cult applaud the elimination of these Cassandras. The appealing myths of magical thinking are pleasant opiates. But this narcotic, like all narcotics, leads to squalor and death.
It’s Worse Than You Think
Widespread social unrest will ignite when Donald Trump’s base realizes it has been betrayed. I do not know when this will happen. But that it will happen is certain. Investments in the stocks of the war industry, internal security and the prison-industrial complex have skyrocketed since Trump won the presidency. There is a lot of money to be made from a militarized police state.
Our capitalist democracy ceased to function more than two decades ago. We underwent a corporate coup carried out by the Democratic and Republican parties. There are no institutions left that can authentically be called democratic. Trump and Hillary Clinton in a functioning democracy would have never been presidential nominees. The long and ruthless corporate assault on the working class, the legal system, electoral politics, the mass media, social services, the ecosystem, education and civil liberties in the name of neoliberalism has disemboweled the country. It has left the nation a decayed wreck. We celebrate ignorance. We have replaced political discourse, news, culture and intellectual inquiry with celebrity worship and spectacle.
Fascism, as historian Gaetano Salvemini pointed out, is about “giving up free institutions.” It is the product of a democracy that has ceased to function. The democratic form will remain, much as it did during the dictatorships in the later part of the Roman Empire, but the reality is despotism, or in our case, corporate despotism. The citizen does not genuinely participate in power.
“It is very similar to late Weimar Germany,” Noam Chomsky told me with uncanny insight when I spoke with him six years ago. “The parallels are striking. There was also tremendous disillusionment with the parliamentary system. The most striking fact about Weimar was not that the Nazis managed to destroy the Social Democrats and the Communists, but that the traditional parties, the Conservative and Liberal parties, were hated and disappeared. It left a vacuum which the Nazis very cleverly and intelligently managed to take over.
“The United States is extremely lucky that no honest, charismatic figure has arisen,” Chomsky went on. “Every charismatic figure is such an obvious crook that he destroys himself, like [Joseph] McCarthy or [Richard] Nixon or the evangelist preachers. If somebody comes along who is charismatic and honest, this country is in real trouble because of the frustration, disillusionment, the justified anger and the absence of any coherent response. What are people supposed to think if someone says ‘I have got an answer: We have an enemy’? There it was the Jews. Here it will be the illegal immigrants and the blacks. We will be told that white males are a persecuted minority. We will be told we have to defend ourselves and the honor of the nation. Military force will be exalted. People will be beaten up. This could become an overwhelming force. And if it happens, it will be more dangerous than Germany. The United States is the world power. Germany was powerful but had more powerful antagonists. I don’t think all this is very far away. If the polls are accurate, it is not the Republicans but the right-wing Republicans, the crazed Republicans, who will sweep the next election.”
The repression of dissents will soon resemble the repression under past totalitarian regimes. State security will become an invasive and palpable presence. The most benign forms of opposition will be treated as if they are a threat to national security. Many, hoping to avoid the wrath of the state, will become compliant and passive. We, however, must fight back. We must carry out sustained acts of civil disobedience, as many have done in streets around the country since the election. But we must also be aware that the democratic space allotted to us in our system of inverted totalitarianism has become much, much smaller.
Trump, with no democratic institutions left to restrain him, will accelerate the corporate assault, from privatizing Social Security to exonerating militarized police forces for the indiscriminate murder of unarmed citizens, while he unleashes the fossil fuel industry and the war industry to degrade and most probably extinguish life on earth. His administration will be populated by the lunatic fringe of the Republican Party, men and women characterized by profound intellectual and moral impoverishment, as well as a stunning ability to ignore reality. These ideologues speak exclusively in the language of intimidation and violence.
Half the country lives in poverty. Our former manufacturing centers are decayed wrecks. Our constitutional rights, including due process and habeas corpus, have been taken from us by judicial fiat. Corporations and the billionaire class carry out legal tax boycotts. Police gun down unarmed citizens in the street. The military, under Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act, is empowered to carry out the extraordinary rendition of U.S. citizens within the United States, strip them of due process and hold them indefinitely in our black sites. We are the most spied upon, watched, eavesdropped, photographed and monitored population in human history. When the government watches you 24 hours a day, you cannot use the word “liberty.” That is the relationship between a master and a slave. And governments that wield this kind of surveillance power swiftly become totalitarian. Trump and his cronies have been handed by bankrupt elites the legal and physical mechanisms to instantly transform America into a brutal police state.
Rudy Giuliani; Newt Gingrich, who advocates stripping U.S. citizens of their citizenship if they are deemed to be terrorists; retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn and John Bolton—these men will not exhibit legal or moral restraint. They see the world through the Manichaean lens of good and evil, black and white, patriot and traitor. Politics have been transformed, as philosopher Walter Benjamin wrote of fascism, into aesthetics. And the ultimate aesthetic experience for the fascist, Benjamin warned, is war.
State terror and state violence, familiar to poor people of color in our internal colonies, will become familiar to all of us. Racism, nationalism, misogyny, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, intolerance, white supremacy, religious bigotry, hate crimes and a veneration of the hypermasculine values of military culture will define political and cultural discourse. The ruling elites will attempt to divert the growing frustration and rage toward the vulnerable—undocumented workers, Muslims, African-Americans, Latinos, homosexuals, feminists and others. White vigilante violence will be directed at those the state demonizes with little or no legal ramifications. New enemies, at home and abroad, will be manufactured. Our endless wars in the Middle East will be expanded, perhaps to include a confrontation with Russia.
There were some, such as Ralph Nader, who saw this dystopia coming. They desperately tried to build a viable third party and empower citizen movements to give the dispossessed working class a vision and hope. They knew that the longer corporate power had a stranglehold on the economic and political system, the more we seeded the ground for an American fascism.
The elites put up numerous obstacles—refusing to let Nader or later, Jill Stein, into the debates, making ballot access difficult or impossible, turning campaigns into long, money-drenched spectacles that cost billions of dollars, and skillfully using the politics of fear to intimidate voters. But the elites were aided by a bankrupt liberal class. In presidential election after presidential election, especially after Nader’s success in 2000, so-called progressives succumbed to the idiotic mantra of the least worst. Those who should have been the natural allies of third parties and dissident movements abjectly surrendered to the Democratic Party that, like the Republican Party, serves the beast of imperialism and makes war on the poor, the working class and the middle class. The cowardice of the liberal class meant it lost all credibility, much as Bernie Sanders did when he sold his soul to the Clinton campaign. The liberal class proved it would stand and fight for nothing. It mouthed words and ideas it did not truly believe. It bears significant responsibility for the phenomena that created Trump. It should have had the foresight to abandon the Democratic Party after President Bill Clinton passed the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, to build parties and institutions that defended the interests of the working class. If it had stood up for working men and women, it might have prevented them being seduced by protofascists.
The rot of our failed democracy vomited up a con artist who was a creation of the mass media—first playing a fictional master of the universe on a reality television show and later a politician as vaudevillian. Trump pulled in advertising dollars and ratings. Truth and reality were irrelevant. Only when he got the nomination did the mass media see their Frankenstein as a threat, but by then it was too late. If there is one vapid group that is hated even more than the liberal class, it is the corporate press. The more it attacked Trump, the better Trump looked.
Trump is emblematic of what anthropologists call “crisis cults.” A society in terminal decline often retreats into magical thinking. Reality is too much to bear. It places its faith in the fantastic and impossible promises of a demagogue or charlatan who promises the return of a lost golden age. The good jobs will come back. The nation will again be prosperous. The decrepit cities will be rebuilt. America will be great again. These promises, impossible to achieve, are no different from those peddled to Native Americans in the 1880s by the self-styled religious prophet Wovoka. He called on followers to carry out five-day dance ceremonies called the Ghost Dance. Native Americans donned shirts they were told protected them from bullets. They were assured that the buffalo herds would return, the dead warriors and chiefs would rise from the earth and the white men would disappear. None of his promises was realized. Many of his followers were gunned down like sheep by the U.S. army.
We face the most profound crisis in human history. Our response is to elect a man to the presidency who does not believe in climate change. Once societies unplug themselves from reality, those who speak truth become pariahs and enemies of the state. They are subject to severe state repression. Those lost in the reverie of the crisis cult applaud the elimination of these Cassandras. The appealing myths of magical thinking are pleasant opiates. But this narcotic, like all narcotics, leads to squalor and death.
SC138-3
https://www.corbettreport.com/voting-is-the-problem-heres-the-solution/
Voting is the Problem. Here’s the Solution.
In Douglas Adams’ So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, there is a scene where a spaceship lands on earth and a robot emerges from the craft, proclaiming that “I come in peace” and exhorting the earthlings to “take me to your Lizard.” The story’s protagonist, Arthur Dent, has this strange request explained to him by his friend, Ford Prefect, an experienced galactic hitchhiker:
“It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see…”
“You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?”
“No,” said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, “nothing so simple. Nothing anything like so straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people.”
“Odd,” said Arthur, “I thought you said it was a democracy.”
“I did,” said ford. “It is.”
“So,” said Arthur, hoping he wasn’t sounding ridiculously obtuse, “why don’t the people get rid of the lizards?”
“It honestly doesn’t occur to them,” said Ford. “They’ve all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they’ve voted in more or less approximates to the government they want.”
“You mean they actually vote for the lizards?”
“Oh yes,” said Ford with a shrug, “of course.”
“But,” said Arthur, going for the big one again, “why?”
“Because if they didn’t vote for a lizard,” said Ford, “the wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?”
“What?”
“I said,” said Ford, with an increasing air of urgency creeping into his voice, “have you got any gin?”
“I’ll look. Tell me about the lizards.”
Ford shrugged again.
“Some people say that the lizards are the best thing that ever happened to them,” he said. “They’re completely wrong of course, completely and utterly wrong, but someone’s got to say it.”
If only this was a joke. But here we are, on the verge of a contest between the two least respected, most distrusted candidates to run for office in modern political history. And some people say these lizards are the best thing that ever happened to them.
If there is any solace at all in this year’s selection cycle it is that, as The Corbett Report has been pointing out since the very day of its inception, there is absolutely nothing at stake here; the presidential figureheads are mere puppets, false fronts for the shadow government and deep state that commands and controls the military, economic and diplomatic machinery of the US-led world empire.
Do you really think the oligarchs put their entire system up on the chopping block every four years, hoping against hope that the public doesn’t use the dreaded ballot box to vote them out of power, dashing decades (or centuries) of carefully cultivated enslavement with pencils and touchscreens? Just in case anyone dislikes rhetorical questions, let me answer that one for you: No. No they do not.
But don’t take my word for it. Take Emma Goldman. As she’s been reputed to have said (and if she didn’t, feel free to tell other people that I said it): “If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.”
Or take H.L Mencken, who in his usual inimitable fashion quipped:
The state—or, to make the matter more concrete, the government—consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principal device to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can’t get, and to promise to give it to them. Nine times out of ten that promise is worth nothing. The tenth time it is made good by looting A to satisfy B. In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.
Or take Lysander Spooner, who wrote:
The principle that the majority have a right to rule the minority, practically resolves all government into a mere contest between two bodies of men, as to which of them shall be masters, and which of them slaves; a contest, that – however bloody – can, in the nature of things, never be finally closed, so long as man refuses to be a slave.
Or Wendy McElroy, who reminds us that:
Voting is not an act of political freedom. It is an act of political conformity. Those who refuse to vote are not expressing silence. They are screaming in the politician’s ear: “You do not represent me. This is not a process in which my voice matters. I do not believe you.”
Yes, voting is worse than a dead end. It’s less effective than bashing your head against a wall in a vain attempt to cure your headache. It’s more pathetic than allowing the oligarchs into your kitchen and then begging for a scrap of food from your own table. It is evil, immoral and contemptible. It is the act of a slave who has internalized that slavery so thoroughly that he wants to ensure that everyone around him is enslaved, too.
But, as I pointed out in yesterday’s conversation with Larken Rose, if there is any bright spot in all of this it is that your vote doesn’t matter anyway and will not change anything at all. It will not even “register as a protest” as some would like to believe, since the elections are rigged and the votes aren’t counted.
So if you are so inclined, knock yourself out. Cast a ballot. But instead of sitting back and feeling good about yourself for having done this senseless, meaningless and immoral act, can we at least agree to use the next 1460 days to do something actually productive? I leave it entirely up to you how to interpret the phrase “actually productive,” but if you’d allow me to offer some humble suggestions:
Find, join or create a community organization or freedom cell with a focus on fostering economic connections and social ties with people in your geographical area.
Find, join or create a community currency, community trading program or community exchange to foster agoristic connection between yourself and others in your area.
Commit to spending a certain amount of time each week spreading awareness about the banking oligarchy, false flag terrorism, GMO crops, or any subject you feel strongly about, either offline or online, using the work of others or by starting your own blog, newsletter or community meet up group.
Learn about gardening, canning, appliance repair, 3D printing, monetary theory, or any subject that you think will be handy in the event of a government collapse (or even if the government doesn’t collapse).
Read more books. Spend less time arguing with people online and more time making friends at the local coffee shop. Learn a new skill and teach it to someone else.
In short, do all of the million things that have nothing whatsoever to do with the phony baloney political charade exemplified by national selection day. Because if all you ever do is tick a box in a voting booth and sit back to see who wins the rigged sporting event, you probably believe the lizards are the best thing that ever happened to you.
Voting is the Problem. Here’s the Solution.
In Douglas Adams’ So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, there is a scene where a spaceship lands on earth and a robot emerges from the craft, proclaiming that “I come in peace” and exhorting the earthlings to “take me to your Lizard.” The story’s protagonist, Arthur Dent, has this strange request explained to him by his friend, Ford Prefect, an experienced galactic hitchhiker:
“It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see…”
“You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?”
“No,” said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, “nothing so simple. Nothing anything like so straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people.”
“Odd,” said Arthur, “I thought you said it was a democracy.”
“I did,” said ford. “It is.”
“So,” said Arthur, hoping he wasn’t sounding ridiculously obtuse, “why don’t the people get rid of the lizards?”
“It honestly doesn’t occur to them,” said Ford. “They’ve all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they’ve voted in more or less approximates to the government they want.”
“You mean they actually vote for the lizards?”
“Oh yes,” said Ford with a shrug, “of course.”
“But,” said Arthur, going for the big one again, “why?”
“Because if they didn’t vote for a lizard,” said Ford, “the wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?”
“What?”
“I said,” said Ford, with an increasing air of urgency creeping into his voice, “have you got any gin?”
“I’ll look. Tell me about the lizards.”
