The final form of Socialism in the USSR failed in the 20th Century.   The Soviet State owned the means of production for making products and controlled the markets for buying and selling those products.  The State was the employer in the USSR.   The State was all powerful and the authoritarian rulers saw change as limitations on their powers.  Therefore, they ignored the problems and doubled down on their methods.  China learned from the Soviets mistakes, realized change was necessary and created their own version of Socialism. They recently eliminated extreme poverty across China while also beating us at our own game of capitalism.  But the State of China still controls all levels of the economic system a new form of the ‘old Socialism.  

Socialism is relatively young and evolving as different countries try out other versions.  The US not only has the lowest level of Socialism of the worlds democratic nations, it has used regime change around the world to stifle new versions of Socialism which guarded national resources from our capitalists.   Scandinavia and Europe have their versions of Socialism/capitalism. They kept certain national resources from corporate/capitalist control and required higher taxes.  Just watch Michael Moore’s Where to Invade Next.  

In contrast, we have Casino Capitalism where the house always wins. Capitalismis hundreds of years old and has changed little over its life as it has spread around the world. Capitalism crashes often, three times so far in the 21st century, and like the failed version of Socialism in the USSR, its flaws are never acknowledged or questioned.

For some of us, we have lived through beneficial phases of a heavily regulated version of capitalism with greater, but still lacking, equality.  More recently, we have witnessed the removal of regulation, growing massive inequality, and the purchase of our political leaders to do the bidding of the capitalists. The capitalists have gained more and more tax breaks and their monopolies have grown without any anti-trust law enforcement.  Some of those who witnessed this expansion of inequality are luckily still part of a prosperous Middle Class.   Unfortunately, we are all now witnessing both a growing billionaire class, in terms of both wealth and numbers, and a growing Poor Class in terms of millions of citizens who can’t afford a $400.00 emergency or the loss of any of their jobs.  The GQP Cult is working hard to cancel the Middle Class

The cycle some of us have lived through personally, has happened before in these United States. The first cycle began with unregulated slavery driven by the billionaires of the day. They started a civil war to keep slavery (inequality) from regulation that would destroy it. The response was three new constitutional amendments to protect and empower the newly freed slaves (more equality). Next, America experienced the unregulated industrial revolution, another spurt of massive economic inequality and the Great Depression. Then came a push back by many new Federal laws grouped as the New Deal. They regulated corporations, kept taxes high, promoted unions, controlled banks, and again, selectively, protected and empowered citizens/workers and the elderly (more equality).

These slow cycles between massive inequality and modest increases in equality over centuries and the more frequent economic crashes of capitalism are a long-term version of Capitalisms Groundhog Day (CGD). We just haven’t yet figured out how to get out of this ruinous cycle. Plus, those who benefit most from this cycle, the capitalists, have the power and control over government to keep saving capitalism from itself. These powerful capitalists eventually eliminate the regulations that restrain their greed and push the pendulum back to more inequality.

The differences between the failed Soviet Socialism and America’s Cyclic Casino Capitalism are:

In America’s short history, wealthy capitalists have stopped regulated capitalism and creeping socialism. The result is popular unrest, revolt and a return to regulation  a cycle that needs to end.   So far, other socialististic nations have managed to keep capitalists from privatizing their social programs and maximizing inequality. However, the capitalists are working hard to acquire that great social wealth for their bank accounts.  These other nations, however, have an advantage over America they have more than two political parties to limit corporate/capitalists vetos.

In conclusion, bureaucrats and capitalists will endeavor to keep and grow their power over both employees/citizens and their democratic governments as long as they control the economic systems.

We need to disempower the single-party bureaucrats and the excessively wealthy and extremely powerful capitalists who own the wealthy bureaucrats. Within democratic political systems around the world, they do that through majority rule, multiple political parties, and elections a democratic process. What we need now are an improved democratic political system(no limitations on voting)anda more democratic economic system. Both will promote and grow social systems to equally protect and empower all citizens/workers while also disempowering the capitalists and the bureaucrats they buy.

So, this democratic economy is now the latest incarnation of a socialist economy. One where employees democratically control the means of production and the markets for buying and selling their products. One that distributes profit democratically instead of concentrating it at the top. One where employees never pollute their communities. One that keeps employees jobs at home. One where employee-fundedwelfare programs managed by a supportivedemocratic government provide a minimum survival foundation for all citizens. One that will avoid undeserved handouts for those at the top of some imaginary social hierarchy.

Democratic Socialism is about social responsibility for all citizens through expansion of democracy in both our political and economic systems.

… Butmany have contrived since the 1700s to limit human rightsas if they were a commodity subject to market distribution based on a contrived social hierarchy of privilege.

Imagine a white person with a friend of color stopping for refreshment at a local establishment. Their server brings them two glasses. One is filled with ice water and given to the white person. The other is empty and given to the friend of color. How strange? They look around at the tables near them. They notice others, all white, all have full glasses. As the server walks away, both customers ask for an explanation. The server explains that this is company policy. They have put limits on water for people of color and leave it up to the customers to figure out what to do.

Obviously, the company policy violates fair distribution of an unlimited resource. Authoritarian leadership should never contrive situations that put customers/citizens into such a divisive situation. Likewise with human rights.

This water example demonstrates the concept of a zero-sum game.  One side loses and the other side gains.  The sum of shared water remains the same but one customer is left feeling loss while the other is left feeling embarassed.

Contrived limits on water or human rights is divisive and immoral. However, authoritarians insist that human rights are a zero-sum game. If someone gains rights, someone else loses rights. This contrivance is used to divide and distract people from those trying to control them. The zero-sum idea, as applied to human rights, is even a conceptimbedded in our legal system:

During Judge Robert Borks confirmation hearings in 1987, he sat for five days and answered questions about his constitutional philosophy. One of the questions was whether he agreed that when a court adds to one persons constitutional rights, it subtracts from the rights of others,Bork said yes,describing it as a matter of plain arithmetic. Linda Greenhouse, covering the hearings for the New York Times, focused on this zero-sum view, describing it as sharply at variance with the vision put forth by [the judges] opponents, who spoke of the Constitution in organic rather than arithmetical terms, as a system elastic enough so that adding to the rights of some did not necessarily diminish the rights of others.

How could Bork be so wrong? How can exercising ones rights limit those of another? If I speak, as in this post, does that take away another’s right to speak or post to their blog? No! If someone establishes and publishes a new newspaper, does that require the closing of another to keep the number of newspapers constant? No!! If one group wants to assemble does another group have to cancel their assembly? No! If Congress guaranteed the right to vote, does my casting a vote require the nullification of an other vote to keep the total number of votes constant? No!!! Human rights are not a commodity!

A human right either exists or it doesn’t. A right is available to all without limit. A human right cannot be taken away without due process. It is immoral for any of us to decide what rights are available for another. Rights are, like water or air; equally available to all. If I need to take a breath, does someone need to stop breathing? Of course not! Any limitations on human rights contrived by authoritarians seeking to protect and empower a privileged few is immoral.

SCOTUS nomineeBork WAS as wrong as the domestic terrorists who abused their right to assemble by ransacking our Capital building. Guilty also are all right-wing authoritarians who promoted the contrived division that lead to this attempted coup.

Human rights are basically limited by the number of citizens who chose to exercise them. Exercising a human right does not diminish the availability of that right to anyone else. Human rights without contrived limits are critical to maintaining a democratic republic like the United States of America.

Right-wing authoritarians, like Bork, who believe human rights are a zero-sum game, where if one gains rights another loses rights, have arbitrarily limited human rights. This fear is real but unreasonable. Right-wing authoritarians promote this zero-sum contrivance because they believe in an imaginary social hierarchy where everything is a commodity subject to limits and hierarchical privilege. They enforce limitations on rights for those lower in their imaginary, self-protecting and self-empowering hierarchy.

Contriving to limit rights is about control and power over others. It’s about arrogance and imaginary supremacy over others and its about maximizing inequality! Most importantly, it’s about destroying our democracy!

A Grand New Deal is now needed to reverse decades of authoritarian driven inequality.

Authoritarian ideology is destructive and abusive.  Authoritarians, who currently control both our economic and political systems, have and are again threatning our democratic republic with another authoritarian coup attempt.  Voters have again pushed back on this attack in 2020, but not strongly enough.  The blue wave lacked adequate concern from those running for office.  The candidates refused to address the abuses and injustices plaguing most voters.  In parallel, the authoritarian oligarchs poured unfathomable billions into dividing the voters to minimize our democratic response the blue wave got no further than the White House.

This is the third attempted coup by our ever-present right-wing authoritarian oligarchs since our founding.  As of this writting, this attempt is still in work.   Ending it will take significant systemic changes in our near future.

Our first attempted coup started in the early 19th century and grew under the leadership of wealthy slave holders of the South. They dreaded the loss of their enriching low-cost slave labor. Fortunately for the slaves, the South lost the struggle on the battlefield. Unfortunately, the authoritarian ideology, which justified the slave owners excessive wealth, their need to control and which drove them to war, survived. This authoritarian ideology spread as the nation expanded westward. Idolizing the Western cowboy made promotion of the authoritarian ideology easy.It infected mostly whites, especially white excessively wealthy industrialists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

After statehood was extended throughout the cowboy dominated West and the unfettered economy enriched the oligarchs across the nation, America suffered another authoritarian-driven monumental setback: the Great Depression. The oligarchs used our authoritarian economic system to crash this system while trying to maximize their wealth.  Citizens rose up and demanded restrictions on their abusers and wanted direct aid to help them survive the economic disaster.  

FDR heard them and addressed their abuses with massive people over profit legislation.  Unfortunately, white citizens were the primary beneficiaries.  But this was still too much for the authoritarian oligarchs of the time who would lose more wealth as the New Deal progressed.  These oligarchs finally resorted to an attempted coup using disgruntled WWI veterans led by a retired Marine General Smedley Butler.  Congress investigated this coup, but no one paid a price for this treason, just as the South never really paid for their treason.

The liberal consensus pushback on authoritarian domination continued into the 1960s as Republicans Eisenhower and Nixon helped. Nixon, however, also helped turn back the tide for rising democracy by appointingLewis Powellto SCOTUS. In 1976 and 1978, Powell helped define money as speech for both corporations and oligarchs.

Another element of the first two attempted authoritarian coups was our national psyche duringWAR.

The Civil War was internal and divided the citizenry over slavery.  Those promoting increased equality and liberty, the liberal consensus, won the war, but the ideology of the authoritarian losers persisted.   Nurturing and expanding it westward laid the foundation for our second authoritarian coup attempt of FDR.

WWII was external and unity of the citizenry was a major factor for winning.  This unity started with the shared suffering from the Great Depression and was maximized with two key government war policies: anti-racist propaganda while fighting the Nazi racists and large scale replacement of capitalism with rationing to avoid corporate exploitation/division of the citizenry.  The intent of rationing was to promote a market, with limited supplies, based on need instead of greed.  The long term impact of citizen unity was a major factor that kept the liberal consensus strong and led to The New Deal.   It also suppressed the deeply embedded authoritarian ideology from the 1860s to the 1960s. 

The third, or on-going, coup attempt, uses the same authoritarian ideology of Southern slave owners and Western cowboys.  What is new in this cycle is the ideological language of the “Movement Conservative” that reframed the authoritarian ideology. In the mid 60s, it pushed the nomination of Barry Goldwater as their ideal Western cowboy hero.  Goldwater lost the election but the authoritarian Republican ideology staying-power won some southern Democratic states.  

Lyndon Johnson became our president as the oligarchs failed again to take control.  Johnson continued the liberal consensus of FDR and Eisenhower to expand equal protect and empower of African American citizens.   However, after the 1964 election loss, Movement Conservative found a new western hero in Ronald Reagan who became the great white hope for the new post-depression oligarchs.  In 1980, Reagan, with Movement Conservative, won the south and the west with the authoritarian ideology that originated in the South and migrated to the West.  The war against the liberal consensus began anew.

With the help of William F. Buckley, Phyllis Schlafly, The John Birch Society, Pat Buchanan, Grover Norquist, ending the Fairness Doctrine, Doug Coe of The Family  the Moral Majority, David Stockman, all the conservative Think Tanks born out of The Powell Memo, the Christian Coalition, Newt Gingrich, Roger Ailes, Roger Stone, Fox News, Hate Radio, pro-corporate and anti-voter rulings from SCOTUS, growing voter suppression accelerated by SCOTUS killing part of the Civil Rights Act, the Clinton Third Way, telecommunications monopolization, gerrymandering, dog whistles turned into blatant racism, billionaires like the Kochs and Mercers buying politicians, and authoritarian coup leaders blaming others, our third authoritarian coup has slowly advanced for four decades.  Trump is still trying to become our first dictator.

Relative to the previous coup attempts, the current coup is most like the slave owner authoritarian coup.  We are again deeply divided and susceptible to attack from a pandemic or opportunity-seeking foreign power.  At this point, the warring sides are only battling using the wide variety of media tools.  The unity of WWII is no where in sight. Hundreds of thousands of Americans are dead and many are isolated from their families in over burdoned ICUs because we are too divided to defeat the pandemic, or anything else.

We need to break this authoritarian driven cycle and stop the current and any future authoritarian coup attempts. We must do more than a Green/Blue/Red/Black New Deal. We need more than improving Social Security. We need more than health care that puts health before profit. We must do more than FDRs Second Bill of Rights. We need more than redirected funding of abusive authoritarian law enforcement.  We need more democracy in both our political and economic systems now.  We need more equal protection and empowerment of both voters and workers.

Voter registration must be automatic.  Voting must become a right without fear of limination or loss.  Election day must be a national holiday.  Employees must have paid time-off for voting early.  All registered voters who want it must be able to vote by mail.  Delivery of mail-in ballots must never be delayed. The Electoral College must be nullified.

To protect and empower workers, we need to repeal the Taft-Hartley Act.  The National Labor Relations act needs modification to allow domestic and farm workers to unionize. We need to enforce anti-trust laws to disempower oligarchs and their destruction of our eonomy and government. Defeating COVID-19 or, for that matter any national threat, requires a level of national unity not seen since WWII. We must pass laws to promote employee-owned businesses and allow employees to take over abusive large corporations.  Employee-owned businesses won’t send their jobs to other countries.  Businesses owned by employees won’t pollute their communities.  Employee-owned businesses will manage work schedules to minimize unemployment.  But most importantly, employee-owned businesses won’t  create (empower and protect) oligarchs to buy our government.

We need to replace corporate personhood with nature personhood.  Congress needs to outlaw corporate rights sanctioned by SCOTUS rulings which enable abuse of citizens and nature.  Citizens and nature need new rights enacted to protect them from corporate/oligarch abuse.

We must attain a national unity by ending the media war with a new Fairness Doctrine.

Stay involved, keep the pressure on your elected officials, remain vigilant. Replace politicians if they remain non-responsive to the abuses you are suffering. Support efforts to equally protect and empower all citizens. Learn to recognize the division of authoritarian ideology and reject its hierarchy of inequality. Support unity through maximizing the liberal consensus that all [people and nature] are created equal.”

Democrats are winning the current battle to save our democracy. However, our anti-democratic adversaries are still with us and there will be more battles we must rally to thwart.

As John Dean wrote in 2006 inConservatives Without Conscience:

“Probably about 20 to 25 percent ofthe adult American population is so right-wingauthoritarian, so scared, so self-righteous, so ill-informed, and sodogmatic that nothing you can say ordo will change their minds. … Andthey are so submissive to their leadersthat they will believe and do virtuallyanything they are told.They are not going to let up and theyare not going away.”

That was 2006, before the election of DJT and his re-galvanizing of our anti-democratic forces. In 2020, Dean wrote on page 106 in his latest book,Authoritarian Nightmare: Donald Trump and His Followers:

And even if Trump accepts the will of the majority and the Electoral College and leaves theWhite House,his backers will remain a very powerful force,ready to give undying loyaltytohim for as long as he wants, and then to the next dictator-in-waiting. And the next one willalmost certainly be smarter than Donald Trump. You can be sure someone is watchingTrump closely, planning to step into his place. Thus,if you want to remain free, youwill probably have to outvote today’s ardent Trump followers , not only inNovember 2020 but for some time in future elections.You may have heard that theprice of freedom iseternal vigilance.”

Relative to the first quote, “about 20 to 25 percent of the American population,” Deans newest book includes the results of a 2019 national survey. This survey indicatesthis anti-democratic part of the population has grown to 35 percent or more. The study also shows this segment of the population is highly prejudice and votes for authoritarian Republican candidates.

This American dichotomy has been with us since before our founding. It created the electoral college and the second amendment to get the support of the southern states. This dichotomy assured disenfranchisement for decades. It lead to our civil war. This dichotomy expanded gerrymandering in 2010 to empower a minority to stay in power. It has left us with a US Senate that has a clear and pronouncedpartisansmall-state bias. This dichotomy led to more voter suppression after the reversal of a key part of the Civil Rights Act. It brought us a Destructor-in-Chief in 2016.

But democracy has fought back.  We’ve amended the constitution to allow women and others to vote. However, voting is still not a right and is still suppressed.  Those who oppose anti-democratic authoritarian rule won the Civil War. They also passed the 13th (Abolishing slavery), 14th (citizenship for persons, including former slaves, born in America), and 15th (right to vote regardless of race, color, or previous condition of servitude) amendments to our constitution.  Under FDR, democracy fought back against the massive economic inequality brought to us by oligarchs. FDR stopped their purchase of our government, which is happening again.  Democracy has now elected a replacement for the Destructor-in-Chief.  But more must be done. Massive public  pressure from citizens who support our new president is how it gets done.  Democracy needs your support to survive.

Understand the authoritarian threat to our democracy is still with us and very real:

“Someone smarter than Trump and championed by Fox News and the right-wing media echochamber, could posea much greater threat down the road. You can bet that variousDouble Highshave already begun thinking how to get incarnated as the next messiah. Youcan also bet the “king-makers” are studying the field right now too, including theleaders ofthe religious rightwho might sense Trump losing a bit of his hold on their believers.” John Dean, Authoritarian Nightmare, page 279

Our democracy requires eternal vigilance and massive participation to keep the ever-present anti-democratic forces corralled. In the near-term,we need two Democratic Senators from Georgia. In the long-term, democracy needs your vigilance.

We are living and dying in the Authoritarian Nightmare!!! We need to cage our authoritarian threat NOW!

I’ve read John Deans new book Authoritarian Nightmare: Donald Trump and His Followers and have already created emails, FB posts, and another blog post from it. I also read his first book in 2006, Conservatives Without Conscience and posted about it. This threat is real, verifiable, well documented and is occupying the White House, our Senate and our state legislatures.

The Republican Party is populated by almost all those in America who tested as highly prejudicial and authoritarian as documented in Dean’s new book. As Dean documents, They are not going away and the rest of us will need to stand up, en masse, to keep these confirmed authoritarians under control FROM THIS ELECTION FORWARD!

If we dont, we are doomed to a authoritarian dictatorship where corporations will have veto power over the government. No more checks and balances. No more separation of powers. No more separation of State and Church. No more Social Security. No more Medicare. Massive infrastructure failures. Hundreds of thousand lost to Pandemic mismanagement. Massive military and police build-up. Instead of advancing democracy in the American workplace, American democracy will be no more. Instead of more equality, just more protection and empowerment for the excessively wealthy and, for the rest of us, growing economic, social, racial, and environmental injustice.

Even after DJT is gone there are other Republican authoritarian leaders salivating to harness the voting power of these unquestioning right-wing authoritarian followers. Until something is done with Fox Noise and right-wing hate radio, these followers will be huddled, galvanized, and ready to follow the next dictator-wana-be.

As seen by the authoritarian handling of COVID, we are in DEADLY straits and we have to stop their maximization of injustice.

As we all know, there are many efforts to distract us from this DJT evil and divide us so we cant fight back. Isee now that the distractions includes our own focus on our favorite issues like the keeping theACA, stopping the separation of immigrant children from their parents and endingthe climate crisis. The issue oriented debates are a part ofthis distraction and are ignoring the Elephant on the debate stage.

We have many distractions from the on-going destruction of our government and our way of life, as perpetrated by authoritarianism, This destruction is largely not discussed by voters and seldom mentioned by our media nor in any debate.

The Authoritarian Republican Elephant is trampling all over our democracy and we need to cage it ASAP.

VOTE DEMOCRATIC.

VOTE AGAINST AUTHORITARIAN RULE.

VOTE EARLY.

VOTE EVERY FUTURE ELECTION.

John Deans newest book. Authoritarian Nightmare: Donald Trump and His Followers, details the threat of American authoritarianism. In addition, he recommends how America can stop the threat of dictatorial rule by highly prejudicial and authoritarian personalities.

Forty years of research demostrate the degree of threat that Amercia is facing. The book covers:

Listed below are selected excerpts about the threat and what we must do to stop and keep it from returning in the future. This is mostly about the last bullet above and with reference to some of the scary survey results.

It has taken forty years of study, and given what has happened in the last four, we believe this research cannot be ignored. page 173.

When joined by the forgotten in 2016, the transformation of the GOP from a conservative political party to an authoritarian one with precious little connection to its past was complete. page 213.

Can this authoritarian movement be contained before its too late. page xv

And even if Trump accepts the will of the majority and the Electoral College and leaves the White House, his backers will remain a very powerful force, ready to give undying loyalty to him for as long as he wants, and then to the next dictator-in-waiting. And the next one will almost certainly be smarter than Donald Trump. You can be sure someone is watching Trump closely, planning to step into his place. Thus, if you want to remain free, you will probably have to outvote todays ardent Trump followers , not only in November 2020 but for some time in future elections. You may have heard that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. page 106

Social dominators have found their authoritarian leader, and we are witnessing the growing unfoldling of authoritarianism in the United States. It has not been our past and should not be our future. But if Trump or any athoritarian leader holds a post as powerful and pervasive as the American presidency, it will be our present, our way in the world. This is the reason it is so important that Americans appreciate that authoritarianism is on the ballot in the 2020 election, not to mention for many elections that will follow. page 123

Someone smarter than Trump and championed by Fox News and the right-wing media echo chamber, could pose a much greater threat down the road. You can bet that various Double Highs have already begun thinking how to get incarnated as the next messiah. You can also bet the king-makers are studying the field right now too, including the leaders of the religious right who might sense Trump losing a bit of his hold on their believers. page 279

The Monmouth University Polling Institute conducted a national psychological survey in support of this book. In prejudice section, the higher the score the more extreme their prejudice. 295 out of a group of 808 all white respondents, scored an average of 134 out of 216 points. This highly prejudicial group, which represents 36.5% of the sample population, strongly approves of Trump. This group included one Trump supporter who scored 214 points. This group also tests high for lack self-awareness and believes, when toldby someone like DJT, thatthey are not prejudice. They are told they are “normal.” There are good people on both sides. For comparison, a group of 370 respondents, who strongly disapproved of Trump, scored an average of only 53 points.

