Congratulations, Stupid.

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Re: Congratulations, Stupid.

Postby JackRiddler » Mon Oct 29, 2018 9:44 am

If I am a judge of it (and I wouldn't be the only one), you are not derailing but contributing intelligently to this thread. But we're supposed to be stupid here, damn it!

More cross-posting to keep track of other relevant threads and contribs later:

JackRiddler » Mon Oct 29, 2018 2:54 am wrote:Anti-Semitic or racist or misogynist is not an essence. It is action, or at the least performance. When you do it in public, what you are inside becomes secondary or irrelevant. I am a money launderer and TV producer playing a billionaire who becomes president by performing the rhetoric and aesthetics of a 21st century celebrity fascist dictator, calling on my people to commit violence on the targets I designate as their enemies; but my behavior also allows the interpretation that I'm only doing this to please myself and make money while scamming my way into history as an unforgettable hero, and any genocides that occur will be incidental and not the product of deep-seated beliefs or emotions as I don't appear to have any. This formula eventually reduces to, I am a fascist.


JackRiddler » Mon Oct 29, 2018 8:29 am wrote:Globalist by now is

a) formerly, a questionable way of describing a segment of the capitalist ruling class, sometimes a.k.a. the "Davos set," who in the intraclass debates and machinations about the proper forms of capitalist development and enforcement (class war) prefer more institutionalized cooperation among transnational elites in the interests of capital accumulation, ostensibly against national controls; but also a term that does not necessarily need to evoke the ways it had been used in the past by anti-Semites and right-wing populists.

b) currently, a term successfully reappropriated and hijacked by anti-Semites and allied right-wing populists to evoke an international Jewish conspiracy against putatively national interests to those among their followers who understand the code, while maintaining a thin plausible deniability that they did not evoke such a trope that fools at least some of the people.

In short, globalists was debatably a word for describing a faction within the system that openly favored the "globalization" strategies adopted by G7 nations after 1989-91, but has been fucked up by the rise of the filth. In this it is not unlike the phrase deep state, which was always pointing at something important that exists but not necessarily covering it accurately. Deep state has currently been repurposed to mean only those parts of the regime-independent national security and empire management apparatus, institutional power elite in and out of government, and surrounding corporate/lobbying/contractor milieu and world of parapolitics that happen to currently oppose the Trump regime, whether for valid reasons or because he happens to hamper aspects of their own agendas. Thus, for example, Erik Prince, by any measure a figure in the deep state as previously defined for more than 20 years but now among the prime movers of the regime, is not labeled as "deep state," but John Brennan is.

.
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Re: Congratulations, Stupid.

Postby Karmamatterz » Tue Oct 30, 2018 3:28 pm

I'm talking about how the media work, in their nature as media and due to the specific practices used. Because of tropes and staging and narratives, and perhaps most of all the disproportionality in attention given to certain often arbitrary topics (along with wild swings in attention), there is always an unreality in what comes across, even at those times when it is factually correct reporting. That's what I meant by feeling fake. Some guy sent some toy or dud bombs around and they give it the nuclear war treatment for several days, of course it has a fake feel to it whether or not it's true.


The untrained eye could easily dismiss that as a rant against the media. One-off scenarios play out constantly and don't appear to be connected to other things even remotely. But taken as a whole there is a pattern that can't be ignored. Muddy the waters enough and it's extremely difficult for the average person to figure just WTF is going on. Sprinkle in enough truth and you keep their attention and some credibility. It's a marathon for sure if you step back and examine the long term impact it has. I daresay it's been going on for more than 25 years. How about all the way back to Edward Bernays?
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Re: Congratulations, Stupid.

Postby JackRiddler » Wed Nov 07, 2018 9:52 pm

.

Two years later, seems to me the analysis we've seen from several posters here including stillrobertpaulsen has been done in greater detail in various studies but not been fundamentally exceeded. In 2016, there was less surge to Trump (that wasn't already voting Republican) than there was continued bleed out of Democrats compared to 2008. The working class for Trump was exaggerated. Below-median income went against him. Yes, Virginia, of course race was a factor as it has been in every American election since... always.

Riddle Time!

Despite the name, I almost never do these. This one's probably easy.

There were two huge factors motivating voter behavior in 2016 of which one was missing yesterday, in 2018, while the other was still present. Can you name these?


stillrobertpaulsen » Fri Nov 11, 2016 8:51 pm wrote:Hey Jack, electoral-vote.com had a few stories today breaking down the numbers:

Democrats Lost Because Democrats Didn't Vote

Many stories have been written (and are yet to be written) about why Hillary Clinton lost. Economists like the idea of "workers are hurting badly" (although see below). Social scientists would probably prefer the "there are a lot of racists out there" line. We're data nerds, so we have a different angle: Democrats didn't bother to vote this time. We even have a downloadable Excel spreadsheet to help make our case. Here are the data from the spreadsheet:

Image

It's a big chart with lots of little numbers, so where do we start? The second and third columns are the Clinton and Trump raw vote in 2016. The fourth column is Clinton minus Trump, so positive means Clinton won the state and negative means Trump won it. From the bottom line we see that Hillary Clinton won the national popular vote in 2016 by 282,546 votes out of a total of 119.8 million votes or 0.2%. Trump's margins in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania were 11,837 and 27,357, and 68,236, respectively. If Clinton had gotten 107,430 more votes in these three states in the right proportion, she would have won the election. In other words, a change of less than 0.1% of the vote, properly placed, would have flipped the presidency. A Trump surprise it was, but a landslide it was not.

Columns five through seven are the analogous data for 2012. Column 8 is how many more Democrats voted in 2016 compared to 2012 as a percentage of the 2012 vote. So for example, in Washington 30.42% fewer Democrats voted for Clinton than voted for Obama in 2012, despite the U.S. population being over 3% larger in 2016. Washington Democrats, you are not doing your job. Column nine is the same thing for the Republicans. Here we see that North Dakota Republican turnout was 14.86% higher in 2016 than in 2012. North Dakota Republicans, you are performing your civic duty very well, congratulations.

Now, let's go back to the bottom row again. In 2016, 60.1 million Democrats voted, compared to 65.9 million in 2012, even though the population was 3.5% larger this year. That's a huge drop-off. In contrast, Republican turnout was down only slightly, from 60.9 million to 59.8 million this year. So our first conclusion is that the Democrats lost because 6 million fewer of them voted this year than last time.

The next question is, where did the dropoff occur? Was it, for example, largely in red states that have adopted stricter requirements to vote? The first thing we note is the champions in not-voting were Washington and California, two very blue states. The table is sorted on column 8, so we see the state where Democratic turnout improved the most is—Texas. What about the states that Obama won but Clinton lost? These are marked in orange in the last two columns. In Iowa and Ohio, Democratic turnout was way down and Republican turnout was somewhat up. Neither state had serious voting restrictions. The Democrats have only themselves to blame. If as many Democrats had voted in Ohio as in 2012, Clinton would have carried the state by over 100,000 votes. Wisconsin and Michigan have similar stories. If Clinton's turnout had matched Obama's, she would have won both states easily.

Pennsylvania is different. There, Democratic turnout didn't fall too much, but Republican turnout was up almost 9%. Finally, in Florida, we have one of only five states where Democratic turnout was better than in 2012 (and only three where it was higher when you correct for population growth). Unfortunately for the Democrats, Republican turnout improved by even more than Democratic turnout.

So, our conclusion is that Democrats lost because their turnout was down, rather than because millions of new Republicans suddenly decided to vote. What we can't see is why. In some cases, it could be due to restrictive state or local laws, in others it could be because supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) decided both Clinton and Trump were corporate stooges and there was no difference between them. Maybe other reasons. We'll leave that for others to figure out. (V)






Was the Trump Voter Motivated by Economics or by Racism

One of the big questions of 2016 was what motivated the people who voted for Donald Trump, besides the little (R) after his name. One theory is that economically hard-hit workers liked his promises to fix the economy and create new jobs. Another is that many voters gravitated to his attacks on blacks, Mexicans, Muslims, and other minorities. The exit polls shed some light on the issue. One of the questions asked of voters was their annual income in six broad ranges as shown below. The numbers in the boxes are Trump's share of the vote minus Clinton's:

Image

What we see is that voters making less than $50,000 per year strongly went for Clinton. Those voters making less than $30,000 per year went for Clinton by 12 points and those making $30,000 to $50,000 went for her by 9 points. Voters making more than $50,000 went for Trump. If Trump's base was primarily voters who are hurting economically (making less than $50K), we would have expected the poorer voters to support Trump. In fact, the reverse is true. This suggests that his attacks on minorities played a bigger role in rounding up voters than economic hardship. (V)



Other Key Findings from the Exit Polls

Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post has dug into the exit poll data and come to a number of conclusions as follows:

Trump won the white vote by a record margin
There was no surge of female voters
There was no surge of Latino voters
Education mattered yugely
Trump did better with white evangelicals than Romney
Trump didn't bring lots of new voters to the process
The economy was a big issue—and Clinton won it
This was a change election and Trump was the change candidate
Obamacare was a wind beneath Trump's wings
Trump's personal image was and is horrible
Clinton's e-mail hurt her
This was a deeply pessimistic electorate
People didn't think Trump lost the debates as badly as I (Cillizza) did

In short, quite a few predictions (female surge, Latino surge) didn't pan out. (V)
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Re: Congratulations, Stupid.

Postby Elvis » Thu Nov 08, 2018 1:18 am

Racism was a motivating factor for voters in both 2016 and 2018.

The economy was a factor in 2016 because people were financially pressed, and the economy was still a factor in 2018, but this time because many voters had the perception that Trump was improving the economy for them.

In man-on-the-street interviews, I kept hearing over and over, "I don't like everything Trump does, but he's doing a good job on the economy, that's why I'll be voting for him."