Ford shrugged again.
“Some people say that the lizards are the best thing that ever happened to them,” he said. “They’re completely wrong of course, completely and utterly wrong, but someone’s got to say it.”
If only this was a joke. But here we are, on the verge of a contest between the two least respected, most distrusted candidates to run for office in modern political history. And some people say these lizards are the best thing that ever happened to them.
If there is any solace at all in this year’s selection cycle it is that, as The Corbett Report has been pointing out since the very day of its inception, there is absolutely nothing at stake here; the presidential figureheads are mere puppets, false fronts for the shadow government and deep state that commands and controls the military, economic and diplomatic machinery of the US-led world empire.
Do you really think the oligarchs put their entire system up on the chopping block every four years, hoping against hope that the public doesn’t use the dreaded ballot box to vote them out of power, dashing decades (or centuries) of carefully cultivated enslavement with pencils and touchscreens? Just in case anyone dislikes rhetorical questions, let me answer that one for you: No. No they do not.
But don’t take my word for it. Take Emma Goldman. As she’s been reputed to have said (and if she didn’t, feel free to tell other people that I said it): “If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.”
Or take H.L Mencken, who in his usual inimitable fashion quipped:
The state—or, to make the matter more concrete, the government—consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principal device to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can’t get, and to promise to give it to them. Nine times out of ten that promise is worth nothing. The tenth time it is made good by looting A to satisfy B. In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.
Or take Lysander Spooner, who wrote:
The principle that the majority have a right to rule the minority, practically resolves all government into a mere contest between two bodies of men, as to which of them shall be masters, and which of them slaves; a contest, that – however bloody – can, in the nature of things, never be finally closed, so long as man refuses to be a slave.
Or Wendy McElroy, who reminds us that:
Voting is not an act of political freedom. It is an act of political conformity. Those who refuse to vote are not expressing silence. They are screaming in the politician’s ear: “You do not represent me. This is not a process in which my voice matters. I do not believe you.”
Yes, voting is worse than a dead end. It’s less effective than bashing your head against a wall in a vain attempt to cure your headache. It’s more pathetic than allowing the oligarchs into your kitchen and then begging for a scrap of food from your own table. It is evil, immoral and contemptible. It is the act of a slave who has internalized that slavery so thoroughly that he wants to ensure that everyone around him is enslaved, too.
But, as I pointed out in yesterday’s conversation with Larken Rose, if there is any bright spot in all of this it is that your vote doesn’t matter anyway and will not change anything at all. It will not even “register as a protest” as some would like to believe, since the elections are rigged and the votes aren’t counted.
So if you are so inclined, knock yourself out. Cast a ballot. But instead of sitting back and feeling good about yourself for having done this senseless, meaningless and immoral act, can we at least agree to use the next 1460 days to do something actually productive? I leave it entirely up to you how to interpret the phrase “actually productive,” but if you’d allow me to offer some humble suggestions:
Find, join or create a community organization or freedom cell with a focus on fostering economic connections and social ties with people in your geographical area.
Find, join or create a community currency, community trading program or community exchange to foster agoristic connection between yourself and others in your area.
Commit to spending a certain amount of time each week spreading awareness about the banking oligarchy, false flag terrorism, GMO crops, or any subject you feel strongly about, either offline or online, using the work of others or by starting your own blog, newsletter or community meet up group.
Learn about gardening, canning, appliance repair, 3D printing, monetary theory, or any subject that you think will be handy in the event of a government collapse (or even if the government doesn’t collapse).
Read more books. Spend less time arguing with people online and more time making friends at the local coffee shop. Learn a new skill and teach it to someone else.
In short, do all of the million things that have nothing whatsoever to do with the phony baloney political charade exemplified by national selection day. Because if all you ever do is tick a box in a voting booth and sit back to see who wins the rigged sporting event, you probably believe the lizards are the best thing that ever happened to you.
SC138-2
https://www.peakprosperity.com/blog/103343/get-ready-change-upon-us
Get Ready... Change Is Upon Us
The 'economic peace' we've enjoyed for decades is over
After WWI, a particularly noxious set of treaties and economic reparations agreements were put in place that all but guaranteed a future WWII. Mr. Keynes sniffed that out and, sadly, was proven correct.
The lesson from this is that, at certain times, it’s really not that hard to predict "what" is going to happen next after disastrously short-sighted and self-interested policies are enacted. Predicting the "when", with precision, is much trickier. But obvious misguided economic policies are destined to have a limited period of apparent (but false) prosperity, after which they end with a nasty Bang!.
We have entered just such a time. This isn't a Trump vs. Clinton thing; I'd make this claim regardless of who won this week's presidential election -- as our plight is much bigger than a single Administration. And my observation is that neither political party had much interest beyond some temporary election year lip-service to the economic plight of the middle class.
And by “middle class” I mean anybody not in the top 5% economic bracket. For those doing the math at home, that leaves the remaining 95% of us stuck in the meat grinder.
WTF Happened?
I know a lot of people who are suffering very raw emotional wounds from the harsh negativity and divisiveness of the seemingly never-ending election we just went through. There will be a period of healing and adjustment for many, and I can fully empathize with how they feel.
For the Clinton supporters stunned that she didn't experience the victory so many predicted, here's a “what went wrong” post-mortem given by the brilliant British comedian Jonathan Pie that I think hits close to the mark (caution: it's a pretty heated rant):
Pie asks some very important questions, chief among them: Have we lost the ability to entertain alternative points of view? Are we ready to begin finally talking to each other again?
The Left has a lot of soul searching to do. As does the Right. Because let’s be clear: Trump wasn’t the Republican’s preferred choice either. They fought him tooth and nail. In terms of the traditional Left vs Right rivalry, both sides lost this time.
If we're to heal and progress from here, it's critical that we take the time to understand why.
The conversation has to begin here, I believe, with this excellent article that I ran across in Cracked – yes, the comedy alt-everything online outfit – explaining how it's the rural vs urban divide more than anything else that's pulling our society apart at the moment.
For those desperately seeking answers to Trump's surprise win, this article, of which I have reproduced only a small part, provides essential context. It's explanation has done wonders for everyone I have shared it with who was struggling:
How Half Of America Lost Its F**king Mind
Oct 12, 2016
[Note: please go to the article to read reasons #6 through #3 as they are very important for understanding the two I have snipped out below]
Reason #2: Everyone Lashes Out When They Don't Have A Voice
[To a rural person] it really does feel like the worst of both worlds: all the ravages of poverty, but none of the sympathy. "Blacks burn police cars, and those liberal elites say it's not their fault because they're poor. My son gets jailed and fired over a baggie of meth, and those same elites make jokes about his missing teeth!" You're everyone's punching bag, one of society's last remaining safe comedy targets.
They take it hard. These are people who come from a long line of folks who took pride in looking after themselves. Where I'm from, you weren't a real man unless you could repair a car, patch a roof, hunt your own meat, and defend your home from an intruder. It was a source of shame to be dependent on anyone -- especially the government. You mowed your own lawn and fixed your own pipes when they leaked, you hauled your own firewood in your own pickup truck. (Mine was a 1994 Ford Ranger! The current owner says it still runs!)
Not like those hipsters in their tiny apartments, or "those people" in their public housing projects, waiting for the landlord any time something breaks, knowing if things get too bad they can just pick up and move. When you don't own anything, it's all somebody else's problem. "They probably don't pay taxes, either! Just treating America itself as a subsidized apartment they can trash!"
The rural folk with the Trump signs in their yards say their way of life is dying, and you smirk and say what they really mean is that blacks and gays are finally getting equal rights and they hate it. But I'm telling you, they say their way of life is dying because their way of life is dying. It's not their imagination. No movie about the future portrays it as being full of traditional families, hunters, and coal mines. Well, except for Hunger Games, and that was depicted as an apocalypse.
So yes, they vote for the guy promising to put things back the way they were, the guy who'd be a wake-up call to the blue islands. They voted for the brick through the window.
It was a vote of desperation.
#1. Assholes Are Heroes
But Trump is objectively a piece of shit!" you say. "He insults people, he objectifies women, and cheats whenever possible! And he's not an everyman; he's a smarmy, arrogant billionaire!"
Wait, are you talking about Donald Trump, or this guy:
You've never rooted for somebody like that? Someone powerful who gives your enemies the insults they deserve? Somebody with big fun appetites who screws up just enough to make them relatable? Like Dr. House or Walter White? Or any of the several million renegade cop characters who can break all the rules because they get shit done? Who only get shit done because they don't care about the rules?
"But those are fictional characters!" Okay, what about all those millionaire left-leaning talk show hosts? You think they keep their insults classy? Tune into any bit about Chris Christie and start counting down the seconds until the fat joke. Google David Letterman's sex scandals. But it's okay, because they're on our side, and everybody wants an asshole on their team -- a spiked bat to smash their enemies with. That's all Trump is. The howls of elite outrage are like the sounds of bombs landing on the enemy's fortress. The louder the better.
Already some of you have gotten angry, feeling this gut-level revulsion at any attempt to excuse or even understand these people. After all, they're hardly people, right? Aren't they just a mass of ignorant, rageful, crude, cursing, spitting subhumans?
Gee, I hope not. I have to hug a bunch of them at Thanksgiving. And when I do, it will be with the knowledge that if I hadn't moved away, I'd be on the other side of the fence, leaving nasty comments on this article.
The essential context is simply that rural residents are drowning under chronic economic blight. And when they dare to complain about it, they're castigated and humiliated by the dominant city culture that has no awareness of or sympathy for their troubles.
We've NAFTA'd away millions of manufacturing jobs (and those that served manufacturing communities) without providing the displaced labor a path to reskill and apply itself. Instead, we've left a patchwork of bomb crater communities across the heartland, where there are no employers and no prospects. To these rural folks, being cast as racist, misogynist, ignorant, or uneducated buffoons for being angry about their plight just adds kerosene to the fire that's been smoldering within them. A fire which just conflagrated during this week's election.
So to reiterate: the cultural divide that's really in play here is not between the 'enlightened/progressive' people and their supposed opposites. Rather, it's Urban vs Rural.
And as the rural dwellers have increasingly felt marginalized, demonized and otherwise unfairly treated, they are now angry enough at the perceived injustice to lash out against the status quo and roll the dice with an outsider who promises to shake things up. It's not surprising, really -- as I've written about before, we humans are wired to reject unfairness. This next short video is a favorite of mine, because it perfectly demonstrates how it's in our genes to become enraged when we perceive we're being unjustly treated:
To put in in monkey terms: since surbanites set the rules because they happen to outvote the rural people, and those same urbanites don't have to live with the consequences of their decisions, then it's cucumbers for rural people and grapes for the urban folks.
Adding to this understanding is today's article by our good friend Charles Hughes Smith, who validates the rage the downtrodden are feeling these days:
The Source of our Rage: The Ruling Elite Is Protected from the Consequences of its Dominance
There are many sources of rage: injustice, the destruction of truth, powerlessness.
But if we had to identify the one key source of non-elite rage that cuts across all age, ethnicity, gender and regional boundaries, it is this: The Ruling Elite is protected from the destructive consequences of its predatory dominance.
We see this reality across the entire political, social and economic landscape. If I had to pick one chart that illustrates the widening divide between the Ruling Elite and the non-elites, it is this chart of wages as a share of the nation's output (GDP): 46 years of relentless decline, interrupted by gushing fountains of credit and asset bubbles that enriched the few while leaving the economic landscape of the many in ruins.
The Ruling Elite once had an obligation to uphold the social contract as a responsibility that came with their vast privilege, power and wealth (i.e. noblesse oblige).
America's Ruling Elite has transmogrified into an incestuous self-serving few unapologetically plundering the many. In their hubris-soaked arrogance, their right to rule is unquestioningly based on their moral and intellectual superiority to "the little people" they loot with abandon.
Rather than feel a responsibility to the nation, America's Elite views the status quo as a free pass to self-aggrandizement. Much has changed in America in the past 46 years. Not only have wages and salaries declined as a share of "economic growth," but the wealth that has been generated has flowed to the top of the wealth/power pyramid (see chart below).
Social mobility has also declined drastically: Restoring America’s Economic Mobility, as has trust in government and key institutions.
As Frank Buckley, the author of The Way Back: Restoring the Promise of America observed: "In a corrupt country, trust is a rare commodity. That’s America today. Only 19 percent of Americans say they trust the government most of the time, down from 73 percent in 1958 according to the Pew Research Center."
The top .01% has seen its share of the household wealth triple from 7% to 22% in the past four decades, while the share of the nation's wealth owned by the bottom 90% has plummeted from 36% to 23%.
Look at that. The share of the national wealth has been steadily, if not increasingly, siphoned away from the 95% and towards the 5%. In reality, it's almost entirely gone towards the 0.1%.
The economic “peace” we’ve seemingly enjoyed over the past number of decades turned out to be no peace at all. It was the same sort of peace that existed between the Treaty of Versailles and the outbreak of WWII -- a crippling arrangement that overwhelmingly favored one side over the other. Germany eventually had no choice but to rebel.
Similarly, by failing to protect anyone but their cloistered and wealthy friends, the elites of both current US political parties has laid the fuel for the fire that now burns.
Bernie Sanders’ post-election statement had this to say about the economics that drove the result:
"Donald Trump tapped into the anger of a declining middle class that is sick and tired of establishment economics, establishment politics and the establishment media. People are tired of working longer hours for lower wages, of seeing decent paying jobs go to China and other low-wage countries, of billionaires not paying any federal income taxes and of not being able to afford a college education for their kids — all while the very rich become much richer.”
Bernie would have easily bested Trump in my opinion. It was a huge twin set of mistakes by the DNC to first hamper his primary efforts, and then fail to at least make him Clinton's running mate.
Redistribution of money and power seem to happen peacefully only rarely among humans and virtually never in America. Labor rights? Fought and died over. Women’s right to vote? Fought and died over. Environmental rights? Brought kicking and screaming across the moats. Racial rights? Only partially achieved after the greatest amount of violence and bloodshed of all these causes.
Can we do better? Absolutely, in theory. But so far we don’t a lot of better examples to point to inside the US.
So this battle is just getting started and will far outlive Trump and everybody reading this. Decades of ill-advised growth and financial squandering cannot be wished away -- we, and our children (and likely our grandchildren, too), will be cleaning up the messes of our profligacy for a long time.
And just as one can easily peer at Charles Hughes Smith's charts and conclude that eventually a rebellion of sorts is inevitable, there’s an even more startling chart you need to see. If you can truly internalize it, you'll understand why the new era of status quo rejection is just getting underway.