The primary test for strong Trump supporters was how high they would score on the well-established authoritarianism score. This test included a total of 990 respondents including the 808 whites from the prejudice test mentioned above. Those who strongly supported Trump and scored highly as authoritarian on this test numbered 348, or 35.2% of the sample group. They scored an average of 119 points out of possible 180. One Trump supporter in this larger group scored 176 points as the most authoritarian personality in the respondents group. For comparison, those who strongly disapproved of Trump, 466 respondents, scored only 54 points.

The correlation measure between the authoritarianism and prejuduce scores is 0.856. Absolute correlation requires a score of 1.000. Here is what the authors had to say about that high correlation:

you can explain most prejudice in terms of authoritarianism. There truly is a big, very bad wolf at our collective doors, and this metaphoric evil snarls such intolerance, discrimination, and victimization that it not only injures its immediate victims, but also shakes the democratic society to its core. Knowingly or unknowingly, prejudice people bring into the voting booth something of even greater danger to everyones freedom and our countrys very existence: authoritarianism. page 219

Ask a very complicated question: Who are Trumps staunch supporters? Get a very simple answer: Prejudiced authoritarians, and few others. page 225

So, what can we do to end this truly evil and growing threat to our national existence?

Nothing has become clearer than the realization that Donald Trump is no part of the solution to our nations problems, but instead in very large measure the cause of them. page 261

he [Trump] has lost the support of the independents, who gave him 46 percent of their votes and Clinton 42 percent in 2016. Just two years later independents favored Democrats over Republicans by 12 percent in the midterm elections. Since the midterms, independents have on balance disapproved of Trumps performance by roughly sever percent, most of them strongly. they will decide the 2020 election. page 262

It will come down to the independent voters in the swing states, and how many Democrat[ic] supporters (get to) vote. page 263

The matter can be decided without a doubt by young voters, who are the least prejudiced age group in the United States and strongly oppose Trump on numerous grounds. If the Democrats run good registration campaigns among the young, and if Biden supporters can overcome all the voter-suppression barriers the Republicans will throw at them, and if Bernie Sanders suppporters can settle for half of what they want in order to have a certain chance to the rest later on, rather than no chance at all if Trump wins, Democrats can win the White House and both Houses of Congress in November. page 276

Imagine believing absolutely that you are the most important person in the world because you are now the leader of what you believe is the greatest nation in the world. You believe you are here because you believe you are greater than all others and you deserve your leadership role. You believe you are where you are because of yourself and your magnificent innate talents.

These beliefs make recognizing reality almost impossible.

Now imagine realizing, just faintly, that your self-made greatness now requires the validation of a subset of less great individuals to stay in power. For such a great person, this makes no sense. In fact, its frightening and threatens your worldview of yourself. It goes against all your previous experiences in an authoritarian corporate world, where you ruled without question and without the need for any external support from others you had to pander to.

You cant believe you need these little people. But they are giving you money, wearing your hats, holding your signs, chanting what you tell them to chant. They are such good followers and you do want to take their money.

On one hand, you crave their celebration of you. On the other, you have to say what these lesser people want to hear. You, The Great One, who needs no one, now needs these lesser people to keep you at the top of a strange political system that includes voting. This political system is so foreign to the corporate system you have lived in and controlled all your life.

These Lesser Ones confuse and complicate your strange political world. So, you adjust. You use them to get what you want. And using them keeps them in their lesser position but lets them still praise you. You actually come to quietly despise them not only for being lesser than you, but also because you need them and you dont need anyone. You take untold joy in your great guile and ease of manipulating them.

In addition, and to lessen the contradictory need for their vote, you learn to manipulate the political system of which you are now a part. You change government to support your ambitions. You hire disciples to carry out your illegal orders. You make threats. You send tweets. You lie more and more often.

Inside though, the contradictions between the unfamiliar and still somewhat democratic political system and the more familiar and totally authoritarian corporate worlds are slowly boiling over from all the friction.

I’m in control. I don’t need anyone. I hate all these lesser people that are part of this political system ‘helping me. I hate those I hire to do my bidding and then don’t. I really hate those suckers who are making me rich while I pander to them. Im getting so angry that If I lose the election, someone will pay and it won’t be me. If I can’t have my kingdom, I will destroy it on my way out and blame others as I wave bye-bye.

Not to worry. American citizens will rise to the occasion, fire DJT in spite of his threats dirty deeds, and reconstruct Congress to enable rebuilding America.

VOTE.   VOTE the entire ballot, and VOTE EARLY.  Replace the authoritarians who helped steal all our wealth and rebuild a Congress of and for all citizens.

Right-wing authoritarianism has been corrupting our critical national systems for decadesso as to end our long-term democratic experiment of maximizing equality. As a result, citizens have suffered needlessly for decades. Now we must stop the authoritarians final push to maximize inequality in their favor.

However, the obstacles to substantive change are several. There are legal protections built into our economic and policing systems that protect abusive behavior of already abusive systems. These legal protections, discussed below, plus

mandate serious system re-evaluation and significant changes to these systems.

Whether youre an employee abused financially (wage theft) and/or physically by your employer, or a citizen physically abused by a Public officer from a national or local agency, this worker/citizen abuse confirms systemic problems that ignore and enable such abuse to continue.

As an employee, you may be subject to decisions by managers whom you dont even know that reduce your income so as to increase theirs. As an employee, managers you do know may abuse you verbally or physically. Either way, if the employer never takes action to address such abuse, it will continue. This is legally known as past practice. Thus, past practice by our authoritarian employers promotes continued abuse.

As a citizen, especially a citizen of color, fear of and actual abuse by Public employees carrying guns, mace, pepper spray, tear gas, rubberized bullets, clubs, defense industry hand-me-downs, etc., are a constant worry. These justifiably fearful citizens often suffer unjustifiable injury and/or death while committing no legal wrong. This Public abuse is sanctioned by:

The Supreme Court of the United States has also sanctioned Qualified immunity.

The best way to stop this abuse of Americans sanctioned by either past practice in our authoritarian employer/employee economic system or by qualified immunity in our authoritarian policing system, is through broad systemic re-evaluation and a determined infusion of democracy.

Remember, our authoritarian employer/employee system has not only enriched the employer at the expense of the employee, it has used its massively excessive wealth to remake our democratic political system into an authoritarian neofascist political system that focuses on abuse of citizens for maximizing financial gain of a few. Even during pandemics their wealth grows beyond comprehension.

Reform can start by neutering our authoritarian economic system:

Using co-ops to infuse democracy into the work place means profit makers (employees) can decide to keep their jobs local. Profit makers won’t poison their own neighborhoods. Workers/Profit makers would rather cut working hours of workers than increase unemployment. Profit makers will distribute profit democratically. Corporate oligarchs will have less and less wealth to buy and subvert our democratic political system.

After enabling the democratization of the workplace, we can repair our political system by rebuilding our damaged democratic foundations.

The workplace of our authoritarian policing system also needs democratization. However, in this case, we must limit both authoritarian political oversight outside corporate authoritarian influence, but also the authoritarian nature of the Public employees (police) who abuse citizen rights for the sake of protectingauthoritarian corporate property rights.

Remember the early history of our policing systems: slave patrols and union busting.

In the North, police evolved out of private, corporate-paid vigilante businesses for killing unionization efforts by employees. Corporations looking to reduce the costs of their private property protection goons convinced city fathers to create replacement Public police forces and make citizens pay for their own clubbing and abuse by authoritarian policemen with a variety of weapons.

In the South, the police evolved out of the slave patrols. These patrols were paid by southern oligarchs, authoritarian plantation owners, to recover their property (slaves).

Our abusive property-protecting policing system has a unique Public authoritarian structure. At the top of this structure, we have an authoritarian local political system that is obligated to authoritarian property owners. The Public employees are the authoritarian police, or stormtroopers, who include former military-trained killers and home-grown white-supremacist militia members. These employees are NOT profit makers. They are profit protectors and are equipped with a growing arsenal of punishment tools to protect property from angry and abused citizens. This Public authoritarian structure is about protecting property and the profit it creates for 21st century oligarchs. The same as our past private union-busting vigilantes of the North and our past slave patrols of the South.

To fix this Public authoritarian policing system, as with fixing the private authoritarian system, requires more democracy in the workplace. Since this Public policing system is occupied by both authoritarian employers and authoritarian employees and because its purpose is to protect the Public, democratization must involve the Public (citizens).

Democratization should replace the current local political authoritarian employer with a community committee with oversight of the policing budget. Also, disabling violent responses based on racial fear, require limiting or eliminating Qualified Immunity. Reducing violent responses also requires work attire to fit the situation. If you dont want a riot, dont dress like you are expecting/projecting one. In addition, employment of ‘Peace’ officers must require their purchase of liability insurance. This insurance will pay their court costs for abuse of their qualified immunity. If they lose their insurance, they cant serve except at desk duty. As part of the hiring process, each peace officer will take a authoritarian personality psychological test which will weigh heavily in hiring decisions.

Fixing our broken authoritarian and abusive workplaces/systems is a matter of adding and reestablishing democracy. To make that happen, we must start withmassive democratic action this November.

My parents and The Greatest Generation united as Anti-Fascist during WWII. Then fascism was in Europe, not in America.

Today, antifa (anti-fascist) individuals are you and I and we are fighting home grown fascism. Antifa is all of us who are working to stop the current threat to our democratic republic from an excessively wealthy and powerful minority of right-wing authoritarians who have stolen past elections and are planning to steal the next one.

We may all feel despair, but dont let it have the last word. Embrace your despair and use its emotional force to stop our growing neofascism by any means available. Use it to become a force for a long-term greater good that is still possible but not yet within sight.

Vote Democratic, vote for every Democrat on the ballot and VOTE EARLY to make sure it counts.

VOTE to not only replace the leader of our fascist GOP Cult, but to replace ALL his right-wing authoritarian enablers.

VOTE to take back, protect and empower our democratic Republic.

VOTE to end decades of massive economic, social, racial, and environmental injustices perpetrated the right-wing authoritarian GOP Cult.

VOTE to make the Greatest Generation proud. We need an undeniable victory in 2020.

VOTE to reform government to maximize equality. 

Damn it, VOTE!!!

This election is about much more than replacing DJT. It’s about the system failures that have enabled him to get elected and that refuse to remove him from office thourgh impeachment. It’s time for major system changes to our economic, political and policing systems. But first let me define some terms that I use in this message:

Our economic, political, and policing systems have all had their pre-existing failures exposed for all to not only witness, but to feel directly through loss of jobs, loss of healthcare and even feel to the point of suffering severe injury during constitutional assemblies and early death from an uncontrolled pandemic.

As our political system drifts further and further from democracy and closer and closer tototalitarianism. Our authoritarian leaders, taking us down this path are thumbing their noses at our Constitution, our separation of powers, our checks balances, ourPostal Serviceand our established laws.

The favorite tool for authoritarian control is militarized police and now unidentifiable federal stormtroopers. The political priority, which is now driven by ourauthoritarian economic system, is property rights over human rights. Disorderly citizens, rebelling against their increasing subjugation by economic inequality are justifiably disrupting the use of property where profits would be produced and stolen. On the other hand, theauthoritarianpeace keepersseem to say: if these citizens would just accept their place and get back to producing profit to enrich theprofit looters,life would be as it should be: more wealth for the excessively wealthy and more poverty for the rest of us.

The move toward more authoritarianism starts with a centuries old authoritarian economic system that elevatesprofit takersoverprofit makers. This abusive system, that can’t respond to national disasters, has existed for hundreds of years and has inflicted society with endless abusive economic cycles. These abusive cycles need to be recognized and dealt with.

Every few years this authoritarian driven economy crashes. That’s just in its nature as history shows. For just this young 21st century, it’s already crashed three times (2000 tech bubble, 2008 Great Recession, 2020 pandemic). Why do we put up with these frequent failures that benefit those who control the economic system while it harms everyone else? Why do we accept increasing economic inequality? When will we scream, “Enough!”?

A longer cycle, which includes about 15 of the short-term economic crashes above, eventually pushes the abusedprofit makersto finally say,Enough! They finally rise to reject the massive economic inequality from these far too frequent economic crashes. The shorter crash cycles have impoverished more and more of theprofit makerswhile enriching only a fewprofit takers, see charts below.These longer cycles range from 70 to 100 years. The Great Depression and subsequent revolt started 91 years ago. A new revolt is underway today.

One of the causal factors of this longer cycle is the political control gained by theprofit takersas their wealth rebounds from reduced restraints. Their growingexcessive wealthallows them to buy the political system and get laws changed that remove more restraints which have minimized their wealth and power. Eventually, there is a revolt by the abusedprofit makers, a corresponding change in political leadership, and reinstatement of restraints on theprofit takers/looters. This longerhad-enoughcycle last rose up in the early 20th century and the same systems that are failing now had failed then. In those times, the industrial oligarchs owned the government and abused the citizens through economic measures and policing to keepprofit makersenslaved.

What BS are we told to distract us from the failures of these abusive systems? Why are there only sequestered discussions about these system failures and possible remedies? Who is being protected by maintaining the abusive cycles?

We need an end to both of these economic cycles: the cycling of market crashes and the longer cycling between maximizing equality with restraints on theprofit looters. and maximizing inequality with the removal of restraints. We need open-minded system change that considers different approaches from what has failed multiple times in American historyas far back as 1800and more recently in the early 1900s and again NOW.

A democratic government is necessary to minimize citizen abuse, to end the short-term and long-term economic cycles of abuse and to redesign ourauthoritarian economic systemwhich produces the abusive cycles. In additioni, we need to redesign the authoritarian policing systems that protects the authoritarian economic system. The redesigned more democratic systems will allow the majority of our American society to focus onmaximizing equality.

Maximizing equalityin America starts withmassive citizen votingto take back and redirect our national and state governments. Then our new government will need to pass new laws that will reinstate eliminated restraints on theprofit-takersand that will protect and empowera more democratic society.

Since our authoritarian economic system is the root cause of the cycles that promote maximizing inequality and taking control of our government, laws are necessary to make our economic system more democratic.  Democracy at work must be promoted through both unions and co-ops.   In other words, profit makers must become equal or sole owners in businesses, especially those businesses who currently abuse citizens the most.  This requires repealing The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which allows right-to-work for slave wages and new laws that put union leaders on board of directors and enables a major long-term shift to profit maker owned/managed co-ops.  The more profit makers are involved in business operational decisions, the less wealth and power are available to profit takers.

Wage Theft Profit makerinflation adjusted compensation for productivitywere reduced to just the rate of inflation in the 70s.

Thosestolen wages from millions ofprofit makers
were transferred to a fewprofit takers:

Givingprofit makerspower over their jobs will disempower theprofit takers. Profit makerswill either share power as members of the board of directors through their unions or through democraticprofit-maker-controlledco-opsto directly determine company goals, objectives and operations.

We also need toreverse pro-corporate SCOTUS decisionsthat have applied human rights to corporations and createdmoneyed speech.
Our policing systems must be made directly accountable to democratically selected group of community leaders who are served by the police. This Community Oversight Teammust also have oversight and veto power over their policing budget. Community leaders must set the goals and objectives for their local policing systems including puttinghuman rightsoverproperty rightsof the extremely wealthy.

Please help redirect our future by regaining our power to rule ourselves and to advance our power tomaximize equality. I must vote and you must vote andVOTE EARLY. VOTE in 2020 and take back our government. Then pressure our government to pass laws that reduce authoritarian control by protecting and empowering our democratic Republic and we the people.

VOTE! Then commit to VOTE in every future election to maintain our Democracy.

“Democracy is NOT a spectator sport.” — Thom Hartmann

For historical totalitarian states, like Nazi Germany, the right-wing authoritarian (RWA) politicians took control of their democratic political systems and worked closely with the profit looters of the existing right-wing authoritarian economic system to create a disastrous RWA war machine to take political and economic control of other countries using vast military forces. Equiping those forces further enriched the profit looters, but also had to many negative side effects. Their RWA hegemony destroyed vast amounts of human, state, national, and corporate resources.

Attempted world domination came at great cost with enormous destruction of resources and then it was defeated by a united democratic team that is now rapidly devolving into what it defeated in WWII. The profit looters just wont relent. Their first attempt was back in 1933 when they tried to replace FDR with a military coup.

In America, the never-give-up profit looters of our excessively wealthy right-wing authoritarian economic system have purchased right-wing authoritarian politicians throughout our state and federal governments and remade our democratic political system into a right-wing authoritarian political system. Their goal is still world domination but now through a global economic system that controls other countries with only the threat of destruction by WMDs from vast military forces. These profit looters are still enriched by maintaining the war machine, small-scale military regime change efforts, and indebting everyone else. This is world domination with minimal damage to corporate resources and maximum return on political investment, but still with significant human toll massive economic inequality.

Both totalitarian systems are a merger of political and economic systems. The economic system, by design, is authoritarian. The political system can start out democratic, but can be devolved in to an authoritarian system with military coup and/or unlimited profit looter financing. Once both are authoritarian, its a matter of which controls the other. Our American version is controlled by the economic system and is detailed by professor Sheldon Wolin in his book called Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism.

Also, here’s a short video with Jason Stanley on recognizing our Fascist totalitarian system.

Jason Stanley wrote How Fascism Works – The Politics of US and Them. Ive summarized Jasons book here:

What Kind of Normal Do You Hope for Beyond 2020? What we had at some point in the past, or something even more inclusive?

A the government that has as its primary moral goal, to equally protect and empower ALL citizens to maximize their freedoms while at the same time limiting the freedoms of those few who abuse their freedoms, creates the ideal Normal. (1)

We came close to this ideal NORMAL of government, of, by, and for most of we the People, after the Great Depression and it continued for about 30 years. My mother and I, as white Americans, benefitted most from this NORMAL, but it wasn’t as broad-based as it could have been due to compromises with southern, racist, politicians. Soon after President Johnson passed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, which added salt to the segregationist’s wound inflected by SCOTUS in the 1954 Brown v Board of Education, the end of this less-than-perfect NORMAL started. This NORMALs last vestige of legislation for the people were the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts passed under Richard Nixon. Since then, our government has not passed any far-reaching people-over-profits legislation into law.

What we live in today, the new ABNORMAL, is about maximizing INEQUALITY by protecting and empowering only those with wealth and power so they can maximize their wealth, power, and freedoms, which economically, socially, racially, and environmentally abuse and impoverish the rest of us, especially minorities. (1)

The rise of this ABNORMAL started with Richard Nixon and his War On Drugs to suppress/imprison anti-war hippies and blacks. Ronald Reagan boosted ABNORMAL with union busting, lies about imaginary “Welfare Queens, and the end of the Fairness Doctrine for our public airwaves. Bill Clinton aided ABNORMAL with neoliberal economic policies while working and authoritarian Newt Gingrich by ending “welfare as we know it,” replacing Glass-Steagall with financial speculation leading to the Great Recession of 2008, and unleashing the corporate media to create media monopolies and profitable news like Fox, the conservative Sinclair Broadcast Group, and right-wing hate radio. The Destroyer-In-Chief, DJT, for over three years, has exacerbated ABNORMAL by appointing corporate lobbyists to run federal citizen-protective agencies, by mismanaging a pandemic, and by enriching the wealthy as ten of thousands of Americans suffer premature death from COVID-19.

Can it get any worse? It could. Can we the people move us into a even more perfect NORMAL? YES!

Over recent decades our authoritarian economic system has created this ABNORMAL by remaking our political systems in its own image. This ABNORMAL protects, empowers and elects almost exclusively the wealthy.

America needs a new and BETTER NORMAL that not only re-establishes all we’ve lost since the mid twentieth century, but includes FDR’s Second Bill of Rights and more.

America needs to disempower the billionaire corporate profit takers by democratizing our authoritarian economic system and putting the workers in charge. We must defund the profit takers so they can no longer buy politicians. With worker owned coops, the worker/owners won’t send their jobs overseas. The worker/owners won’t pollute their own neighborhoods. All worker/owners will decide how to invest profits in themselves, their community, and their businesses. (2)

We also need massive action on the climate crisis by repurposing dirty energy to clean energy. Congress needs to re-instate the section of the Civil Rights Act that was nullified by SCOTUS. We need to redistribute defense and policing budgets to programs that equally protect and empower all citizens not property. The Justice Dempartment needs to use anti-trust laws to break up media and banking monopolies. We need to repeal the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act and endable employee run coops. Congress needs to repeal and replace our property-over-people policing system. We need to make voting a right, election day a holiday, and institute automatic voter registration. Congress needs to institute a universal draft for all to serve their nation for a minimum of two years. We need to remake/modernize a new Glass-Steagall Act. Congress needs to end corporate personhood and money is speech.

Relative to a more broadly based, more equal, improved NORMAL(3) as a national moral goal, we need a female VP who best represents the ideals of Frances Perkins, the first female member of a president’s cabinet. FDR selected Frances for his Secretary of Labor in1933. She wrote much of the New Deal legislation, and created Social Security.

We need lots of new lawmakers and legislation to equally protect and empower all citizens and create an IMPROVED NORMAL. The 2018 elections and recent 2020 primaries show we the people can beat the oligarchs.

1.) Congress passed laws that enabled the old, less than perfect, NORMAL and the new abusive ABNORMAL.

2.) Will America Recover From the Right-Wing Billionaire’s War Against Us?

3.) 150+ Civil Society Groups Issue Global Call for New—and Improved—Normal for Post-Pandemic World

Many Americans can’t see it coming Some are unwittingly glorifying it.

I’ve been reading, viewing, and writing about authoritarianism in America since 2005.  I’ve watched it take control of the Republican party and infect the Democratic party.  I’ve come to understand it’s built into our 400 year old predatory economic system.  That our authoritarian economic system is remaking our democratic political system into its own authoritarian image.  That our authoritarian policing system was created by our authoritarian economic system to punish those who threaten the wealth of the profit looters.  That our authoritarian military system, as a mega-expansion of our internal policing system, has become another punishing tool of our economic system to obtain and protect foreign economic resources.  That we now have an authoritarian (DJT) executive branch of government supported by its authoritarian legislative branch, i.e. the US Senate.   Both branches are working to convert our federal court system into another authoritarian system to protect and empower the profit looters, CxOs of the world.

I’ve also learned about the history of America as seen from the eyes of the American worker.  Workers have been abused by our authoritarian economic and policing systems for over 140 years.  This abuse rises and falls depending on worker/citizen interest, resistance, and interest/abilities to participate in the political system.

Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy of WWII, and other countries since, were run by authoritarian political systems that also created their own authoritarian policing systems and that coerced their complementary authoritarian economic systems into financing their political and policing systems.

In America, our march to an authoritarian state has taken a different path.  Unlike Germany and Italy, where the political system used the economic system to enforce its hegemony, America’s movement to the extreme right has been driven by our centuries-old authoritarian economic system, which is described as Inverted Totalitarianism.   This economic takeover of our government was first attempted during our Civil War and again in 1933 by the Wall Street Putch, with Prescott Bush, when the oligarchs tried to replace our elected President with a military coup of disgruntled WWI veterans led by Marine General Smedley Butler, who actually exposed the plot. 

That violent, failed, fascist takeover of America in 1933 has been replaced by a decades-long stealth approach detailed in Democracy In Chains by Nancy MacLean, which under current national leadership has become more blatant .  The goals of our current profit looter American fascist leaders are to have a constitutional convention in order to rewrite the US Constitution to give corporations veto power over new government laws, eliminate majority rule with national voter suppression, and neuter the Federal government by eliminating agencies, services, and social programs which were set up to protect and empower citizens.  The new constitution will cast in concrete what has mostly been put in place and will finish off what remains like privatizing Medicare and Social Security.

In my lifetime I’ve lived under two opposing forms of government:

What follows is my description of our current broken and interrelated political, economic, and policing systems as the right-wing authoritarian extremists push us closer to complete Inverted Totalitarianism.

The economic and policing systems were authoritarian at birth. Capitalism grew out of the authoritarian feudalism by replacing the lord/surf structure with the employer/employee structure. As we have seen during the pandemic, capitalism is oriented to protect and empower the profit looters at the expense of all others.

Protecting the profit looters required goons to stop unionizing in North America and protect their slave property in the south.   They needed a policing system for protecting their property (human or brick mortar).   The policing system has advanced into legalized abusing and killing with “qualified immunity.

Empowering the profit looters required an end to government oversight and regulations intended to protect and empower their customers.  That was going to take some planning, including some favorable SCOTUS rulings  in 1976 and 1978 assisted by the justice who wrote the Lewis Powell Memo and a lot of money.  They had lots of money but needed more.  Then comes Reagan’s Neo-liberal, trickle-down, economics that provided tax breaks, lucrative war contracts, and large corporate welfare subsidies.  This self-enrichment by the wealthy is called legalized looting   Profit looters (DJT) now occupy the White House, own the US Senate and, together, they are stacking the federal courts with corporate lackeys.

In summary, a 400 year-old authoritarian economic system gave birth to our authoritarian policing system to put property rights over human rights, that legalized massive profit looting, that has stealthily stole ownership of the citizen’s government and is maneuvering to turn it into a fascist-like totalitarian state.

Others are more versed in authoritarianism as it relates to Nazi Germany and what can be said about its growth in America.  Professor Altemeyer has studied it, helped John Dean write about it, and wrote about it himself,     Progressive Thom Hartmann provides a review of the book They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45, by Milton Mayer and then suggests reading the book:

“We must not allow it to happen in our nation. Read They Thought They Were Free and awaken as many as you can.

For What Its Worth

Theres something happening here
But what it is aint exactly clear
Theres a man with a gun over there
Telling me I got to beware

I think its time we stop
Children, whats that sound?
Everybody look whats going down?

Theres battle lines being drawn
Nobodys right if everybodys wrong
Young people speaking their minds
Getting so much resistance from behind

Its time we stop
Hey, whats that sound?
Everybody look whats going down?

What a field day for the heat
A thousand people in the street
Singing songs and carrying signs
Mostly saying, hooray for our side

Its time we stop
Hey, whats that sound?
Everybody look whats going down?

Paranoia strikes deep
Into your life it will creep
It starts when youre always afraid
Step out of line, the man come and take you away

We better stop
Hey, whats that sound?
Everybody look whats going down?

We better stop
Hey, whats that sound?
Everybody look whats going down?

We better stop
Hey, whats that sound?
Everybody look whats going down?

We better stop
Hey, whats that sound?
Everybody look whats going down?

The combination of

has nurtured a multigenerational group of Americans who now have nothing left to lose” and are rising up.

These newly exposed political and economic system failures are on top of a decades long implementation of a stealth plan resulting in:

Our failed political and economic systems have moved from equally protecting and empowering all citizens to only protecting and empowering the excessively wealthy and their “qualified immunity policing forces. Our excessive military budgets are replicated at the local level with excessive policing budgets. Right-wing authoritarians need such tools to keep their control over the less pure surrounding them.

We are at the beginning of this centurys Great Depression. Forty million unemployed and without healthcare during a pandemic. Half of commercial businesses were unable to pay their rent to the commercial property owners who in turn cant make their loan payments to the banks that financed the property purchase. This depression has quickly reached levels of unemployment that took years to reach in last centurys Great Depression.

With such massive unemployment, the abusive employers have an unbeatable upper-hand. Employees going back to work will be seen as powerless and if an employee refuses to accept the new, less-supportive, circumstances, the employer will find some other worker from the new enormous pool of unemployed.

Just as the authoritarian police forces kettle” citizens to teargas and pepper spray them at will, corporations will kettle workers into unsafe, unhealthy, work environments to abuse them with exposure to COVID-19, lower pay, and benefit reductions. It’s too expensive to create a safe and healthy workplace, but some might try . There is insufficient COVID-19 testing for anyone, much less employees returning to work.

People with nothing left to lose are left with few options taking to the streets, refusing the abuse of their labor, and voting. They feel, witness, and experience the abusive cracks of our failed systems. Cracks that protect the wealthy property owners with local police. Cracks that protect the police who are granted qualified immunity” by SCOTUS. This gives them freehand to attack peaceful citizens, crack the skulls of old men, take personal property, and target, literally, the free press, after murdering another man for being black.

This revolution will grow as the failed systems take more and more desperate steps to stop it. Fearful abusers become more abusive when resisted just look at all the videos of self-motivated police attacks on citizens. The Liar-in-Chief cant control himself two hundred tweets in one day. He and his lackeys will abuse as needed, stage property damage and blame citizens for it, and will attempt to divide this unified response with racial/political dog whistles.

Recent suppressive actions to quell the revolution were learned in our recent foreign wars. Police are not only equipped with military hardware, they are trained in military tactics to suppress unruly citizens bring in the military helicopters to hover just overhead.

Don’t expect the local police to join the revolution. Their history as slave patrols and corporate goons does not give much hope for that. They know who protects/empowers them, have a military background that reinforces their authoritarian nature, and will continue to protect their right-wing authoritarian leaders: DJT and their city mayors who put curfews in place to provide cause for arrest.

The videos of police abuse we are now seeing is normal police practice. It’s only news to those of us who don’t live in the communities where police use these tactics on a daily basis.

To conclude, this rapidly growing depression (except for investors), the failure to minimize citizen deaths during a pandemic, state sanctioned abuse of citizens by extreme policing including the free press, the massive unemployment, and over 110,000 premature citizen deaths, have exposed the massive systems failures and show that fixing what’s broken can only happen from the bottom up. Top-down approaches, like trickle-down, have failed fantastically. Our once democratic, now authoritarian, political system, empowered by our centuries-old authoritarian economic system, must be rescued by removing the billionaires as employers. Employees must become the owners/managers of companies. They will not decide to send their jobs out of country. They will not poison the communities they live in. They will not abuse their coworkers by exposing themselves to unsafe workplaces. They will keep profits in their pockets.

Tens of millions of citizens have nothing left to lose! The knee of our right-wing authoritarian oppressors are on the necks of all citizens/workers. Removing that knee of our failed systems requires historically massive public action (Revolution) and political participation.

-

Five member panel discussion on the revolution/depression (skip ahead to about 2:55): https://www.youtube.com/embed/AQJkOl92sbw

-

The Vote In November MUST Be Historic

We need democracy in the workplace to disempower the one percent.

What it took to defeat the evil of those who started WWII, is what we need now to defeat the same kind of evil that now runs our America.

This recurring evil that goes back across world history for centuries is driven byright-wing authoritarianism (RWA). The RWA personality, which can be tested for with a psychological test, has been the subject of psychologists looking at history to better understand what drives humanity to self-destruction. This testing showed that the authoritarian personality is correlated strongly with the political right and is almost non-existent on the political left. The research also showed that German citizens were more susceptible to its influences.

There have also been studies of the human brain to understand why people operate differently. This has led to the establishment oftwo opposing family modelswhichin turn define opposing politics. On the one hand there are families that fit what is called the strict-father family model. On the other hand, is the nurturant parent family model. This brain research shows that most of us are a mix of the two models. Based on recent voting history and other research referenced below, RWAs now represent at least 28% of the voting populace or 20 to 25% of the total population.

Other research efforts byStanley MilgramandPhillip Zimbardoshow that since most of us share some elements of authoritarian traits, these traits can be exploited. The subtitle of Zimbardo’s book,The Lucifer Effect, isUnderstanding How Good People Turn Evil. This book was written after theAbu Ghraib evil events were revealed and was supported by Zimbardo’sprison experiment at Stanford.

A concept Zimbardo developed in his book, The Lucifer Effect, was the “bad barrel.” In other words, your environment can override your personal inhibitions under the right influences. Consider the possibility that citizens, hunkered down in their homes with vast stores of weapons and ammo to protect them from the less pure among us, who are also watching Fox News and listening to hate radio, are in a nationwide bad barrel. How else can you explain all the viral videos of RWAs doing evil things?

The strict-father model produces the RWA personality and the moral values system behind the policies they support. This family model is based on a social hierarchy with one, most perfect, group at the top and all other groups at progressively lower levels based on their degree of imperfection as defined by those most perfect. This leads to a strong belief in inequality and absolute individual responsibility. They support government policies thatprotect and empower only those most perfect individuals. They also have a strong belief that each human is prone to evil at birth and what they define as evil can’t be allowed to grow. The basic tool used, within this family model to maintain their imaginary social hierarchy and minimize the evil they fear most, is severe punishment. Punihment starting at less than two years of age and extending to outright murder of adults of lesser perfection and war with nations with less perfect citizens.

For the nurturant parent family model, both parents use a moral values system based on equality, compassion/empathy, andresponsibility not only for oneself but for others. They believe in equality of opportunity and accounting for life’s unpredictable misfortunes driven by the circumstances of birth. They teach compassion for their fellow man. They nurture our hardwired ability to empathize.They believe and expect every child has great power to do good.Their moral values drive them to support family and government policies thatequally protect and empower all their fellow citizens and all family members.

In addition to Zimbardos bad barrel impacting otherwise good citizens to act in evil ways, there is also the research that shows the stress of a strict-father family on the fetus of a pregnant wife increases the possibility of RWA tendencies in the child as an adult. Thisstress actually changes the brainof the fetus.

Restating what I said at the start of this article, the native RWA tendencies in Germany, Italy, and other countries since, led to staggering levels of death and destruction for the sake of protecting and empowering the most perfect. The United States of that time included a small minority of RWAs who supported Germany:companies,Lindberg,The German American Bund. However, the vast majority of Americans agreed to sacrifice for the greater good. Capitalism was replaced with rationing. Sons and daughters joined the military. Those at home agreed tosacrifice personal gainnow for gains after the war, like through the GI Bill. Citizens, with very few exceptions, were UNIFIED against RWA evil!

Well, now we are battling a new enemy which RWAs are allowing to directly attack us all. Unfortunately, the RWAs are dividing/distracting us while tens of thousands are dying prematurely. We have a larger portion of RWAs blindly supporting a psychopath and a few of these RWAs have become wealthy enough, through excessive tax cuts, to take advantage of changed telecommunications laws and regulations to purchase our media and create a nationwide bad barrel of television and radio. Thedouble-high authoritarian leadersuse this bad barrel as a direct line to manipulate and unify their followers with repeated, formulated, identical, fear and hate based, messages against those who are less pure.

We need to counter this well organized RWA unity with a unity that goes beyond the Democratic Party. We need massive voter participation by all those left of the RWA TEA Party. We need to elect every Democrat on the ballot. We need aBrand New Congresswith a plurality in both houses. We need tosupport your local candidates with donations and labor.

As we did during WWII, we need to replace our predatory economic system with a more democratic economic system that eventually disempowers the psychopathic, excessively wealthy, double-high, RWA leaders so they can no longer buy our government by uniting their RWA followers with their RWA media. We need to pass laws that reverse decades of economic, social, racial, environmental, and enfranchisement injustices perpetrated by the RWAs. We need to pass laws that outlaw lying by public officials.

Party unity is critical and necessary, but we need even more. We need voter turnout we haven’t seen since the late 1800s. Turnout as in 2018 which provided a hopeful sign for 2020. But don’t use that possibility as an excuse to say they don’t need my vote. Vote for every Democrat no matter what. Vote and support all your local candidates. Vote to stop the growing hate/violence we see in videos of RWAs exercising their freedoms while abusing the freedoms of others.

Since WWII, the enemy of the United States has grown from within from a seed left over from that time. We must all unite as The Greatest Generation did to take out the Kreepy, Krawly, Kudzuthat has infested our land. We must unite to bring down the wealthy, double-high, RWA traitors who arestealthily stealing our government from us.

The A-Team for winning WWII was a united citizenry. The A-Team for winning in 2020 must be aunited citizenry.

????Rescuing America starts in November, 2020, and WE are ALL the A-Team!!!????

Do you now see what America has become: An Inverted Totalitarian State of, by, and for the capitalists? Would you like to know more about a system that puts people-before-profit, democratic socialism?

The COVID-19 pandemic is bringing out the worst in our predatory economic system:

The ignored, hidden, and inherent short comings of authoritarian, predatory, capitalism have been exposed: hoarding, scarcity of TP and medical equipment caused by “just-in-time” supply chains (minimize inventory at the supplier), price gouging, increased denial of medical care and virus testing, explosive medical bills, bankruptcy and homelessness from massive unemployment, farmer/doctor suicides, profit-over-people, and hundreds of thousands of premature deaths from a new virus, much of which could have been avoided.

Something else that has been hidden and suppressed is the alternate to this abusive, authoritarian, economy. This alternate has been attempted in the past and failed, but unlike the ignored failures of capitalism, this alternate system has been subject to open, critical, self-analysis. Lessons were learned and reformation applied to remedy its failures. Solutions for this alternate economic system have been continuously reviewed, tested, and changed. Solutions now include democracy at work, not just in government. This democracy takes form as coops. Employees decide how business is conducted. They won’t be shipping their jobs overseas or under paying their real profit makers, themselves. They won’t be poisoning their host community their neighbors.

If youre receptive to learning more about this alternate, more democratic, economic system, democratic socialism, watch this video:

I’ve read Nancy Macleans book and used it in my blog and just watched the video of her talk in Seattle at the Fix Democracy First event where she expanded on her book, Democracy In Chains, to further reveal the THE DEEP HISTORY OF THE RADICAL RIGHTS STEALTH PLAN FOR AMERICA.” Professor Maclean is the William H. Chafe Distinguished Professor of History and Public Policy.

Another author and professor I reference is Richard Wolff. Professor Wolff is Professor of Economics Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Amherst where he taught economics from 1973 to 2008. He is currently a Visiting Professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University, New York City. Both authors are pointing out the problems that are plaguing our democracy/economy.

What I understand from Professor Maclean is that the more we know about this stealthy, authoritarian, political Koch plan, the better we can recognize and defeat it. What I understand from Professor Wolff is that our auuthoritarian economic system is also contributing to the destruction of America. And the goals of both authoritarian manipulated systems overlap to empower and protect the excessively wealthy.

What this becomes for me is this. Our political system, which is under stealth attack as Macleans book documents, is founded on democratic values which are being destroyed. In addition, as Professor Wolff has documented in books, articles and video,our economic system is founded on authoritarian values master/slave, lord/serf, employer/employee and we need to recognize it’s also a broken economic system that is being used to fund the conversion of our political system into an authoritarian one owned by the capitalists. They are both describing a future for American that is also described by Sheldon Wolin in Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism.

The Kochs, other right-wing authoritarians, and libertarian thinktanks are all key authoritarian destructors for both our political and economic systems.

The antidote for our authoritarian political future that MacLean promotes is recognition of the authoritarian subterfuge and massive democratic action. The antidote for our current authoritarian economic system is also massive democratic action. Professor Wolff envisions this democratic action asdemocracy@workby replacing the employer/employee system with a purely employee driven economic system commonly called coops.

Both our political and economic systems are broken and making our economic system more democratic would enhance Macleans antidotal recommendations to help save our political system by disempowering the wealthy authoritarians/employers who are using our authoritarian economic system, capitalism, to fund the destruction of our democratic political system.

Our moral values inform and provide the foundation for our political choices. My political choices have changed over the decades as I’ve evolved my moral foundation.

As I’ve stated many times, including in my email signature, “The morally right option is the one that maximizes equality by equally protecting and empowering the greatest number of citizens.” That means I have moral qualms when politicians compromise on social programs that exempt any number of citizens from these programs. Here are some historical examples that I consider immoral compromises. The compromise got the programs implemented, but their impact was minimized on a racial/wealth basis and that was morally wrong.

Social Security Compromised:
Two groups of employees were exempted from Social Security as a compromise to get it past the bigots in Congress: farm workers and domestic workers, which were both large groups of people of color.

Union Organizing Compromised:
A similar exclusion exempted farm workers from union protection of the National Labor Relations Act of 1935.

Building of Hospitals Compromised:
In 1946, the Hospital Survey and Construction Act passed by including a rule that allowed states to allocate resources locally, so that they could drive new hospital construction away from African American communities.

GI Bill Benefits Compromised:
Then there were the Jim Crow policies that limited accessing benefits from the WWII GI Bill difficult for black GIs.

Affordable Care Act Compromised:
There are still tens of millions of Americans without healthcare coverage or high co-pays and deductibles. The ACA left health insurance tied to your job. If youre unemployed, you can’t afford coverage. It left some coverage up to the states and their uneven application of healthcare through insurance exchanges “state-level recalcitrance will leave two-thirds of poor blacks, two-thirds of single mothers, and half of all uninsured low-wage workers ineligible for Medicaid and therefore unable to afford coverage offered by the insurance exchanges.” ACA is still beholding to private insurance and private insurance profits from reducing coverage.

Medicaid Expansion Compromised:
When right-wing authoritarians can’t force a compromise to limit social program coverage from the start, they work to dismantle and limit the social program. For example, with the Affordable Care Act they won a SCOTUS ruling that made expanding Medicaid a state option. This ruling is limiting healthcare coverage and forcing the closing of rural hospitals.

Incrementalism, extending social programs little-by-little is a form of compromise that is just as immoral as outright exemption from policies meant to equally protect and empower all citizens. Letting those who already have protection and power decide who cannot have the same protection and power until later is immoral.

Therefore, I favor a national commitment to stopping the Sixth Great Extinction, healthcare for all, student debt forgiveness for all, publicly and fairly funded, lower (mandatory) and higher (optional) education, including civics, for all, new legislation to advance democracy at work, and progressive taxation similar to before President Reagan including property taxes on ownership of corporations.

Quotes from Outgrowing growth: why quality of life, not GDP, should be our measure of success

The worlds right-wing authoritarian, self-enriching, gobble-up, neoliberal, abusive, form of capitalism is based on never ending growth and has birthed massive inequality and the 6th Great Extinction. A major change in this economic system to improve quality of life and end the climate crisis is needed.

“Mainstream economics still thinks growth is essential, but this blind belief in GDP is just enriching the rich and killing the planet. We don’t need more growth to improve people’s lives. By working less, buying and producing less, and investing in public services, we can improve quality of life – and fight the climate crisis.”

“Think about it: we’ve built up a global fossil fuel infrastructure over the past 250 years, and now we have to completely overhaul it in only 30. Everything has to change in a matter of decades.

“The old fantasy that market mechanisms will somehow magically solve the climate crisis has been thoroughly dashed, and a new consensus is emerging: we need coordinated government action on a massive scale. “

Only government action can force corporations to change business as usual. Without government intervention, energy use and CO2 production will never reverse, and life’s quality will further deminish.

“The evidence is mounting: if we want a decent shot at climate stability, high-income nations will have to shift to post-growth economic principles. This would have been unthinkable in mainstream circles only a few years ago, but there’s now a striking consensus forming. In 2018, 238 scientists called on the European commission to abandon growth as an objective and explore post-growth futures. In 2019, more than 11,000 scientists from over 150 countries published an article stating that We need to shift from pursuing GDP growth and affluence toward sustaining ecosystems and improving well-being.’

Post-growth thinking is starting to trickle into policy, too. Jacinda Ardern, the prime minister of New Zealand, captured headlines in 2019 with her promise to abandon GDP growth as an objective in favour of wellbeing. The leaders of Scotland and Iceland have indicated that they will follow suit. With each announcement, social media erupted with excitement. People are ready for something different.”

What people want and need is economic, social, racial, and environmental justice and that is incompatible with endless growth in inequality under authoritarian capitalism. Quality of life in America, as measured by life expectancy, has dropped as per capita GDP has risen. “Spain spends $2,300 per person on healthcare, which is enough to secure one of the highest life expectancies in the world (83.3 years). The United States spends four times more to get worse results.

Another measure of quality of life is education. America’s per capita GDP is failing to educate its citizens. “Finland has one of the best education systems in the world, despite having a GDP per capita that’s 23% less than the United States. Estonia ranks highly too, with 66% less GDP per capita. Poland outperforms the United States with 77% less.

The reason America’s per capita quality of life is so low is because of massive inequality. It’s only available to the 1% who have far more wealth than is necessary to provide their own cadillac-level of health and education. The lower quality of life for the 99% drags Americas average down.

“ … it becomes clear that growthism is little more than ideology – an ideology that benefits a few at the expense of our collective future. We’re urged to step on the growth accelerator with deadly consequences for our planet, all so that a rich elite can get even richer.

The truth is we don’t need more growth to improve people’s lives. We can accomplish our social goals right now, without any growth at all, simply by sharing what we already have more fairly, and by investing in generous public goods. It turns out justice is the antidote to the growth imperative – and key to solving the climate crisis.”

The policy objective of switching from the inequality of growth to the justice of universal wellbeing will require massive, near-term, change. This includes significant scaling back on energy use along with massive conversion to renewables. Growth drives energy consumption and planned obsolescence is what drives growth this has to stop. Advertising also drives energy consumption by driving consumption of more stuff that goes obsolete.

“We like to think of capitalism as a system that’s rational and efficient when it comes to meeting human needs. But in some respects, it’s exactly the opposite. In pursuit of constant growth, firms resort to intentional inefficiencies. This might be rational from the perspective of profits, but from the perspective of human need, and from the perspective of ecology, it is a kind of madness. It is madness in terms of human labour, too. Think about the millions of hours that are poured into producing stuff that’s designed to break down, or that people don’t actually need in the first place.”