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Re: Congratulations, Stupid.

Postby JackRiddler » Thu Dec 13, 2018 11:48 am

Racism is always a major motivating factor in American elections (and most everywhere else, unfortunately).

I CANNOT BELIEVE HOW TRUTHFUL THIS IS:

I have been out-radicaled by a self-identified Republican. In Forbes. Really, read this, it's not at all what you expect from an anti-Trump Republican. It's a shocking confession, from the inside of the Happy White World (perhaps still the majority, barely). I do disagree insofar as this implies the attitudes people have are not changing. They obviously have been, and more than gradually.

From last year. Follow for embedded citations.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/chrisladd/ ... in-the-us/

739,851 views Mar 13, 2017, 02:02pm

Unspeakable Realities Block Universal Health Coverage In America

Chris Ladd
Contributor

Election 2016 has prompted a wave of head-scratching on the left. Counties Trump won by staggering margins will be among the hardest hit by the repeal of the Affordable Care Act. Millions of white voters who supported Donald Trump stand to lose their access to health coverage because of their vote.

Individual profiles of Trump voters feed this baffling narrative. A Washington Post story described the experience of Clyde Graham, a long-unemployed coal worker who depends on the ACA for access to health care. He voted for Trump knowing it might cost him his health insurance out of his hope of capturing the great white unicorn – a new job in the mines. His stance is not unusual.

Why are economically struggling blue collar voters rejecting a party that offers to expand public safety net programs? The reality is that the bulk of needy white voters are not interested in the public safety net. They want to restore their access to an older safety net, one much more generous, dignified, and stable than the public system – the one most well-employed voters still enjoy.

When it seems like people are voting against their interests, I have probably failed to understand their interests. We cannot begin to understand Election 2016 until we acknowledge the power and reach of socialism for white people.

Americans with good jobs live in a socialist welfare state more generous, cushioned and expensive to the public than any in Europe. Like a European system, we pool our resources to share the burden of catastrophic expenses, but unlike European models, our approach doesn’t cover everyone.

Like most of my neighbors I have a good job in the private sector. Ask my neighbors about the cost of the welfare programs they enjoy and you will be greeted by baffled stares. All that we have is “earned” and we perceive no need for government support. Nevertheless, taxpayers fund our retirement saving, health insurance, primary, secondary, and advanced education, daycare, commuter costs, and even our mortgages at a staggering public cost. Socialism for white people is all-enveloping, benevolent, invisible, and insulated by the nasty, deceptive notion that we have earned our benefits by our own hand.

My family’s generous health insurance costs about $20,000 a year, of which we pay only $4,000 in premiums. The rest is subsidized by taxpayers. You read that right. Like virtually everyone else on my block who isn’t old enough for Medicare or employed by the government, my family is covered by private health insurance subsidized by taxpayers at a stupendous public cost. Well over 90% of white households earning over the white median income (about $75,000) carried health insurance even before the Affordable Care Act. White socialism is nice if you can get it.

Companies can deduct the cost of their employees’ health insurance while employees are not required to report that benefit as income. That results in roughly a $400 billion annual transfer of funds from state and federal treasuries to insurers to provide coverage for the Americans least in need of assistance. This is one of the defining features of white socialism, the most generous benefits go to those who are best suited to provide for themselves. Those benefits are not limited to health care.

When I buy a house for my family, or a vacation home, the interest I pay on the mortgage is deductible up to a million dollars of debt. That costs the treasury $70 billion a year, about what we spend to fund the food stamp program. My private retirement savings are also tax deductible, diverting another $75 billion from government revenues. Other tax preferences carve out special treatment for child care expenses, college savings, commuter costs (your suburban tax credit), local taxes, and other exemptions.

By funding government programs with tax credits and deductions rather than spending, we have created an enormous social safety net that grows ever more generous as household incomes rise. It is important to note, though, that you need not be wealthy to participate. All you need to gain access to socialism for white people is a good corporate or government job. That fact helps explain how this welfare system took shape sixty years ago, why it was originally (and still overwhelmingly) white, and why white Rust Belt voters showed far more enthusiasm for Donald Trump than for Bernie Sanders. White voters are not interested in democratic socialism. They want to restore their access to a more generous and dignified program of white socialism.

In the years after World War II, the western democracies that had not already done so adopted universal social safety net programs. These included health care, retirement and other benefits. President Truman introduced his plan for universal health coverage in 1945. It would have worked much like Social Security, imposing a tax to fund a universal insurance pool. His plan went nowhere.

Instead, nine years later Congress laid the foundations of the social welfare system we enjoy today. They rejected Truman’s idea of universal private coverage in favor of a program controlled by employers while publicly funded through tax breaks. This plan gave corporations new leverage in negotiating with unions, handing the companies a publicly-financed benefit they could distribute at their discretion.

No one stated their intention to create a social welfare program for white people, specifically white men, but they didn’t need to. By handing control to employers at a time when virtually every good paying job was reserved for white men the program silently accomplished that goal.

White socialism played a vital political role, as blue collar factory workers and executives all pooled their resources for mutual support and protection, binding them together culturally and politically. Higher income workers certainly benefited more, but almost all the benefits of this system from health care to pensions originally accrued to white families through their male breadwinners. Blue collar or white collar, their fates were largely united by their racial identity and employment status.

Until the decades after the Civil Rights Acts, very few women or minorities gained direct access to this system. Unsurprisingly, this was the era in which white attitudes about the social safety net and the Democratic Party began to pivot. Thanks to this silent racial legacy, socialism for white people retains its disproportionately white character, though that has weakened. Racial boundaries are now less explicit and more permeable, but still today white families are twice as likely as African-Americans to have access to private health insurance. Two thirds of white children are covered by private health insurance, while barely over one third of black children enjoy this benefit.

White socialism has had a stark impact on the rest of the social safety net, creating a two-tiered system. Visit a county hospital to witness an example. American socialism for “everyone else” is marked by crowded conditions, neglected facilities, professionalism compromised by political patronage, and long waits for care. Fall outside the comfortable bubble of white socialism, and one faces a world of frightening indifference.

When Democrats respond to job losses with an offer to expand the public safety net, blue collar voters cringe and rebel. They are not remotely interested in sharing the public social safety net experienced by minority groups and the poorest white families. Meanwhile well-employed and affluent voters, ensconced in their system of white socialism, leverage all the power at their disposal to block any dilution of their expensive public welfare benefits. Something has to break.

We may one day recognize that we are all “in it together” and find ways to build a more stable, sensible welfare system. That will not happen unless we acknowledge the painful and sometimes embarrassing legacy that brought us to this place. Absent that reckoning, unspoken realities will continue to warp our political calculations, frustrating our best hopes and stunting our potential.

For almost thirty years I was active in Republican politics. Most recently I spent ten years as a Republican precinct committeeman in suburban Chicago. I am a Texan in exile. While a college intern at the Texas Legislature I met a young Rick Perry, fresh off his switch from the Democratic Party. As a donor and volunteer for a Republican PAC in Houston I volunteered for Republican state and local campaigns. From 2009-2016 I wrote the GOPLifer blog. My book, The Politics of Crazy, is a distillation of ideas from the blog. After the 2016 Republican National Convention, I resigned my position as a precinct committeeman and left the Republican Party. I now maintain a new blog, PoliticalOrphans.com.

Chris Ladd, former GOP Precinct Committeeman, author of The Politics of Crazy and creator of PoliticalOrphans.
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Re: Congratulations, Stupid.

Postby stickdog99 » Thu Dec 13, 2018 3:54 pm

Damn, that was a truth bomb that I would not have expected to see in Forbes.
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Re: Congratulations, Stupid.

Postby JackRiddler » Fri Dec 14, 2018 12:35 am

stickdog99 » Thu Dec 13, 2018 2:54 pm wrote:Damn, that was a truth bomb that I would not have expected to see in Forbes.


It's a truth bomb like you won't see almost anywhere. It almost requires a well-off white man to describe his situation with uncompromising honesty from the inside. It's rare. Wow.
We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

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Re: Congratulations, Stupid.

Postby JackRiddler » Mon Dec 17, 2018 7:17 pm

.

Although published today, for whatever reason, this was obviously written in late 2016, before the election. It's a great summary, no blinders, that holds up really well.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/12/17 ... iberalism/


DECEMBER 17, 2018

What is Neoliberalism?

by ANIS SHIVANI

Over the last eighteen years as I wrote for many progressive outlets, editors often asked me not to mention the word “neoliberalism,” because I was told readers wouldn’t comprehend the “jargon.” The situation is even worse with literary journals, my main territory, which are determined not to have anything to do with this vocabulary. This has begun to change recently, as the terminology has come into wider usage, though it remains shrouded in great mystery.

People throw the term around loosely, as they do with “fascism,” with the same confounding results. Imagine living under fascism or communism, or earlier, classical liberalism, and not being allowed to acknowledge that particular frame of reference to understand economic and social issues. Imagine living under Stalin and never using the communist framework but focusing only on personality clashes between his lieutenants, or likewise for Hitler or Mussolini or Mao or Franco and their ideological systems! But this curious silence, this looking away from ideology, is exactly what has been happening for almost thirty years, since neoliberalism, already under way since the early 1970s, got turbocharged by the Democratic party under the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) and Bill Clinton.[1]We live under an ideology that has not been widely named or defined.

Absent the neoliberal framework, we simply cannotgrasp what is good or bad for citizens under Cruz versus Trump, or Clinton versus Sanders, or Clinton versus Trump, away from the distraction of personalities. To what extent does each of them agree or disagree with neoliberalism? Are there important differences? How much is Sanders a deviation? Can we still rely on conventional distinctions like liberal versus conservative, or Democrat versus Republican, to understand what is going on? How do we grasp movements like the Tea Party, Occupy, and now the Trump and Sanders insurgencies?