Promises That Can’t Be Kept
There's a lot of data I can provide here, but I’ll go with a single -- but critically important -- chart from Ray Dalio’s Bridgewater Associates, one of the largest money management firms out there.
I’m sorry that you have to squint a little to see this, but here’s all you need to know: when you add up both the debts and the liabilities of the US, those are more than 1,000% of current GDP:
One thousand one hundred percent?!?!? As in eleven times GDP?? You might as well say eleventy gajillion because there’s no sense in any of these numbers.
Yep. No country has ever dug out from under such a load. None have even come close. The “prediction,” which is so simple it’s not really a prediction at all, that flows from the above chart is this: Somebody is going to have to eat the losses.
Massive, fabulously enormous losses.
Trillions and trillions of losses in current dollars. Even if the economic elites don’t try to force all of those losses on the ‘little people’, the pain is still going to be so extraordinary that serious political and social crises will erupt.
You can count on it.
You can already see that larger future predicament playing out painfully around us. One example is how pensions are cutting back benefits, lowering expectations, demanding higher funding payments by taxpayers, and otherwise displaying signs of distress.
And this is with equity markets perched at all-time highs (at the moment of this writing, the Dow is at a new record).
So our recent decades of economic peace must end, given the thousand percent indebtedness predicament revealed by the chart above.
We got into that thousand percent predicament the exact same way the DNC lost to Trump: by failing to address things that plainly needed to be dealt with. We proved to ourselves, yet again, that pretending something uncomfortable doesn’t exist doesn’t make it go away.
“Well, we might just grow out from under those debts and obligations” some might be tempted to say. My response is to ask you to go back and look at that chart again and note that it has grown from 700% to 1,100% since 2001. If GDP had been growing at the same pace, the ratio value wouldn't have budged. It would have remained at 700%.
But it grew to 1,100%, which means the debts and obligations were growing much faster than GDP.
So for the past 15 years the “grow out of it” mantra -- which has been echoed ad nauseum -- has been a complete train wreck of a failure. How many more years before we can all just admit the obvious?
Just as both the RNC and DNC opted to ignore the extreme damage their policies had been inflicting on the upper, middle and lower classes, sparing only the very tippy-top elites (but hand-feeding those elites peeled grapes it should be noted, because their lot improved wildly over the past decades), everybody in power has been steadfastly ignoring our massive debt and liability problems, too.
Those are going to shape the future, and that future is going to be plenty painful. The longer we wait, the more painful it will be. This has been our steady message at Peak Prosperity for a very long time, and we are actually hopeful that now, finally, we can speak about the unspeakable to those who had no willing ear for it just a short week ago.
Conclusion
The political upheaval of Donald Trump is best understood through the lens of economic erosion suffered by the vast majority of people. If a democracy is measured in how well it serves the interests of the majority, the United States is not a democracy at all.
Of course, nearly everyone already knows this. But it's been all but unspeakable in polite circles to say so.
Now, it is finally becoming okay to voice.
Which is, admittedly, a breath of fresh air for us at Peak Prosperity. Because not only are massive, obvious economic issues going to unavoidably visit the US in the not-too-distant future, but they'll be doing so at a time when many critical resources will be in decline.
Chief among those? Oil, of course.
To skirt the impact of a future oil supply crunch, we'll need an incredible effort of joined forces and strict prioritization to assure that whatever transition we can effect will be a smooth as possible. Even then, we’ll be lucky to evade painful disruption.
But if we don't begin to view our future with clear eyes and a united sense of what the predicaments are, if we instead turn to another version of four more years of preservation of the status quo, then we will face a future of disruption so painful it will make the worst of post-election Wednesday for the most ardent liberal seem like a minor inconvenience (by comparison, I mean, of course).
It will take an enormous amount of effort simply to stem the tide of economic erosion that now besets the land. And that’s just as true for the US as it is for Japan, Europe and the UK. The same forces are at play in all of these centers.
It will take another massive bowlful of effort to begin to address the debts and liabilities issues. And yet another cauldron of effort to revamp our energy infrastructure in parallel with all the other challenges. Put it all together and you can begin to understand why, if we're going to deplore something from the recent election, it should be the running of an intentionally divisive set of campaigns that have driven as large a wedge between people in the US as has existed in a very long time.
We need to be working together on the common predicaments that care not if we are liberal or conservative, religious or not, male or female, or which race or sexual persuasion best applies to us. Declining global net energy per capita. Our massive fiscal over-indebtedness. The collapse of too many ecosystems we depend on for food and drinkable water. The list is sadly long...
It’s not just time to heal; it’s imperative that we do. So that we stand united to deal with these predicaments as they arrive in full force.
There’s really not a moment to spare....
These massive problems will continue to build. The overwhelming natural tendencies of human behavior/actions ensures this outcome.
Get Ready... Change Is Upon Us
The 'economic peace' we've enjoyed for decades is over
After WWI, a particularly noxious set of treaties and economic reparations agreements were put in place that all but guaranteed a future WWII. Mr. Keynes sniffed that out and, sadly, was proven correct.
The lesson from this is that, at certain times, it’s really not that hard to predict "what" is going to happen next after disastrously short-sighted and self-interested policies are enacted. Predicting the "when", with precision, is much trickier. But obvious misguided economic policies are destined to have a limited period of apparent (but false) prosperity, after which they end with a nasty Bang!.
We have entered just such a time. This isn't a Trump vs. Clinton thing; I'd make this claim regardless of who won this week's presidential election -- as our plight is much bigger than a single Administration. And my observation is that neither political party had much interest beyond some temporary election year lip-service to the economic plight of the middle class.
And by “middle class” I mean anybody not in the top 5% economic bracket. For those doing the math at home, that leaves the remaining 95% of us stuck in the meat grinder.
WTF Happened?
I know a lot of people who are suffering very raw emotional wounds from the harsh negativity and divisiveness of the seemingly never-ending election we just went through. There will be a period of healing and adjustment for many, and I can fully empathize with how they feel.
For the Clinton supporters stunned that she didn't experience the victory so many predicted, here's a “what went wrong” post-mortem given by the brilliant British comedian Jonathan Pie that I think hits close to the mark (caution: it's a pretty heated rant):
Pie asks some very important questions, chief among them: Have we lost the ability to entertain alternative points of view? Are we ready to begin finally talking to each other again?
The Left has a lot of soul searching to do. As does the Right. Because let’s be clear: Trump wasn’t the Republican’s preferred choice either. They fought him tooth and nail. In terms of the traditional Left vs Right rivalry, both sides lost this time.
If we're to heal and progress from here, it's critical that we take the time to understand why.
The conversation has to begin here, I believe, with this excellent article that I ran across in Cracked – yes, the comedy alt-everything online outfit – explaining how it's the rural vs urban divide more than anything else that's pulling our society apart at the moment.
For those desperately seeking answers to Trump's surprise win, this article, of which I have reproduced only a small part, provides essential context. It's explanation has done wonders for everyone I have shared it with who was struggling:
How Half Of America Lost Its F**king Mind
Oct 12, 2016
[Note: please go to the article to read reasons #6 through #3 as they are very important for understanding the two I have snipped out below]
Reason #2: Everyone Lashes Out When They Don't Have A Voice
[To a rural person] it really does feel like the worst of both worlds: all the ravages of poverty, but none of the sympathy. "Blacks burn police cars, and those liberal elites say it's not their fault because they're poor. My son gets jailed and fired over a baggie of meth, and those same elites make jokes about his missing teeth!" You're everyone's punching bag, one of society's last remaining safe comedy targets.
They take it hard. These are people who come from a long line of folks who took pride in looking after themselves. Where I'm from, you weren't a real man unless you could repair a car, patch a roof, hunt your own meat, and defend your home from an intruder. It was a source of shame to be dependent on anyone -- especially the government. You mowed your own lawn and fixed your own pipes when they leaked, you hauled your own firewood in your own pickup truck. (Mine was a 1994 Ford Ranger! The current owner says it still runs!)
Not like those hipsters in their tiny apartments, or "those people" in their public housing projects, waiting for the landlord any time something breaks, knowing if things get too bad they can just pick up and move. When you don't own anything, it's all somebody else's problem. "They probably don't pay taxes, either! Just treating America itself as a subsidized apartment they can trash!"
The rural folk with the Trump signs in their yards say their way of life is dying, and you smirk and say what they really mean is that blacks and gays are finally getting equal rights and they hate it. But I'm telling you, they say their way of life is dying because their way of life is dying. It's not their imagination. No movie about the future portrays it as being full of traditional families, hunters, and coal mines. Well, except for Hunger Games, and that was depicted as an apocalypse.
So yes, they vote for the guy promising to put things back the way they were, the guy who'd be a wake-up call to the blue islands. They voted for the brick through the window.
It was a vote of desperation.
#1. Assholes Are Heroes
But Trump is objectively a piece of shit!" you say. "He insults people, he objectifies women, and cheats whenever possible! And he's not an everyman; he's a smarmy, arrogant billionaire!"
Wait, are you talking about Donald Trump, or this guy:
You've never rooted for somebody like that? Someone powerful who gives your enemies the insults they deserve? Somebody with big fun appetites who screws up just enough to make them relatable? Like Dr. House or Walter White? Or any of the several million renegade cop characters who can break all the rules because they get shit done? Who only get shit done because they don't care about the rules?
"But those are fictional characters!" Okay, what about all those millionaire left-leaning talk show hosts? You think they keep their insults classy? Tune into any bit about Chris Christie and start counting down the seconds until the fat joke. Google David Letterman's sex scandals. But it's okay, because they're on our side, and everybody wants an asshole on their team -- a spiked bat to smash their enemies with. That's all Trump is. The howls of elite outrage are like the sounds of bombs landing on the enemy's fortress. The louder the better.
Already some of you have gotten angry, feeling this gut-level revulsion at any attempt to excuse or even understand these people. After all, they're hardly people, right? Aren't they just a mass of ignorant, rageful, crude, cursing, spitting subhumans?
Gee, I hope not. I have to hug a bunch of them at Thanksgiving. And when I do, it will be with the knowledge that if I hadn't moved away, I'd be on the other side of the fence, leaving nasty comments on this article.
The essential context is simply that rural residents are drowning under chronic economic blight. And when they dare to complain about it, they're castigated and humiliated by the dominant city culture that has no awareness of or sympathy for their troubles.
We've NAFTA'd away millions of manufacturing jobs (and those that served manufacturing communities) without providing the displaced labor a path to reskill and apply itself. Instead, we've left a patchwork of bomb crater communities across the heartland, where there are no employers and no prospects. To these rural folks, being cast as racist, misogynist, ignorant, or uneducated buffoons for being angry about their plight just adds kerosene to the fire that's been smoldering within them. A fire which just conflagrated during this week's election.
So to reiterate: the cultural divide that's really in play here is not between the 'enlightened/progressive' people and their supposed opposites. Rather, it's Urban vs Rural.
And as the rural dwellers have increasingly felt marginalized, demonized and otherwise unfairly treated, they are now angry enough at the perceived injustice to lash out against the status quo and roll the dice with an outsider who promises to shake things up. It's not surprising, really -- as I've written about before, we humans are wired to reject unfairness. This next short video is a favorite of mine, because it perfectly demonstrates how it's in our genes to become enraged when we perceive we're being unjustly treated:
To put in in monkey terms: since surbanites set the rules because they happen to outvote the rural people, and those same urbanites don't have to live with the consequences of their decisions, then it's cucumbers for rural people and grapes for the urban folks.
Adding to this understanding is today's article by our good friend Charles Hughes Smith, who validates the rage the downtrodden are feeling these days:
The Source of our Rage: The Ruling Elite Is Protected from the Consequences of its Dominance
There are many sources of rage: injustice, the destruction of truth, powerlessness.
But if we had to identify the one key source of non-elite rage that cuts across all age, ethnicity, gender and regional boundaries, it is this: The Ruling Elite is protected from the destructive consequences of its predatory dominance.
We see this reality across the entire political, social and economic landscape. If I had to pick one chart that illustrates the widening divide between the Ruling Elite and the non-elites, it is this chart of wages as a share of the nation's output (GDP): 46 years of relentless decline, interrupted by gushing fountains of credit and asset bubbles that enriched the few while leaving the economic landscape of the many in ruins.
The Ruling Elite once had an obligation to uphold the social contract as a responsibility that came with their vast privilege, power and wealth (i.e. noblesse oblige).
America's Ruling Elite has transmogrified into an incestuous self-serving few unapologetically plundering the many. In their hubris-soaked arrogance, their right to rule is unquestioningly based on their moral and intellectual superiority to "the little people" they loot with abandon.
Rather than feel a responsibility to the nation, America's Elite views the status quo as a free pass to self-aggrandizement. Much has changed in America in the past 46 years. Not only have wages and salaries declined as a share of "economic growth," but the wealth that has been generated has flowed to the top of the wealth/power pyramid (see chart below).
Social mobility has also declined drastically: Restoring America’s Economic Mobility, as has trust in government and key institutions.
As Frank Buckley, the author of The Way Back: Restoring the Promise of America observed: "In a corrupt country, trust is a rare commodity. That’s America today. Only 19 percent of Americans say they trust the government most of the time, down from 73 percent in 1958 according to the Pew Research Center."
The top .01% has seen its share of the household wealth triple from 7% to 22% in the past four decades, while the share of the nation's wealth owned by the bottom 90% has plummeted from 36% to 23%.
Look at that. The share of the national wealth has been steadily, if not increasingly, siphoned away from the 95% and towards the 5%. In reality, it's almost entirely gone towards the 0.1%.
The economic “peace” we’ve seemingly enjoyed over the past number of decades turned out to be no peace at all. It was the same sort of peace that existed between the Treaty of Versailles and the outbreak of WWII -- a crippling arrangement that overwhelmingly favored one side over the other. Germany eventually had no choice but to rebel.
Similarly, by failing to protect anyone but their cloistered and wealthy friends, the elites of both current US political parties has laid the fuel for the fire that now burns.
Bernie Sanders’ post-election statement had this to say about the economics that drove the result:
"Donald Trump tapped into the anger of a declining middle class that is sick and tired of establishment economics, establishment politics and the establishment media. People are tired of working longer hours for lower wages, of seeing decent paying jobs go to China and other low-wage countries, of billionaires not paying any federal income taxes and of not being able to afford a college education for their kids — all while the very rich become much richer.”
Bernie would have easily bested Trump in my opinion. It was a huge twin set of mistakes by the DNC to first hamper his primary efforts, and then fail to at least make him Clinton's running mate.