Making such massive change must be forced by the federal government. That requires a massive change in government and wresting control from the growth oriented corporations. Then legislation is possible that promotes universal wellbeing:

“What’s exciting about this move is that it has a substantial positive impact on wellbeing. Studies in the US have found that people who work shorter hours are happier than those who work longer hours, even when controlling for income. And it has a big impact on energy demand, too. If the United States were to reduce its working hours to the levels of western Europe, its energy use would decline by a staggering 20%.

Public interest in post-growth economics has soared over the past year as the climate crisis worsens. With fires blazing through Australia and the Amazon, floods swamping northern England, droughts driving migration, and record heatwaves searing across Antarctica, people realise that the status quo has us hurtling toward disaster, and they’re increasingly open to new ideas. In the 2020s, we can expect that the climate movement will rally around the Green New Deal and a vision for a completely new economy. “

The openness “to new ideas” is demonstrated by greater acceptance of democratic socialism, , especially by those born or growing up in this century and who have and will suffer the most in a growth oriented economy.

Quotes fromThe Virus and Capitalism.

America’s unique, right-wing authoritarian, self-enriching, gobble-up, neoliberal, form of capitalism is helping it’s wealthy owners again while ignoring and abusing most citizens.    Back in 2008, the neoliberal puppets bailed out the banks and screwed families out of their homes.  Today they are trying to bailout companies who just got huge tax breaks and failed to create their own rainy day funds while leaving citizens to self-quarantine, social-distancing, or die prematurely in a profit-over-people healthcare system.

“The U.S. is in the midst of a full-blown public health crisis made worse by systemic political dysfunction.”

Millions of fellow citizens may die due lack of a robust government response.  National emergencies can only be responded to by our national government.  The critical question is will the response help the 1% or the 99%?  

And who we elect to national leadership will be critical to changing America’s uniquely ugly form of capitalism.

The official plan to date is financial, to bail out Wall Street and the airlines, a payroll tax cut and token checks to the masses, and hope that it all works out.”

The payroll taxe cuts will help defund Social Security and Medicare.  These right-wing authoritarian capitalists always defund public services to end or privatize them, like public schooling and creating mass student debt.
The token checks are a one time placation in a long-term, abusive, crisis.

“In lieu of providing an adequate level of healthcare to address the pandemic, which even hardened D.C. hacks know can’t be conjured out of thin air in a timely enough fashion, what is left is ‘social distancing.’ This is polite speak for quarantines variably undertaken.

“The strategy of ‘flattening the curve,’ of slowing the spread of the virus so that the healthcare system isn’t overwhelmed at any one time, could bring the mortality rate in the U.S. down by matching healthcare need to capacity.  But implied in the structure of the economic stimulus is a couple of weeks at home watching Netflix and then it’s back to the races. This is a low probability outcome. Eighteen months, the anticipated duration of the pandemic if effective action to mitigate it is taken, means that a radically changed world will emerge from the other side.”

Question is who will we elect to be there with those of us who survive the pandemic?  Someone who perpetuates our uniquely, deadly, authoritarian, protect-the-rich, economic system or someone who would make it more democratic and fair for all?

“ … here we are ten years later and the previously bailed out are once again telling us that the Federal government has to bail out corporations and the rich to ‘save the economy.’ ‘The economy’ is indeed in trouble, but it is in trouble because of the fragility created to benefit corporations and the rich, not because stock prices have fallen.

“ … The problem is that four decades of neoliberalism have instantiated the ethos that the role of government is to make rich people richer.

“More broadly, through the self-serving mythology of rugged individualism, capitalism has been used to shape and reshape social relations. This makes its dependence on serial bailouts both ridiculous and pathetic. [Capitalism,] Conceived several centuries ago to shift power from Aristocrats to a burgeoning business class, without a large and intrusive government to prevent consolidation and self-dealing, it quickly creates a new Aristocracy to close the door behind it. What is left is the privileged, remote and self-dealing oligarchy that now stands before us.”

In normal times, this uniquely American, authoritarian, economic system creates massive inequality.  It times like this, it accelerates that creation of inequality.  Its immorality becomes even more depraved.

“During ‘normal’ times, when this oligarchy isn’t acting to destroy other nations and the world, malgovernance for its own benefit is made the ordinary working of government. For instance, the U.S. military is wildly overfunded while the healthcare system is structured to let the people die at a politically acceptable pace. During ‘not normal’ times, a hierarchy of privilege is set in motion. First, save the wealth of the rich through bailouts. Second, secure the rights of corporations to profit from catastrophe. Last, let the people die at a politically acceptable pace.”

The massive mismanagement of the pandemic in America could produce politically UNacceptable numbers of  American deaths before the November election.

“The risk for the rich is that the logic of the guillotine begins to make sense. The risk for the rest of us can be counted in the sick and dying.”

Minimizing premature deaths has always been part of healthcare for all.  The absence of such healthcare means even more unwarranted premature American deaths are likely during this mismanaged pandemic.

“Donald Trump’s clumsy effort to corner the market in virus test kits for ‘American’ corporations has meant that we simply don’t have them. Obamacare certainly hasn’t produced any. The strategy that is unfolding of ad hoc quarantines and wishful thinking will either be converted into a robust response or the existing political order will end.

The question of bailouts is fundamentally different from that of taking care of people. An adequate response to the pandemic will require years of dedicated effort, not tossing a trillion dollars at ‘the economy’ and hoping for the best. Social distancing and quarantines might require income and material support for tens of millions of people for as long as eighteen months.”

To change our uniquely authoritarian, American economic system that maximizes inequality into a more moral system that will work, long-term, for the 99% and one that will minimize premature, unwarranted American deaths will require significant voter turnout to significantly change who runs the federal government.  

Saving American lives cant morally be done incrementally.

You and I, our local city and county governments, and our state governments all need to operate, as fiscal conservatives, within a budget. Our expenses all need to be covered by some form of income like wages, tips, selling a product, issuing bonds, or collecting taxes. The main reason for balancing income and expenses is because individuals, businesses, cities, states have no authorization for creating money. We all need income, government created money, to pay expenses.\

The federal government’s power to create money gives it unique power to focus on balancing the national economy instead of its budget. It can add money to the economy to make it grow or help fix a national (natural or man-made) disaster. It can remove money, through taxes, from the economy to slow it down. Keeping the national economy balanced between jobs and inflation is the responsibility of the federal government and using fiat money to do that.

Keeping the economy balanced may require deficit spending. As long as the additional money results in a growing economy, more jobs, and the deficit remains small relative to the nations total economic output, or gross domestic product (GDP), i.e. low inflation, the additional spending is responsible and the economy remains in balance.

This responsibility to balance the economy with deficit spending is not what most of us consider fiscally conservative. However, it is within the power of the federal government to do so when needed.

This federal power can be used to fix national economic catastrophes as it did in the Great Recession of 2008/9. Quite suddenly the national economy, via risky banking activities, was coming up vastly short of cash. Only the federal government had the power to replace what was lost. It created hundreds of billions of dollars to replace the cash shortage when the bottom fell out of the artificially bloated/securitized home mortgage market.

Thankfully, there was no requirement for a federal balanced budget, fiscal conservatism, to prevent this federal action. The federal government was thus able to log into a federal bank computer terminal, enter the primary account number for each bank that needed rescue and key in the billions each bank had lost to make them whole again. They also bought ownership in the auto industry from the same computer terminals by purchasing company stocks with more money created out of thin air.

This same kind of federal money magic happens each time Republicans increase our military spending while also reducing federal income with massive tax breaks for billionaires and corporations. However, this kind of deficit spending has negligible impact on balancing the national economy. There is no real job growth or better wages for workers to spend and grow the economy. Economic growth is anemic. The magic money just keeps the existing defense industry running to replace equipment used for fighting our unnecessary wars. Our GDP is little changed from all the new money given to defense contractors who reward their executives like Dick Cheney with bonuses. It becomes money chasing money and some is used by company board of directors to buy back company shares and artificially inflate share value. The market looks great as the extra cash inflates stock prices, but the national economy isn’t browing.

Obviously, there has been no fiscal conservatism at the federal level for some time, nor should there be. The question is, if the federal government can create money to solve national problems like the Great Recession and the Great Depression, how can new money be better used such that there is actual growth in the GDP and real problem solving by creating jobs with living wages?

Most Republican deficits protect and empower the wealthy and create massive economic inequality. Reps believe only those at the top of their imaginary social hierarchy deserve government welfare. These deficits don’t create jobs, don’t grow the nations’s GDP, and tend to boost the stock market that is 80% owned by the one percent.

A better way to use the government’s magic money is to fund programs that grow the nation’s GDP. How about an initiative to reverse our growing climate crisis? The federal government could buy controlling interests of dirty energy companies, as they did the auto industries, and change the industry goal from fossil fuel extraction to expanding clean energy sources.

In addition, let’s stop increasing defense spending and reverse tax breaks for the wealthy and corporations. This may not be good for the stock markets, but who is mostly impacted by this? The wealthy and don’t they have far too much wealth to start with?

If the federal government were forced into fiscal conservatism and had to balance its budget instead of balancing the economy, our economy could not be rescued or protected from another financial crisis nor could it help solve national problems like it did after other Great Recessions, or needs to do now to minimize the Sixth Great Extinction.

Read The Deficit Myth for more details.

Economic Democracy must replace Economic Authoritarianism What Does Economic Democracy Look Like?

Over the centuries oligarchs have created economic systems for enriching and keeping the oligarchs in power:

There are variants of these systems based on who the oligarchs are, private individuals or public officials. Private control could be an individual oligarch or a group of oligarchs such as a board of directors. Public control is the state or government that represents the state and that state could be elected or self-appointed. The USSR and today’s China used/use state capitalism as their economic system. Over the last century, the United States has shifted from state-capitalism controlled by laws and regulation to private capitalism where the state is run by and for capitalists. Regardless of whos in control of capitalism, state or private, citizens are suffering varying levels of economic abuse.

Where can we go from here? Surely smart people have been thinking about what has come before and comes next. Hopefully, they are considering how a democratic system could replace the current authoritarian system, capitalism, created by the oligarchs for the oligarchs? Yes they, the socialist economists, are proposing what comes next: Democracy in the workplace to better fit, protect, and empower our democratic political system. Whether it’s state or private capitalism, it’s still authoritarian and abusive to citizens. Democracy embedded in our current economic system is what could admonish and wrest control of the economy from the oligarchs.

To get there, it’s going to take a vibrant democratic political system with massive citizen participation to enable this new democratic economic system called socialism.

In our Constitution, our democratic political system includes a division of responsibilities to enable a means of checks and balances. Each of the three branches of government is responsible for keeping the others in proper bounds.

In Capitalism, this authoritarian economic system has a division of power that despises checks and balances. And the oligarchs are working hard to grow their power to include a veto over the checks and balances of our political system through a Constitutional Convention.

Our authoritarian economic system needs democratization so we can save our democratic political system for the long-term.

Whats required to activate and unify voters on the left?

Americas political and economic policies have moved from greater equality after WWII and through the 70s to massive inequality in the decades since. This has happened surreptitiously without the backing of a majority of Americas citizens. Fear mongering, mass misinformation, and voter suppression funded by billions of Kochkash dollars have foisted this shift upon America.

The laws passed under FDR and LBJ, and improvements for people of color and women since, helped advance our political and economic equality. Since then, neoliberal economists, corporate boards, and SCOTUS have reduced equality by empowering and protecting the oligarchy.

Imagine an economic/political equality scale of +10 for maximized equality to -10 for maximized inequality. The +10 end of the scale is not absolute equality and still has some inequality limited mostly to the oligarchs. The zero point is where instances of inequality and equality are equal they exist in equal portions but not necessarily equally distributed. The -10 end of the spectrum, maximum inequality, includes some equality limited mostly to the oligarchs.

The +10 end of the scale also correlates to left-wing communalism and the -10 correlates to right-wing authoritarianism. This communal/authoritarian nature of this equality scale takes us from maximized democracy and individual freedom in both our economic and political systems to minimized democracy and individual freedoms in both systems.

For reference, Scandinavian countries like Denmark might rate a +5 and Nazi Germany would rate a -10.

To maximize democracy and individual freedom for the +10 POLITICAL system, one requirement would be a law that makes voting a right, registration automatic at birth, and voting without arbitrary, fear/hate-based, restrictions like voter IDs. To maximize democracy and individual freedom in the +10 ECONOMIC system would require employee owned/run corporations as has been done in Mondragon, Spain, since the end of WWII. This is in contrast to -10 society where both economic and political systems favor a minority, purist, group of oligarchs that have enslaved all others.

Assume that in 2019, under the current right-wing authoritarian Administration, that America is approaching a -7. Maybe after WWII, we were at +2 and after LBJs civil and voting rights acts, and Nixons clean air and water acts, we made it to +3. Then Bush II took the scale to -3 and gutting the VRA by SCOTUS took it to -4 under Obama while the Republican Congress kept Obama from pushing back.

Relative to this equality/inequalityscale and where America stands in it, what should our goals be for the 2020 election? How hard should voters push back in order to lay a certain foundation that moves our democracy and individual freedom back to at least a +3? What kind of voter turnout could help move us higher on the equality side of the scale? What message will inspire that kind of voter turnout? What will bring back the base that dropped out of the 2016 election? What will bring back those who, in even larger numbers than the disinterested base, went to a third party in 2016? The losses from our base that either stayed home or voted third parties was seen nationally.

Based on the detailed analyses of the election and re-election of President Obama, and subsequent post analyses of the 2016 and 2018 elections, part of the answers to the questions above for maximizing our political and economic success in 2020 is to:

Based on the equality/inequality scale above, what should our goal be to politically and economically maximize equality, democracy, and individual freedom?

I think our goal should be +7.

Decisions by oligarchs only benefit oligarchs whether they control our economic or political systems. We need more democracy in both systems.

Economic systems controlled by oligarchs benefits only the oligarchs. For example, as worker productivity increases, the oligarchs fire employees and put the savings in employee cost in their own pockets while keeping production constant. Thus the oligarchs enrich themselves, unemployment increases and the oligarchs have divided the workforce to use one group against the other. Employees learn to fear productivity gains.

On the other hand, economic systems controlled by the citizens benefit the citizens. For example, as worker productivity increases, the workers decide to keep everyone employed by decreasing hours worked while keeping production constant. Thus increasing leisure time and minimizing citizen division. Employees now favor productivity gains.

Political systems controlled by oligarchs will reward oligarchs for success and protect them from failure. For example, increasing defense spending, bailing out failed banks, and massive tax cuts will benefit the oligarchs by promoting war, forcing foreclosures and creating depressed property values for mass purchase, putting our children in harms way, and increasing the tax burden on everyone else.

On the other hand, political systems controlled by voters, benefit the voters. For example, increasing subsidies for green energy while decreasing subsidies for dirty energy, breaking up banks to big to fail, removing the salary cap on Social Security contributions, minimizing the middleman in and expanding healthcare, funding public education, taxing the oligarchs as needed to reduce the threat of inflation, replacing the reward/welfare system for non-productive oligarchs with a living wage for all, and fixing our failing infrastructure will benefit the voter by promoting employment at a living wage, freeing families from medical bankruptcy, preventing the 6th great extinction, making voters smarter, and keeping seniors out of poverty.

In other words, maximizing the principles of democracy in the political system through increased participation can lead to applying the principles of democracy in the workplace thus benefiting all citizens, minimizing the influence of oligarchs and removing the divisions promoted by the authoritarian oligarchs.

The distinct strategies of fascist politics include: the mythic past, propaganda, anti-intellectualism, unreality, hierarchy, and victimhood. Other strategies also included are law and order, sexual anxiety, appealing to the heartland, and dismantling public welfare and unity. Below is summary of those strategies from How Fascism Works The Politics of US and Them by Jason Stanley.

As you read, note the correlations with the blog categories listed to the right under Strict Father State. These categories came from a short paper on Fascism.

Fascist politics invokes a purist, conquering, mythical past that others, who deny the myth, supposedly destroyed. This mythical past presents a glorious, patriarchal time that still survives in rural America and ignores the nations darker moments that dilute its purity. It blames others in urban America for destroying this purist past and creating the dysfunctional present where the authoritarian patriarchs are no longer in control.

The function of the mythcal past is to harness the emotion of nostalgia to the central tenets of fascist ideology authoritarianism, hierarchy, purity, and struggle against the less pure others.

Fascist politics uses the language of virtuous ideals to unite a purest people behind otherwise objectionable ends. This virtuous language magnifies the glories and purity of the mythical past and uses the media to call out the impurities that threaten the myth. These impurities are corrupting and propaganda mocks them.

A key intent of fascist propaganda is to replace rule of law with the rule of a patriachal leader, like a CEO. Laws that prevent rule by a dictator, are declared corrupt and ignored. This includes the laws of checks and balances and freedom of the press.

All liberal institutions threaten the fascist mythical past with the darker elements of that past and expose the lies of the patriarchal fascist leader. The fascist leader must compromise or discredited these institutions. They will become part of the fascist propaganda machine to promote the mythical past, elevate the pure and patriarchal leaders of that past, and obliterate the redeeming contributions from the impure elements of society.

Fascist politics undermines public discourse by attacking and devaluing liberal education, knowledgable expertise, and complex language. In addition, they make extensive use of false equivalences. As a result, unchecked power, suppressed reality, and a herd mentality guided by simple slogans control the dominant race and suppress everyone else.

Fascist politics grants excessive time to the alternate realities of conspiracy theorists and a wide-ranging gaggle of flat-earthers. The fake realities obsure a broad, long-held, set of sacrosanct political values and decades of scientific research with the use of the false equivalences. In addition, these unrealities transform information and reasoned debate into an emotional spectacle with a demagogue as the star performer.

Right-wing authoritarians, Americas fascists, are self-empowering through their belief that everyone else is inferior. As a result, these chosen hold on to a comforting illusion of control over and a justification of a social hierarchy. This heirarchy ranks heterosexual, wealthy, white, Christianist, men just below God and above all else. Any threat by those promoting equal empowerment and protection of all citizens results in feelings of victimization.

There are victims of economic, social, racial, or environmental abuse from those who cant self-limit their privilege of self-claimed superiority. Then there are victims who suffer the loss of privilege through government intervention and forced equality, rebellion of the abused, or both. In one case, victimization comes from the enforcement of hierarchical inequality. In the other, it comes from equality forced on those atop this mythical hierarchy.

Victimhood results from domination-driven movements or from equality-driven movements. We all feel victimized whether it is from a struggle for equal respect or a struggle for dominance.

In fascist politics, the patriarchal demagogue classifies who is lawful or who is an illegal immigrant. In other words, it defines who is a threat to its law and order. The law and order which protects its position of privilege. So, law and order that equally protects all citizens becomes demagoguery of protecting the purity of the chosen.

The most useful threats of a patriarchal hierarchy are based on sexual anxiety. The patriarchal leaders accuse those lower on the hierarchy of raping the pure. The rapists threaten the purity of the chosen race. In addition, sexual anxiety also enables subjugation of homesexuals and transgender people. They threaten the purity of men. Both are threats to both toxic masculinity and social hierarchy of fascist politics.

Fascist politics must locate, propagandize, and isolate its base. In addition, it must make sure the base knows where the enemy resides. Primarily, this is a rural vs urban identification. Fascist politics delineates small towns and farms controlled by hardworking, individuals from sanctuary cities, Hollywood, and slums controlled by the impure. The Heartland is pure while the surrounding city centers are overflowing with disease, pestilence. The Heartland is self-sufficient and self-made while the cities are full of parasites dependent on the state.

Basically, Americas Heartland is our majority white counties as opposed to counties that are minority majority.

Knowing where your base is located aids in distributing the propaganda of fascist politics: promoting their mythical past, advancing their superiority in their social hierarchy, devaluing of science with false equivalencies, amplifying the threat of equality and sexual identity to their purity, and using law and order to suppress the others.

Fox News, as part of basic cable, is the propaganda machine for fascist politics. Other news sources are only available with cable or satellite for an additional fee. In addition, purifying the mythical fascist state requires elimination of progressive news sources.

Propaganda is a means to an end. It manufactures a mythical past and identities an enemy for fascist supporters to blame for their ills. The belief in a social hierarchy and inequality justifies placing blame. Fascist politics uses law and order to write new laws that prevent unity of those lower on the hierarchy. In addtion, the new laws punish the others and subjugates them to keep them from contradicting the hierarchy and inequality of fascist politics. In addition, the new laws keep the enemy isolated and unable to unite for their own protection through unions or other social means.

The belief in a social hierarchy means fascist politics has great admiration for the authoritarian structure of corporations. Putting a CEO at the head of a fascist political party, like the current Republican Party, is idyllic for fascist ideology.

The law and order strategy of fascist politics favors laws that keep individuals from uniting, such as the Right to Work (ie. Defund Unions) laws. The other side of the unity busting coin is preventing or eliminating existing social protection laws which unites a community in mutual bonds of care. This explains the resistance to Medicare for All and the desire to end Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act. They create caring social bonds.

An authoritarian economic system, like capitalism, will always be in opposition to a democratic political system. Authoritarians prefer to resolve this political/economic conflict by forcing the democratic political system into an authoritarian system. However, those who believe in a democratic political system prefer to resolve this political/economic conflict by expanding the economic system to maximize social freedom and democracy.

Even before FDRs socially responsible New Deal and laws passed since, corporations and excessively wealthy individuals have been stealthily working to put our democracy in chains by neutering the Federal government, eliminating majority rule, and defunding our social programs.

In 1935, FDR brought us Social Security, which initially did not include domestic and farm workers, but was eventually expanded to all workers. Now it just needs removal of the income cap to keep it funded.

In 1965, LBJ amended the Social Security Act to add Medicare and Medicaid, which now needs expansion to cover all citizens. LBJ also signed The Civil Rights Act and The Voting Rights Acts, which have been under attack ever since.

In the late 60s and early 70s, the Federal government forced corporations to start cleanup of the environment with the Clear Air and Clean Water Acts. This created the EPA. There was also the Job Safety law of 1970 that created OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration). These agencies need increased funding and pro-citizen management.

These efforts by the Federal government to empower and protect citizens were met with well organized resistance and lots of Kochkash.

Through several SCOTUS rulings, constitutional right have been extended to man-made corporations. With those undeserved rights, corporations are economically starving the government of we the people and replacing it with a corporate rubber stamp. Corporations are robbing and pillaging Americas common wealth and destroying the public infrastructure to equally empower and protect all citizens. Corporations are replacing the social contract with an individual contract to empower and protect themselves.