Neoliberalism has been more successful than most past ideologies in redefining subjectivity, in making people alter their sense of themselves, their personhood, their identities, their hopes and expectations and dreams and idealizations. Classical liberalism was successful too, for two and a half centuries, in people’s self-definition, although communism and fascism succeeded less well in realizing the “new man.”

It cannot be emphasized enough that neoliberalism is notclassical liberalism, or a return to a purer version of it, as is commonly misunderstood; it is a newthing, because the market, for one thing, is not at all free and untethered and dynamic in the sense that classical liberalism idealized it. Neoliberalism presumes a strong state, working only for the benefit of the wealthy, and as such it has little pretence to neutrality and universality, unlike the classical liberal state.

I would go so far as to say that neoliberalism is the final completion of capitalism’s long-nascent project, in that the desire to transform everything—every object, every living thing, every fact on the planet—in its image had not been realized to the same extent by any preceding ideology. Neoliberalism happens to be the ideology—unlike the three major forerunners in the last two hundred and fifty years—that has the fortune of coinciding with technological change on a scale that makes its complete penetration into every realm of being a possibility for the first time in human history.

From the early 1930s, when the Great Depression threatened the classical liberal consensus (the idea that markets were self-regulating, and the state should play no more than a night-watchman role), until the early 1970s, when global instability including currency chaos unraveled it, the democratic world lived under the Keynesian paradigm:[2] markets were understood to be inherently unstable, and the interventionist hand of government, in the form of countercyclical policy, was necessary to make capitalism work, otherwise the economy had a tendency to get out of whack and crash.

It’s an interesting question if it was the stagflation of the 1970s, following the unhitching of the United States from the gold standard and the arrival of the oil embargo, that brought on the neoliberal revolution, with Milton Friedman discrediting fiscal policy and advocating a by-the-numbers monetarist policy,[3] or if it was neoliberalism itself, in the form of Friedmanite ideas that the Nixon administration was already pursuing, that made stagflation and the end of Keynesianism inevitable.

It should be said that neoliberalism thrives on prompting crisis after crisis, and has proven more adept than previous ideologies at exploiting these crises to its benefit, which then makes the situation worse, so that each succeeding crisis only erodes the power of the working class and makes the wealthy wealthier. There is a certain self-fulfilling aura to neoliberalism, couched in the jargon of economic orthodoxy, that has remained immune from political criticism, because of the dogma that was perpetuated—by Margaret Thatcher and her acolytes—that There Is No Alternative (TINA).[4]

Neoliberalism is excused for the crises it repeatedly brings on—one can think of a regular cycle of debt and speculation-fueled emergencies in the last forty years, such as the developing country debt overhang of the 1970s,[5] the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s,[6] the Asian currency crisis of the 1990s,[7] and the subprime mortgage crisis of the 2000s—better than any ideology I know of. This is partly because its very existence as ruling ideology is not even noted by the population at large, which continues to derive some residual benefits from the welfare state inaugurated by Keynesianism but has been led to believe by neoliberal ideologues to think of their reliance on government as worthy of provoking guilt, shame, and melancholy, rather than something to which they have legitimate claim.

It is not surprising to find neoliberal multiculturalists—comfortably established in the academy[8]—likewise demonizing, or othering, not Muslims, Mexicans, or African Americans, but working-class whites (the quintessential Trump proletariat) who have a difficult time accepting the fluidity of self-definition that goes well with neoliberalism, something that we might call the market capitalization of the self.

George W. Bush’s useful function was to introduce necessary crisis into a system that had grown too stable for its own good; he injected desirable panic, which served as fuel to the fire of the neoliberal revolution. Trump is an apostate—at least until now—in desiring chaos on terms that do not sound neoliberal, which is unacceptable; hence Jeb Bush’s characterization of him as the “candidate of chaos.”[9] Neoliberalism loves chaos, that has been its modus operandi since the early 1970s, but only the kind of chaos it can direct and control.

To go back to origins, the Great Depression only ended conclusively with the onset of the Second World War, after which Keynesianism had the upper hand for thirty-five years. But just as the global institutions of Keynesianism, specifically the IMF and the World Bank, were being founded at the New Hampshire resort of Bretton Woods in 1944, the founders of the neoliberal revolution, namely Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman, and others were forming the Mount Pelerin Society (MPS) at the eponymous Swiss resort in 1947,[10] creating the ideology which eventually defeated Keynesianism and gained the upper hand during the 1970s.

So what exactly is neoliberalism, and how is it different from classical liberalism, whose final manifestation came under Keynesianism?

Neoliberalism believes that markets are self-sufficient unto themselves, that they do not need regulation, and that they are the best guarantors of human welfare. Everything that promotes the market, i.e., privatization, deregulation, mobility of finance and capital, abandonment of government-provided social welfare, and the reconception of human beings as human capital, needs to be encouraged, while everything that supposedly diminishes the market, i.e., government services, regulation, restrictions on finance and capital, and conceptualization of human beings in transcendent terms, is to be discouraged.

When Hillary Clinton frequently retorts—in response to demands for reregulation of finance, for instance—that we have to abide by “the rule of law,” this reflects a particular understanding of the law, the law as embodying the sense of the market, the law after it has undergone a revolution of reinterpretation in purely economic terms. In this revolution of the law persons have no status compared to corporations, nation-states are on their way out, and everything in turn dissolves before the abstraction called the market.

One way to sum up neoliberalism is to say that everything—everything—is to be made over in the image of the market, including the state, civil society, and of course human beings. Democracy becomes reinterpreted as the market, and politics succumbs to neoliberal economic theory, so we are speaking of the end of democratic politics as we have known it for two and a half centuries. As the market becomes an abstraction, so does democracy, but the real playing field is somewhere else, in the realm of actual economic exchange—which is not, however, the market. We may say that all exchange takes place on the neoliberal surface.

Neoliberalism is often described—and this creates a lot of confusion—as “market fundamentalism,” and while this may be true for neoliberalism’s self-promotion and self-presentation, i.e., the market as the ultimate and only myth, as were the gods of the past, I would argue that in neoliberalism there is no such thing as the marketas we have understood it from previous ideologies.

The neoliberal state—actually, to utter the word state seems insufficient here, I would claim that a new entity is being created, which is not the state as we have known it, but an existence that incorporates potentially all the states in the world and is something that exceeds their sum—is all-powerful, it seeks to leave no space for individual self-conception in the way that classical liberalism, and even communism and fascism to some degree, were willing to allow.

There are competing understandings of neoliberal globalization, when it comes to the question of whether the state is strong or weak compared to the primary agent of globalization, i.e., the corporation, but I am taking this logic further, I am suggesting that the issue is not how strong the state is in the service of neoliberalism, but whether there is anything left over beyond the new definition of the state. Another way to say it is that the state has become the market, the market has become the state, and therefore both have ceased to exist in the form we have classically understood them.

Of course the word hasn’t gotten around to the people yet, hence all the confusion about whether Hillary Clinton is more neoliberal than Barack Obama, or whether Donald Trump will be less neoliberal than Hillary Clinton. The project of neoliberalism—i.e., the redefinition of the state, the institutions of society, and the self—has come so far along that neoliberalism is almost beyond the need of individual entities to make or break its case. Its penetration has gone too deep, and none of the democratic figureheads that come forward can fundamentally question its efficacy.

I said almost. The reason why Bernie Sanders, self-declared democratic socialist, is so threatening to neoliberalism is that he has articulated a conception of the state, civil society, and the self that is not founded in the efficacy and rationality of the market. He does not believe—unlike Hillary Clinton—that the market can tackle climate change or income inequality or unfair health and education outcomes or racial injustice, all of which Clinton propagates. Clinton’s impending “victory” (whatever machinations were involved in engineering it) will only strengthen neoliberalism, as the force that couldn’t be defeated even when the movement was as large and transcendent as Sanders’s. Although Sanders doesn’t specify “neoliberalism” as the antagonist, his entire discourse presumes it.

Likewise, while Trump supporters want to take their rebellion in a fascist direction, their discomfort with the logic of the market is as pervasive as in the Sanders camp, and is an advance, I believe, over the debt and unemployment melancholy of the Tea Party, the shame that was associated with that movement’s loss of identity as bourgeois capitalists in an age of neoliberal globalization. The Trump supporters, I believe, are no longer driven by shame, as was true of the Tea Party, and as has been true of the various dissenting movements within the Republican party, evangelical or otherwise, in the recent past. Rather, they have taken the shackles off and are ready for a no-holds barred “politically incorrect” fight with all others: they want to be “winners,” even at the cost of exterminating others, and that is not the neoliberal way, which doesn’t acknowledge that there can be winners and losers in the neoliberal hyperspace.

In the current election campaign, Hillary Clinton has been the most perfect embodiment of neoliberalism among all the candidates, she is almost its all-time ideal avatar, and I believe this explains, even if not articulated in such a fashion, the widespread discomfort among the populace toward her ascendancy. People can perceive that her ideology is founded on a conception of human beings striving relentlessly to become human capital (as her opening campaign commercial[11] so overtly depicted), which means that those who fail to come within the purview of neoliberalism should be rigorously ostracized, punished, and excluded.

This is the dark side of neoliberalism’s ideological arm (a multiculturalism founded on human beings as capital), which is why this project has become increasingly associated with suppression of free speech and intolerance of those who refuse to go along with the kind of identity politics neoliberalism promotes.

And this explains why the 1990s saw the simultaneous and absolutely parallel rise, under the Clintons, of both neoliberal globalization and various regimes of neoliberal disciplining, such as the shaming and exclusion of former welfare recipients (every able-bodied person shouldbe able to find work, therefore under TANF welfare was converted to a performance management system designed to enroll everyone in the workforce, even if it meant below-subsistence wages or the loss of parental responsibilities,[12] all of it couched in the jargon of marketplace incentives).