Redistribution of money and power seem to happen peacefully only rarely among humans and virtually never in America. Labor rights? Fought and died over. Women’s right to vote? Fought and died over. Environmental rights? Brought kicking and screaming across the moats. Racial rights? Only partially achieved after the greatest amount of violence and bloodshed of all these causes.
Can we do better? Absolutely, in theory. But so far we don’t a lot of better examples to point to inside the US.
So this battle is just getting started and will far outlive Trump and everybody reading this. Decades of ill-advised growth and financial squandering cannot be wished away -- we, and our children (and likely our grandchildren, too), will be cleaning up the messes of our profligacy for a long time.
And just as one can easily peer at Charles Hughes Smith's charts and conclude that eventually a rebellion of sorts is inevitable, there’s an even more startling chart you need to see. If you can truly internalize it, you'll understand why the new era of status quo rejection is just getting underway.
Promises That Can’t Be Kept
There's a lot of data I can provide here, but I’ll go with a single -- but critically important -- chart from Ray Dalio’s Bridgewater Associates, one of the largest money management firms out there.
I’m sorry that you have to squint a little to see this, but here’s all you need to know: when you add up both the debts and the liabilities of the US, those are more than 1,000% of current GDP:
One thousand one hundred percent?!?!? As in eleven times GDP?? You might as well say eleventy gajillion because there’s no sense in any of these numbers.
Yep. No country has ever dug out from under such a load. None have even come close. The “prediction,” which is so simple it’s not really a prediction at all, that flows from the above chart is this: Somebody is going to have to eat the losses.
Massive, fabulously enormous losses.
Trillions and trillions of losses in current dollars. Even if the economic elites don’t try to force all of those losses on the ‘little people’, the pain is still going to be so extraordinary that serious political and social crises will erupt.
You can count on it.
You can already see that larger future predicament playing out painfully around us. One example is how pensions are cutting back benefits, lowering expectations, demanding higher funding payments by taxpayers, and otherwise displaying signs of distress.
And this is with equity markets perched at all-time highs (at the moment of this writing, the Dow is at a new record).
So our recent decades of economic peace must end, given the thousand percent indebtedness predicament revealed by the chart above.
We got into that thousand percent predicament the exact same way the DNC lost to Trump: by failing to address things that plainly needed to be dealt with. We proved to ourselves, yet again, that pretending something uncomfortable doesn’t exist doesn’t make it go away.
“Well, we might just grow out from under those debts and obligations” some might be tempted to say. My response is to ask you to go back and look at that chart again and note that it has grown from 700% to 1,100% since 2001. If GDP had been growing at the same pace, the ratio value wouldn't have budged. It would have remained at 700%.
But it grew to 1,100%, which means the debts and obligations were growing much faster than GDP.
So for the past 15 years the “grow out of it” mantra -- which has been echoed ad nauseum -- has been a complete train wreck of a failure. How many more years before we can all just admit the obvious?
Just as both the RNC and DNC opted to ignore the extreme damage their policies had been inflicting on the upper, middle and lower classes, sparing only the very tippy-top elites (but hand-feeding those elites peeled grapes it should be noted, because their lot improved wildly over the past decades), everybody in power has been steadfastly ignoring our massive debt and liability problems, too.
Those are going to shape the future, and that future is going to be plenty painful. The longer we wait, the more painful it will be. This has been our steady message at Peak Prosperity for a very long time, and we are actually hopeful that now, finally, we can speak about the unspeakable to those who had no willing ear for it just a short week ago.
Conclusion
The political upheaval of Donald Trump is best understood through the lens of economic erosion suffered by the vast majority of people. If a democracy is measured in how well it serves the interests of the majority, the United States is not a democracy at all.
Of course, nearly everyone already knows this. But it's been all but unspeakable in polite circles to say so.
Now, it is finally becoming okay to voice.
Which is, admittedly, a breath of fresh air for us at Peak Prosperity. Because not only are massive, obvious economic issues going to unavoidably visit the US in the not-too-distant future, but they'll be doing so at a time when many critical resources will be in decline.
Chief among those? Oil, of course.
To skirt the impact of a future oil supply crunch, we'll need an incredible effort of joined forces and strict prioritization to assure that whatever transition we can effect will be a smooth as possible. Even then, we’ll be lucky to evade painful disruption.
But if we don't begin to view our future with clear eyes and a united sense of what the predicaments are, if we instead turn to another version of four more years of preservation of the status quo, then we will face a future of disruption so painful it will make the worst of post-election Wednesday for the most ardent liberal seem like a minor inconvenience (by comparison, I mean, of course).
It will take an enormous amount of effort simply to stem the tide of economic erosion that now besets the land. And that’s just as true for the US as it is for Japan, Europe and the UK. The same forces are at play in all of these centers.
It will take another massive bowlful of effort to begin to address the debts and liabilities issues. And yet another cauldron of effort to revamp our energy infrastructure in parallel with all the other challenges. Put it all together and you can begin to understand why, if we're going to deplore something from the recent election, it should be the running of an intentionally divisive set of campaigns that have driven as large a wedge between people in the US as has existed in a very long time.
We need to be working together on the common predicaments that care not if we are liberal or conservative, religious or not, male or female, or which race or sexual persuasion best applies to us. Declining global net energy per capita. Our massive fiscal over-indebtedness. The collapse of too many ecosystems we depend on for food and drinkable water. The list is sadly long...
It’s not just time to heal; it’s imperative that we do. So that we stand united to deal with these predicaments as they arrive in full force.
There’s really not a moment to spare....
These massive problems will continue to build. The overwhelming natural tendencies of human behavior/actions ensures this outcome.
Saturday, November 12, 2016
SC138-1
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/climate-change-game-over-global-warming-climate-sensitivity-seven-degrees-a7407881.html
Climate change may be escalating so fast it could be 'game over', scientists warn
It is a vision of a future so apocalyptic that it is hard to even imagine.
But, if leading scientists writing in one of the most respected academic journals are right, planet Earth could be on course for global warming of more than seven degrees Celsius within a lifetime.
And that, according to one of the world’s most renowned climatologists, could be “game over” – particularly given the imminent presence of climate change denier Donald Trump in the White House.
Read more
Map shows how climate change will hit world's poorest nations hardest
Record-breaking heat of 2015 could become ‘new normal’ within years
China slams Trump’s plan to back out of climate change agreement
Americans more scared of clowns than climate change
Scientists have long tried to work out how the climate will react over the coming decades to the greenhouse gases humans are pumping into the atmosphere.
According to the current best estimate, by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), if humans carry on with a “business as usual” approach using large amounts of fossil fuels, the Earth’s average temperature will rise by between 2.6 and 4.8 degrees above pre-industrial levels by 2100.
However new research by an international team of experts who looked into how the Earth’s climate has reacted over nearly 800,000 years warns this could be a major under-estimate.
Because, they believe, the climate is more sensitive to greenhouse gases when it is warmer.
A reconstruction of the Earth's global mean temperature over the last 784,000 years, on the left of the graph, followed by a projection to 2100 based on new calculations of the climate's sensitivity to greenhouse gases (Friedrich, et al. (2016))
In a paper in the journal Science Advances, they said the actual range could be between 4.78C to 7.36C by 2100, based on one set of calculations.
Some have dismissed the idea that the world would continue to burn fossil fuels despite obvious global warming, but emissions are still increasing despite a 1C rise in average thermometer readings since the 1880s.
And US President-elect Donald Trump has said he will rip up America’s commitments to the fight against climate change.
Professor Michael Mann, of Penn State University in the US, who led research that produced the famous “hockey stick” graph showing how humans were dramatically increasing the Earth’s temperature, told The Independent the new paper appeared "sound and the conclusions quite defensible".
“And it does indeed provide support for the notion that a Donald Trump presidency could be game over for the climate,” he wrote in an email.
Trump's views on climate change mean he's a danger to us all
“By ‘game over for the climate’, I mean game over for stabilizing warming below dangerous (ie greater than 2C) levels.
“If Trump makes good on his promises, and the US pulls out of the Paris [climate] treaty, it is difficult to see a path forward to keeping warming below those levels.”
Greenpeace UK said the new research was further evidence that urgent action was needed.
Dr Doug Parr, the environmental campaign group’s chief scientist, said: “The worrying thing is the suggestion climate sensitivity is higher [than thought] is not incompatible with higher temperatures we have been seeing this year.
“If there is science backing that up, that there’s a higher sensitivity of the climate to greenhouse gases, that puts at risk the prospect of keeping the globe at the Paris target of well below 2C.
“Anybody who understands the situation we find ourselves in would have already have realised we are in an emergency situation.”
Dr Tobias Friedrich, one of the authors of the paper, said: “Our results imply that the Earth’s sensitivity to variations in atmospheric carbon dioxide increases as the climate warms.
“Currently, our planet is in a warm phase – an interglacial period – and the associated increased climate sensitivity needs to be taken into account for future projections of warming induced by human activities.
“The only way out is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible.”
Dr Andrey Ganopolski, who was involved in the research and on the IPCC’s latest report, admitted their work was controversial with some scientists disagreeing and others agreeing with their findings.
“In our field of science, you cannot be definite by 100 per cent. There are always uncertainties and we discuss this in the paper,” he said.
“If we have more and more results of this sort, then we have more reasons to be concerned.”
Dr Ganopolski, of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, suggested their findings meant it would be harder to prevent the world entering dangerous global warming of 2C or above.
“Our results mean it is not impossible to stay within 2C but it probably – if we are right and climate sensitivity is higher than this – would require even strong cuts in carbon emissions,” he said.
“Whether it’s feasible politically … I believe it is feasible technically.
“It would be really good to stay below 1.5C or close to that, whether it’s feasible I’m probably a bit sceptical about that.”
But he noted the authors had used different ways of estimating average global temperature, some of which had produced “a lower range of values”.
“The estimates of temperature in this paper are subject to large uncertainties, and therefore the range of estimates for 2100 is also very wide,” Professor Wolff said.
“Still, it's encouraging that it overlaps with model estimates and confirms that the emission reductions promised in Paris are essential to avoid unacceptable climate changes."
Mark Lynas laid out what would happen as the temperature rises in his award-winning book, Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet.
He was shocked by the researchers’ results.
“It sounds on the apocalyptic side of bad and, in some ways, it is realistic because ‘business as usual’ just got more likely as Trump wants to rebuild the pipelines … the complete ‘fossilisation’ of the US,” he said.
“It was game over at six [degrees] to be honest. I don’t think there was much more to add, other than turning the planet into Venus.”
Nasa recently said Venus may once have been habitable before runaway global warming turned the planet into its current version of hell with temperatures of more than 460C, almost no water and an atmosphere of mainly carbon dioxide with clouds of sulphuric acid.
Climate change may be escalating so fast it could be 'game over', scientists warn
It is a vision of a future so apocalyptic that it is hard to even imagine.
But, if leading scientists writing in one of the most respected academic journals are right, planet Earth could be on course for global warming of more than seven degrees Celsius within a lifetime.
And that, according to one of the world’s most renowned climatologists, could be “game over” – particularly given the imminent presence of climate change denier Donald Trump in the White House.
Read more
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Record-breaking heat of 2015 could become ‘new normal’ within years
China slams Trump’s plan to back out of climate change agreement
Americans more scared of clowns than climate change
Scientists have long tried to work out how the climate will react over the coming decades to the greenhouse gases humans are pumping into the atmosphere.
According to the current best estimate, by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), if humans carry on with a “business as usual” approach using large amounts of fossil fuels, the Earth’s average temperature will rise by between 2.6 and 4.8 degrees above pre-industrial levels by 2100.
However new research by an international team of experts who looked into how the Earth’s climate has reacted over nearly 800,000 years warns this could be a major under-estimate.
Because, they believe, the climate is more sensitive to greenhouse gases when it is warmer.
A reconstruction of the Earth's global mean temperature over the last 784,000 years, on the left of the graph, followed by a projection to 2100 based on new calculations of the climate's sensitivity to greenhouse gases (Friedrich, et al. (2016))
In a paper in the journal Science Advances, they said the actual range could be between 4.78C to 7.36C by 2100, based on one set of calculations.
Some have dismissed the idea that the world would continue to burn fossil fuels despite obvious global warming, but emissions are still increasing despite a 1C rise in average thermometer readings since the 1880s.
And US President-elect Donald Trump has said he will rip up America’s commitments to the fight against climate change.
Professor Michael Mann, of Penn State University in the US, who led research that produced the famous “hockey stick” graph showing how humans were dramatically increasing the Earth’s temperature, told The Independent the new paper appeared "sound and the conclusions quite defensible".
“And it does indeed provide support for the notion that a Donald Trump presidency could be game over for the climate,” he wrote in an email.
Trump's views on climate change mean he's a danger to us all
“By ‘game over for the climate’, I mean game over for stabilizing warming below dangerous (ie greater than 2C) levels.
“If Trump makes good on his promises, and the US pulls out of the Paris [climate] treaty, it is difficult to see a path forward to keeping warming below those levels.”
Greenpeace UK said the new research was further evidence that urgent action was needed.
Dr Doug Parr, the environmental campaign group’s chief scientist, said: “The worrying thing is the suggestion climate sensitivity is higher [than thought] is not incompatible with higher temperatures we have been seeing this year.
“If there is science backing that up, that there’s a higher sensitivity of the climate to greenhouse gases, that puts at risk the prospect of keeping the globe at the Paris target of well below 2C.
“Anybody who understands the situation we find ourselves in would have already have realised we are in an emergency situation.”
Dr Tobias Friedrich, one of the authors of the paper, said: “Our results imply that the Earth’s sensitivity to variations in atmospheric carbon dioxide increases as the climate warms.
“Currently, our planet is in a warm phase – an interglacial period – and the associated increased climate sensitivity needs to be taken into account for future projections of warming induced by human activities.
“The only way out is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible.”
Dr Andrey Ganopolski, who was involved in the research and on the IPCC’s latest report, admitted their work was controversial with some scientists disagreeing and others agreeing with their findings.
“In our field of science, you cannot be definite by 100 per cent. There are always uncertainties and we discuss this in the paper,” he said.
“If we have more and more results of this sort, then we have more reasons to be concerned.”
Dr Ganopolski, of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, suggested their findings meant it would be harder to prevent the world entering dangerous global warming of 2C or above.
“Our results mean it is not impossible to stay within 2C but it probably – if we are right and climate sensitivity is higher than this – would require even strong cuts in carbon emissions,” he said.
“Whether it’s feasible politically … I believe it is feasible technically.