In the 50s, James Buchanan started work immediately to resist Brown v BofE in Virginia. As detailed in Democracy In Chains, the works of Buchanan were eventually melded with Kochkash to stealthily plan the destruction of American socialism through messaging, defunding social programs, and privatization of public resources to enrich those responsible for this destruction.

In 1970, Congress passed the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1970 and opened up all their committees to the public and, incidentally, corporate lobbyists.

In 1971, the US Chamber of Commerce contracted with future SCOTUS justice, Lewis Powell to detail ideas for how corporations could respond to the recent laws that reduced their corporate gains. The Powell Memo provided another means for investing Kochkash by funding ALEC and numerous anti-government think tanks like The Cato Institute and The Heritage Foundation.

Since the 70s corporations have kept the rewards of our increased productivity for themselves by keeping wage growth stagnant. They have reduced benefits and left workers to fend for themselves as independent contractors with absolutely no bargaining power.

The infrastructure created during the recovery from the Great Depression is on the verge of collapse. Public roads and public water supply systems need upgrading. Some publicly funded services, prisons for example, have been privatized for the wealthy. Public education is failing due to defunding. Other publicly funded earned benefits like Social Security and Medicare are a top priority for privatization.

We need to regain control of our government so it will empower and protect all human citizens equally. This is American socialism that was significantly enhanced under FDR, Eisenhower, LBJ, and Nixon. American socialism maximizes individual freedom while regulating those who take their freedoms to excess and abuse citizens.

Empowering citizens requires a Federal government that maximizes ones ability to succeed. The ability to succeed is maximized through adequately funded public education, properly maintained public roads, public transportation, clear air, clean public water and sewage treatment, a mandated living wage, and healthcare for all.

Protecting citizens requires a Federal government that maximizes ones freedom to succeed. This started with our Bill of Rights and has been expanded with other constitutional amendments. We now need protection from man-made corporations by ending corporate personhood and declaring free speech can only come from human beings. We also need the act of voting to be declared a right and to maximize all citizens freedom to exercise that right.

Balancing the freedoms of users and abusers requires a balanced national economy and elected federal officials who understand deficits which equally empower and protect citizens are sometimes necessary. This balanced economy promotes full employment at a livable wage while preserving public services, infrastructure, and lands needed for the Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness of all citizens.

Controlling inflation in a balanced economy requires a progressive revenue system which increases contributions to replensish the common wealth based on ones ability to pay and ones use of the common wealth. In other words, the more you gain from the commons, the more you pay in citizenship dues to maintain the commons for the social welfare of all.

American socialism equally empowers and protects citizens through a balanced national economy that uses both deficit spending only for the common good and progressive citizenship dues as necessary to keep that economy balanced.

The professional messengers of Nazi Germany and the Republican Party know there are two key factors for turning a lie into accepted fact over the long term:

Exaggerate the situation or issue beyond the pale
Get everyone on the team, and even your opponents, to repeat the exaggeration endlessly for years.

The exaggeration gets your attention and the repetition reinforces the neural connections in your brain to increase you retention of the lie and deminish other neural connections that contradict the lie. Eventually the contradictions are forgotten and only the lie remains as accepted fact.

The endless repetition of a lie first made by a president from the 80s is now known by almost everyone and accepted fact. (I think you know the lie and who said it, and Im not repeating it. Though doing this is like saying Dont Think of An Elephant. What are you now thinking about.)

Ive heard many, who strongly support public infrastructure, in its broadest sense, which is created and maintained by the government, repeat the lie in casual conversation. Its automatic, the lie gets blurted out as if its fact.

Opponents of Nazis, Neonazis, Altright, or any right-wing authoritarian must avoid helping these extremists spread their lies and turn them into accepted fact.

Please, dont repeat their Noble Lies. And while youre at it, dont repeat their names.

Leo Strauss re-introduced the Noble Lie to pro-war neocons.

Bill Kristol, the son of Irving Kristol uses Noble Lies

Instead, repeat the names and truths you know and bolster them with your moral values that are the foundation of your truth.

A federal government with a sovereign currency has a unique responsibility/capability A Balanced Economy.

Unlike the federal government, you and I, our local governments, our county governments, and our state governments all have to live within a balanced budget, which may include borrowing and paying back the debt, using dollars from the federal government. We all need dollars, coming and going, to balance our budget.

Not so for the federal government. Their job is to maintain a balance economy where they must balance inflation against unemployment. They use the creation and deletion of dollars to manage this balancing act and that can only happen using a federal deficit (good or bad).

The unique capability of the federal government to create every dollar of Americas currency out of thin air is what allows the rest of us to function within the economy and balance our budgets.

This unique capability of the federal government means that, unlike you or I or lower level governments, the federal government doesnt technically need to borrow. It just uses a computer keyboard to pump dollars into the economy. It also means it doesnt need to tax anyone to pay its bills. It will just create dollars as needed to make payments. More on this below.

This unique Federal ability to create money to inflate a deflated economy, means the federal government can pay for wars without increasing taxes like GWB. It also means the federal government can increase the the largest defense budget in the world while providing enormous tax cuts for billionaires and corporations as DJT has done. The government just adds dollars to the defense bank accounts and leaves more dollars in the economy through less taxation to keep the economy growing, sort of. And all without inflation because the economy is not balanced.

Unfortunately, these GWB and DJT deficita are bad for the economy because it doesn’t cause widespread, democratic, economic growth. The money from this bad deficit is focused on just a few citizens who work for defense contractors and an even smaller number of billionaires like DJT and his owners. These few citizens can’t buy a lot of stuff with those trillions and everyone else suffers because they got nothing from this national deficit spending spree.

On the other hand, a good deficit would make sure the money pumped into the economy is more democratically distributed. For example, rebuilding our aging national infrastructure, funding a green new deal, raising the minimum wage to a living wage, wiping out student debt, and providing medicare for all. This will affect hundreds of millions of citizens who will buy stuff and pay taxes.

Yes, both the bad and good deficits increase the number of dollars in the economy and inflation can be a consequence. However, when the current economy isnt at full capacity this wont happen. Currently, inflation isnt happening and interest rates have been historically low and sometimes negative to try and stimulate the economy.

So at the federal level, more dollars can be pumped into the economy without inflation as long as the economy is operating at less than full capacity and full employment. And as we have experienced, an inflationary economy and full employment arent likely with the bad deficits we are currently suffering from.

Now imagine a good deficit like the one described above. It would lead to full employment at a living wage and eventual inflationary pressures. At some point after this stimulation kicks in, the federal government must put on the economic breaks by removing dollars from the economy and/or slowing their creation for buying stuff.

Since the federal government controls the dollar pump to fuel the economy, it can also slow down the dollar pump and consider consuming/disappearing dollars when inflation becomes a problem.

To slow down the pump, they will raise interest rates to discourage the need to create dollars. On the other end, they will, as needed, increase income taxes and promote ‘government borrowing’ a misnomer.

To be effective at slowing down the economy, tax revenues represent dollars that must be removed not only from your bank account but also from the economy. Just like these dollars were created from thin air on a computer balance sheet, they will disappear from that same balance sheet and are no longer part of the economy. They can no longer be used to buy stuff and thus cut inflationary pressures.

Government borrowing’ is another tool to remove dollars from the economy. When we buy stuff, many of those dollars end up leaving the country and are now held by others, like China. To get those dollars back from others and disappeare them from the economy like tax revenues, the federal government makes an agreement with those dollar hoarders to take them back with a promise of small, periodic, periodic income until they need those dollars again at some later time. Hopefully, that will be when the economy has slowed down and needs a boost. In the mean time, there are fewer dollars in the economy and less inflationary pressure.

If you’d like to know more, this all comes under the heading of Modern Monetary Theory/Practice.

Am I too extreme to want representatives who will unabashedly speak out against all forms of economic injustice spawned by right-wing extremists and their belief that only the wealthy deserve government aid?

Am I too extreme to want representatives who will unabashedly speak out against all forms of social injustice spawned by right-wing extremists and their denial of sexual diversity?

Am I too extreme to want representatives who will unabashedly speak out against all forms of racial injustice spawned by right-wing extremists and their arrogant belief in white supremacy?

Am I too extreme to want representatives who will unabashedly speak out against all forms of environmental injustice spawned by right-wing extremists and their desire for the end times or getting filthy rich in case they are not among the chosen?

Am I too extreme to want representatives who will make a moral commitment to equally protect all living and breathing citizens from the economic, social, racial, and environmental injustices committed by man-made, heartless, and greedy entities with their immoral, excessive, power and pursuit of profit without regard to harming citizens?

Am I too extreme to want representatives who will make a moral commitment to equally empower living and breathing citizens such that their freedoms to choose, like voting and medical procedures, are maximized?

Am I too extreme to want representatives who will make a moral commitment to equally empower living and breathing citizens such that their abilities, like critical thinking, are maximized?

Am I too extreme to want representatives who will make a moral commitment to equally protect living and breathing citizens such that they are free from medical bankruptcy caused by death panels protecting health insurance profits?

Am I too extreme to want representatives who will make a moral commitment to equally protect living and breathing citizens such that they are free from sacrifice in never-ending wars for corporate enrichment?

Am I too extreme to want today’s version of FDRs second bill of rights written into law?

If you answered, No, to most of these questions, then maybe Im not that extreme. We just want what is just.

If you answered, Yes, you’re too extreme,” to some, but not all, of these questions, then we have some common ground.

The left must unite with all who have suffered the injustices of right-wing extremists who support protecting and empowering a greedy minority just as the right unites against the majority who would equally protect and empower all Americans.

All of us must unite over any common ground or the right, who unite in spite of their diverse extremist views, will continue to win.

RE: Democracy In Chains by Nancy MacLean and Conservatives Without Conscience by John Dean

Since
Brown v Board of Education in 1954 that caused Virginia to shut down all public education for a short time and initiated a Libertarian school of propaganda,
the sexual revolution of the 60s that scared the religious right,
the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1971 that increased corporate lobbyists by thousands,
the facilitation of the 1971 Powell Memo by billionaires like the Koch brothers that laid the foundation for corporations to control our government,
the Presidency of Ronald Reagan that advanced union busting and the austerity of economic neoliberalism and trickle-down BS that enriches the excessively wealthy,
the various telecommunication acts of 90s that turned news into entertainment for profit and allowed vast consolidation/homogenization across the nation, and
SCOTUS decisions like Citizens United,

the right-wing authoritarian extremists have advanced their agenda to
neuter the federal government,
end majority rule,
give veto power to the 1%, and
advance their personal economic liberty without regard to the resulting economic, social, racial, and environmental injustices inflicted upon both the people of America and the nations of the world with resources to steal.

Act now and get politically active. Support your local party, volunteer for a candidate, donate to either or both, learn what it takes to be a candidate, register to vote, help register voters, become a precinct chair, join a movement, etc.

Instead of sharing instances of what we all know is a new era of escalating injustice, share ideas of what others are doing to end this era like:

Poor Peoples Campaign
March for Our Lives
Popular Resistance

Professor Phillip Zimbardo, who conducted the Stanford Prison experiment in his younger days and has since written about what hes learned, The Lucifer Effect Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, coined the phrase bad barrel. A bad barrel is an authoritarian system, in which the participants are coerced into doing bad things think Abu Ghraib in Iraq. This reality was also demonstrated by the Milgram Obedience Study.

In an email exchange with professor Zimbardo, I suggested a national bad barrel and he agreed to the concept. That bad barrel is what has led to the growing support of DJT. Its composed of individuals chosing to surround themselves with just two news sources: Fox News, which is the only news source that is part of basic cable no extra fees like for CNN or MSNBC, and the ubiquitous Hate Radio.

To expand on that, I suggest that most who oppose DJT are in our own, not as bad, bad barrel. Its consists of NPR, PBS, CNN and MSNBC, that we have to pay extra for, and some of the left-leaning print media that is mostly controlled by right-wing executives. Ive gradually stepped outside of that bad barrel to see whats coming.

For decades, I was a loyal, annual contributor/supporter, of NPR, almost $6,000 over the decades. This lasted until 2013 when I finally tired of the conservative worldview creeping into their national and local programs. I complained often, to no avail. That recognition of the red-shift came from the books and other news sources which are not funded in any way by corporate donors/influencers.

What really cinched my divorce from NPR was when they changed how they raised funds. What I noticed first was a drop in their fund-raising goals. This contrasted to previous decades of continuously increasing fund-raising goals associated with increasing numbers of listeners. To replace the reduced income from local listeners, they contracted with a third-party to reach out to large donors. Large/corporate/Koch donors who will probably want to influence programming in a way that would increase the red shift.

This national, slow, move to the right (as the right becomes more extreme and draws the rest of the country with it and this includes profit-centric media that must grow its annual revenue to maximize the wealth of its right-wing authoritarian CEOs) reminds me of the parable about the frog in boiling water. If you change ones environment slowly enough, it will be too late to reverse the end of the good that was. Until that frog gets out of the slowly warming water, it cant see whats coming.

And thats why I prefer nonprofit left/progressive media. It gets me out of the fast/slow, red-shifting, media bad barrels.

I remember back before Reagans FCC killed the Fairness Doctrine when the news was non-profit and legally required to support the common good. The situation worsened in 1996 when Clinton and Gingrich passed a new telecommunications law that enabled the new right-wing authoritarian and left-leaning, but red-shifting, bad barrels.

Yes, the less bad, bad barrel of the left-leaning profit-centric media provides useful information. However the nonprofit media is necessary for what the profit-centric media will NOT cover in any great detail without creating a false equivalency. For example, Comcast owns MSNBC. Comcast has recently gotten its wish to end Net Neutrality. When has MSNBC ever gone into detail about the value of Net Neutrality. And if they have, did they create a false equivalency by giving equal time to the profit masters who put profit before fully informing citizens so they can make better decisions.

What MSM coverage is there of the ongoing poisoning of citizens in Flint, MI? How about the devastation being ignored in Puerto Rico? Or the decades-long GOP efforts to suppress the vote of people of color far more massive than Russiagate? What about the privatization/destruction of Social Security and Medicate that Congress is pushing hard now as we are all in shock of immigrant abuse by ICE? How about the recent lynching of two black men in OK. What coverage was there of the massive, and uniting, efforts of the Water Protectors in ND and their abuse by local authorities and vigilantes following the orders of the corporation and committing injustices in the name of that corporation?

The public good far outweighs the need to enrich the one percent. Americas MSM is more and more putting profit before people as it continues its red-shift in our bad, and not so bad, bad barrels.

Profit alone is not the problem. Putting it before all else is the problem. I grew up when profit had limits. People were protected, more then than now, from corporations externalizing their costs to maximize profit and abuse citizens. Nixon signed the clear air and clean water acts into law and created the EPA and OSHA. Now thats all a facade controlled by corporate hacks and MSM is not reporting on this destruction in any meaningful way.

The people in the streets today, who feel the impact of Americas growing inequality, are there in spite of profit-centric MSM, not because of it, and I dont think thats why the free press has its position of high regard in our Constitution. Overall, MSM is shirking its responsibility to adequately inform citizens. They are more into entertaining than informing.

There will come a time in your life when you have the power within you, as an ordinary person, as a person who is willing to take a decision, to blow the whistle, to take action, to go the other direction and do the heroic thing.” Professor Phillip Zimbaardo

While corporate bankers get bailed out with public funds for their greedy mistakes and with Net Neutrality changed to enhance corporate greed, citizens are being arrested for protesting economic, social, racial, and environmental injustices (Poor Peoples Campaign), and gifted children, like Aaron Shartz, are driven to suicide for their success at stopping SOPA and freeing public owned documents from corporate control.

Back in 1980, the Koch brothers documented their Libertarian goals when David Koch ran for Vice President by preparing their campaign platform. Below are key excerpts from their platform. For contrast, I’ve added [my 2 cents].

“We urge the repeal of federal campaign finance laws, and the immediate abolition of the despotic Federal Election Commission.” [Thanks to the Citizens United decision, this commission has basically been neutered. The mission of the FEC is to administer and enforce the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) that governs the financing of federal elections.]

“We favor the abolition of Medicare and Medicaid programs.” [Results in early death of seniors who can’t afford private medical care.]

“We oppose any compulsory insurance or tax-supported plan to provide health services, including those which finance abortion services.” [This is a bone for getting Evangelical support. If you can’t afford health insurance, you have my thoughts and prayers.]

“We also favor the deregulation of the medical insurance industry.” [Most people can’t afford medical insurance as is. Mary and I are paying exorbitant monthly premiums for Dawn’s medical insurance.]

“We favor the repeal of the fraudulent, virtually bankrupt, and increasingly oppressive Social Security system. Pending that repeal, participation in Social Security should be made voluntary.” [Privatizing SS puts seniors at greater risk of falling into poverty.]

“We propose the abolition of the governmental Postal Service. The present system, in addition to being inefficient, encourages governmental surveillance of private correspondence. Pending abolition, we call for an end to the monopoly system and for allowing free competition in all aspects of postal service.” [Eliminating the Postal Service, reducing competition for the existing private services like FedEx.]

“We oppose all personal and corporate income taxation, including capital gains taxes.” [Elimination of taxes is really about defunding public institutions like our schools. As a citizen of America, I believe we must pay citizenship dues for the privilege of being here and helping those with worse luck than me.]

“We support the eventual repeal of all taxation.” [Without taxation, there is no way to control inflation. Our federal government can create unlimited dollars to boost the economy, but it needs taxation to remove dollars from an overheated economy.]

“As an interim measure, all criminal and civil sanctions against tax evasion should be terminated immediately.” [Dont arrest those who refuse to pay citizenship dues.]

“We support repeal of all law which impede the ability of any person to find employment, such as minimum wage laws.” [Get rid of minimum wage so employers can pay less.]

“We advocate the complete separation of education and State. Government schools lead to the indoctrination of children and interfere with the free choice of individuals. Government ownership, operation, regulation, and subsidy of schools and colleges should be ended.” [Privatize education to teach consumerism instead of citizenship.]

“We condemn compulsory education laws … and we call for the immediate repeal of such laws.” [This is about tax reduction and education only for the wealthy.]

“We support the repeal of all taxes on the income or property of private schools, whether profit or non-profit.”

“We support the abolition of the Environmental Protection Agency.” [Our planet has limited “carrying capacity” and excessive use of natural resource exceeds that capacity. Speaking of unlimited Libertarian freedom, life on this planet, excluding humans, has lived freely but without destroying it’s environment. President Nixon, a Republican, signed the law that created the EPA. Nixon also signed the Clean Air and Clean Water acts into law.]

“We support abolition of the Department of Energy.” [This department regulates much of their business.]

“We call for the dissolution of all government agencies concerned with transportation, including the Department of Transportation.” [This also benefits the industries the Kochs own.]

“We demand the return of Americas railroad system to private ownership. We call for the privatization of the public roads and national highway system.” [Imagine the daily cost of tolls you would pay during your daily activities if public roads were privatized.]

“We specifically oppose laws requiring an individual to buy or use so-called self-protection equipment such as safety belts, air bags, or crash helmets.” [Permit unsafe conditions that force everyone else to pay for the uninsured in the emergency room.]

“We advocate the abolition of the Federal Aviation Administration.”

“We advocate the abolition of the Food and Drug Administration.” [Allow sale of unhealthy products.]

“We support an end to all subsidies for child-bearing built into our present laws, including all welfare plans and the provision of tax-supported services for children.” [This is racist since it predominantly impacts the poor.]

“We oppose all government welfare, relief projects, and ‘aid to the poor’ programs. All these government programs are privacy-invading, paternalistic, demeaning, and inefficient. The proper source of help for such persons is the voluntary efforts of private groups and individuals.” [Our level of poverty is growing and private groups cannot finance the needs.]

“We call for the privatization of the inland waterways, and of the distribution system that brings water to industry, agriculture and households.”

“We call for the repeal of the Occupational Safety and Health Act.” [Protecting employees is costly. President Nixon, a Republican, signed the law that created the OSHA.]

“We call for the abolition of the Consumer Product Safety Commission.” [The Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) protects the public from unreasonable risks of serious injury or death from thousands of types of consumer products under its jurisdiction, including products that pose a fire, electrical, chemical, or mechanical hazard or can injure children. Corporations are removing themselves from our court system and trial by jury through forcing citizens to sign arbitration agreements when they buy products or services. Abba has an arbitration clause in every contract. For a company that ethically regulates itself per Libertarian philosophy, that’s not a problem for the consumer. But we all know there are unethical businesses that deserve to be sued.]

“We support the repeal of all state usury laws.” [No limit on interest for loans.]

For more on their decades long, stealth, effort to implement this platform, without being elected to office and by forcing a Constitutional Convention to rewrite our Constitution, read Democracy In Chains by Nancy MacLean. The chapter titled “No Compromise” is about the Koch brothers.

https://history.duke.edu/book/democracy-chains

Putting profit before people has led to decades of poisoning our air, our water and our soil. Some of this abuse has resulted from privatization of public resources. Blind allegiance to profit has also led to torturing of gifted individuals who have tried to reverse privatization by making what was public, public again.

The Internets Own Boy, the story of Aaron Swartz, an internet innovator, who stopped SOPA (the first attempt to privatize the internet), who laid the foundation for a fourteen year old to develop a test for detecting pancreatic cancer, and who later committed suicide at age 26 after threats of decades in prison and total loss of access to computers, reveals the torture Aaron, his family, and his friends suffered for his effort to make public papers public again.

My takeaways from this story:

In 1970, income and wealth inequality were at historical lows. The income tax tables had over 25 brackets with the top marginal rate of 74%. Campaign funding was limited to the presidential campaigns and lobbyists were few and far between.

After the Brown v Board of Education the development of ideas to resist federal laws was initiated. Read Democracy In Chains for details which also includes who funded this idea development like the Koch Brothers.

In 1971, Lewis Powell wrote a memo at the request of the president of the US Chamber of Commerce. This memo laid the foundation for corporate intrusion into our political process.

In 1970, for the second time in our national history, a law, called the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1970, was passed that changed the way Congress operated. This act is what enabled the massive growth in lobbyists, changed how our laws were written, and enable organizations like the NRA to keep laws desired by the majority from becoming law.

Listen to Congressional researcher James DAngelo as he explains how the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1970 opened up politicians voting records and has helped special interests and corporations put profit before people:

Which candidates will speak loudly and repeatedly about long-term, still-growing, massive, widespread, injustices in America?

There are those who believe inequality is normal and ordained. God is at the top, followed by white male Christianists, then everyone else based on religion, skin color, sex, and sexual orientation. Those who believe this, and have gained control of our government, perpetrate massive injustices since they also believe in extreme punishment as a teaching tool.