The actual cost to the state of the AFDC program was minimal, but its symbolism was incalculable. The end of welfare went hand in hand with the disciplinary “crime bill” pushed by the Clintons, leading to an epidemic of mass incarceration. Neoliberalism, unlike classical liberalism, does not permit a fluidity of self-expression as an occasional participant in the market, and posits prison as the only available alternative for anyone not willing to conceive of themselves as being present fully and always in the market.

I believe that the generation of people—in their forties or older—supporting Hillary have already internalized neoliberal subjectivity, which they like to frame as realism or pragmatism, refusing for instance to accept that free college or health care are even theoretical possibilities. After all, they have maintained a measure of success in the past three or four decades after conceptualizing themselves as marketplace agents. Just as the Tea Party supporters found it intolerable that government should help irresponsible homeowners by bailing them out of unsustainable debt, the Clinton supporters hold essentially the same set of beliefs toward those who dare to think of themselves outside the discipline of the market.

I spoke of the myth of the market, as something that has no existence in reality, because none of the elements that would have to exist for a market to work are actually in place; this is even more true for neoliberalism than it was for the self-conscious annihilation of the market by communism, because at least in that system the market, surreptitiously, as in various Eastern European countries, kept making an appearance. But when the market takes neoliberal shape, i.e., the classical conceptions of the buyer and seller as free agents are gone, then radical inequality is the natural outcome. And inequality in the last four decades, as statistics for the U.S. and everywhere neoliberalism has made inroads prove beyond a doubt,[13]has exploded, thereby invalidating neoliberalism’s greatest claim to legitimacy, that it brings about a general increase in welfare. So neoliberalism, to the extent that the inequality discourse has made itself manifest recently, must insist all the more vocally on forms of social recognition, what Clinton, for example, likes to call the “fall of barriers.”

Neoliberalism likes to focus on public debt—in the Clinton years debt reduction became a mania, though George W. Bush promptly spent all the accumulated surpluses on tax cuts for the wealthy and on wars of choice—rather than inequality, because the only way to address inequality is through a different understanding of public debt; inequality can only be addressed through higher taxation, which has by now been excluded from the realm of acceptable discourse—except when Sanders, Trump, or Jeremy Corbyn in England go off script.

So to recapitulate neoliberalism’s comprehensive success, let us note that we have gone from a liberal, Keynesian, welfare state to a neoliberal, market-compliant, disciplinary state.

Neoliberalism expects—and education at every level has been redesigned to promote this—that economic decision-making will be applied to all areas of life (parenthood, intimacy, sexuality, and identity in any of its forms), and that those who do not do so will be subject to discipline. Everyone must invest in their own future, and not pose a burden to the state or anyone else, otherwise they will be refused recognition as human beings.

This supposed economic “rationality” (though it is the greatest form of irrationality) applies to civil society as much as the state, so that none of the ideals of classical liberalism, or previous ideologies rooted in humanism, are valid any longer, the only value is the iteration of the market (as myth, not reality); in other words, neoliberalism, unlike the elevation of the individual in classical liberalism or the state in fascism or the collectivity in communism, has erected something, the market, that has no real existence, as the only god to serve! And it is just like a god, with an ethereal, unchallengeable, irrefutable, ubiquitous presence. Whatever in state policy does not serve market-conformity is to be banned and banished from memory (the secular scriptures are to be rewritten), which explains neoliberalism’s radical narrowing of public discourse, including the severance of identity politics from any class foundation.

Neoliberalism will continue to perpetuate reduced opportunity, because one of its characteristics—as in any system that wants to thrive on the world stage—is to constantly refine the field upon which the human subject can operate.

As such, those displaced workers who have suffered the most from the erosion of the old industries in the former manufacturing centers of the world are not even factors to contend with, they are invisible and cannot be part of the policy equation. To the extent that their actual presence is reckoned with, the economy can be said to have crashed; but the problem doesn’t arise because of the management of unemployment or underemployment statistics, unlike a housing crash which is palpable and cannot escape statistical definition.

The danger for neoliberalism—as is clear from the support of millions of displaced human beings for Trump—is that with each crisis neoliberalism sheds more workers, makes individuals and firms more “disciplined,” narrows the scope of opportunity even further. At times, the disciplining of the non-neoliberal other—as with the killing of Michael Brown or Eric Garner—explodes to surface consciousness in an unsavory way, so an expert manager like Clinton or Obama is required to tamp down the emotions of such unruly entities as Black Lives Matter which arise in response. If climate change, according to Clinton and her cohort, can and should have market solutions, then surely racial disparity, or police violence, should also have market solutions and no others; it is here that neoliberal multiculturalism, operating in the academy, is so insidious, because at the elite level it functions to validate market discourse, it does not step outside it.

The present breakdown of both major political parties can be explained by the frustration that has built up in the body politic over the past decade, because after the crash there was no sustained intellectual movement to question the myth of the market. The substitution of economic justice with identity politics is something Ralph Nader, Howard Dean, and now Bernie Sanders have contested in a humane manner, while the same process is at work, admittedly in an inhumane way, in the Trump phenomenon.

Thus, also, Hillary Clinton’s animus against free college education;[14] that form of expansion of opportunity, which was a reality from the 1950s to the 1980s, cannot be allowed to return, human beings are supposed to invest in their own future earnings potential, they are not entitled to a transcendent experience without barriers manifesting in discipline and self-correction. Education, like everything else, including one’s own health, becomes an expensive consumer good, not a right, no longer an experience that might lead to a consciousness beyond the market but something that should be fully encapsulated by the market. If one is a capable market player, education as we have classically understood it becomes redundant.

Unlike the interregnum between 1945-1973, the rising tide—no matter the befuddlements Arthur Laffer and his fellow Reaganite ideologues proffered[15]—doesnotlift all boats today, it is outside the logic of neoliberalism that it do so, so the idea of reforming neoliberalism, or what is often called “globalization with a human face,” is a rhetorical distraction. All of the policy innovations—interpreted as “socialism” by the Tea Partiers—offered by Barack Obama fall within the purview of neoliberalism, above all the Affordable Care Act, whose genesis was hatched in neoliberal think tanks decades ago.[16]

It is important to note that neoliberal economic restructuring necessarily means social restructuring, i.e., a movement toward disciplinarity and away from liberalism; the disciplinarity can take a Bushian, Clintonian, or Trumpian form, but these are manifestations of the same tendency.

When wage growth is decoupled from economic growth[17] (as it has been since Friedman and others inaugurated the revolution in the early 1970s), this means that the human subject is ripe for discipline. Furthermore, wage fairness cannot be rationally discussed (hence the obfuscation surrounding the $15 minimum wage orchestrated by Clinton and others) because the concept of the market has been disembedded from society; the market as abstraction, not a concrete reality, makes any notion of reform or restructuring impossible. Like the minimum wage, something like free child care also remains outside the bounds of discourse, because public policy cannot accommodate discussions that do not take the self-regulating market as unassailable myth.

What neoliberalism canaccommodate is relentless tax cuts (Trump has already offered his huge tax cut plan, as Bush did as his first order of business), which only exacerbate the problem, leading to increasing concentrations of wealth. It has to be said, though, that Ted Cruz more comfortably fit the neoliberal paradigm, with his familiar calls for lower taxes along with reduced regulation and further limits on social welfare, whereas Trump shows, for now, some elements of apostasy. If neoliberalism were to get a Cruz, it would have no problem working with him, or rather, Cruz would have had no problem executing neoliberalism, beyond the surface dissimilarities from Hillary Clinton.

As Sanders has consistently noted,[18] economic inequality leads to political inequality, which means that democracy, after a certain point, becomes only theoretical (viz. Citizens Unitedand the electoral influence of such powerful entities as the Koch brothers). Both processes—economic inequality and political inequality—have accelerated after each downturn in the forty-five-year history of neoliberalism, therefore a downturn is always exciting, and even preordained, for a Bush, a Trump, or a Clinton. Again, economic inequality and political polarity (polarity is simply a manifestation of democracy having become dysfunctional) strongly correlate, and both have come to a head in this election.

Neoliberalism’s task, from this point on, is to mask and manage the increasing inequalities that are likely to befall humanity, especially as the planet reaches a crisis point in its health.[19] In a way, George W. Bush threw a wrench—he was a perverted Keynesian in a way, believing in war to prime the pump, or inflating unsustainable bubbles, or spending exorbitantly on grandiose gestures—into the process of neoliberal globalization that was going very smoothly indeed under Bill Clinton and would likely have flourished under Al Gore as well. With Hillary Clinton, the movement will be toward further privatization of social welfare, “reforming” it along market principles, as has been true of every neoliberal avatar, whether it was Bill Clinton’s incentives to work in the performance management makeover of welfare, George Bush’s proposed private social security accounts, Mitt Romney’s proposed private health care accounts, or the school vouchers that tempt all of them from time to time.

What remains to be seen is the extent to which the millennial generation might be capable of thinking outside the neoliberal paradigm, i.e., they don’t just want more of what neoliberal promises to give them yet fails to deliver, but want things that neoliberalism does not or cannot promise. On this rests the near-term future of the neoliberal project.

Beyond Sanders himself, the key question is the ability of the millennial generation to conceive of themselves outside the neoliberal subjectivity they have been pushed to internalize. They have been encouraged to think of themselves as capital producers, turning their intellectuality into social media popularity for the benefit of capital, in the service of the same abstract market that has no place, no role, no definition beyond the fallen liberal calculus. Does the millennial generation believe, even about its most intimate core, that everything has been privatized?