“It would be really good to stay below 1.5C or close to that, whether it’s feasible I’m probably a bit sceptical about that.”
But he noted the authors had used different ways of estimating average global temperature, some of which had produced “a lower range of values”.
“The estimates of temperature in this paper are subject to large uncertainties, and therefore the range of estimates for 2100 is also very wide,” Professor Wolff said.
“Still, it's encouraging that it overlaps with model estimates and confirms that the emission reductions promised in Paris are essential to avoid unacceptable climate changes."
Mark Lynas laid out what would happen as the temperature rises in his award-winning book, Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet.
He was shocked by the researchers’ results.
“It sounds on the apocalyptic side of bad and, in some ways, it is realistic because ‘business as usual’ just got more likely as Trump wants to rebuild the pipelines … the complete ‘fossilisation’ of the US,” he said.
“It was game over at six [degrees] to be honest. I don’t think there was much more to add, other than turning the planet into Venus.”
Nasa recently said Venus may once have been habitable before runaway global warming turned the planet into its current version of hell with temperatures of more than 460C, almost no water and an atmosphere of mainly carbon dioxide with clouds of sulphuric acid.
Wednesday, November 9, 2016
SC137-15
http://www.oftwominds.com/blog.html
The Source of our Rage: The Ruling Elite Is Protected from the Consequences of its Dominance
There are many sources of rage: injustice, the destruction of truth, powerlessness. But if we had to identify the one key source of non-elite rage that cuts across all age, ethnicity, gender and regional boundaries, it is this: The Ruling Elite is protected from the destructive consequences of its predatory dominance.
We see this reality across the entire political, social and economic landscape.
If I had to pick one chart that illustrates the widening divide between the Ruling Elite and the non-elites, it is this chart of wages as a share of the nation's output (GDP): 46 years of relentless decline, interrupted by gushing fountains of credit and asset bubbles that enriched the few while leaving the economic landscape of the many in ruins.
The Ruling Elite once had an obligation to uphold the social contract as a responsibility that came with their vast privilege, power and wealth (i.e. noblesse oblige).
America's Ruling Elite has transmogrified into an incestuous self-serving few unapologetically plundering the many. In their hubris-soaked arrogance, their right to rule is unquestioningly based on their moral and intellectual superiority to "the little people" they loot with abandon.
Rather than feel a responsibility to the nation, America's Elite views the status quo as a free pass to self-aggrandizement.
Much has changed in America in the past 46 years. Not only have wages and salaries declined as a share of "economic growth," but the wealth that has been generated has flowed to the top of the wealth/power pyramid (see chart below).
Social mobility has also declined drastically: Restoring America’s Economic Mobility, as has trust in government and key institutions.
As Frank Buckley, the author of The Way Back: Restoring the Promise of America observed:
"In a corrupt country, trust is a rare commodity. That’s America today. Only 19 percent of Americans say they trust the government most of the time, down from 73 percent in 1958 according to the Pew Research Center."
The top .01% has seen its share of the household wealth triple from 7% to 22% in the past four decades, while the share of the nation's wealth owned by the bottom 90% has plummeted from 36% to 23%.
As I described in America's Ruling Elite Has Failed and Deserves to Be Fired and Now That the Presidential-Election Side Show Is Finally Ending...., the economy is rapidly undergoing structural changes that tend to reward the top 5% class of technocrats and managers and the top .1% with millions in mobile capital, while leaving the bottom 95% in the dust.
Rather than address this rising inequality directly and honestly, the Ruling Elite has parroted propaganda and policies that protect their gains while obfuscating the reality that most American households have been losing ground for decades, a decline that has been masked by replacing real income with rising debt.
The ceaseless parroting of the Ruling Elite and the Mainstream Media that prosperity has been rising for everyone is nothing less than the destruction of truth. This propaganda has one purpose: to mask the inequality and injustice built into the American status quo.
The rapid concentration of wealth has also concentrated political power in the hands of a few who seamlessly combine public and private modes of power.
This wealth and power protects the Ruling Elite from the perverse consequences of their dominance. Their precious offspring rarely serve at the point of the American military's spear, they never lose their jobs or income when corporations shift production (and R&D, etc.) overseas, and they are never replaced with illegal immigrants paid under the table.
Rather, the Ruling Elite is pleased to pay immigrants a pittance to care for their children, clean their luxe homes, walk their dogs, etc.
This is why we're enraged: we bear the consequences of the Ruling Elite's dominance. The system is rigged to benefit the few, who use their wealth and power to protect themselves from the destructive consequences of their self-serving dominance.
This rage is as yet inchoate, sensed but not yet understood as the inevitable result of a broken system and a predatory Elite that exploits the system to maximize their private gain by any means available.
ELECTION NOTE: As I write this Tuesday evening, it appears Donald Trump may win the presidency. For those who cannot understand how anyone could possibly vote for Trump, please read the above essay again and ponder what people were voting against by voting for Trump.
They may well have been voting against the corrupt, self-serving status quo rather than voting for the individual Donald Trump.
There are very few opportunities for powerless non-elites to register their disapproval of the nation's Ruling Elite and the corrupt status quo. Voting for an outsider in a national election is one such rare opportunity.
As I noted in October, The Ruling Elite Has Lost the Consent of the Governed (October 20, 2016).
If you still don't understand how Trump could win, please read the above essay as many times as is necessary for you to get it: the status quo of corrupt self-serving insiders generates injustice and inequality as its only possible output.
The Source of our Rage: The Ruling Elite Is Protected from the Consequences of its Dominance
There are many sources of rage: injustice, the destruction of truth, powerlessness. But if we had to identify the one key source of non-elite rage that cuts across all age, ethnicity, gender and regional boundaries, it is this: The Ruling Elite is protected from the destructive consequences of its predatory dominance.
We see this reality across the entire political, social and economic landscape.
If I had to pick one chart that illustrates the widening divide between the Ruling Elite and the non-elites, it is this chart of wages as a share of the nation's output (GDP): 46 years of relentless decline, interrupted by gushing fountains of credit and asset bubbles that enriched the few while leaving the economic landscape of the many in ruins.
The Ruling Elite once had an obligation to uphold the social contract as a responsibility that came with their vast privilege, power and wealth (i.e. noblesse oblige).
America's Ruling Elite has transmogrified into an incestuous self-serving few unapologetically plundering the many. In their hubris-soaked arrogance, their right to rule is unquestioningly based on their moral and intellectual superiority to "the little people" they loot with abandon.
Rather than feel a responsibility to the nation, America's Elite views the status quo as a free pass to self-aggrandizement.
Much has changed in America in the past 46 years. Not only have wages and salaries declined as a share of "economic growth," but the wealth that has been generated has flowed to the top of the wealth/power pyramid (see chart below).
Social mobility has also declined drastically: Restoring America’s Economic Mobility, as has trust in government and key institutions.
As Frank Buckley, the author of The Way Back: Restoring the Promise of America observed:
"In a corrupt country, trust is a rare commodity. That’s America today. Only 19 percent of Americans say they trust the government most of the time, down from 73 percent in 1958 according to the Pew Research Center."
The top .01% has seen its share of the household wealth triple from 7% to 22% in the past four decades, while the share of the nation's wealth owned by the bottom 90% has plummeted from 36% to 23%.
As I described in America's Ruling Elite Has Failed and Deserves to Be Fired and Now That the Presidential-Election Side Show Is Finally Ending...., the economy is rapidly undergoing structural changes that tend to reward the top 5% class of technocrats and managers and the top .1% with millions in mobile capital, while leaving the bottom 95% in the dust.
Rather than address this rising inequality directly and honestly, the Ruling Elite has parroted propaganda and policies that protect their gains while obfuscating the reality that most American households have been losing ground for decades, a decline that has been masked by replacing real income with rising debt.
The ceaseless parroting of the Ruling Elite and the Mainstream Media that prosperity has been rising for everyone is nothing less than the destruction of truth. This propaganda has one purpose: to mask the inequality and injustice built into the American status quo.
The rapid concentration of wealth has also concentrated political power in the hands of a few who seamlessly combine public and private modes of power.
This wealth and power protects the Ruling Elite from the perverse consequences of their dominance. Their precious offspring rarely serve at the point of the American military's spear, they never lose their jobs or income when corporations shift production (and R&D, etc.) overseas, and they are never replaced with illegal immigrants paid under the table.
Rather, the Ruling Elite is pleased to pay immigrants a pittance to care for their children, clean their luxe homes, walk their dogs, etc.
This is why we're enraged: we bear the consequences of the Ruling Elite's dominance. The system is rigged to benefit the few, who use their wealth and power to protect themselves from the destructive consequences of their self-serving dominance.
This rage is as yet inchoate, sensed but not yet understood as the inevitable result of a broken system and a predatory Elite that exploits the system to maximize their private gain by any means available.
ELECTION NOTE: As I write this Tuesday evening, it appears Donald Trump may win the presidency. For those who cannot understand how anyone could possibly vote for Trump, please read the above essay again and ponder what people were voting against by voting for Trump.
They may well have been voting against the corrupt, self-serving status quo rather than voting for the individual Donald Trump.
There are very few opportunities for powerless non-elites to register their disapproval of the nation's Ruling Elite and the corrupt status quo. Voting for an outsider in a national election is one such rare opportunity.
As I noted in October, The Ruling Elite Has Lost the Consent of the Governed (October 20, 2016).
If you still don't understand how Trump could win, please read the above essay as many times as is necessary for you to get it: the status quo of corrupt self-serving insiders generates injustice and inequality as its only possible output.
Monday, November 7, 2016
SC137-14
http://www.theburningplatform.com/2016/11/03/civil-war-ii-fourth-turning-intensifying-part-i/
As we enter the final stretch of this vitriolic, deplorable, venomous, propaganda saturated, deceitful, rigged presidential election spectacle, it becomes painfully obvious this Fourth Turning is careening toward bloodshed, bedlam, confrontation, and civil war. The linear fixated establishment, who fancy themselves intellectually superior to the irredemables, are too blinded by their sociopathic, increasingly audacious subversion of the Constitution, to grasp the level of rage and disillusionment of a white working class that has been screwed over for decades.
As the Wall Street shysters frantically accelerate their embezzlement of what remains of middle class wealth, with the Fed and the corporate media propagandists as their wing-men, the country devolves into a corporate fascist state. The disposition of the nation grows dark like the sky before an approaching deadly blizzard. As passions boil over and violence portends, this Fourth Turning hastens towards a bloody decade ahead with an uncertain climax.
If you think this is just hyperbole, you either haven’t studied history or your cognitive dissonance and normalcy bias prevent you from seeing the unavoidable societal altering clashes, which occur like clockwork on an eighty year cycle, when the portents are right in front of your eyes. Historian Arnold Toynbee’s great war cycle that arise every 80 years or so, aligns perfectly with the Fourth Turning generational theory. Great wars occur when the generation that doesn’t remember the last catastrophic war ascends to leadership of the country.
We are eight years into a Crisis period which won’t end until the mid-2020s. As this bitterly vicious presidential campaign accelerates towards a finale which will leave the country divided and irate, the hostile opposing forces will be seeking revenge, retribution, and retaliation no matter the outcome. There is no doubt the regeneracy is well under way.
“The next Fourth Turning is due to begin shortly after the new millennium, midway through the Oh-Oh decade. Around the year 2005, a sudden spark will catalyze a Crisis mood. Remnants of the old social order will disintegrate. Political and economic trust will implode. Real hardship will beset the land, with severe distress that could involve questions of class, race, nation and empire. The very survival of the nation will feel at stake. Sometime before the year 2025, America will pass through a great gate in history, commensurate with the American Revolution, Civil War, and twin emergencies of the Great Depression and World War II.” – Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning
It was five years ago I spent a couple fascinating hours with Neil Howe, co-author of the Fourth Turning, during the Occupy Wall Street protests. He thought the protests were all passion and no depth, engineered by anarchist Boomers. He was right. I thought OWS might be the start of the regeneracy, but it flamed out quickly. It was only a foreshadowing of what was to come. Whatever event or movement created the regeneracy, it would be driven by the toxic combination of debt, civic decay, and global disorder.
Neil was particularly worried about the Federal Reserve zero interest rate policy and how it was ruining our economic system, creating disincentives to saving and encouraging warped, debt driven speculation. And that was in 2011. The Fed keeping interest rates near zero on behalf of a corrupt establishment for the last eight years has been the primary factor in creating the anger, disillusionment and revolutionary spirit driving the regeneracy.
No critical thinking human being can deny this tumultuous presidential election and its equally turbulent primaries have been fueled by the dreadful self-serving response of the establishment to the 2008 Wall Street created financial collapse; the geopolitical anarchy created by U.S. interventionism in the Middle East; the civic decay created by a failing government educational system; rampant debt financed materialism enabled and encouraged by the financial/media complex; and racial division facilitated by the president and his social justice warrior brethren.
The rescue of Wall Street and destruction of Main Street by the Fed, Wall Street and the captured politicians of both parties in Washington D.C. has created the angry, acrimonious, throw the bums out mood boiling over in flyover America. The widening Grand Canyon gap in wealth between the haves and the have nots, produced by solutions from sociopaths in suits has reached the pitchfork and torch level.
The linear thinking ruling class has been in denial since this Crisis catalyzed in September 2008. Their looting, pillaging and ransacking campaign, designed to enrich and empower a small cadre of shadowy, powerful, wealthy men, had been successful for decades. When you control the currency and interest rates; rig the financial markets; buy the politicians; write the laws and regulations; own the corporate propaganda machines known as the mainstream media; operate a high tech surveillance state; create a dumbed down populace through government school indoctrination; and distract the masses with iGadgets, reality TV, hero worship, professional sports, social media, irrelevant cultural issues, and literally thousands of other modern day bread and circuses; you become arrogant and careless.
These sociopaths are so consumed with their ravenous fleecing of the middle class, waging wars for profit, and shredding the Constitution, they failed to recognize 2008 for the seismic earth shattering event that will change everything. The mood of the country shifted like tectonic plates beneath the nation. The mood continues to grow dimmer, as the peasants grow poorer and the modern day aristocracy (Wall Street bankers, corporate executives, corrupt politicians, shadowy billionaires) accumulate obscene ill-gotten wealth through their complete capture of the system. This perverted, degenerative, criminal degradation of our society is powerfully summed up by Jesse from Jesse’s Café Americain:
“Not all sociopaths wield knives and knotted cords. Some wear suits, and are exceptionally intelligent and articulate, obsessively driven, and are able to use and undermine the law and the rules for their advantage, like weapons. It is never about the win, never about the money. It is about the kill, the expression of their hatred, about elevating themselves with the suffering of others. Bind, torture, kill. Not only with ropes and knives, but also with power and money, and the subversion of law. Lawlessness is their addiction, their will to power.