Democratic candidates must speak out loudly and repeatedly against the decades-long economic, social, racial, and environmental INJUSTICES that have been perpetrated by these extremist right-wing authoritarian leaders.

Policies developed to resolve these injustices for all the people, requires both:

Government representatives with the moral commitment to equally protect and empower all the people such that 1) People’s individual freedoms are maximized, and 2) Economic, social, racial, and environmental injustices are minimized, and
An active participation (voting and political participation) of a majority of the people to maintain such a people driven government.

For all candidates, what will you say and do about these, and many other, long-term, still- growing, massive, widespread, injustices in America?

Who are these people using WMDs for mass murder in America?

They are men who have been taught that there is a social heirarchy with God at the top. After God comes white, Christianist, males, then everyone else based on religion, sex, sexual orientation, and skin color. This allows them to devalue all those NOT like them. They also believe in severe punishment, up to and including death/war, as a necessary tool for enforcing their world view. Do what I say or die, you nonhuman animal.

These are the men who kill others in massive numbers so easily and they are defended by those like them: some of whom are our elected officials who get money from the #NRA and who need to be voted out of office.

From Intro To Modern Money Theory:

Modern Monetary Theory is partly a description of how our modern fiat, floating exchange rate currencies actually work, and partly a prescription of what we ought to do with this knowledge. MMT realizes that many of the constraints we place on our money system today as well as many of our models for understanding it are actually holdovers from the era of gold-standards and fixed exchange rates that dont apply at all today.

Heres my take on how MMT works to create a national balanced economy that results in full-capacity, full employment, and low-inflation.  The balance is between employment and inflation not income and spending.

Imagine that Americas economic capacity is a swimming pool. This swimming pool is filled with liquid US Dollars. When the US economy is at full capacity the money in the pool is at just the right level. This right level for a full capacity economy is where the number of available jobs equals the number of available workers. Thus the economy is at full capacity.

If more jobs exist than workers, the level of the pool is too high and the government must reduce the level of money in the pool to bring employment and jobs back into balance by reducing the money supply and/or increasing taxes (draining the pool of money) to reduce the number of jobs. If there are more workers than jobs, the government must pour more money into the pool, creating more jobs, and bring the level back to full employment.   Raising taxes (draining the pool) in this situation would defeat/slow increasing the flow of money into the economy and make creating jobs difficult.

This effort to maintain a balanced economy changes when the deficit, the flow of money into and out of the pool/economy (money supply and taxes) becomes a problem. As long as the economy is at full capacity, the money flow is properly balanced. If that leads to a deficit, more spending than taxing, its OK, because the economy is balanced by additional employee spending from full employment and the purchase of goods and services that would otherwise not happen. The extra money is circulating and maintaining full employment. The extra money also allows people to save for retirement and pay for health insurance.

On the other hand, if the deficit occurs while there is any imbalance in the full capacity of the balanced economy, its a problem. For example, DJT is increasing defense spending by a small amount to keep/grow jobs while decreasing taxes by a much larger amount not draining the pool. This means money is being added to the economy but not it a way that will promote full employment and more consumer spending. The economic capacity, or money in the pool, will rise but it wont result in a balanced economy because most or the money wont be spent on jobs, goods and services. Instead, it will be spent in investment markets to enrich the one percent and inflate the stock market which doesnt help balance jobs and workers to attain a full capacity economy.

In other wards, deficits are good if they result in full employment and a balance economy but bad if they result in increased austerity, growing economic inequality and fewer jobs.

Also, a balanced federal budget translates into bad deficits, an economy far below capacity, lots of unemployment, lower wages, under employment and prevents solving problems like global warming without end, no universal health care, no greening of our energy sources, and perpetual austerity except for the one percent.

Good deficits lead to a balanced economy that minimizes economic inequality.

More:

The unfolding climate crisis demands that we make an urgent and just transition to a green economy. The question many are asking is, How will the U.S. government pay for this transition? In this talk we learn how the U.S. has used modern money since we came off the gold standard in 1971, which offers substantial new options which have not been utilized. Modern monetary theory can be used by the federal government to create new green jobs, build a green economy, and fund social programs in a surprisingly affordable and complete way.

Randy Mandell works on Modern Money Revolution, a campaign of 1 Sustainable Planet and 350Seattle.org, and actively works for climate recovery.

Ive posted multiple times about my concerns with profit-centric MSM and their requirement to put profit before the common good of we the people.

For many, profit-centric news is only kind of news with which you are familiar. Well, back before Reagan, it wasnt this way. The evening news was only available on three networks, who broadcast over the publicly owned airways, and were required to report the facts of reality if they wanted to use our Public airways. The news staff were forbidden to fraternize with the marketing staff. The news staff were responsible for serving the common good of all citizens. That all ended when the Fairness Doctrine was eliminated and the non-profit news of old, was merged into the profit-centric entertainment divisions of the networks.

But now, MSM does what ever it takes to attract the most viewers to the commercial ads they run. They all play the ratings game and brag when possible. The more eyeballs they capture, the more they can charge for those ads.

Part of the effort to maximize their profits includes attracting viewers from both sides of the political spectrum. To do this, they have talking heads from both sides of an issue.

The problem with this balanced reporting is that it presents a false equivalency. Take global warming as an example. Even though the scientific community is split 97 to 3 in favor of man-made climate change, the news is presented as two equal options for the viewer to consider.

This equivalency keeps both sides watching, doesnt change anyones opinion, and keeps the eyeballs on the commercial ads. Heres another way to report on this issue:

Just be aware of this effort to equate that which isnt, and its ability to reinforce a false reality for those who believe it. It is not in the interest of the peoples common good and is now profit-driven.

$700 Billion for the Pentagon Where Will All That Federal Money Come From? A Few Taps on a Keyboard.

DJT just signed a bill to provide $700 Billion for the Pentagon in FY2018 while Congress is working on a new, enormous, welfare giveaway for the one percent. How is this possible?

Once a federal spending budget is approved, credits to all government spending accounts are added. Its just a matter of a few keystrokes at a federal government computer. Then, poof, theres money in their accounts to spend. Nothing was printed. The authorized funds were just added out of thin air to these accounts. For some accounts, like the DoD, there will be increases from 2017. For social programs, there will be decreases from 2017.

Guess what. If our federal government officials were of a different political persuasion, they would use the same technique to increase funding for healthcare for all and transitioning to a green economy while creating new jobs for sustaining instead of destroying life.

Its up to We The People to make this happen participate in the political process! Force candidates to address the issues you are most concerned about. Help register voters. Help encourage registered voters to vote.

Modern monetary theory has been used to pay for our bloated military but can be used by the federal government to create new green jobs, build a green economy, and fund social programs in a surprisingly affordable and complete way. Learn more.

He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression. For if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.
Revolutionary activist Thomas Paine

“We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not fearful men, not descended from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes which were for the moment unpopular.”
US broadcast journalist, Edward Murrow

McCarthy and his team were able to sow fear, paranoia, and a rigid adherence not to democracy or free speech but to intolerance of dissent and the questioning of the received truths that sustained America’s engagement with the rest of the world.
Journalist John Wight

Assassinating the messengers to void their message is a very common tactic. Women claiming assault or abuse are blamed for being victims. Members of the communist party were victimized to satisfying the fears of the right. Journalists are imprisoned and KILLED to keep their words from revealing the terror they witness. Now RT is slandered and requested to register as a foreign agent without regard to freedom of the press. When blaming/killing the messenger includes limiting constitutional freedoms, we are likely to lose those freedoms too.

Other than changing liberal media to profit-centric corporate media, I concur with this article: As for those on the so-called left who have remained silent, or worse are gloating over the moves to shut down Russian media, they are like people feeding a crocodile hoping it will eat them last.

This growth must go beyond reversing voter suppression, improving public education, and expanding civic participation. Maximizing the rule of democracy for our government of, by and for the PEOPLE must also include democratizing our economy. Record economic inequality must be reversed and it will take more tan tweaking the current economic system.

Expanding the democratic concept will require minimizing our centurys long acceptance of authoritarian economic domination. One place where this authoritarian domination has increasingly worked against we the PEOPLE is the workplace.

Can you imagine a workplace without managers, without a small group of extremely wealthy individuals making all the key decisions on products, employees, benefits, suppliers, and the best use of profits? This non-authoritarian workplace is foreign to most, but it exists, it is growing, and its been in place since WWII in some parts of the free world.

Read more about the THE FULL PARTICIPATION ECONOMY in this five part series from Democracy at Work:

PRISON WORKERS, THE AMERICAN WORKER AND THE POWER OF COOPERATIVE WORK [PART I]

Social Exclusion [Part II]

Viable Models — Looking Abroad and in the US [Part III]

The Worker Cooperative as a Bulwark against Social Exclusion [Part IV]

New York City — Where to go next? [Part V]

How effective was Russian propoganda on social media? Who many votes were switched? What other voter numbers are more significant?

But just how many Facebook users who saw this propoganda, actually bothered to vote? A 2010 study of Facebook users showed a small increase of 340,000 votes, nationwide, based on a direct get out the vote plea.

Then there were tens of millions who just didnt vote, and Texas was worse than the nation, see table below.

Also, there was the GOP Operation Cross Check that eliminated upto 7 million minority votes from the 2016 election results.

And what about the large increase for third party candidates. In Galveston county Texas third party vote went from a historical average of 1.4% to 4.5%. Nationally the vote change for third party went from 1.7 in 2012 to 4.1 in 2016. And according to WikiPedia election results, the change in third party votes from 2012 to 2016 was 4,962,440 additional votes.

Many factors affected the 2016 election. This also includes media favoritism. Remember the CEO of CBS saying that DJT may be bad for the country but hes great for the bottom line profit. Tens of millions were spent on TV campaign ads telling voters what they already knew about DJT instead of investing in ground troops to make calls or go door-to-door to encourage voting. According to Steve Phillips in his book Brown Is the New White, some $20 million spent on TV ads for a 2014 losing Democratic Senatorial candidate could have resulted in 56,000 more votes for the loser if that money had instead been spent on the GOTV ground game.

Metrics on voting results show that voter turnout is increased by 5% with that kind of ground game. Add to that all the new voter suppression laws past by Republican controlled states with the help of ALEC and since SCOTUS ransacked the Civil Rights Act.

Elections are complex, multi-variant processes and blaming the results on one thing is grossly problematic and suspiciously distracting.

From the last chapter of Democracy In Chains, by Nancy MacLean, here is how the Koch Brothers and their elite Libertarian cadre are increasing their, white, billionaire, veto power over govt and majority rule:

1. By mandatory and ubiquitous Arbitration Clauses that allow corps to opt out of Americas justice system. Corporations can abuse Americans without reproach regardless of the harm they inflict.

2. By promoting Federal Judicial Activism which ranks Kochs Economic Liberty over greater equity for the American majority. one must be cognizant of the fact that no matter what those who have good intentions say, any decision that consolidates power in the national government is an attack on the foundation of self-government and liberty.

3. By reinstating Jim Crow expanding disenfranchisement: Massive minority Voter Suppression via Interstate Cross Check. After the SCOTUS decision on Citizens United and prior to the 2012 election, GOP Voter Suppression was expanded by 180 bills in 41 states. Massive Election Fraud = Elite minority rule

4. By states passing Preemption Laws to keep municipalities from protecting empowering citizens: Fight For 15, Marriage Equality, Fracking. All with the help of SPN, ALEC, millions in KochKash, corporate lobbyists, and significant lower eligible voter participation. United States ranks 138th out of the worlds 172 democracies for voter turnout.

5. By most audacious gerrymander in U.S. history … to allow legislators to select their voters. After the unfathomable (for the extreme right) election of Obama, this elite right wanted to chose their electorate. The GOP (Koch) evil plan for massive voter control is documented in Redistricting Majority Project. Even though more Democratic votes are cast, more Republicans get elected/re-elected. More Voter Suppression.

To value liberty for the wealthy minority above all else and enshrine it in the nations governing rules, as Calhoun and Buchanan both called for and the Koch network is achieving, play by play, is to consent to an oligarchy in all but the outer husk of representative form. Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains, page 233.

Ive been reading Democracy In Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Rights Stealth Plan for America, by Nancy MacLean. Yesterday, I read about some of the lessons learned by James Buchanan. Mr. Buchanan is the main subject of the book and the key producer of 20th Century Libertarian (Koch/Mercer/Friedman/Rand) ideas behind the stealth takeover of America to maximize their elitist, individual, liberty and minimize the freedoms of everyone else.

In the late 50s, Buchanan and his team from the University of Virginia, were developing and sharing a plan to help the state of Senator Harry Byrd mount a major resistance to the Brown v Board of Education decision by SCOTUS. These good old white boys would rather close all Virginia public schools that attempted integration, and provide vouchers for private schools, than integrate. However, their ideas were no match for state Legislators who were more worried about getting reelected, many more citizens that supported the decision, and the court rulings that found their attempts to resist unconstitutional.

What Buchanan took from these losses, and started working on solutions for, was:

Ameliorating the re-election fears of state legislators for both resisting federal intervention in state business and, at the same time, ignoring the wishes of their constituents. (Think Gerrymandering.)
Making sure that our Constitution could no longer be used to block their states rights efforts to maximize their individual liberties and to force others to adhere to their minority view. (Think Constitutional Convention.)

After decades of refining his extreme, right-wing, ideas on control by the wealthy, James McGill Buchanan, professor at the University of Virginia and head of his very own Thomas Jefferson Center for Political Economy and Social Philosophy department, joined forces with the Koch Brothers, other Libertarians, and vast amounts of KochKash (funds from excessively wealthy, right-wing extremists from around the world) to stealthily and nonviolently:

We all know from reading about The Powell Memo, the Kochs were, and still are, key to funding ALEC, The Cato Institute, The Heritage Foundation, Americans for Prosperity and other extreme right-wing organizations since the early 70s. What this books adds is how they developed all their extreme ideas in the late 50s before promulgation by all these right-wing propaganda outlets.

Part of this coup has been the takeover of the Republican party through the primary process. Two members of their minority cadre are Mike Pence and Ted Cruz. So, these Libertarian billionaires now own the GOP, and coincidentally are corporate leaders. Their corporations are just a tool for funding their stealth, non-violent, Libertarian coup.

Watch as Amy Goodman interviews Nancy MacLean, author of Democracy In Chains. This new book details this coup of America by a minority of Libertarians who know their ways will never be accepted by a majority of Americans, and is based on a recently discovered, long forgotten, and extensive archive at the University of Virginia and other historical records as annotated in its 60 pages of notes and 19 page bibliography.

Read a review of MacLeans book at Slate.com.

At the birth of our nation, we rebelled against an external, wealthy, oligarchy that blatantly and violently minimized our freedoms. Now a new, well-organized, internal oligarchy, led by a minority of extremist Libertarians with fine tuned ideas and hordes of KochKash, are stealthily minimizing our freedoms and neutering our federal government.

Voter Suppression: Legalized, Rationalized, and Self-inflicted

Right-wing extremists have been promoting voter suppression since the founding of America.

Since Brown vs Board of Education and the Civil Rights Act, it was started anew with the Nixons war on drugs and using three strikes to get more convictions on felony charges. Now, after SCOTUS killed part of the Civil Rights Act, weve seen Voter IDs laws, shorter early voting periods, the end of same day registration, closed polling locations in minority neighborhoods, malfunctioning voter equipment sent to poor neighborhoods, lost voter registration forms, shutdown of minority voter registration efforts, and most recently voter roll purges of millions of minority voters in 30 states with the Interstate Cross Check actions.

And behind all this is Kochcash (any funds from right-wing billionaires) to pay for getting state laws written via ALEC, funding of the Tea Party to inspire right-wing extremist voters, and compilation of minority voter lists for purging those with similar names.

This and MORE has helped to bring Democratic legislative losses to almost 1,000 since 2008, with the largest jump in 2010.

The MORE includes a profit-centric media that puts profit before public service. As the CEO of CBS said, DJT may be bad for the country, but hes great for the companys bottom line. This is a media that ignores those who discuss issues, gives free air time to those who lie fabulously, and helps suppress the vote further as voters tire of political waring.

The MORE includes decades of right-wing messaging that promotes tax cuts for the wealthy to cripple government functions and then blaming government for failures. Messaging that promotes privatization of the government they have broken. Messaging that promotes me over we. Messaging that justifies inequality by promoting greed, individualism, self-discipline, self-made, and direct causation. Messaging that promotes war (punishment) on women, on poor, on LGBTQ, on people of color, on nations with dirty energy sources, on non-Christians, and on all those not like the right-wing ideal of white, successful, authoritarian men. All of this messaging makes voter suppression acceptable. Those people dont deserve to vote. They are morally inferior.

The MORE includes excessive reductions in citizenship dues for those who meet this white, successful, authoritarian male ideal which means less funding for government to protect and empower its human capital. Their tax rates are reduced, especially for investment income. They also receive corporate welfare and can externalize corporate costs which maximizes both their profit and the harm done to the worlds citizens. The result of this wealth transfer it that most citizens spend all their time working. They dont have time to vote and may lose their job if they take the time.

The MORE also includes Democrats using Republican-lite messaging, https://www.thenation.com/article/jon-ossoffs-loss-should-be-a-lesson-to-corporate-democrats/. Right-wing voters have replaced most moderate Republicans with the more extreme brand of Republican or Libertarian by using effective messaging to support their extreme agenda. These voters have a mindset that affirmatively responds to this language. Democrats using Republican-lite, right-wing messaging, will only reinforce the mental frames that inspire right-wing voters to vote for the right-wing candidates. If the right-wing extremists wont accept their moderate brothers and sisters, what makes Democrats think these voters will vote for a Republican-lite Democrat?

The MORE includes suppressing Dem-leaning voters by ignoring the issues by which these voters are harmed. Issues are set aside in favor of speaking Republican-lite, sounding like your opponent, or asserting that youre not your opponent, http://freebeacon.com/politics/study-nearly-all-hillary-clintons-tv-ads-didnt-discuss-policy/. As analysis of the 2016 election, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/21/opinion/move-left-democrats.html, shows there are far more Dem-leaning voters who either didnt vote or voted third-party, than there are voters who switched from Obama to DJT.

Bottom line is: The right has fine tuned massive voter suppression and the left needs to stop helping them suppress the vote by imitating them.

Complaining about the idiocy of the opposition is such a distraction a waste of time and provides little incentive for Democratic voter turnout.

Democrats need to talk about how they will address the massive economic, social, racial, and environmental injustices perpetrated by the radical right-wing demagogues for the last four decades. Democrats need to speak to how they will equally empower and protect all citizens from the abuses of the extremely wealthy and the greedy multi-national corporations. Democrats need to speak to how they will equally maximize the freedoms of all citizens and stop others from maximizing freedoms for only the wealthy and the greedy multi-national corporations. Democrats need to speak to how they will reverse the destruction of our public infrastructure, which has occurred through both massive tax breaks for hedge fund managers, investors, and corporations, and through privatization. Democrats need to speak on how the profit motive supersedes the public interest, fabricates fake news, and destroys public infrastructure, which destroys the foundation for all that is private.

In other words, Democrats must maximize individual freedoms, rebuild our infrastructure, re-establish an independent free press, and take back our government from the oligarchs like Robert and Rebekah Mercer?

As an American Baby Boomer, Ive lived under two different systems of government:

Post depression/post WWII and pre 1980s government:

Government of, by, and for the People requires:

Government with the moral purpose to equally protect and empower ALL the People such that 1) Peoples individual freedoms are maximized and 2) Economic, social, racial, and environmental injustices are minimized, andActive participation (voting and paying citizenship dues) of a majority of the people to maintain such a government.

Post 1980s government:

Government of, by, and only for the successful requires:

Government with the focused purpose to protect and enrich only the successful such that their individual freedom and wealth are maximized without concern for any resulting injustices, andActive participation (voting, lobbying and campaign payments) of just the successful, and their lackeys, to maintain such a government.

Fortunately, I benefited greatly from both the former system of government and many other factors. Unfortunately, even though my daughter, and others her age and younger, shared similar factors, they will continue struggling with the latter system of government.

The latter system, which is killing our middle class, will continue until we re-learn that government of, by, and for ALL the People is key part of the solution.

The following are from an article by Thom Hartman, where you can read more:

When Washington became president in 1789, most of America’s personal and industrial products of any significance were manufactured in England or in its colonies. Washington asked his first Treasury Secretary, Alexander Hamilton, what could be done about that, and Hamilton came up with an 11-point plan to build American manufacturing, which he presented to Congress in 1791.

By 1793, most of its points had either been made into law by Congress or formulated into policy by either Washington or the various states.

Those strategic proposals built the greatest industrial powerhouse the world had ever seen, and were only abandoned, after more than 200 successful years, during the administrations of Ronald Reagan, George HW Bush, and Bill Clinton (and remain abandoned to this day, as President Obama prepares to further expand “free trade”).

China, instead of following our recent path, implemented most of Hamilton’s plan, and it brought about a remarkable transformation of that nation in just a single generation.

China has been following the lead of Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea during the past half century, and has become an industrial powerhouse as a result. And, ironically, each of those countries got their strategy from us:

South Korea did all this in a single generation by closing its economy and promoting its export industries. A decade earlier Japan had done the same thing. Forty years earlier Germany had done it.

Consider the historical impact of Hamilton’s plan, which was adopted in a series of piecemeal legislative and executive action steps mostly by 1793: Tariffs became so important that they constituted pretty much the only source of revenue for the federal government until the Civil War, were the single largest source of federal revenue from then until World War I. And even when government had grown exponentially as we led up to World War II, fully a third of all federal revenues came from tariffs. [Note: Free trade, by eliminating tariffs, is like excessive tax breaks for the wealthy, they rob the government of revenue to enforce the moral purpose of government to equally protect and empower all the people such that 1) Their individual freedoms are maximized and 2) Economic, social, racial, and environmental injustices are minimized.]

After 34 years of Reaganomics, we’ve completely flipped this upside down. We’ve become the world’s largest exporter of raw materials, the world’s largest importer of finished goods, and the world’s largest debtor. We now export raw materials to China, and buy from them manufactured goods. And we borrow from them to do it. Our trade debt right now stands at over $11 trillion, and it’s the principle reason why one-seventh of all assets in the United States are foreign-owned.

See the full article for Thoms recommendations.

Today Thom Hartmann reviewed this history on FreeSpeech TV.

Are profit-centric media and supporting profit-centric defense contractors promoting a new cold war, via Russian Hack hysteria, and boosting support for more defense spending? Are regime change neocons fanning the flames for a new cold war to remove Putin from power? Will a new cold war require an even larger, all ready unprecedented, war budget? Will the Republican controlled Congress require cuts in remaining FDR/LBJ social programs to offset new, questionable, war spending? Will dear-in-headlights Democrats support war and social program cuts or will they consider other options and views?