I am not necessarily making a pessimistic prediction. I am merely outlining the strength of an opponent that has refused to be namedfor forty-five years, although it has been the ruling ideology that long! In defining neoliberalism, I have sought to distance myself from the distraction of personalities, and tried to expose the dark side of our politics which we can only see when we name and understand the ideology as such. We are up against a system that is so strong that it has survived, for the most part, the last crash, as citizens couldn’t get their heads around the idea of nationalizing banks or health care.

It is existentially imperative to ponder what happens beyond Sanders, because neoliberalism has its end-game in sight, letting inequality continue to escalate past the crash point (meaning the point where the economy works for most people), past any tolerable degradation of the planet (which is being reconceptualized in the shape of the market).

What, indeed, does happen beyond Sanders, because as we have seen Hillary Clinton is one of the founders of neoliberal globalization, one of its central historical figures (having accelerated the warehousing of the poor, the attack on trade unions, and the end of welfare and of regulatory prowess), while Trump is an authoritarian figure whose conceptions of the state and of human beings within the state are inconsistent with the surface frictionlessness neoliberalism desires? To go back to Hillary Clinton’s opening campaign commercial, to what extent will Americans continue to believe that the self must be entrepreneurially leveraged toward maximum market gains, molded into mobile human capital ever ready to serve the highest bidder?

As to whether a non-neoliberal globalization is possible and what that might look like on the international stage after a quarter-century of Clinton, Bush, and Obama—which is essentially the frustration Trump is tapping into—this is the question of the day, which needs to be answered to clarify the differences between Sanders versus Clinton, and Trump versus Clinton.

For now, I would suggest that it is not that globalization causes or has caused neoliberalism, but that neoliberalism has pushed a certain form of globalization that suits its interests. This is a crucial distinction, on which everything else hinges. The neoliberal market doesn’t actually exist; at the moment it is pure abstraction; what is actually filling up economic and political space can only be discussed when we step away from this abstraction, as Sanders has so ably done, and as the Occupy and Black Lives Matter movements tentatively set in motion.

This essay, a version of which originally appeared at Salon, is excerpted from the book Why Did Trump Win? Chronicling the Stages of Neoliberal Reactionism. Shivani is also the author of Confronting American Fascism: Essays on the Collapse of the Democratic Order, 2001-2017and This Is the Only Way to Solve the Immigration Problem: A Radical Human Rights Approach. A History of the Cat in Nine Chapters or Less: A Noveland Logography: A Poetry Omnibusare forthcoming in early 2019.

Notes.

[1] Alex Chadwick, “Hillary Clinton to Chart Centrist Democratic Agenda,” NPR, July 26, 2005: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/stor ... Id=4771471.

[2] A short primer on Keynesianism: http://www.economicshelp.org/blog/6801/ ... economics/.

[3] Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom(1962) and Free to Choose(1980) are essential to understanding today’s ideological landscape. Here he is dissing an idealistic student at Stanford University: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0E-URmNAa5o.

[4] The last British Prime Minister, David Cameron, reiterates TINA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0k4QkVOMNs.

[5] Jerome Roos, “Since the Mexican Debt Crisis, 30 Years of Neoliberalism,” Roar Magazine, Aug. 22, 2012.

[6] Kimberly Amadeo, “Savings and Loans Crisis: Causes, Cost,” The Balance, updated September 8, 2016: https://www.thebalance.com/what-is-firrea-3305839.

[7] Ramon Moreno, “What Caused East Asia’s Financial Crisis,” Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, August 7, 1998: http://www.frbsf.org/economic-research/ ... al-crisis/.

[8] Michael Kreiter, “Neoliberal Multiculturalism: The Diversity That Divides Us,” unpublished paper 2013, Department of Sociology, Boise State University.

[9] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnjv5_rIPeU.

[10] Mount Pelerin Society, “Statement of Aims,” originally published April 8, 1947: https://www.montpelerin.org/statement-of-aims/.

[11] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N708P-A45D0.

[12] Danilo Trisi and Ladonna Pavetti, “TANF Weakening As a Safety Net for Poor Families,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, May 14, 2012.

[13] Oxfam International, “Richest 1% will own more than all the rest by 2016,” Jan. 19, 2015.

[14] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZxVjhXC0Bs.

[15] Pamela Prah, “Laffer’s Supply-Side Economics Staging a Comeback,” Stateline/Pew Charitable Trust, March 2, 2012: http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-an ... a-comeback

[16] Avik Roy, “How the Heritage Foundation, a Conservative Think Tank, Promoted the Individual Mandate,” Forbes, October 20, 2011: http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapotheca ... 5410f1621b.

[17] Economic Policy Institute, “The Productivity-Pay Gap,” updated Aug. 2016: http://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/.

[18] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTiPr90jk-o.

[19] The Ayn Rand Institute offers, in all seriousness, a “free-market solution” to climate change: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZkobdaR9wBk.


Anis Shivani is the author of Why Did Trump Win? Chronicling the Stages of Neoliberal Reactionism and This Is the Only Way to Solve the Immigration Problem: A Radical Human Rights Approach. A History of the Cat in Nine Chapters: A Noveland Logography: A Poetry Omnibusare forthcoming in early 2019.


My god, this thing was so phony, so unbearable, so unconscious:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N708P-A45D0
We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

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Re: An empire of fraud, Made in America

Postby JackRiddler » Mon Jan 28, 2019 3:30 pm

.

Wow time!

I direct you all to a Democracy Now! interview with the maker of a new documentary on the life of Roy Cohn and his protege and "best friend," Donald Trump. Starring Cohn's good friend Roger Stone, no less. It's as illuminating and as relevant today as last year's NY Times expose on the family business dating back to World War II, my comment on which I post again below.

Unlike the NY Times, the interview about the documentary (which I cannot have seen, as I am obviously not at Sundance) is purely synthetic, meaning it doesn't seem to have news we have not known all along. Also, much the same insights into the life and transactional mode of Cohn were covered beautifully in Angels in America, which deserved a mention. But the following brings it together with impact.

Video at
https://www.democracynow.org/2019/1/28/ ... m_explores

Transcript:

www.democracynow.org
“Where’s My Roy Cohn?”: Film Explores How Joseph McCarthy’s Ex-Aide Mentored Trump & Roger Stone

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman. On Friday, federal agents raided the home of President Trump’s ally and former adviser Roger Stone. Prosecutors from special counsel Robert Mueller’s team charged the longtime Republican operative with obstruction, witness tampering and lying to Congress about his communications with WikiLeaks. An indictment, unsealed Friday, reveals a senior Trump campaign official was directed to contact Stone ahead of the 2016 election to see what other leaks about Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee were coming from WikiLeaks. Roger Stone was released later Friday on a $250,000 bond and spoke to the press.

ROGER STONE: I will plead not guilty to these charges. I believe this is a politically motivated investigation. I am troubled by the political motivations of the prosecutors.

AMY GOODMAN: Roger Stone will be arraigned on Tuesday. Stone and Donald Trump share a unique history: Both were heavily influenced by the infamous attorney Roy Cohn, who served as a chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy during the Red Scare in the 1950s and would later become a leading mob attorney. Roy Cohn represented Donald Trump for years and once claimed Trump considered him to be his best friend.

Roy Cohn is the subject of a new documentary here at the Sundance Film Festival titled Where’s My Roy Cohn? I spoke to the film’s director, Matt Tyrnauer, on Sunday. I began by asking him to explain who Roger Stone is and his connection to Roy Cohn.

MATT TYRNAUER: He was a protégé of Roy Cohn. He has something in common with Donald Trump other than being a friend and off-and-on political adviser to Donald Trump. He and Trump were both the protégés of Roy Cohn. Their origins in politics, and really in all of the way they deal with life and business, come from the same place. And that’s the late Roy M. Cohn.

AMY GOODMAN: So, before we go to the late Roy M. Cohn, talk about your feelings on Friday, on that day that began with a raid of Roger Stone’s house, and just who Roger Stone is.

MATT TYRNAUER: Roger Stone is a political dirty trickster whose methods and persona really dovetail with and presage the Trump administration. They’re cut from the same cloth. And again, they had the same mentor—I can’t overstate the importance of that. This comes from the dirty pool kind of illegitimate political world that Roy Cohn personified, Richard Nixon toiled in. And Donald Trump is a kind of delayed re-emergence of this dirty pool transactional type of politics that now really is verging onto a type of fascism, that I think has been incipient in our republic for a long time but has emerged. And the point of the film is that the seeds for this were planted long ago, and Roy Cohn was a major sower of those seeds.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go to a clip of Roger Stone from your film, talking in the same way you’re talking, interestingly, about Roy Cohn, Donald Trump and, well, Roger Stone himself.

ROGER STONE: Roy would always be for an offensive strategy. Those are the rules of war. You don’t fight on the other guy’s ground; you define what the debate is going to be about. I think Donald learned that from Roy; I learned that from Roy.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Roger Stone talking about Roy M. Cohn. So, Matt Tyrnauer, take us there. Take us to who Roy M. Cohn is and how you became so fascinated with him.

MATT TYRNAUER: Roy Cohn would have been, I think, a very bold footnote in American history, if it hadn’t been for the surprising result of the election of 2016. He was, at a very young age, the handmaiden of Joseph McCarthy in the early '50s on through the mid-'50s. He was most famous for those photographs of him whispering into the ear of McCarthy during the infamous Senate subcommittee witch-hunting hearings, where McCarthy, demagogue of his era, was trying to root out mostly imaginary communists in the State Department and other branches of the government.

Cohn was a son of great privilege, who would became an attorney. In fact, he graduated from law school so young, he couldn’t take the bar exam for another year. He was a prodigy, and he was a very brilliant man. It turned out, through the course of his life, he used his brilliance for mostly the dark arts of manipulation and self-enrichment, and certainly, later in his career, even literally mafia activities. He became the number one mob lawyer in this country. But he was also the great—I call him the CEO of the Favor Bank. He was the great political fixer of his time.