When societies become lax and complacent, these sociopaths can possess great political power through great amounts of unprincipled money. And over time they become almost anti-human, destroyers of all that is good, all that is life, all that offends their insatiable sickness with its goodness. They twist the public against itself, and turn a broad sweep of society into their killing grounds. This is the undeniable lesson of the last century. There are monsters, and they walk among us.”....
....Based upon the reaction of the citizens in the last ten months, the dire problem facing the nation, perceived as the largest threat to our future, happens to be the Deep State establishment currently ruling the country. The captured mainstream media and grey beards running both political parties were completely stunned, horrified, and irate at the unprecedented success achieved by the two anti-establishment candidates, Trump and Sanders.
This election was supposed to follow the script as planned and coordinated by the establishment, with Hillary Clinton defeating Jeb Bush and continuing the corrupt status quo policies agreed to by the bought off leaders of both parties. They badly miscalculated the mood of the country and the whirlwind of change seeking to sweep away the stubborn remnants of a crooked, decrepit, putrid, existing social order. This collective middle finger to the establishment could only happen during a Fourth Turning.
This regeneracy is well under way and is poised to transform and replace the very foundation of this crumbling empire of debt, delusions, and denial. The unanswered question is what happens next. I posed that question to Neil Howe five years ago and he said the specific events of a Fourth Turning are unknowable, but the reaction to those events by the generational cohorts is consistent over time.
We are seeing the reaction of critical thinking Americans as they come to the realization the system is rigged against them....
....All signs point toward this Fourth Turning being a life or death struggle between the ruling class of sociopathic bankers, corporate elites, and sleazy politicians versus the oppressed and infuriated middle class. The lying, deceit, rigging, deception, theft and other crimes perpetrated by the ruling elites will be atoned for. The heroic patriotic revelations from Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, and Bradley (Chelsea) Manning proving the government and politicians to be lying, corrupt, immoral, sociopathic traitors to the Constitution have undermined the last vestiges of trust in the system and the establishment. The alignment of generational dynamics will provoke the responses to events moving forward. We have been badly led. A silent coup by Deep State perpetrators has led to the complete capture of our economic, financial, judicial and political systems.
A vast swath of the populace has been lured into living beyond their means. The existing system is unsustainable. The Boomer generation does not want to yield on their perceived entitlements. The Millennial generation is saddled with un-payable debts, living in their parents’ basements, working the night shift at Ruby Tuesday. Generation X is trapped in the middle of this generational struggle. The huge economic imbalances, created by politicians buying votes and engineering wealth inequality to benefit the few, have built up over decades like flood waters behind a weakening levee. When the levee breaks the morally bankrupt criminal social order will be swept away in the raging torrent to follow.
Winter will eventually turn into Spring, but it might be a bitter, gloomy, austere Spring. Every Fourth Turning brings on forecasts of imminent doom, but that is also a trait of Prophet (Trump, Clinton) Generations. It’s how they feel about the prospects of their imminent die off; they expect the entire world to go with them. The 2008 financial crisis was horrific, scary and an eye opener for those who blindly believed what they were told by their establishment zoo keepers. The regeneracy has begun; trust in the system has further disintegrated; this presidential election has further deepened this distrust of the entrenched establishment; and the coming bust for stocks, bonds, and real estate will knock out the supports for the dwindling remaining trust in this crooked system....
http://www.theburningplatform.com/2016/11/04/civil-war-ii-fourth-turning-intensifying-part-2/
This dysfunctional rigged presidential election reflects the tearing of the civic fabric at points of maximum susceptibility. As a country we have neglected, denied, or delayed necessary action on a plethora of vital issues threatening our long term viability as a nation. The deferral of difficult painful decisions has been a ploy of the ruling class, allowing them to further siphon the wealth of a dying empire, while maintaining control over the masses through laws, regulations, taxes, surveillance, intimidation, technology bread and circuses, and mainstream media propaganda....
....Next week we will know whether a regime change has taken place. A Trump presidency would surely mark a drastic transformation from the existing decrepit social order. But the Deep State is not going to relinquish their power, wealth and control without a fight to the finish. They will activate all of their remaining allies on Wall Street, in the media, running government bureaucracies, and running the military industrial complex to stonewall and defeat Trump’s agenda. If that fails, they will attempt to assassinate him.
A Clinton win would aggravate the building societal pressures, as the Trump supporters and most of the young Sanders supporters would refuse to recognize her as their president. She would assume power while under investigation by the FBI and Congress. The poisoned atmosphere in Washington D.C. would lead to a Constitutional crisis. Would her sociopathic nature lead her to start a war with Russia to distract attention from her criminality? The election of either candidate is likely to trigger events leading to Civil War II.
“This new regime will enthrone itself for the duration of the Crisis. Regardless of its ideology, that new leadership will assert public authority and demand private sacrifice. Regardless of its ideology, that new leadership will assert public authority and demand private sacrifice. Where leaders had once been inclined to alleviate societal pressures, they will now aggravate them to command the nation’s attention. The regeneracy will be solidly under way.” – The Fourth Turning – Strauss & Howe
No matter who wins the election, they will not have anything approaching a mandate. There are 219 million eligible voters in the U.S. Only 125 million or so will actually vote on November 8. The winner will likely chalk up about 58 million votes. Therefore, almost 75% of eligible voters in the country will not have voted for the next president. The country is as fractured as it was in 1860. The polling data reveals the major fractures.
The upper class is perfectly fine with things as they are because they own most of the financial assets, work directly or indirectly for the Deep State, or depend upon the government and/or Wall Street for their bloated salaries and bonuses. If you’re winning the class war, why would you want to change anything? It’s hard not to win when the game is rigged in your favor by your fellow .1% cronies. As Buffett noted, it is a class war and his class is winning. The lower classes are too ignorant and dependent upon the state for their survival to seek any change – other than protesting or rioting for more free shit.
It’s the demoralized, disillusioned, angry working middle class who have been pillaged by the ruling class through taxes, outsourcing their jobs, and Federal Reserve created inflation. With real median household income languishing at 1989 levels, it’s those in the middle who have lost the most. The 0% interest rates have punished senior citizens and middle class savers, while $3 trillion of QE benefited financial industry millionaires. The next financial collapse, which is baked into the cake, initiated by the policies designed to benefit the .1%, will push class warfare into the streets....
....It is clearly apparent to me this Fourth Turning’s primary driving force will be the domestic conflict between the Deep State establishment, the deplorables, and irreconcilable factions within the country. To linear thinkers, self-proclaimed progressives, corrupt politicians, subservient government workers, myopic media and those reliant upon the government for their sustenance, the thought of civil war in the United States is inconceivable.
Civil disorder would likely occur after a financial collapse of epic proportions. With stocks, bonds, and real estate at bubble proportions, interest rates already at zero, the country already in recession, inflation rising, deficits poised to breach $1 trillion per year over the next decade, Obamacare imploding, and real incomes stagnant, the coming economic implosion will make 2008 look like a walk in the park.
Once a chaotic financial collapse gets underway, it will be near impossible to stem the tide. Think back to the chaotic days of September 2008. Our $60 trillion of total credit market debt won’t matter until it matters. The cascade of bad debts will evaporate the remaining trust in our financial system.
Whether by accident or due to cyber-attack, a breakdown in our electronic based economic system in which store shelves go empty, fuel becomes scarce, and the electronic transfer of welfare benefits ceases, would create mass chaos in the streets. The 300 million guns in this country would get some use. Revenge, retribution and settling scores would be the order of the day.
With our just in time supply chain, a grid failure or breakdown of electronic ordering, payment and communication would bring the nation to its knees within one week. Millions would perish within a few weeks. Our civilized society would become uncivilized overnight. The downside of a society that stresses individualism over community would be borne out.
Cooperation, teamwork and shared sacrifice would be required to survive. The government would attempt to utilize the military and national guard to maintain order. A large portion of the country would rightfully blame the government and the corrupt establishment for causing the collapse. With their families also starving and no means of getting paid, will police, national guardsmen and the military continue obeying the orders of government leaders who caused the collapse?
Either due to the financial collapse or more overreach by the Federal government, the possibility of secession is real. It’s been attempted before and the conflict was bloody and earth shattering. There really are two Americas. The east and west coasts are dominated by the liberal elites who look down their noses upon the flyover country of ignorant deplorables. The .1% mostly resides in gated enclaves, penthouse suites, and luxury beachfront mansions.
They show nothing but contempt and disdain for the average American, living in Middle America or the South. The feeling is mutual amongst the working class towards the liberal elites who rule the country. Most of the 300 million guns are concentrated in the Midwest and South. With this amount of firepower and millions of Americans with nothing left to lose, those attempting to retain power will be at a distinct disadvantage. I believe armed vigilantes will hunt down those responsible for the destruction of the American economy and invoke their own justice.
As trust in government and institutions wanes and economic hardship deepens, the issue of states’ rights is likely to gain traction amongst a large swath of the critical thinking citizenry. The animosity between factions in this country is at historic levels. Large swaths of the country feel no kinship to the elitists on the coasts.
Civil war, secession, and the nation breaking into sectional regions of common benefits are unlikely to occur until the existing social order collapses under the weight of un-payable obligations. That time is approaching rapidly. The existing social order will be replaced by something new, but not necessarily better. That will depend on the choices we make and the leaders we follow.
“The risk of catastrophe will be very high. The nation could erupt into insurrection or civil violence, crack up geographically, or succumb to authoritarian rule. If there is a war, it is likely to be one of maximum risk and effort – in other words, a total war. Every Fourth Turning has registered an upward ratchet in the technology of destruction, and in mankind’s willingness to use it.” – Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning
No matter who wins the election next week, turmoil and trouble will befall our crumbling empire of debt. The three drivers of this Fourth Turning – debt, civic decay, global disorder – will continue to provide the impetus for change, conflict and the sweeping away of the morally bankrupt establishment. The empire builders planted the seeds of their own destruction. Their arrogance and hubris led them to abscond with too much, promise far more goodies than they could possibly deliver, execute military overreach – bankrupting the country and creating enemies across the globe.
The zombie economy is moribund, the productive people have been pillaged, and the bread and circus act is running on fumes. The American welfare/warfare state is crumbling. The ruling elite are desperate. They don’t want their Ponzi scheme to end, but they always fail. It’s a confidence game, and the game is over. The economic crisis is foreseeable to anyone with their eyes open. This empire will crumble and fall, just as others before throughout history....
As we enter the final stretch of this vitriolic, deplorable, venomous, propaganda saturated, deceitful, rigged presidential election spectacle, it becomes painfully obvious this Fourth Turning is careening toward bloodshed, bedlam, confrontation, and civil war. The linear fixated establishment, who fancy themselves intellectually superior to the irredemables, are too blinded by their sociopathic, increasingly audacious subversion of the Constitution, to grasp the level of rage and disillusionment of a white working class that has been screwed over for decades.
As the Wall Street shysters frantically accelerate their embezzlement of what remains of middle class wealth, with the Fed and the corporate media propagandists as their wing-men, the country devolves into a corporate fascist state. The disposition of the nation grows dark like the sky before an approaching deadly blizzard. As passions boil over and violence portends, this Fourth Turning hastens towards a bloody decade ahead with an uncertain climax.
If you think this is just hyperbole, you either haven’t studied history or your cognitive dissonance and normalcy bias prevent you from seeing the unavoidable societal altering clashes, which occur like clockwork on an eighty year cycle, when the portents are right in front of your eyes. Historian Arnold Toynbee’s great war cycle that arise every 80 years or so, aligns perfectly with the Fourth Turning generational theory. Great wars occur when the generation that doesn’t remember the last catastrophic war ascends to leadership of the country.
We are eight years into a Crisis period which won’t end until the mid-2020s. As this bitterly vicious presidential campaign accelerates towards a finale which will leave the country divided and irate, the hostile opposing forces will be seeking revenge, retribution, and retaliation no matter the outcome. There is no doubt the regeneracy is well under way.
“The next Fourth Turning is due to begin shortly after the new millennium, midway through the Oh-Oh decade. Around the year 2005, a sudden spark will catalyze a Crisis mood. Remnants of the old social order will disintegrate. Political and economic trust will implode. Real hardship will beset the land, with severe distress that could involve questions of class, race, nation and empire. The very survival of the nation will feel at stake. Sometime before the year 2025, America will pass through a great gate in history, commensurate with the American Revolution, Civil War, and twin emergencies of the Great Depression and World War II.” – Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning
It was five years ago I spent a couple fascinating hours with Neil Howe, co-author of the Fourth Turning, during the Occupy Wall Street protests. He thought the protests were all passion and no depth, engineered by anarchist Boomers. He was right. I thought OWS might be the start of the regeneracy, but it flamed out quickly. It was only a foreshadowing of what was to come. Whatever event or movement created the regeneracy, it would be driven by the toxic combination of debt, civic decay, and global disorder.
Neil was particularly worried about the Federal Reserve zero interest rate policy and how it was ruining our economic system, creating disincentives to saving and encouraging warped, debt driven speculation. And that was in 2011. The Fed keeping interest rates near zero on behalf of a corrupt establishment for the last eight years has been the primary factor in creating the anger, disillusionment and revolutionary spirit driving the regeneracy.
No critical thinking human being can deny this tumultuous presidential election and its equally turbulent primaries have been fueled by the dreadful self-serving response of the establishment to the 2008 Wall Street created financial collapse; the geopolitical anarchy created by U.S. interventionism in the Middle East; the civic decay created by a failing government educational system; rampant debt financed materialism enabled and encouraged by the financial/media complex; and racial division facilitated by the president and his social justice warrior brethren.
The rescue of Wall Street and destruction of Main Street by the Fed, Wall Street and the captured politicians of both parties in Washington D.C. has created the angry, acrimonious, throw the bums out mood boiling over in flyover America. The widening Grand Canyon gap in wealth between the haves and the have nots, produced by solutions from sociopaths in suits has reached the pitchfork and torch level.
The linear thinking ruling class has been in denial since this Crisis catalyzed in September 2008. Their looting, pillaging and ransacking campaign, designed to enrich and empower a small cadre of shadowy, powerful, wealthy men, had been successful for decades. When you control the currency and interest rates; rig the financial markets; buy the politicians; write the laws and regulations; own the corporate propaganda machines known as the mainstream media; operate a high tech surveillance state; create a dumbed down populace through government school indoctrination; and distract the masses with iGadgets, reality TV, hero worship, professional sports, social media, irrelevant cultural issues, and literally thousands of other modern day bread and circuses; you become arrogant and careless.