The CIA has provided misinformation for past regime change efforts as in Iraq and in other nations. Are they now promoting regime change in America?

As Robert Parry of Consortium News puts it:

So, as the Democrats chart their future, they need to decide if they want to leapfrog the Republicans as America’s “war party” or whether they want to pull back from the escalation of tensions with Russia and start addressing the pressing needs of the American people.

This was a response to part of business editorial on DJT’s “Wheeling and Dealing over the Carrier jobs.

_______________________________________
I agree that DJT’s approach to governing is frightening.

What I take issue with is this statement from the editorial:

“The government’s job is to provide an educated workforce, quality infrastructure and a regulatory environment that fosters fair competition in a free market.”

What that statement says to me is that government is all about protecting and empowering businesses and that the people will some how benefit from trickle down” in the form of jobs. Jobs with low pay, limited hours, and no benefits.

I prefer a definition of government that is about We the People and one that charters businesses to support the people:

Government of, by, and for the People requires both:
A government with the moral purpose to equally protect and empower all the People such that
The Peoples individual freedoms are maximized and
Economic, social, racial, and environmental injustices are minimized, and
The active participation of a majority of these People to maintain such a government.

To contrast these two views of government, I’ll reference phrases from the above editorial statement:

“educated workforce” Yes, the People must be educated, but the primary purpose of that education is to create competent citizens first, then enable them to succeed through employment of their choice. Education as a workforce is secondary to being a responsible citizen and maintaining government of, by, and for the People. Citizens must be knowledgeable of the different systems which affect their lives and must be able to elect government officials who can maximize those systems to support the People.

“regulatory environment that fosters fair competition in a free market” Yes, we want fair competition, but todays free market fundamentalists don’t want any regulation that limits their freedom to maximize profit. Regulations, however, are about protecting the People from abuse by those with power who can’t self-regulate their freedoms.

“quality infrastructure” Again the primary purpose of infrastructure is to protect and empower the People. The fact that this also benefits private enterprise is necessary for the economy but also secondary to the purpose of the People’s government.

The People are not here to serve enterprise. Enterprise and government are here to serve We the People and we need to re-establish government that protects and empowers the People and regulates enterprise to eliminate abuse of the People.

Remember the Tea Party motto Take Our Country BACK? Back to where, I once asked a local Tea Party leader?

As a boomer, I enjoyed a well-regulated economy that wasnt influenced by the many conservative think tanks of today and free market fundamentalism that grew out of the 1971 Powell Memo. What I, especially as a white male, also enjoyed was a world economy dominated by the United States. I had a lifetime of wage growth that out paced inflation. I had great benefits. My veteran status helped me secure my BS degree. My single, divorced, mother helped purchase our first home and purchase my teenage cars.

That kind of life is gone for my daughter and the millennials. But its what those, who voted for Obama in 2008 and DJT in 2016, are familiar with and would like to go BACK to. Also, DJT is a boomer, except he was born into extreme wealth and remembers this time too.

What enabled those pre 1980 decades of American dominance in the world economy? It was WWII. Asia and Europe had to rebuild while the United states was the country getting paid to help them rebuild.

So, might DJTs answer to the MAGA question be another world war! Hes hiring several generals. Hes identified the enemy. Now all he needs is a military and as soon as he takes the oath as president, he has control of the largest and best equipped military the world has ever seen.

On the other hand, he wants to kill the pork program called the F-35.

Right-wing authoritarian Republican politicians, like Paul Ryan, believe that the individual is solely responsible for their success or failure. Their moral righteousness is based on ones self-discipline and ability to plan for every contingency. That leaves the 99% to fend for themselves regardless of circumstances beyond individual control, like anyone who abuses their individually, self-regulated, power over others. This leads to a government that ignores all citizens except the financially successful.

They also believe that unfettered capitalism is the best tool for their self-made man to achieve success.

All this leads to the privatization of all government programs like free public education, non-profit public utilities, socially/citizen financed Social Security, and socially/citizen financed Medicare, all of which protect and empower the 99%. Privatization shifts government priorities to protecting and empowering the 1% and thats morally wrong as are the greedy right-wing beliefs.

To highlight the two different views on government, here are two definitions. There are two parts to each: Government Purpose and Citizen Participation. These definitions are independent of the economic system used, but address the control/freedom of that economic system.

Progressive government:
A Government of, by, and for the people requires:
A government with the moral purpose to equally protect and empower all the peoplesuch that their individual freedoms are maximized and such that economic, social, racial, and environmental injustices are minimized, and
The active participation of a majority of the people to maintain such a government.

Conservative government:
A Government of, by, and for the successful requires:
A government with the purpose to protect and empower only the successfulsuch that their individual freedom and wealth are maximized, and
The active participation of only the successful to maintain such a government.

Since 2005, I’ve written 425 blog posts, , and most of them have been about Americas growing authoritarian state. I’ve had a lot of help along the way from many others more knowledgeable than me.

It started with a paper given to me by a friend written by Lawrence Britt, on the 14 traits of a proto-fascist government. After reading John Dean’s 2006 book, Conservatives Without Conscience, I posted this article on Fascism in America and three related posts. This last post is my most viewed post and has been seen almost 3,800 times since it was published in 2006.

Now Americas authoritarian state is about to take a quantum leap and become a bigger threat to all of us who don’t follow the new leader. There will be a select few who will follow.

Probably about 20 to 25 percent of the adult American population is so right-wing authoritarian, so scared, so self-righteous, so ill-informed, and so dogmatic that nothing you can say or do will change their minds. … And they are so submissive to their leaders that they will believe and do virtually anything they are told. They are not going to let up and they are not going away.

— John Dean, Conservatives Without Conscience

Authoritarians were taught all their lives, under threat of abusive punishment, to respect and follow their chosen leader without question. They have selected DJT. DJT is already a corporate dictator and he will take that punishing leadership style to The People’s House. On top of that, the Republican right-wing authoritarians will unquestioningly follow DJT’s orders, as will a few authoritarian Democrats. Luckily, there is a small number of progressive Democratic Senators who have already drawn a line in the sand and will resist, but they need a lot of people support and acknowledgement by the media.

I hope this election is as low as America will go, but I’m not yet seeing a public that is paying attention or responding en masse. I’m also not seeing a profit-centric media that will forego profit for the sake of exposing this threat to our democracy and act as a catalyst for the People. (There is, however, one media exception, Free Speech TV.)

Based on the work of others, primarily Professor George Lakoff, an expert in cognitive linguistics how the brain uses and responds to language, here is what Ive come to understand about those who support people like racist, misogynist, DJT and other right-wing authoritarians who prefer using dog whistle language.

First here is a quote from John Dean (Nixon White House counsel) from his 2006 book Conservatives Without Conscience:

“Probably about 20 to 25 percent of the adult American population is so right-wing authoritarian, so scared, so self-righteous, so ill-informed, and so dogmatic that nothing you can say or do will change their minds. … And they are so submissive to their leaders that they will believe and do virtually anything they are told. They are not going to let up and they are not going away.” (Keep in mind that DJT secured about 26.7% of the eligible voters and they vote!!!)

The following is what I have taken from Lakoffs work. This right-wing group adheres to a set of beliefs, or moral values, and related understandings which drive their policies and the people they support. These beliefs are foreign to yours, mine and all progressives, but explains a lot about them and how their brains are wired differently.

First of all, they have a strong belief in a moral hierarchy for humans and all things non-human. At the top of this hierarchy is a Christian God. Next is Christian/successful white men. At the bottom are poor, single, black women with kids who all follow Islam. If you are successful (self-made), as DJT appears, and white, you must be Christian because only white Christians have the self-discipline to succeed. This belief in hierarchy then leads to an understanding that inequality must be normal and immutable. This then justifies harming of those inferior and pillaging the Earths natural resources with no fear of consequences or concern for systemic impacts.

These fellow Americans also believe individuals have singular control over their success there are no external factors you cant work around if you just work hard enough. If you have self-discipline, you will become a self-made success. So, successful corporations and billionaires deserve government welfare as reward for their singularly self-made success. Conversely, if you are not successful, its singularly your fault. You lack self-discipline and deserve what you have. You also deserve nothing from fellow, successful, Americans, especially via government controlled wealth transfer. Also, this self-discipline/self-made success begets a self-righteousness and moral superiority for those at the upper levels of the hierarchy.

Their self-made man belief is also based on a fundamental, easily observed and demonstrated, process called direct causation. (If you do A, B will happen immediately and without question.) We have all learned it as part of growing up. The problem is that most right-wing authoritarians have only limited understanding of systemic causation (A will occur provided B occurs, provided that C happens, and C happens provided D happens, etc.), which plays a major role in ones success or failure. This is why this group cant accept concepts like global warming there is no direct relation between extracting fossil fuels from Texas shale and extreme warming of the atmosphere over the North Pole.

Direct causation also contributes to a black and white view of the issues and those who support an issue. There is no grey. There are no extenuating circumstances. Issues/policies are morally right or wrong no compromise. You are with them or against them. You are for the war on non-white terrorists or you are a traitor. Your success or failure comes singularly from your self-discipline and has nothing to do with when or where you were born, what family you were born into, who their friends are, the teachers or preachers who came and went, the laws in effect and whether they equally protected and empowered all or only those who were successful, etc.

Their favorite tool for reinforcing direct causation is abusive punishment, starting as early as 18 months of age. Refuse to learn their right-wing moral values and the punishment will escalate until you comply thus a belief in war at any cost and torture. They believe that all children are born evil and severe punishment will make them good, self-disciplined, adults. Only severe punishment teaches what is morally right: hierarchy, inequality, torture, and self-made success.

Another side effect of abusive punishment is the severe reduction of ones ability to empathize. Research shows that empathy, through mirror neurons, exists in every healthy brain at birth. However, abusive punishment suppresses empathy wiring to allow acceptance of social hierarchy and inequality. Abusive punishment combined with a social hierarchy liberates these folks from concern for other less equal/successful Americans.

Systemic causation, compassion, shades of grey, equality, all threaten the right-wing authoritarian worldview and their self-identity. Our beliefs are key to our self-identity. Any facts to the contrary are a threat and result in a loud and violent defensive response. Those on the right will apply abusive punishment, including civil and international war, to preserve their self-identity and its foundation their beliefs.

These right-wing beliefs also lead to acceptance of government welfare for large corporations, to-big-to-fail banks, and billionaire hedge fund managers, and, conversely, to purposely leaving those without self-discipline to the vagaries of unrecognized systemic causation.

As John Dean said, these neighbors are so right-wing authoritarian, so scared, so self-righteous, so ill-informed, and so dogmatic that nothing you can say or do will change their minds. They are who they are because of what they believe. In their mind they are morally right and they dont have the neural wiring to understand otherwise.

You cannot change their beliefs without rewiring decades of neural hard wiring and isolating them from endless hours of right-wing media that reinforces their beliefs.

What is killing our middle class is the replacement of a more SHARING economic system, which considers all STAKEholders in the economic system, with a free market fundamentalism, or neoliberal economic policies based on maximizing GREED for the few!

Greedy neoliberal economic policies that:

The distraction of Widdle Donnie Thwimpie is all over the news as the worst ever candidate for an American president, while mainstream media ignores the real enemy of our democracy:

This should be no surprise. The corporate take over of our government was detailed in the 1971 Powell Memo and has been funded by families like the Kochs ever since. Its been a slow process and was foisted onto the public by the corporate purchase of our free press.

In addition to top-level Executive branch staff appointees referenced in this article, there are hundreds of permanent civil service employees who were hired by corporate stooges/staffers in past administrations.

In terms of foreign policy, pro-war, regime-change, neocon stooges have been hired into our government by those key staffers to get us into war in Iraq and soon with other countries. There are also plenty of neocons in our military leadership to support our pro-war civilian leadership.

In terms of economic policy, free market fundamentalists, or neoliberals, have also been embedded to promote austerity, defunding of public education, profit over people, and privatization of all government functions except execution of war.

(Social Security is very likely the next privatization victim. Just as corporate-funded, guaranteed-income, pension plans were replaced by employee-funded, mostly shrinking, market-dependent 401Ks, so too will the wealth of government managed SS be replaced by self-guided 401Ks and transferred to the ONE%.)

Beware of the distraction promoted by profit-centric media. They must keep their profit masters content or learn to live like the rest of the 99%. Question whats behind this distraction and realize what is at stake: our democracy.

Then understand, you have only one option left: Vote.

Here are links to three articles on American Authoritarianism and selected quotes from each:

The Rise of American Authoritarianism

Trump embodies the classic authoritarian.

Donald Trump could be just the first of many Trumps in American politics

The political phenomenon we identify as right-wing populism seems to line up, with almost astonishing precision, with the research on how authoritarianism is both caused and expressed

Authoritarians are a real constituency that exists independently of Trump — and will persist as a force in American politics

If this rise in American authoritarianism is so powerful as to drive Trumps ascent, then how else might it be shaping American politics?

The social threat theory helps explain why authoritarians seem so prone to reject not just one specific kind of outsider or social change, such as Muslims or same-sex couples or Hispanic migrants, but rather to reject all of them

Non-authoritarians who were sufficiently frightened of threats like terrorism could essentially be scared into acting like authoritarians

Authoritarians generally and Trump voters specifically, we found, were highly likely to support five policies:

Using military force over diplomacy against countries that threaten the United StatesChanging the Constitution to bar citizenship for children of illegal immigrantsImposing extra airport checks on passengers who appear to be of Middle Eastern descent in order to curb terrorismRequiring all citizens to carry a national ID card at all times to show to a police officer on request, to curb terrorismAllowing the federal government to scan all phone calls for calls to any number linked to terrorism

If Trump loses the election, that wont remove the threats and social changes that trigger the action side of authoritarianism

We may now have a de facto three-party system: the Democrats, the GOP establishment, and the GOP authoritarians

After Trump: How Authoritarian Voters Will Change American Politics

This is a big group of people now, and its not going away

The GOP had already become the party of American authoritarianism

There are now two Republican parties, and neither can win the White House

Congress in the authoritarian era: more divided, more extreme, more unruly

The problems in the Republican party arent just problems in the Republican party. Theyre problems for all Americans.

Democratic agendas, which often involve expanding programs or imposing new regulations, Skocpol pointed out, are more likely to require new laws. Republicans, on the other hand, can count inaction as a win when they manage to block that kind of expansion. Worsening polarization will exacerbate this.

Perhaps GOP voters in those states will divide, or perhaps authoritarian-minded voters will nominate Trump-style candidates who alienate the rest of the state, thus allowing Democrats a shot at winning otherwise unwinnable races.

That level of partisan bias gives the GOP a great deal of protection against its voters defecting to the Democrats. In other words, there is something that still unites Republican voters in both the authoritarian and non-authoritarian camps: They really, really dont like Democrats.

What matters is not just that authoritarians influence within the party is rising, but when it is happening: at a moment when the party is institutionally far weaker than it has been in the past. Its leadership is less in control of rank-and-file, less able to steer voters, and often contradicted or undermined by party elites, such as donors, who have a growing ability to push their own agendas.

The Republican establishment, less able to control a party that is increasingly driven by donors acting on their own agendas, has grown weak and fractured. The scale of the authoritarian movement would have shaken any party, but todays GOP is especially unable to resist or control it.

Donald Trump’s tactics are disturbingly similar to those of actual dictators

But now that the Donald has made a career shift, abandoning the boardroom in favor of the campaign trail, he could use some role models of his own. In fact, one could be forgiven for thinking that hes already found them: Whether Trump is aware of it or not, he appears to be increasingly following the unwritten playbook of tricks used by dictators and autocratic leaders the world over.

Rule 1: Wink at violent supporters to intimidate the opposition

Rule 2: Tell your supporters that your political opponents are enemies of the state

Rule 3: Intimidate or co-opt journalists to ensure positive coverage

Rule 4: Use strict libel and sedition laws as weapons

Rule 5: Hint that if the election doesn’t go your way, your supporters will respond violently

Step one is to claim that the election was wrongfully stolen from you. Step two is to unleash your supporters, who now believe their chosen candidate was denied rightful office, on the streets to cause riots or violent chaos. Step three, the end goal, is to graciously accept the presidency, or perhaps a significant role in a government of national unity in exchange for telling your supporters to stand down.

Here are two interviews comparing Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. One with Dr. Henry Giroux and the other with Dr. Cornel West:

This Is Hell! | On violence, neoliberalism and the hallucinatory anti-politics of the Trump era

If we cant change consciousness, if we cant get people to identify with the issues in a way that make them appear very real to their lives, then all of a sudden anger gets distorted and rerouted into something worse it becomes racism, it becomes a movement mobilized by the need for saviors, it becomes a movement that embodies the worst possible political alternative.

Cornel West: Why I Endorse Green Partys Jill Stein Over Neoliberal Disaster Hillary Clinton

Hillary is a neoliberal disaster:

A neoliberal disaster is one who generates a mass incarceration regime, who deregulates banks and markets, who promotes chaos of regime change in Libya, supports military coups in Honduras, undermines some of the magnificent efforts in Haiti of working people, and so forth. That’s the record of Hillary Clinton. So there was no way—when my dear brother, who I love very deeply, Bernie Sanders said she will make an outstanding president, I said, Oh, I disagree with my brother. I think she’ll—I don’t think she’ll make an outstanding president at all. She’s a militarist. She’s a hawk. She could take us into war with Russia. She could take us into war with Iran. So, I mean, I think she’s—she’s dangerous in terms of her neoliberal ideology—not as a woman, because I’m supporting, of course, my dear sister Jill Stein.

Trump is a neofascist disaster:

Now, Trump is a neofascist in the making. There’s no doubt about that.

Because neofascism in the United States takes the form of big money, big banks, big corporations, tied to xenophobic scapegoating of the vulnerable, like Mexicans and Muslims and women and black folk, and militaristic policies abroad, with strongman, charismatic, autocratic personality, and that’s what Donald Trump is.

With Trump we get our version of corporate sponsored Fascism and internal war plus world war. With Hillary we get corporate driven neoliberal austerity with rioting mobs of the abused at home and world war.

So, austerity is better than concentration camps, right?

The BREXIT surprise resulted from a broken political system burdened by an austerity driven, neoliberal, economic system under the EU that drove angry voters to the polls.

Is this a precursor for a surprise in the US presidential election? Arent American voters likewise burdened with a broken, dysfunctional, political system that cant fix the injustices caused by extreme economic, social, racial, and environmental inequality? Arent they being subjected to the same austerity driven, neoliberal, economic solutions pushed by the same corporate leaders who drive the EU economic system and the trade agreements like TPP and TTIP? Wont we have angry voters on the right who select a property magnate for their presidential candidate and angry voters on the left who refuse to vote for an establishment candidate?

Based on two different graphics about voter preferences, one for party and one for progressive vs conservative, Dems will win only if they inspire the progressive base and progressive independents to vote.

According to results of the above Gallup poll, if only the Democratic base voted, Dem candidates would get no more than 29% of the nations votes. If only the Republican base voted, then Rep candidates would get no more than 26% of the nations votes.

In other words, both parties need the independent voters, who represent 45% of the nations voters, to win any elections and/or for their opponents supporters to stay home on election day. Some of those independents are truly independent and vote for a third-party, but most will lean either Repub or Dem/conservative or progressive.

Assuming negligible votes for third parties, then Dems need at least 22% of these independents to win. That gives Dems 51% and Reps 49%. That leaves 23% of the independents for the Repugs/conservatives and they need 25% of independents to win.

Now take a look at the New American Majority pie chart above to see what that winning 51% for Dems is composed of progressive whites and progressive people of color. This chart is from Steve Phillips book titled Brown Is The New White, in which he and his team analyzed the Citizen Voting Age Population (CVAP) data from the Census bureau and a detailed CNN exit poll data from the 2012 national election which included voting numbers by race and many other demographic factors. (Appendix A of the book goes into detail on how this chart was determined.)

In this chart, independents are split between the shrinking conservative-leaning and the growing, mostly, progressive-leaning voter, especially the Millennials.

To win that 51% of existing 2012 progressive voters, Democratic candidates must publicly and repeatedly address the concerns of this progressive voting majority: economic, social, racial, and environmental injustice. In other words, what will Dems do to minimize the, what are now extreme, inequalities born out of these injustices?

Note in the Phillips pie chart, the 49% of whites and people of color who vote Republican/Conservative, including right-leaning independents. Also note, that John Dean, in Conservatives Without Conscience, identified the radical right, which helped elect the Tea Party to Congress, as 20 to 25% of the US population. If you add to this 25% an additional 3% of conservatives who seldom vote unless enabled by a leader like Trump, then that leaves 21% (49-28) for the right-leaning independents based on the first graphic above.

Even though the odds are now in favor of progressives taking back our government from corporate control, Trump can still win if Democratic candidates dont inspire the left-leaning independents and their base to vote by speaking about progressive values assuming that voter suppression and election fraud equally impact both parties.

Now that the party primaries are over, it appears that the profit centric MSM has guided the voters quite convincingly. We ended up with the candidates which both medias profit masters most approve of and which voters have the lowest approval of.

Our democracy is just an illusion as long as a minority of voters select our leaders. The last two Texas governors were elected by less than 21% of all registered voters and the primaries represent an even smaller minority.

There is no conspiracy to select these candidates, just a decades old plan for a corporate coup which this minority of voters is either blind or obedient to. And with the Dem Party minority turnout even smaller than the minority Repug turnout, the profit masters may have one of their own as POTUS.

The Powell Memo of 1971 laid out the plan for this coup and everything seems to be going as planned.

What will the November election bring us?

Professor Altemeyer, was referenced extensively in John Dean’s Conservatives Without Conscience and in this blog. He has written a summary on authoritarians and related articles.

If the New American Majority, discussed by Steve Phillips in Brown Is The New White, don’t participate in the political process, these authoritarian followers will make Trump our next president.

RE: Brown Is The New White by Steve Phillips (This is my kind of book. Filled with quantitative and qualitative details, and progressive policies for the mind, and, more importantly, backed up and supported by progressive values for the soul.)

Hope your Memorial Day weekend included remembering a loved one who served our country.

Phillips new book, in addition to quantifying NAM, also includes two chapters on planning and policy. I thought it would be worth sharing highlights from the policy chapter and a couple of related figures.

Policy Priorities for the New American Majority:

Chapter 7 of Phillips new book, referenced above, recommends ideas for reaching out to the New American Majority. Here are some excerpts on the economic injustices of America and recommended policies to rectify them:

Todays racial wealth gap is a modern-day manifestation of the fact that America was built on land stolen from Native Americans and Mexicans, and developed by the backbreaking labor of African Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans.