AMY GOODMAN: So, well, the mob is where Donald Trump comes in, in his early years of being a developer in Manhattan. But go back even further, to the Rosenbergs, from before the McCarthy hearings.

MATT TYRNAUER: Sure. Roy Cohn cut his teeth in public life as the junior prosecutor in the Rosenberg spy case, which was an infamous trial of two Jewish Americans, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were accused of and convicted of sharing atomic secrets with the Soviet Union.

AMY GOODMAN: Conspiring to.

MATT TYRNAUER: Yes. And Cohn was among a group of Jewish lawyers and judges who were appointed to give the impression that it was not an anti-Semitic prosecution. He proved himself to be incredibly aggressive and very, very savvy at gaining publicity for himself and for the cause that he was pushing. And he is perhaps most famous in this for engaging in a very questionable collusion with the judge, who was Judge Kaufman. And Judge Kaufman, legend has it, would call Roy Cohn, the prosecutor in the case, outside of his synagogue, Park Avenue Synagogue in New York, to ask Roy Cohn, the junior prosecutor, for guidance on what kind of sentencing he should hand down. Roy Cohn—

AMY GOODMAN: And just to be clear, ex parte communications between a judge and a prosecutor are illegal.

MATT TYRNAUER: You said it. And Cohn was encouraging him, by Cohn’s own admission, to give the death penalty not only to Julius, who, it turned out, was indeed guilty, and Ethel, who was—no one’s ever proven guilt for. The couple were sentenced to death and executed in the electric chair. It was a truly traumatic moment for certainly the Jewish community of the United States, but also really the United States at large. And the film unearths footage, contemporary footage, that was actually very shocking to me. I didn’t realize how violent and emotional the protests were in the streets of New York City on the day of the execution.

AMY GOODMAN: And this was what? June 21st, 1953?

MATT TYRNAUER: That’s right. And Cohn at the time was, I believe, 23.

AMY GOODMAN: And, of course, the message that was sent all over the country with the execution of this couple at Sing Sing, of putting them in the electric chair. Interestingly, you have a clip of Roger Stone, that we want to turn to right now, remembering what Roy Cohn said to him about their execution.

ROGER STONE: When you would try to get him to talk about Joe McCarthy or the Army-McCarthy trials or that whole period, J. Edgar Hoover, you couldn’t get much out of him. On the Rosenbergs, I asked him how he felt about it—I told him I’d read the case—and he said—and I quote—”If I could have pulled the switch, I’d have done it myself.” That doesn’t sound like remorse. I think Roy was a hard-liner to the end.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Roger Stone, from the documentary, Where’s My Roy Cohn?, talking about Roy M. Cohn and the execution of the Rosenbergs. Matt Tyrnauer?

MATT TYRNAUER: It seemed to me that someone in their early twenties who had killed a mother of two, who was almost certainly not guilty of the crime for which she was convicted and murdered by the state, might have some feelings of remorse for this later in life, as he was on his own deathbed, for instance. I asked Stone that, and Stone gave the answer that you just saw in the film clip.

AMY GOODMAN: So let’s move forward, down to the McCarthy hearings in Washington. Roy M. Cohn becomes his right-hand man, famously—and you show this so beautifully in the film—constantly in the ear of McCarthy. You’ve got two sets of hearings. You’ve got the original McCarthy hearings, going after communists, and then you’ve got the Army-McCarthy hearings. And you describe this as an early reality TV, very Trumpian. Explain what took place.

MATT TYRNAUER: Army-McCarthy is a byword in our culture. The McCarthy era, of course, is the dictionary definition of witch hunting and demagoguery and the big lie in politics. The Army-McCarthy hearings’ details and the nuances, I really feel, have been lost to history and lost in the very porous education system we have in this country that just doesn’t teach history thoroughly. So I wanted to show a granular portrayal of this peculiar episode that occurred, that really riveted the nation at the dawn of the age of television.

What happens in the complex Army-McCarthy scenario is that Cohn is McCarthy’s protégé. Cohn, as a string puller and a favor doer, wants to do a particular favor for someone, a certain someone special to him, and that is a young man named G. David Schine, who was the scion of a wealthy hotel family and was just Roy Cohn’s type, sexually speaking, it turns out. Cohn, we haven’t mentioned yet, was gay and very deeply in the closet in this period. He clearly has a romantic crush on David Schine and gets him on Joseph McCarthy’s committee as a junior aide. At a certain point in the Korean War period, David Schine is drafted into the Army as a private. This incenses not only David Schine, but Roy Cohn. So, Cohn, who was powerful at the time, but not as powerful as he thought he was, did what every wealthy, spoiled child might do, except this one happened to be occupying a Senate post: He called the secretary of the Army, and he threatened the secretary of the Army. And he said, “Either David Schine is given a commission as a general, not a private, and posted in the penthouse of the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York,” the city that Roy Cohn—happened to be his hometown, “or we—Roy Cohn and Joseph McCarthy—will go after the Army and accuse them of being run by a secret gay, communist cabal.”

The Army didn’t react well to this bizarre threat coming from a relative political nobody, the one with great connections and a connection to the leading demagogue of the day, Joseph McCarthy. So the Army pushed back. And we have to remember also that the president at the time was an Army man: Dwight Eisenhower was a general. And he didn’t say much at the time, but behind the scenes was—didn’t like these accusations being leveled against his branch of the military.

So, what unfolds then is, I believe, the first instance of reality television—unwitting reality television. I think TV, in its infancy, was trying to find its footing, and whatever was good spectacle and whatever would get people to tune in flew at the time. This was an open, televised hearing with a sensationalistic charge and a secret homosexual subplot. It made the stuff of perfect television drama, really, although no one really knew what was going to happen. It was an open-ended narrative, which really is the definition of reality TV.

AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about the—really, the climax of these hearings, with the counsel for the secretary of the Army.

MATT TYRNAUER: What ended up happening was the Army lawyered up and went after McCarthy and Cohn. And they hired a very good lawyer, a very folksy, telegenic, avuncular man who was a Boston Brahmin attorney named Joseph Welch. Welch played his cards beautifully on TV and in the hearing room here, and he paced himself. He sort of let his fellow questioners pick apart this bizarre scenario. McCarthy and Cohn are demagoguing and trying to show that there are communists and gays in the Army and that they’re bad for the United States and bringing down the republic and the democracy, basically. The Army was able to poke holes in that.

Eventually, near the end, McCarthy sees he’s losing this battle, and he wants to fight back. There had been a backroom deal made at a certain point that one of the people that they were going to drag through the mud was an associate of Welch’s in his Boston law firm who may or may not have been a member of a group that may or may not have had some communist leanings. It wasn’t even a communist front. It was really nothing, as most of the charges McCarthy leveled were. And Cohn had told Welch, “I’ll trade you not implicating this guy for something else.” And McCarthy missed that meeting, and he started to bring this young man’s name into the hearings on television.

And Welch realized that he had broken the agreement, and went after McCarthy. And he says words that turned out to be immortal—very few words, but they’ll always be remembered among anyone who is a student of history and even people who were casual TV viewers of the time. And it’s—I’ll miss some of these words, but it was basically, “Senator, you’ve done enough.” And he’s sort of winding up like a pitcher would wind up. “At long last, have you no sense of decency?”

JOSEPH WELCH: Look, you have done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?

MATT TYRNAUER: The Senate room—it’s the Russell hearing room of the Senate, which was where Anita Hill’s trial—hearing took place—bursts into applause. You can see McCarthy’s face just collapses, basically. He goes pale. And this caught the conscience of an entire nation, because of television, and it led to the very quick discrediting and downfall and eventual censure of Joseph McCarthy in the Senate. And it destroyed Roy Cohn, as well, as a Senate aide. And that really ended the McCarthy era—Joseph Welch. It should have ended Roy Cohn, but it did not.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Matt Tyrnauer, director of the new documentary Where’s My Roy Cohn? When we come back, we’ll talk about how Roy Cohn ended up representing a young New York real estate developer named Donald Trump in the 1970s and how they became best friends. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” by Tears for Fears. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman. We’re broadcasting for the week from the Sundance Film Festival here in Park City, Utah, as we continue to look at the new documentary Where’s My Roy Cohn? It looks at the man who mentored Donald Trump and Roger Stone. The film just premiered here at the Sundance Film Festival.

After Roy Cohn left Washington in disgrace in the 1950s, he became a prominent attorney in New York—a prominent mob attorney. His clients included the mob and a future president. Let’s go back to my interview with director Matt Tyrnauer.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s leap forward to his relationship with Donald Trump, how he came to know Donald Trump.

MATT TYRNAUER: So, Cohn has an immediate success as a lawyer in New York. And people have said to me, journalists have asked me, “How could someone so discredited worm his way to the top echelons of New York society after having crashed and burned so badly and humiliated himself and everyone around him in the McCarthy—in the Army-McCarthy period?” My answer is: Have you ever met New York society? It’s the most transactional place in the world. And Roy Cohn was the king of transactional relationships. I call him the CEO of the Favor Bank. And that’s the way he operated, and to great success, all through the ’60s, all through the early ’70s.

And there comes a day, a fateful day, when Roy Cohn, powerbroker, mob lawyer, meets a young man who was the just-starting-out son of a major real estate developer in Queens and Brooklyn named Donald J. Trump. Trump was pure outer-borough material. He had the money, but he didn’t have the status. He was considered to be very uncouth and was not welcome in the important places in New York City business and society, but he had a burning aspiration to rise to those levels. He did find his way to a chic nightclub at that time called Le Club, kind of Midtown East in Manhattan, which existed until relatively recently, in fact. In that kind of swingy, proto-disco environment, he meets the famous Roy Cohn.