These sociopaths are so consumed with their ravenous fleecing of the middle class, waging wars for profit, and shredding the Constitution, they failed to recognize 2008 for the seismic earth shattering event that will change everything. The mood of the country shifted like tectonic plates beneath the nation. The mood continues to grow dimmer, as the peasants grow poorer and the modern day aristocracy (Wall Street bankers, corporate executives, corrupt politicians, shadowy billionaires) accumulate obscene ill-gotten wealth through their complete capture of the system. This perverted, degenerative, criminal degradation of our society is powerfully summed up by Jesse from Jesse’s Café Americain:
“Not all sociopaths wield knives and knotted cords. Some wear suits, and are exceptionally intelligent and articulate, obsessively driven, and are able to use and undermine the law and the rules for their advantage, like weapons. It is never about the win, never about the money. It is about the kill, the expression of their hatred, about elevating themselves with the suffering of others. Bind, torture, kill. Not only with ropes and knives, but also with power and money, and the subversion of law. Lawlessness is their addiction, their will to power.
When societies become lax and complacent, these sociopaths can possess great political power through great amounts of unprincipled money. And over time they become almost anti-human, destroyers of all that is good, all that is life, all that offends their insatiable sickness with its goodness. They twist the public against itself, and turn a broad sweep of society into their killing grounds. This is the undeniable lesson of the last century. There are monsters, and they walk among us.”....
....Based upon the reaction of the citizens in the last ten months, the dire problem facing the nation, perceived as the largest threat to our future, happens to be the Deep State establishment currently ruling the country. The captured mainstream media and grey beards running both political parties were completely stunned, horrified, and irate at the unprecedented success achieved by the two anti-establishment candidates, Trump and Sanders.
This election was supposed to follow the script as planned and coordinated by the establishment, with Hillary Clinton defeating Jeb Bush and continuing the corrupt status quo policies agreed to by the bought off leaders of both parties. They badly miscalculated the mood of the country and the whirlwind of change seeking to sweep away the stubborn remnants of a crooked, decrepit, putrid, existing social order. This collective middle finger to the establishment could only happen during a Fourth Turning.
This regeneracy is well under way and is poised to transform and replace the very foundation of this crumbling empire of debt, delusions, and denial. The unanswered question is what happens next. I posed that question to Neil Howe five years ago and he said the specific events of a Fourth Turning are unknowable, but the reaction to those events by the generational cohorts is consistent over time.
We are seeing the reaction of critical thinking Americans as they come to the realization the system is rigged against them....
....All signs point toward this Fourth Turning being a life or death struggle between the ruling class of sociopathic bankers, corporate elites, and sleazy politicians versus the oppressed and infuriated middle class. The lying, deceit, rigging, deception, theft and other crimes perpetrated by the ruling elites will be atoned for. The heroic patriotic revelations from Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, and Bradley (Chelsea) Manning proving the government and politicians to be lying, corrupt, immoral, sociopathic traitors to the Constitution have undermined the last vestiges of trust in the system and the establishment. The alignment of generational dynamics will provoke the responses to events moving forward. We have been badly led. A silent coup by Deep State perpetrators has led to the complete capture of our economic, financial, judicial and political systems.
A vast swath of the populace has been lured into living beyond their means. The existing system is unsustainable. The Boomer generation does not want to yield on their perceived entitlements. The Millennial generation is saddled with un-payable debts, living in their parents’ basements, working the night shift at Ruby Tuesday. Generation X is trapped in the middle of this generational struggle. The huge economic imbalances, created by politicians buying votes and engineering wealth inequality to benefit the few, have built up over decades like flood waters behind a weakening levee. When the levee breaks the morally bankrupt criminal social order will be swept away in the raging torrent to follow.
Winter will eventually turn into Spring, but it might be a bitter, gloomy, austere Spring. Every Fourth Turning brings on forecasts of imminent doom, but that is also a trait of Prophet (Trump, Clinton) Generations. It’s how they feel about the prospects of their imminent die off; they expect the entire world to go with them. The 2008 financial crisis was horrific, scary and an eye opener for those who blindly believed what they were told by their establishment zoo keepers. The regeneracy has begun; trust in the system has further disintegrated; this presidential election has further deepened this distrust of the entrenched establishment; and the coming bust for stocks, bonds, and real estate will knock out the supports for the dwindling remaining trust in this crooked system....
http://www.theburningplatform.com/2016/11/04/civil-war-ii-fourth-turning-intensifying-part-2/
This dysfunctional rigged presidential election reflects the tearing of the civic fabric at points of maximum susceptibility. As a country we have neglected, denied, or delayed necessary action on a plethora of vital issues threatening our long term viability as a nation. The deferral of difficult painful decisions has been a ploy of the ruling class, allowing them to further siphon the wealth of a dying empire, while maintaining control over the masses through laws, regulations, taxes, surveillance, intimidation, technology bread and circuses, and mainstream media propaganda....
....Next week we will know whether a regime change has taken place. A Trump presidency would surely mark a drastic transformation from the existing decrepit social order. But the Deep State is not going to relinquish their power, wealth and control without a fight to the finish. They will activate all of their remaining allies on Wall Street, in the media, running government bureaucracies, and running the military industrial complex to stonewall and defeat Trump’s agenda. If that fails, they will attempt to assassinate him.
A Clinton win would aggravate the building societal pressures, as the Trump supporters and most of the young Sanders supporters would refuse to recognize her as their president. She would assume power while under investigation by the FBI and Congress. The poisoned atmosphere in Washington D.C. would lead to a Constitutional crisis. Would her sociopathic nature lead her to start a war with Russia to distract attention from her criminality? The election of either candidate is likely to trigger events leading to Civil War II.
“This new regime will enthrone itself for the duration of the Crisis. Regardless of its ideology, that new leadership will assert public authority and demand private sacrifice. Regardless of its ideology, that new leadership will assert public authority and demand private sacrifice. Where leaders had once been inclined to alleviate societal pressures, they will now aggravate them to command the nation’s attention. The regeneracy will be solidly under way.” – The Fourth Turning – Strauss & Howe
No matter who wins the election, they will not have anything approaching a mandate. There are 219 million eligible voters in the U.S. Only 125 million or so will actually vote on November 8. The winner will likely chalk up about 58 million votes. Therefore, almost 75% of eligible voters in the country will not have voted for the next president. The country is as fractured as it was in 1860. The polling data reveals the major fractures.
The upper class is perfectly fine with things as they are because they own most of the financial assets, work directly or indirectly for the Deep State, or depend upon the government and/or Wall Street for their bloated salaries and bonuses. If you’re winning the class war, why would you want to change anything? It’s hard not to win when the game is rigged in your favor by your fellow .1% cronies. As Buffett noted, it is a class war and his class is winning. The lower classes are too ignorant and dependent upon the state for their survival to seek any change – other than protesting or rioting for more free shit.
It’s the demoralized, disillusioned, angry working middle class who have been pillaged by the ruling class through taxes, outsourcing their jobs, and Federal Reserve created inflation. With real median household income languishing at 1989 levels, it’s those in the middle who have lost the most. The 0% interest rates have punished senior citizens and middle class savers, while $3 trillion of QE benefited financial industry millionaires. The next financial collapse, which is baked into the cake, initiated by the policies designed to benefit the .1%, will push class warfare into the streets....
....It is clearly apparent to me this Fourth Turning’s primary driving force will be the domestic conflict between the Deep State establishment, the deplorables, and irreconcilable factions within the country. To linear thinkers, self-proclaimed progressives, corrupt politicians, subservient government workers, myopic media and those reliant upon the government for their sustenance, the thought of civil war in the United States is inconceivable.
Civil disorder would likely occur after a financial collapse of epic proportions. With stocks, bonds, and real estate at bubble proportions, interest rates already at zero, the country already in recession, inflation rising, deficits poised to breach $1 trillion per year over the next decade, Obamacare imploding, and real incomes stagnant, the coming economic implosion will make 2008 look like a walk in the park.
Once a chaotic financial collapse gets underway, it will be near impossible to stem the tide. Think back to the chaotic days of September 2008. Our $60 trillion of total credit market debt won’t matter until it matters. The cascade of bad debts will evaporate the remaining trust in our financial system.
Whether by accident or due to cyber-attack, a breakdown in our electronic based economic system in which store shelves go empty, fuel becomes scarce, and the electronic transfer of welfare benefits ceases, would create mass chaos in the streets. The 300 million guns in this country would get some use. Revenge, retribution and settling scores would be the order of the day.
With our just in time supply chain, a grid failure or breakdown of electronic ordering, payment and communication would bring the nation to its knees within one week. Millions would perish within a few weeks. Our civilized society would become uncivilized overnight. The downside of a society that stresses individualism over community would be borne out.
Cooperation, teamwork and shared sacrifice would be required to survive. The government would attempt to utilize the military and national guard to maintain order. A large portion of the country would rightfully blame the government and the corrupt establishment for causing the collapse. With their families also starving and no means of getting paid, will police, national guardsmen and the military continue obeying the orders of government leaders who caused the collapse?
Either due to the financial collapse or more overreach by the Federal government, the possibility of secession is real. It’s been attempted before and the conflict was bloody and earth shattering. There really are two Americas. The east and west coasts are dominated by the liberal elites who look down their noses upon the flyover country of ignorant deplorables. The .1% mostly resides in gated enclaves, penthouse suites, and luxury beachfront mansions.
They show nothing but contempt and disdain for the average American, living in Middle America or the South. The feeling is mutual amongst the working class towards the liberal elites who rule the country. Most of the 300 million guns are concentrated in the Midwest and South. With this amount of firepower and millions of Americans with nothing left to lose, those attempting to retain power will be at a distinct disadvantage. I believe armed vigilantes will hunt down those responsible for the destruction of the American economy and invoke their own justice.
As trust in government and institutions wanes and economic hardship deepens, the issue of states’ rights is likely to gain traction amongst a large swath of the critical thinking citizenry. The animosity between factions in this country is at historic levels. Large swaths of the country feel no kinship to the elitists on the coasts.
Civil war, secession, and the nation breaking into sectional regions of common benefits are unlikely to occur until the existing social order collapses under the weight of un-payable obligations. That time is approaching rapidly. The existing social order will be replaced by something new, but not necessarily better. That will depend on the choices we make and the leaders we follow.
“The risk of catastrophe will be very high. The nation could erupt into insurrection or civil violence, crack up geographically, or succumb to authoritarian rule. If there is a war, it is likely to be one of maximum risk and effort – in other words, a total war. Every Fourth Turning has registered an upward ratchet in the technology of destruction, and in mankind’s willingness to use it.” – Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning
No matter who wins the election next week, turmoil and trouble will befall our crumbling empire of debt. The three drivers of this Fourth Turning – debt, civic decay, global disorder – will continue to provide the impetus for change, conflict and the sweeping away of the morally bankrupt establishment. The empire builders planted the seeds of their own destruction. Their arrogance and hubris led them to abscond with too much, promise far more goodies than they could possibly deliver, execute military overreach – bankrupting the country and creating enemies across the globe.
The zombie economy is moribund, the productive people have been pillaged, and the bread and circus act is running on fumes. The American welfare/warfare state is crumbling. The ruling elite are desperate. They don’t want their Ponzi scheme to end, but they always fail. It’s a confidence game, and the game is over. The economic crisis is foreseeable to anyone with their eyes open. This empire will crumble and fall, just as others before throughout history....
SC137-13
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/defying_the_politics_of_fear_20161106
Defying the Politics of Fear
No social or revolutionary movement succeeds without a core of people who will not betray their vision and their principles. They are the building blocks of social change. They are our only hope for a viable socialism. They are willing to spend their lives as political outcasts. They are willing to endure repression. They will not sell out the oppressed and the poor. They know that you stand with all of the oppressed—people of color in our prisons and marginal communities, the poor, unemployed workers, our LGBT community, undocumented workers, the mentally ill and the Palestinians, Iraqis and Afghans whom we terrorize and murder—or you stand with none of the oppressed. They know when you fight for the oppressed you get treated like the oppressed. They know this is the cost of the moral life, a life that is not abandoned even if means you are destined to spend generations wandering in the wilderness, even if you are destined to fail.
I was in East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Romania in 1989 during the revolutions, or in the case of Romania an interparty putsch. These revolutions were spontaneous outbursts by an enraged population that had had enough of communist repression, mismanagement and corruption. No one, from the dissidents themselves to the ruling communist parties, anticipated these revolts. They erupted, as all revolutions do, from tinder that had been waiting years for a spark.
These revolutions were led by a handful of dissidents who until the fall of 1989 were marginal and dismissed by the state as inconsequential until it was too late. The state periodically sent state security to harass them. It often ignored them. I am not even sure you could call these dissidents an opposition. They were profoundly isolated within their own societies. The state media denied them a voice. They had no legal status and were locked out of the political system. They were blacklisted. They struggled to make a living. But when the breaking point in Eastern Europe came, when the ruling communist ideology lost all credibility, there was no question in the minds of the public about whom they could trust. The demonstrators that poured into the streets of East Berlin and Prague were aware of who would sell them out and who would not. They trusted those, such as Václav Havel, who had dedicated their lives to fighting for open society, those who had been willing to be condemned as nonpersons and go to jail for their defiance.
Our only chance to overthrow corporate power comes from those who will not surrender to it, who will hold fast to the causes of the oppressed no matter what the price, who are willing to be dismissed and reviled by a bankrupt liberal establishment, who have found within themselves the courage to say no, to refuse to cooperate. The most important issue in this election does not revolve around the personal traits of Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. It revolves around the destructive dynamic of unfettered and unregulated global capitalism, the crimes of imperialism and the security and surveillance apparatus. These forces are where real power lies. Trump and Clinton will do nothing to restrict them.
It is up to us to resist. We must refuse to be complicit, even in the act of voting, with the fossil fuel industry’s savaging of our ecosystem, endless wars, oppression of the poor, including the one in five children in this country who is hungry, the evisceration of constitutional rights and civil liberties, the cruel and inhumane system of mass incarceration and the state-sponsored execution of unarmed poor people of color in our marginal communities.
Julien Benda reminds us that we can serve two sets of principles. Privilege and power or justice and truth. The more we make compromises with those who serve privilege and power the more we diminish the capacity for justice and truth. Our strength comes from our steadfastness to justice and truth, a steadfastness that accepts that the corporate forces arrayed against us may crush us, but that the more we make compromises with those whose ends are privilege and power the more we diminish our capacity to effect change.