Economic inequality is the defining issue of our time.

Beyond the morality of the matter as motivation to act, there are also significant strategic reasons to pursue an economic agenda.

Accepting the premise that Whites are in a privileged position because they have been favored as a group throughout our history while others have been held back as a group is the first step toward thinking about sweeping public policy solutions to address our racial wealth gap.

I dont expect these things returning of land and reparations to happen anytime soon, but if they sound outrageous, then by comparison, other policy proposals to correct injustice:

Phillips then details each of these policy proposals, which I wont go into here, and closes with the way to win.

A bold social just agenda is the key to bringing forward and bringing out the best in progressive Whites. Progressive people are not simply motivated by material self-interest; there is a value and benefit to living in a more just and equal society and having a sense of meaning and purpose in ones life. Given this moment in time, a strong social justice agenda could help progressive Whites who often find themselves asking What is justice? to answer the question with decisive, nondefensive, bold action.

Championing economic justice is more than moral and just. Its also the way to win elections.

People of color vote in lower numbers because many of them feel that most of the U.S. public policy agenda has little relevance to their lives.

The political power of fighting for economic justice and its potential became clear in Obamas 2008 campaign when he specifically addressed the wealth and income gap in his campaign speeches, grabbing the attention of voters everywhere.

Attacking and forcibly removing Native Americans from Americas fertile fields, enslaving and economically exploiting Africans in America, launching a war against Mexico so Texas could continue to practice slavery, encouraging Chinese immigration to build an economically valuable railroad but then explicitly excluding Chinese from becoming citizens, and racially restricting access to mortgage loans in economically expanding neighborhoods were not unfortunate aberrations carried out by a few rogue officials and bad actors, the likes of which we dont see any more. These were official policies of the Unites States of America.

Although justice has long been delayed, those who bore the brunt of those attacks now have the numbers to serve as the cornerstone of a New American Majority. With those numbers, with that majority, we have the opportunity indeed the obligation to make new public policies. Policies rooted in justice and dedicated to the proposition that all people are indeed created equal.

In chapter 8, Phillips warns us that Republicans also know the demographic change is coming and they have been working on their outreach programs since 2012. Just look back at the mix of candidates they had during the debates. The book was completed before Trump won all the primaries, but Phillips did mention Trump as a complicating factor.

Another example of information you wont get from profit centric MSM that must keep its profit master happy by entertaining the masses:

Steven Hill has written Raw Deal. Using companies like Uber and AirBnB, Hill discusses the next move in cheapening the wellbeing of the worker.

Employment used to include a living wage, a pension plan, a health plan, sometimes even paid overtime, vacation time, sick leave, 401K with a company match, etc. And these were all mostly paid for by the employer.

Then came the move to contract workers, where you got a living wage and much reduce benefits.

Now, with Uber, under the guise of being your own CEO, you depend on others to pay you, you then pay a percentage of your income to Uber to use their system for finding customers, and you take on all the expenses and liabilities of doing business. You have no benefits except being in charge. You must provide all the tools for the job, like your car. You have to figure out how to pay for the increased costs of driving and how you will replace your car sooner than you expect. You have to pay higher car insurance fees for all the extra driving you do and risk you take. You not only have to pay your share of Social Security and Medicare taxes, you have to pay the employers share as self-employed business owner.

And all the money you send to Uber is almost pure profit for them.

Welcome to the #ShareTheCrumbsEconomy / #GigEconomy

A 2014 study commissioned by the Freelancers Union found that more than one in three workers — 53 million Americans — are now freelancing. Other estimates predict that within 10 years nearly a majority of the 145 million employed Americans — 65–70 million workers — will be so-called independent workers. Sharing economy companies like Uber, Airbnb, TaskRabbit, Postmates and Homejoy claim they are liberating workers to become independent — “their own CEOs” — in reality, workers are forced to take ever-smaller jobs (gigs and micro-gigs) and wages while the companies profit handsomely. Indeed, some workers have multiple employers in a single day. Even many full-time, professional jobs and occupations are experiencing this shift toward precarity. Business consultancy MBO Partners has estimated that the number of freelance workers is projected to outpace full-time workers by 2020.

How much of the following would you either agree with or can offer a more accurate/corrected summary?

Is incremental, slow, change no longer acceptable?
Is working from within the rigged system not worth the effort to re-rig it?
Are you feeling disenchanted and is this disenchantment driven by the massive inequality of economic neoliberalism and the pro-war, neocon-driven, foreign policy?
Would this disenchantment drive you to vote for Trump if Bernie is not the Democratic nominee?
Will you continue the #PoliticalRevolution even if Sanders is not nominated?

Here is a detailed reply from Mark.

It is a natural result of many factors including, but not limited to:

Decades of repeating that government IS the problem and predatory privatization of our government

Decades of disempowering the peoples government while empowering
the excessively wealthy with even more power by both:

Giving them excessive reductions in citizenship dues
to help starve the government, and
Allowing corporations to divert savings from productivity
increases from millions of productive profit makers to a
very few, non-value added, profit takers at the top, who
put those savings in tax shelters further starving govt.

Enabling a communication network of profit centric media,
via changes in our telecommunications laws, whos profit is:

Required by a very few empowered profit takers, and
Maximized by entertaining citizens, who are told
shopping, not voting, is patriotic

Who will save us from a Trump Presidency?

The Powell Memo of 1971 formalized our path to this point in our corporatocracy. Since the corporate plan laid out in this memo has: been funded by the likes of Koch, Coors, Olin, Bradley, Scaife, and others; has constructed a massive pro-corporate infrastructure of think tanks and lobbyists; and has had several pro-corporate rulings by SCOTUS, our REAL national problem is that it’s owned by Wall $treet, hedge fund managers, and Realestate tycoons.

In addition, these profit hoarders have fostered both foreign and domestic wars to transfer more wealth from the poor and middle class to the ONE%, or to distract and divide us. The foreign relations ideology of the neocons has been promoting the American Empire for decades through regime change in SA, ME, and Eastern Europe. The economic neoliberals have enabled economic wars on citizens through free market fundamentalism and privatization of public institutions like prisons. Then there is the war on drugs, women’s health, and the poor.

So, my biggest concerns are America’s corporatocracy and it’s profit driven pro-war mania. Stopping these acts of greed is a must. We need a massive and united #PoliticalRevolution.

How is the revolution maximized and what are our most likely options?

The maximum possibility is achieved with:
An independent president, Bernie Sanders, with the largest separation from the ONE% and Wall $treet and significant campaign funds from millions of individuals not from corporations or PACs
A massive turn-over in Congress with a 2/3s majority in both houses.

The first less than optimum possibility is:
A Democratic president, Hillary Clinton, with ties to pro-war neocons and Wall $treet, but who may continue with a more progressive agenda than President Obama
A massive turn-over in Congress with a 2/3s majority in both houses to keep a Democratic president more in line with progressive desires of those who elected them.

Next less than optimum possibility is:
A Democratic president, Hillary Clinton with ties to pro-war neocons and Wall $treet, but who may continue with a more progressive agenda than President Obama
A less than massive turn-over in Congress to push a progressive agenda

Next option:
A third-party candidate. This will only improve the chances for a Republican president. Now if Bernie broke away to run as a third-party, this could be a real close race depending on whether Trump is the opponent? Trump can’t get more than about 30% of America’s vote. That may leave 40% to split between Hillary and Bernie. Doesn’t sound like a good option until voter turnout gets to 80%.

The key to the first maximum impact option is a unified and massive vote by whites, blacks, Hispanics, and millennials. However, the black vote for Sanders is a potential problem, which could be partially off-set by the enthusiasm of the millennials. This is also best for changes to SCOTUS and will promote values that best support “us.” #NotMeUs

The second option is just not likely. Hillary has inspired more fund-raisers than high turnout voter rallies. Millennials see her as part of the problem and will not change their historical non-participation in politics for her. Blacks like her and they are 13% of the US population.

The third option is likely with Hillary as the Dem nominee and that means at least 4 more years like the last eight. Since Republican bigotry is matched by Republican misogyny, Hillary will be resisted as strongly as Obama. This does not bode well for SCOTUS appointees that would support values of “we the people.”

I participated in a recent poll by MoveOn.org and they sent me a follow-up survey to understand why I chose Bernie Sanders for MoveOn to endorse. Here is part of my survey feedback:

Im a leader in the Texas Democratic Party who sees America following in the missteps of Texas on the road to oligarchy and single party rule. Free market fundamentalists have been pandering to billionaires and CEOs for too long. Their cancer of excessive greed was born out of the 1971 Powell Memo and has resulted in ALEC, SPN, AFP, lots of conservative think tanks, Liberty University, purchasing control of universities, profit-centric media that cant afford to air any news that speaks ill of their wealthy puppet masters, predatory privatization, excessive tax cuts for the wealthy, trade agreements that ship good jobs overseas and lowers wages to the lowest common denominator, Congressional districts that select their voters, deteriorating public infrastructure, bloated military budget to go with their war-mongering, regime change, foreign policy, and voter suppression.

Apathetic voters are a root cause of Texas and Americas current deterioration, but they have been mislead by free market fundamentalists and their profit-centric media to think that citizenship is defined by how much they shop. In addition, their freedom to participate in the democratic process has been limited by decades of stolen wages and increasing, high-cost, debt which force them to work multiple jobs. There is either no interest or no time for voting by two-thirds of eligible American voters.

Then there is voter intimidation created by new Voter ID laws to scare voters into staying home.

Its past time for a broad-based political revolution to reverse decades of damage to America.

How many wars are todays neocons willing to promote for the sake of regime change that grows corporate profit?

The demonizing of Russia’s President Vladimir Putin appears to know no bounds, with the White House and The New York Times going out of their way to mock his request for a meeting with President Barack Obama and then ladling on insults about Putin’s looks and posture

even during Josef Stalin’s brutal reign and during the height of the Cold War, American presidents regularly met with their Soviet counterparts. They did so in a mature and respectful way despite serious disputes between the two nations. From Franklin Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan, presidents recognized the need to coordinate on important geopolitical issues whatever their personal feelings about the Soviet leaders.

Are these neocons coercing President Obama into publically disrespecting other world leaders?

Though I’m told that Obama understands how inaccurate this black-and-white depiction is, he feels that he must go with the flow to avoid being denounced by the neocons and liberal interventionists as “weak.” Thus, Press Secretary Earnest was dispatched to describe Putin as “desperate” and lacking good posture.

Mr. President,

I really find it hard to understand that youve managed to resist the opposition and get the Iran Deal, yet that resistance has tiptoed away as you repeat a very negative, pro-confrontational approach in Syria and Ukraine.

Conservatives without Conscience, a minority in America defined by John Dean in his book by the same title, accept the collateral damage of their many wars, including innocent American children and many others taken by mass killings mass killings that spring from both their war on Ameircans and others not like them, and their denial of limitations on their freedom to punish others, here and anywhere in the world, with our personal and military weapons of mass destruction.

Are we prepared to say that such violence visited on our children [and children of the world] year after year after year is somehow the price of our freedom?

When will American voters wake up to realize they can change this? Be the change you want to see. Participate in the political process.

We need a political revolution in 2016 to promote peace, not punishment for profit and war.

Unsustainable economic growth and its systemic impacts on the wealth gap, human population, and Earth’s climate are enslaving and abusing all Peoples.

(This is based on a new section of Professor Lakoff’s re-released Don’t Think of an Elephant that addresses the systemic impacts of Thomas Pikettys revelations on the global wealth gap.)

We need a massive and broad “political revolution.

Henry Giroux re-evaluates the works of Orwell and Huxley compares them to the new American Authoritarianism and proposes actions to reverse it.

Both authors provide insight into the merging of the totalitarian elements that constitute a new and more hybridized form of authoritarian control, appearing less as fiction than a threatening indication of the unfolding 21st century. Consumer fantasies and authoritarian control, Big Brother intelligence agencies and the voracious seductions of privatized pleasures, along with the rise of the punishing state which criminalizes an increasing number of behaviors and invests in institutions that incarcerate and are organized principally for the production of violence and the collapse of democratic public spheres into narrow, market-driven orbits of privatization these now constitute the new order of authoritarianism.

This is the Big Brother that pushes youthful protests out of the public spaces they attempt to occupy. This is the hypernationalistic Big Brother clinging to notions of racial purity and American exceptionalism as a driving force in creating a country that has come to resemble an open-air prison for the dispossessed. This is the Big Brother whose split personality portends the dark authoritarian universe of the 1% with their control over the economy and use of paramilitarized police forces, on the one hand, and, on the other, their retreat into gated communities manned by SWAT-like security forces.

Fear and isolation constitute an updated version of Big Brother. Fear is managed and is buttressed by normalizing the neoliberal claim that it be accepted as a general condition of society, dealt with exclusively as an individual consideration, disassociated from the politics and moral panics endemic to an authoritarian society, and be used to mobilize the individuals fear of the other. In the surveillance state, fear is misplaced from the political sphere and emergence of an authoritarian government to the personal concern with the fear of surviving, not getting ahead, unemployment and the danger posed by the growing legions of the interminable others. As the older order dies, a new one struggles to be born, one that often produces a liminal space that gives rise to monsters, all too willing to kidnap, torture and spy on law-abiding citizens while violating civil liberties. As Antonio Gramsci once suggested, such an interregnum offers no political guarantees, but it does provide or at least gestures toward reimagining what is to be done, how it might be done and who is going to do it.

In spite of his vivid imagination, Orwell never could have imagined that the National Security Agency (NSA) would amass metadata on billions of our phone calls and 200 million of our text messages every day. Orwell could not have foreseen that our government would read the content of our emails, file transfers, and live chats from the social media we use.

Orwells dark image is the stuff of government oppression whereas Huxleys is the stuff of distractions, diversions and the transformation of privacy into a cheap and sensational performance for public display.

Corporations use new technologies to track spending habits and collect data points from social media so as to provide us with consumer goods that match our desires, employ face recognition technologies to alert store salespeople to our credit ratings, and so it goes.

the most dangerous repercussions of a near total loss of privacy involve more than the unwarranted collecting of information by the government: We must also be attentive to the ways in which being spied on has become not only normalized, but even enticing, as corporations up the pleasure quotient for consumers who use new digital technologies and social networks not least of all by and for simulating experiences of community.

Just as we can envision Orwells and Huxleys dystopian fables morphing over time from realistic novels into a real life documentary, and now into a form of reality TV, privacy and freedom have been radically altered in an age of permanent, nonstop global exchange and circulation. That is, in the current moment, the right to privacy and freedom has been usurped by the seductions of a narcissistic culture and casino capitalisms unending desire to turn every relationship into an act of commerce and to make all aspects of daily life subject to market forces under watchful eyes of both government and corporate regimes of surveillance.

Each day, new evidence surfaces pointing to the emergence of a police state that has produced ever more sophisticated methods for surveillance in order to enforce a mass suppression of the most essential tools for democratic dissent: the press, political activists, civil rights advocates and conscientious insiders who blow the whistle on corporate malfeasance and government abuse.

It is worth repeating that Orwells vision of surveillance and the totalitarian state look mild next to the emergence of a corporate-state surveillance system that wants to tap into every conceivable mode of communication, collect endless amounts of metadata to be stored in vast intelligence storage sites around the country and potentially use that data to repress any vestige of dissent.

Aided by a public pedagogy, produced and circulated through a machinery of consumption and public relations tactics, a growing regime of repression works through the homogenizing forces of the market to support the widespread embrace of an authoritarian culture and police state.

Relentlessly entertained by spectacles, people become not only numb to violence and cruelty but begin to identify with an authoritarian worldview. As David Graeber suggests, the police become the almost obsessive objects of imaginative identification in popular culture watching movies, or viewing TV shows that invite them to look at the world from a police point of view.

Violence has become the organizing force of a society driven by a noxious notion of privatization in which it becomes difficult for ideas to be lifted into the public realm. Under such circumstances, politics is eviscerated because it now supports a market-driven view of society that has turned its back on the idea that social values, public trust and communal relations are fundamental to a democratic society. This violence against the bonds of sociality undermines and dissolves the nature of social obligations as freedom becomes an exercise in self-development rather than social responsibility.

By integrating insights drawn from both Huxley and Orwell, it becomes necessary for any viable critical analysis to take a long view, contextualizing the contemporary moment as a new historical conjuncture in which political rule has been replaced by corporate sovereignty, consumerism becomes the only obligation of citizenship, and the only value that matters is exchange value. Precarity has replaced social protections provided by the state, just as the state cares more about building prisons and infantilizing the US public than it does about providing all of its citizens with quality educational institutions and health care. The United States is not just dancing into oblivion as Huxley suggested; it is also being pushed into the dark recesses of an authoritarian state.

The co-existent lack of interest in the loss of privacy, citizenship redefined as obedient shopping, individual greed and responsibility suppressing social responsibility and caring for others, the indifference to violence against the 99% in the context of a war on mentality, and the lack of citizens participation in the political process, expose the growing authoritarian state in America.

The situation is dire when people no longer seem interested in contesting such power. It is precisely the poisonous spread of a broad culture of political indifference that puts at risk the fundamental principles of justice and freedom, which lie at the heart of a robust democracy. The democratic imagination has been transformed into a data machine that marshals its inhabitants into the neoliberal dream world of babbling consumers and armies of exploitative labor whose ultimate goal is to accumulate capital and initiate individuals into the brave new surveillance-punishing state that merges Orwells Big Brother with Huxleys mind-altering soma.

Giroux suggests five actions to ignite a new resistance to put a stop to Americas growing hybridized, authoritarian, dystopia:

First, there is a need for what can be called a revival of the radical imagination. This call would be part of a larger project to reinvent democracy in the wake of the evidence that, at the national level, there is no democracy if by democracy we mean effective popular participation in the crucial decisions affecting the community. Democracy entails a challenge to the power of those individuals, financial elites, ruling groups and large-scale enterprises that have hijacked democracy. At the very least, this means refusing to accept minimalist notions of democracy in which elections become the measure of democratic participation. Far more crucial is the struggle for the development of public spaces and spheres that produce a formative culture in which the US public can imagine forms of democratic self-management of what can be called key economic, political, and social institutions.

Second, young people and progressives need to create the institutions and public spaces in which education becomes central as a counternarrative that serves to both reveal, interrogate and overcome the common sense assumptions that provide the ideological and affective webs that tie many people to forms of oppression.

Rejecting [Massive] Criminalization [through wars on drugs, poor, women, minorities, and youth.]

individualization of the social is one of the most powerful ideological weapons used by the current authoritarian regime and must be challenged.

Under the star of Orwell, morality loses its emancipatory possibilities and degenerates into a pathology in which misery is denounced as a moral failing. Under the neo-Darwinian ethos of survival of the fittest, the ultimate form of entertainment becomes the pain and humiliation of others, especially those considered disposable and powerless, who are no longer an object of compassion, but of ridicule and amusement. This becomes clear in the endless stories we are now hearing from US politicians disdaining the poor as moochers who dont need welfare but stronger morals.

Lastly, any attempt to make clear the massive misery, exploitation, corruption and suffering produced under casino capitalism must develop both a language of critique and possibility. It is not enough to simply register what is wrong with US society; it is also crucial to do so in a way that enables people to recognize themselves in such discourses in a way that both inspires them to be more critical and energizes them to do something about it.

Orwell and Huxley saw America devolving into pathological states in which politics was recognized in the interest of death over life and justice but over the last 4 decades America has devolved into a despotic authoritarian state that neither Orwell nor Huxley could have imagined. Reversing this violent, corporate lead, course will take many spirited forms of collective resistance willing to reclaim the reigns of political emancipation.

For Huxley, there was hope in a pessimism that had exhausted itself; for Orwell, optimism had to be tempered by a sense of educated hope. Only time will tell us whether either Orwell or Huxley was right. But one thing is certain: History is open and the space of the possible is always larger than the one currently on display.

From Bernie Sanders is a democratic socialist, but what does that term mean?:

There are essentially two types of socialists in modern Western democratic politics. Social democrats are effectively what the left is in nearly every Western European and North American country. They might find socialism laudable, but have made peace with enacting changes to capitalism to make it more equitable. Social democrats enacted policies typically referred to as the mixed economy or welfare state, such as Social Security and universal health care. While U.S. Democrats dont use these labels, social democrats generally define the center-left of the political spectrum in the West.

The above article makes some other points that are worth commenting on.

1. What the author calls libertarian socialism is also called Democracy at Work, by professor Richard Wolff, a self-taught marxist economist.

2. The author of the article indicts the profit-centric media by claiming they would be harder on Sanders than on Clinton. Thus Sanders would supposedly lose even though he represents the values of more Americans, than all the Republican candidates combined. This was not only self-contradictory but did its part in promoting a self-fulfilling prophecy that is applied to populists by both Reps and Wall $treet Dems.

To add to the above article on socialism is this one, by Richard Wolff, that reviews the history of socialism definitions and redefines it for the 21st century:

Doing so culminates in new definitions of socialism for the 21st century focused increasingly on democratizing the workplace at the micro-level. That is the key change that was missing from previous socialisms. It must be added to old definitions that were over-focused on substituting socialized for privately owned means of production and substituting planning for markets.

Socialism in and for the 21st century must now define itself in clear distinction from both regulated private capitalism and state capitalism. Only then can we begin our strategic debates over precisely which socialist goal to set and pursue.

#FeelTheBern

Back in January, 2007, as The Shrub, GWB, began his final year in office I wrote a blog post titled Bush’s Administration – Neocons Everywhere According to Bush and Rumsfeld. In September of last year, I wrote another posting called, Neocons Left Over from Reagan and Bush II Using ISIS Crisis to Expand Right-wing Authoritarian Regime Change Policy.

This last article was written with information from Consortium News and journalist Robert Parry, who is known for exposing the Iran/Contragate of President Reagan. Well, with all the talk of war in Ukraine and Syria here is a new article from Robert Parry on the neocons and “Liberal interventionists” who strive for regime change” for the sake of democracy, freedom, and the expansion of the American empire. And of course, these war mongers are supported, not questioned, by our profit-centric media.

Liberal interventionist Samantha Power – along with neocon allies – appears to have prevailed in the struggle over how President Obama will conduct his foreign policy in his last months in office, promoting aggressive strategies that will lead to more death and destruction.

Today, Power is a leading force opposing meaningful negotiations over Syria and Ukraine, again staking out “moralistic” positions – rejecting possible power-sharing with Assad in Syria and blaming the Ukraine crisis entirely on the Russians. She doesn’t seem all that concerned about impending genocides against Assad’s supporters in Syria or ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine.

Growing the American Empire has deadly consequences for Americas sons and daughters, and many others.

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