At that precise moment, the Justice Department was going after Trump’s father and Trump himself, who was a junior partner in the Trump family real estate business, for racial discrimination. At the time, it was very provable that the Trump housing company was taking the rental applications of minority applicants and marking them with a code word, which was C for colored, and then denying them rental apartments. The Justice Department was going to come down very hard on them, and Trump was worried and wanted to help his father and help himself out of this nasty predicament. He explained the predicament to Roy Cohn that night and said, “Hey, can you help me get out of this?” And Cohn said, “Absolutely. Come see me tomorrow morning.” Trump did. And Cohn, in the room with him, outlined a strategy for conquering this Justice Department suit against them, which really was the game plan that Trump followed every day for the rest of his life and into our own lives, in our daily lives now.

AMY GOODMAN: Fully provable that they were engaging in racist practices, but they never admitted it.

MATT TYRNAUER: That’s right. So, they settled. And settling is not technically an admission of guilt. Now, Trump says he never settles, but of course he settles all the time. And Cohn says he never settled or never pleaded, and he pleaded and settled all the time. But Cohn’s premise was never admit guilt, and a settlement isn’t an admission of guilt. And if you don’t admit guilt, you can go to the press and claim victory. Pure Roy Cohn.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Roy Cohn was not only his lawyer that he turned to, one of his lawyers, but he considered him one of his best friends.

MATT TYRNAUER: He was his consigliere and best friend. In Cohn’s eyes, he, in the film, on an interview that he gives in the early '80s, brags that Donald Trump, in a letter to him, says that he's his best friend.

AMY GOODMAN: When Trump buys the Bonwit Teller Building, this massive concrete building, historic, and then, in its place, builds Trump Tower, talk about the blueprint, basically, that involves the mob and Roy Cohn.

MATT TYRNAUER: The Trump Tower story is exemplary. It just sets the pattern for the way Trump and the Trump Organization did business. And again, it’s torn from the playbook of Roy Cohn. It probably didn’t need to be this way, but corners were cut to generate maximum profits. And I think it was also in that time in New York, just part of what you did as a skullduggerer to kind of get the mafia involved and, you know, get special privileges to speed up construction, etc., etc., etc. So, this was a really corrupt project. And I want to give credit to the journalist David Cay Johnston, who was doing this reporting in real time back in the ’80s and has been chronicling the bad business dealings of the Trump Organization for years. And we rely on an interview with David Cay Johnston in the film to explain how something was very peculiar about the construction of Trump Tower, which Roy Cohn helped Donald Trump achieve and engineer. And Trump—or, rather, Cohn shows off a letter from Trump thanking him for allowing the fast realization of the Trump Tower project.

A few things in particular, though. Trump Tower is built of concrete. Buildings in the '80s in New York were very rarely built of concrete. They were built of structural steel usually, which was a much more efficient way to build. And one reason it was more efficient was that the mob at the time controlled the poured concrete contract business, and you need to pay off the mob. And also the mob, in a bit of subtle skullduggery, controlled the unions, so the unions could close the construction fences and keep the cement mixers waiting to come into the construction site and ruin your cement and cost you, you know, millions of dollars, basically. But, indeed, this building went up made of concrete, because Roy Cohn, according to Johnston's reporting, introduced Trump to all of his mafioso connections, that allowed this project to go forward without any interruptions.

There was another very famous thing, which also, I believe, Hillary Clinton brought up in the campaign, which was that the Bonwit Teller Building, which was the building that preceded Trump Tower on that site, was demolished by a group of illegal immigrants called the Polish Brigade, that were brought down to New York City from Rochester, New York. Trump never paid them. So, not only was he employing illegal immigrants and not paying appropriate taxes and having any accountability on that way back in the '70s and ’80s, but he was also stiffing people. Again, pure Roy Cohn. Cohn was an expert tax evader and a stiffer of contractors. And he, Trump, Donald Trump, really learned this, it's thought, from Cohn.

AMY GOODMAN: So we take this story, decades later, to just this week, where The New York Times and Washington Post are reporting on undocumented immigrants who work at the Westchester golf course of President Trump. And though they were honored for being best employee repeatedly, one by one, they were called in, and they were fired. They are speaking out and saying the Trumps full well knew that they didn’t have the proper documents.

MATT TYRNAUER: Yes. I mean, so much of the film really is connecting the dots and giving even more truth to the famous George Santayana aphorism, “Those who do not remember history are condemned to repeat it.” I also like to quote Gore Vidal, who used to say we live in the “United States of Amnesia.” All of this has precedent, and sometimes very literal precedent. The same people perpetrating the same misdeeds or crimes are telling the same lies and untruth. They’ve been proven and reported on for years, and yet it’s occurring again, now on an international scale with really terrifying long-term consequences.

AMY GOODMAN: So, let’s go back to your interview with Roger Stone in 2017, where he once again quotes Roy Cohn.

ROGER STONE: Roy famously argued that all of the expenses of his law firm were—you know, were deductible. The IRS did not see it this way. Roy told me that the whole point of dealing with the IRS was to die owing them as much as humanly possible.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Roger Stone. Matt Tyrnauer?

MATT TYRNAUER: So, there’s a great interview with Mike Wallace and Roy Cohn, where Wallace says to Cohn, “You’re a tax avoider,” and Cohn indignantly says, “We’re all tax avoiders. The president is a tax avoider.” Of course, the president that Cohn’s talking about at that moment was Ronald Reagan. But when you watch it now, it has a certain resonance and ring to it. And then Wallace brilliantly says, “Well, you’re better at it than others.” And then Cohn says, “Well, don’t blame me for your inadequacies.”

Trump did the same thing in the debate with Hillary Clinton, where she assailed him of tax evasion, and he then leaned into the microphone and said, “That makes me smart.” And at that moment, my heart sank, because I thought, I could see that that would be a very populist one-liner in a debate, actually. Cohn got that. I mean, there’s something about the public that loves a scoundrel. And Cohn played that to the hilt. And I think Trump also took that persona from his mentor, Roy Cohn.

AMY GOODMAN: So now take us back to Roger Stone, the man who’s now just been indicted in the Mueller inquiry, and talk about the triumvirate here—Roy Cohn, Roger Stone and Donald Trump.

MATT TYRNAUER: One of the people I spoke to off camera about Roy Cohn and his relationship with Trump said to me, not jokingly, “Donald Trump is Roy Cohn.” And you could say that about Roger Stone. I think Roger Stone might say it about himself, actually. They swallowed Roy Cohn whole, in a certain way, and absorbed all of his incredible abilities at practicing the dark arts of manipulation of politics and media, and understanding the nexus between politics and media and how to operate those levers for really dark and selfish purposes. That’s really what Cohn’s mastery ended up being.

AMY GOODMAN: I think what you convey very well in this film is not just their manipulativeness, whether we’re talking about Trump or Stone or Cohn, but the utter cruelty, Roy Cohn willing to destroy lives, whether in his anti-communist crusade, his anti-LGBTQ crusade, even though he himself was a gay man. Ultimately he would die of AIDS, though he denied this, right? That he was dying of AIDS.

MATT TYRNAUER: Yes, he denied it consistently. He denied it on camera, off camera, publicly and privately.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, President Reagan and Nancy were his dear friends.

MATT TYRNAUER: That’s right.

AMY GOODMAN: President Reagan wouldn’t mention AIDS for something like seven years of his presidency. But in the very end of Roy Cohn’s life, you report that they got him into a special drug trial at the National Institutes of Health?

MATT TYRNAUER: Yes. I mean, this is one of the most bitter ironies and just really diabolical truths of Cohn’s life. He spearheaded, with McCarthy, the lavender scare in the ’50s, ruining the lives of LGBTQ people in government. Of course, he himself was one. So, that was bad enough. He, according to Nancy Reagan, helped her husband get elected, and actually was, perhaps, the key person, for a variety of reasons. The Reagans had many gay friends, but they were publicly and on a policy level as bad as you can be for gay rights and handling the HIV/AIDS plague at the time. Cohn appealed to them for special treatment as he was secretly dying of the disease. And Ronald and Nancy Reagan got him into an experimental treatment program at the NIH that very few people could get into. There are telegrams that we show on screen of Ronald Reagan, blithely ignoring the greatest public health crisis of our time, telegramming Roy Cohn, wishing him good health and godspeed as he gets out of the hospital and goes back home after a round of experimental treatment.

AMY GOODMAN: And then talk about how Donald Trump, the man who called Roy Cohn his best friend, how he dealt with Roy Cohn suffering from AIDS.

MATT TYRNAUER: Many people who were witnesses to the relationship cite that Trump did back away from Cohn when he was on his deathbed. At the same time, Cohn was disbarred, very late in his life, with almost, I think, weeks left to live. They managed, after decades of trying, at different levels of government, to get him disbarred. It was achieved. He had late-stage HIV illness at that time. And there are many accounts of him appealing to Trump for certain kinds of help and being nervous about what Trump would think. And then Trump did, according to his cousins, who were very much present at the time of Cohn’s illness, back away.

AMY GOODMAN: Left him to die alone, as many of Cohn’s friends did.

MATT TYRNAUER: Yes. I think this is the moral of the story of being a transactional person, in many ways. Cohn had many friends, but how true were these friends? They were friends that were gained through being a master of transactional living, transactional politics. He was a total transactional figure. When he had this terrible disease, which was a deeply ironic thing for him to die of, he lost a lot of friends, who were, I think, backing away because of these dual crises in his life—disbarment and an assured death of a terrible and, at that time, we have to remember, really extremely terrifying disease that was very little understood.

AMY GOODMAN: Which brings us now to the title of your film, Where’s My Roy Cohn? Talk about how you came up with it.

MATT TYRNAUER: “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” is not a question, it’s a complaint, issued by Trump in the White House in 2017, when I think he first felt the walls of the Mueller investigation closing in on him. I don’t think he could have predicted the length of this. I think he thought he would short-circuit it, and he was hoping that a Roy Cohn type would help him short-circuit it.