Karl Popper in “The Open Society and Its Enemies” writes that the question is not how do you get good people to rule. Popper says this is the wrong question. Most people attracted to power, he writes, have “rarely been above average, either morally or intellectually, and often [have been] below it.” The question is how do we build forces to restrict the despotism of the powerful. There is a moment in Henry Kissinger’s memoirs—do not buy the book—when Nixon and Kissinger are looking out at tens of thousands of anti-war protesters who have surrounded the White House. Nixon had placed empty city buses in front of the White House to keep the protesters back. He worried out loud that the crowd would break through the barricades and get him and Kissinger. And that is exactly where we want people in power to be. This is why, although he was not a liberal, Nixon was our last liberal president. He was scared of movements. And if we cannot make the elites scared of us we will fail.
The rise of Donald Trump is the product of the disenchantment, despair and anger caused by neoliberalism and the collapse of institutions that once offered a counterweight to the powerful. Trump gives vent to the legitimate rage and betrayal of the white underclass and working poor. His right-wing populism, which will grow in virulence and sophistication under a Clinton presidency, mirrors the right-wing populism rippling across much of Europe including Poland, Hungary, France and Great Britain. If Clinton wins, Trump becomes the dress rehearsal for fascism.
A bankrupt liberal class, as was true in Yugoslavia when I covered the war and as was true in Weimar Germany, is the great enabler of fascism. Liberals, in the name of the practical, refuse to challenge parties that betray workingmen and –women. They surrender their values for political expediency. Our [failure] to build a counterweight to the Democratic Party after it abandoned the working class with the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994 was our gravest mistake.
Hillary Clinton embodies the detested neoliberal establishment. She can barely fend off one of the most imbecilic and narcissistic candidates in American history. Matched against a demagogue with brains and political skill, she would lose. If we do not defy the neoliberal order, championed by Clinton and the Democratic Party elites, we ensure the conditions for a terrifying right-wing backlash, one that will use harsh and violent mechanisms to crush the little political space we have left.
The tactic of strategic voting begs the question “Strategic for whom?” Our money-drenched, heavily managed elections are little more than totalitarian plebiscites to give a veneer of legitimacy to corporate power. As long as we signal that we are not a threat to the established order, as long as we participate in this charade, the neoliberal assault will continue towards its frightening and inevitable conclusion.
Alexis de Tocqueville correctly saw that when citizens can no longer participate in a meaningful way in political life, political populism is replaced by a cultural populism of sameness, resentment and mindless patriotism and by a form of anti-politics he called “democratic despotism.” The language and rituals of democracy are used to mask a political system based on the unchallenged supremacy of corporate power, one the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls “inverted totalitarianism.”
We must build structures of open defiance to the corporate state. It may take as long as a decade for us to effectively confront corporate power. But without a potent counterweight to the neoliberal order we will be steadily disempowered. Every action we take, every word we utter must make it clear that we refuse to participate in our own enslavement and destruction. The rapid disintegration of the ecosystem means resistance cannot be delayed.
Our success will be determined not by the number of votes we get in this or any other election but by our ability to stand unequivocally with the oppressed. The enemies of freedom throughout history have always charged its defenders with subversion. The enemies of freedom have often convinced large parts of a captive population to parrot back mind-numbing clichés to justify their rule. Resistance to corporate power will require fortitude, an ability to march to the beat of our own drum.
No revolutionary abandons, no matter what the cost, those he or she defends. We cannot betray those murdered by police in our marginal communities. We cannot betray the courageous dissidents—Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden and the great revolutionary Mumia Abu-Jamal. They have not betrayed us. We cannot betray the dissidents in North Dakota who are defying a fossil fuel industry that is orchestrating the sixth great mass extinction, melting the polar ice caps and raising carbon emissions to over 400 parts per million. We cannot betray the 2.3 million men and women locked in cages across this nation for years and decades. We cannot betray the Palestinians. We cannot betray the Iraqis and Afghans whose lives we have destroyed by state terror. If we betray them we betray ourselves.
We cannot betray the ideal of a popular democracy by pretending this contrived political theater is free or fair or democratic. We cannot play their game. We cannot play by their rules. Our job is not to accommodate the corporate state. Our job is to destroy it. “We think we are the doctors,” Alexander Herzen told anarchists of another era. “We are the disease.”
The state seeks to control us through fear, propaganda, wholesale surveillance and violence. [This] is the only form of social control it has left. The lie of neoliberalism has been exposed. Its credibility has imploded. The moment we cease being afraid, the moment we use our collective strength as I saw in Eastern Europe in 1989 to make the rulers afraid of us, is the moment of the system’s downfall.
Go into the voting booth on Tuesday. Do not be afraid. Vote with your conscience. Vote Green. If we win 5 percent we win. Five percent becomes the building block for the years ahead. A decade ago Syriza, the ruling party in Greece, was polling 4 percent. And after you vote, join some movement, some protest, some disruption, Black Lives Matter, the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign against Israel, an anti-fracking demonstration. Courage is contagious. Revolutions begin, as I saw in East Germany, with a few Lutheran clergy holding candles as they marched through the streets of Leipzig in East Germany. It ends with half a million people protesting in East Berlin, the defection of the police and the army to the side of the protesters and the collapse of the Stasi state. But revolutions only happen when a few dissidents decide they will no longer cooperate, when they affirm what we must all affirm, when, as Havel said, they choose to live in truth.
We may not succeed. So be it. At least those who come after us, and I speak as a father, will say we tried. The corporate forces that have us in their death grip will destroy our lives. They will destroy the lives of my children. They will destroy the lives of your children. They will destroy the ecosystem that makes life possible. We owe it to those who come after us not to be complicit in this evil. We owe it to them to refuse to be good Germans. I do not, in the end, fight fascists because I will win. I fight fascists because they are fascists.
Defying the Politics of Fear
No social or revolutionary movement succeeds without a core of people who will not betray their vision and their principles. They are the building blocks of social change. They are our only hope for a viable socialism. They are willing to spend their lives as political outcasts. They are willing to endure repression. They will not sell out the oppressed and the poor. They know that you stand with all of the oppressed—people of color in our prisons and marginal communities, the poor, unemployed workers, our LGBT community, undocumented workers, the mentally ill and the Palestinians, Iraqis and Afghans whom we terrorize and murder—or you stand with none of the oppressed. They know when you fight for the oppressed you get treated like the oppressed. They know this is the cost of the moral life, a life that is not abandoned even if means you are destined to spend generations wandering in the wilderness, even if you are destined to fail.
I was in East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Romania in 1989 during the revolutions, or in the case of Romania an interparty putsch. These revolutions were spontaneous outbursts by an enraged population that had had enough of communist repression, mismanagement and corruption. No one, from the dissidents themselves to the ruling communist parties, anticipated these revolts. They erupted, as all revolutions do, from tinder that had been waiting years for a spark.
These revolutions were led by a handful of dissidents who until the fall of 1989 were marginal and dismissed by the state as inconsequential until it was too late. The state periodically sent state security to harass them. It often ignored them. I am not even sure you could call these dissidents an opposition. They were profoundly isolated within their own societies. The state media denied them a voice. They had no legal status and were locked out of the political system. They were blacklisted. They struggled to make a living. But when the breaking point in Eastern Europe came, when the ruling communist ideology lost all credibility, there was no question in the minds of the public about whom they could trust. The demonstrators that poured into the streets of East Berlin and Prague were aware of who would sell them out and who would not. They trusted those, such as Václav Havel, who had dedicated their lives to fighting for open society, those who had been willing to be condemned as nonpersons and go to jail for their defiance.
Our only chance to overthrow corporate power comes from those who will not surrender to it, who will hold fast to the causes of the oppressed no matter what the price, who are willing to be dismissed and reviled by a bankrupt liberal establishment, who have found within themselves the courage to say no, to refuse to cooperate. The most important issue in this election does not revolve around the personal traits of Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. It revolves around the destructive dynamic of unfettered and unregulated global capitalism, the crimes of imperialism and the security and surveillance apparatus. These forces are where real power lies. Trump and Clinton will do nothing to restrict them.
It is up to us to resist. We must refuse to be complicit, even in the act of voting, with the fossil fuel industry’s savaging of our ecosystem, endless wars, oppression of the poor, including the one in five children in this country who is hungry, the evisceration of constitutional rights and civil liberties, the cruel and inhumane system of mass incarceration and the state-sponsored execution of unarmed poor people of color in our marginal communities.
Julien Benda reminds us that we can serve two sets of principles. Privilege and power or justice and truth. The more we make compromises with those who serve privilege and power the more we diminish the capacity for justice and truth. Our strength comes from our steadfastness to justice and truth, a steadfastness that accepts that the corporate forces arrayed against us may crush us, but that the more we make compromises with those whose ends are privilege and power the more we diminish our capacity to effect change.
Karl Popper in “The Open Society and Its Enemies” writes that the question is not how do you get good people to rule. Popper says this is the wrong question. Most people attracted to power, he writes, have “rarely been above average, either morally or intellectually, and often [have been] below it.” The question is how do we build forces to restrict the despotism of the powerful. There is a moment in Henry Kissinger’s memoirs—do not buy the book—when Nixon and Kissinger are looking out at tens of thousands of anti-war protesters who have surrounded the White House. Nixon had placed empty city buses in front of the White House to keep the protesters back. He worried out loud that the crowd would break through the barricades and get him and Kissinger. And that is exactly where we want people in power to be. This is why, although he was not a liberal, Nixon was our last liberal president. He was scared of movements. And if we cannot make the elites scared of us we will fail.
The rise of Donald Trump is the product of the disenchantment, despair and anger caused by neoliberalism and the collapse of institutions that once offered a counterweight to the powerful. Trump gives vent to the legitimate rage and betrayal of the white underclass and working poor. His right-wing populism, which will grow in virulence and sophistication under a Clinton presidency, mirrors the right-wing populism rippling across much of Europe including Poland, Hungary, France and Great Britain. If Clinton wins, Trump becomes the dress rehearsal for fascism.
A bankrupt liberal class, as was true in Yugoslavia when I covered the war and as was true in Weimar Germany, is the great enabler of fascism. Liberals, in the name of the practical, refuse to challenge parties that betray workingmen and –women. They surrender their values for political expediency. Our [failure] to build a counterweight to the Democratic Party after it abandoned the working class with the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994 was our gravest mistake.
Hillary Clinton embodies the detested neoliberal establishment. She can barely fend off one of the most imbecilic and narcissistic candidates in American history. Matched against a demagogue with brains and political skill, she would lose. If we do not defy the neoliberal order, championed by Clinton and the Democratic Party elites, we ensure the conditions for a terrifying right-wing backlash, one that will use harsh and violent mechanisms to crush the little political space we have left.
The tactic of strategic voting begs the question “Strategic for whom?” Our money-drenched, heavily managed elections are little more than totalitarian plebiscites to give a veneer of legitimacy to corporate power. As long as we signal that we are not a threat to the established order, as long as we participate in this charade, the neoliberal assault will continue towards its frightening and inevitable conclusion.
Alexis de Tocqueville correctly saw that when citizens can no longer participate in a meaningful way in political life, political populism is replaced by a cultural populism of sameness, resentment and mindless patriotism and by a form of anti-politics he called “democratic despotism.” The language and rituals of democracy are used to mask a political system based on the unchallenged supremacy of corporate power, one the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls “inverted totalitarianism.”
We must build structures of open defiance to the corporate state. It may take as long as a decade for us to effectively confront corporate power. But without a potent counterweight to the neoliberal order we will be steadily disempowered. Every action we take, every word we utter must make it clear that we refuse to participate in our own enslavement and destruction. The rapid disintegration of the ecosystem means resistance cannot be delayed.
Our success will be determined not by the number of votes we get in this or any other election but by our ability to stand unequivocally with the oppressed. The enemies of freedom throughout history have always charged its defenders with subversion. The enemies of freedom have often convinced large parts of a captive population to parrot back mind-numbing clichés to justify their rule. Resistance to corporate power will require fortitude, an ability to march to the beat of our own drum.
No revolutionary abandons, no matter what the cost, those he or she defends. We cannot betray those murdered by police in our marginal communities. We cannot betray the courageous dissidents—Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden and the great revolutionary Mumia Abu-Jamal. They have not betrayed us. We cannot betray the dissidents in North Dakota who are defying a fossil fuel industry that is orchestrating the sixth great mass extinction, melting the polar ice caps and raising carbon emissions to over 400 parts per million. We cannot betray the 2.3 million men and women locked in cages across this nation for years and decades. We cannot betray the Palestinians. We cannot betray the Iraqis and Afghans whose lives we have destroyed by state terror. If we betray them we betray ourselves.
We cannot betray the ideal of a popular democracy by pretending this contrived political theater is free or fair or democratic. We cannot play their game. We cannot play by their rules. Our job is not to accommodate the corporate state. Our job is to destroy it. “We think we are the doctors,” Alexander Herzen told anarchists of another era. “We are the disease.”
The state seeks to control us through fear, propaganda, wholesale surveillance and violence. [This] is the only form of social control it has left. The lie of neoliberalism has been exposed. Its credibility has imploded. The moment we cease being afraid, the moment we use our collective strength as I saw in Eastern Europe in 1989 to make the rulers afraid of us, is the moment of the system’s downfall.
Go into the voting booth on Tuesday. Do not be afraid. Vote with your conscience. Vote Green. If we win 5 percent we win. Five percent becomes the building block for the years ahead. A decade ago Syriza, the ruling party in Greece, was polling 4 percent. And after you vote, join some movement, some protest, some disruption, Black Lives Matter, the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign against Israel, an anti-fracking demonstration. Courage is contagious. Revolutions begin, as I saw in East Germany, with a few Lutheran clergy holding candles as they marched through the streets of Leipzig in East Germany. It ends with half a million people protesting in East Berlin, the defection of the police and the army to the side of the protesters and the collapse of the Stasi state. But revolutions only happen when a few dissidents decide they will no longer cooperate, when they affirm what we must all affirm, when, as Havel said, they choose to live in truth.
We may not succeed. So be it. At least those who come after us, and I speak as a father, will say we tried. The corporate forces that have us in their death grip will destroy our lives. They will destroy the lives of my children. They will destroy the lives of your children. They will destroy the ecosystem that makes life possible. We owe it to those who come after us not to be complicit in this evil. We owe it to them to refuse to be good Germans. I do not, in the end, fight fascists because I will win. I fight fascists because they are fascists.
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