He was not able to find that in the person of his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, or his White House counsel, both of whom have left office. It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of someone in the executive branch that the attorney general or the White House counsel serves him personally: These are the employees of a dictator; these aren’t the employees of an elected president of the United States. The attorney general represents the people. The Justice Department represents the interests of the United States. The people are sovereign in the United States. The president is not sovereign. I’m not sure anyone’s been able to explain that to Donald Trump.

But Roy Cohn taught him that he was sovereign. Roy Cohn behaved as if he was sovereign, Roy Cohn was sovereign. And he convinced Trump that if you follow that playbook of ultimate selfishness and ends justifying means, that you could get away with anything. Roy Cohn almost did. It’s Shakespearean and irredeemable, his end, but he has given us this delayed re-emergence of demagoguery that is the result of a seed he planted in the early ’80s, I would say, and has come back to haunt us in a really unimaginable way.

AMY GOODMAN: Matt Tyrnauer, director of the new documentary Where’s My Roy Cohn? It just premiered here at the Sundance Film Festival, where we’ll be broadcasting all week.


The Fred and Donald story:

JackRiddler » Wed Oct 03, 2018 12:32 pm wrote:.

Before it disappears, allow me to summarize the most important article yet about the Life of Trump. (Link. It is 13,000 words. Read it.)

On the front end, Fred Trump's fortune drew from decades of post-World War II federal housing development loans and subsidies worth tens of millions. On the back end, tax evasion was vast, multifarious and constant. That was the business model. Properties were wildly undervalued, expenses inflated, revenues hidden. Tenants were systematically victimized. The family cultivated a deep contempt for the government that provided them with such largesse.

Over decades, hundreds of millions were shifted from Fred to his children via untaxed gift-loans and hidden property-transfer schemes. Donald received tens of millions in such never-to-be-repaid "loans" on a near-quarterly basis, contrary to his ridiculous legend that he made billions starting with nothing more than a million-dollar stake from Fred. A friend of the family enacted one payoff from Fred to Donald by buying 3.5 million in casino chips and leaving Atlantic City without making a bet. In Fred's final years, the children set up a scam company that overcharged on building services to drain the father's holding companies of $50 million in excess cash. After Fred's death, his properties were assessed at a small fraction of the value, allowing the children to evade at least $50 million in estate taxes. The IRS let almost all of this pass, sometimes making minor revisions in assessments. All of the late father's holdings were sold in 2004 at near full value for more than $800 million.

The lion's share of all this went to the "self-made" son and chosen successor, Donald. He was probably never a billionaire until recently, but for many years a gambler entangled in many schemes, often on the knife's edge of ruin. He got away with it in large part thanks to the corporate media.

The New York Times confesses to jump-starting Donald's celebrity career with a 1976 puff-piece that legitimated his absurd claim to be worth $200 million. This helped launch him as a suitor in the lobbies of higher-level finance. Today the paper describes their own article as a con-job. This kind of media coverage became routine and enabled the many side-scams based on the Trump name: the airline, the golf clubs, the steaks, the "university." Trump was made synonymous with the good life, with the American vision of success.

Now, finally, the Times presents the underbelly they mostly failed to cover for 42 years, drawing on thousands of documents to expose the workings of a crime family. Nothing about it is surprising, but confirmation in this much detail is big news. This was never a "business" in the sense that many Americans still believe.

Two vital takeaways:

1. Of course the system is designed to favor the rich, but tax evasion and scams with public money on this scale for this long do not happen without protection. New York developers exploiting government welfare in the postwar era could hardly have avoided collaboration with the mobsters that controlled the construction trades and the protection rackets, but this is not merely a truism. The Trump links to New York-New Jersey mafia figures and their shared lawyers (like Roy Cohn) are known. The most explosive parts of this story are implicit but still need to be told: payoffs to officials, bought politicians, the likelihood of blackmail and extortion. In the Donald years, this morphed into global money laundering through real estate and casinos. For all the legal mutations and shell-games, the resulting concerns remain active today. Anything done after 2012 is still liable to prosecution.

2. Given that, and with this piece landing on the desks of attorney generals from New York to California, the speculation no longer appears outlandish that Trump needs to get Kavanaugh seated before the Supreme Court considers the Gamble "double jeopardy" case, which could end state-level investigations into Trump Organization emoluments and scams.

3. The corporate media was complicit at every stage. They did not report on the businesses. They did not take up the investigative research published by the likes of David Cay Johnston, Wayne Barrett, and several others starting already in the 1980s. They did devote decades of puff to the fake playboy. This relationship blossomed into 14 seasons of The Apprentice, the WWE venture, and the years of uninterrupted transmission of his every poisonous word that powered the presidential campaign, long before the first primary. Today they still enable him by coddling the violent, racist politics as "populist" and, paradoxically, by pretending anything bad about the regime is the product of an obscure foreign conspiracy.
We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

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Re: Congratulations, Stupid.

Postby JackRiddler » Tue Apr 09, 2019 1:52 pm

.

Watch the two documentaries below, from 2017: they still represent the best understandings about what really happened in the 2016 election and at the start of the Trump regime. Why?

Today, Americans still don't know who the Mercers are, and barely know about the Koch or DeVos-Prince role in this government. Most have little notion about the many ways the election was really rigged, or about the actual illegalities the Trump Org and the presidency have engaged in. Trump won't let go of the wall madness, just delivered a Hitlerian dose of dehumanizing speech about immigrants and invaders and the country being full to the Republican Jewish Coalition, has lined up the military for wars of aggression against Venezuela and Iran (both of which are now being starved of goods and cash), basically serves as a pitch-man for U.S. arms to the Middle East and NATO countries (what the "2%" business is all about) at those times when he isn't pitching his own businesses to foreign clients. And all this seems normal, he has been legitimated even for the majority who still hate his guts.

And this, mainly, is because the fucking corporate media just spent three years drilling them with sinister-sounding trivia about the inconsequential or non-existent Russian connections of campaign interns like George Papadopoulos, before Mueller predictably confirmed that the main plot of #Russiagate was bullshit.

Just sticking to election-related matters, all this went lost in the 2+ years of #Russiagate:

Election rigging by fraud and favoritism, probably illegal, in the Democratic primaries. (Covering this up, of course, was the original point of #Russiagate.)

Election rigging the accustomed legal way by the corporate media, who effectively chose the nominees by the amount of attention given to them in advance of any primaries.

Election rigging more or less legally by the money, by the campaign finance and dark-money systems. (The latter came in huge for Trump in the final weeks, so don't believe the hype about him having been outspent by very much.)

Election rigging legally and illegally by the GOP state machines through massive voter suppression and likely count fraud (in the states Clinton refused to back the Green recount).

Election rigging by the Dead Hand of 1787 (the "Electoral College"). Constitutionally!

Longstanding election meddling and political influence buying by foreign powers, with Israel and Saudi Arabia far in the lead.

The billionaires who engineered the win for Trump (Mercers) and who fashioned the Trump cabinet (Kochs). Despite the many firings, most of the latter picks are still in place.

NOT ISSUES!


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6cWxyqVH90

Did you know Hillary: The Movie, the work on which the Citizens United case was based, was directed by one Steve Bannon?


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nqx2P40tbHk
We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

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Re: Congratulations, Stupid.

Postby JackRiddler » Sun Oct 13, 2019 11:19 am

I'm so glad Street has spoken so clearly all that I've said about Trumpism and the big lies about him from some on the left or the populist right. There are a few here who could stand to read this twice, and reconsider false confusionist tropes like "isolationism," "peace president," "white working class," and "what about Hillary?"

www.counterpunch.org

On the TrumpenLeft and False Equivalence

No political “Left” can or should exist that:

+ cannot or will not walk and chew gum at the same time.

+ fails to forthrightly and unambiguously oppose the United States’ current fascist, racist, eco-cidal, and sexist presidency and its noxious white Amerikaner base.

+ reflexively and constantly responds to every liberal and Left criticism of Trump by saying “but/what about Hillary” (and/or “but/what about Obama,” “but/what about Pelosi,” and “but/what about Schiff,” etc.

+ constantly lectures fellow and actual leftists about something we already know very well: the dismal, dollar-drenched, neoliberal-imperialist corporate Democrats are a deeply ruling class and imperialist party.

+ automatically assumes that to oppose Trump is to support the Democrats and the corporate-imperial “deep state.”

+ cannot or will not distinguish solidaristic working-class anti-racism/anti-Nativism/anti-sexism from bourgeois identity politics.

+ cannot or will not process sociopolitical data demonstrating that Trump’s base is linked by a combination of white racism and authoritarian values, not working-class economic grievance.

+ falls for the moronic mainstream narrative that Trump is an electoral product of the “white working-class.”

+ thinks that someone could simultaneously be on the Left and support Donald Trump

+ fails to adequately distinguish between Trump and previous Republican presidents.

Factions are warring within the American ruling class. So-called deep state agents (that is, ruling class/power elite players both within and beneath the parliamentary and electoral surface of U.S. politics and policy) have been opposing Trump for reasons that reflect elite interests (corporate globalization, investment stability/predictability, imperial and national credibility and branding among other things) that (as Trump’s “left” defenders rightly point out) have nothing to do with principled, democratic, and popular opposition.

Think of understanding this as a form of basic left mental walking. Does this elementary mental stroll mean that one cannot at the same time chew gum by opposing the Trumpenstein and working for its fastest possible demise based on one’s understanding that the current White House is neo-fascistic, racist, ecocidal, and sexist and headed by a malignantly narcissistic and epically corrupt maniac who takes pleasure in terrorizing immigrant children and flouting civilized norms and the rule of law – and who, by the way, is doing everything he can to accelerate the process of turning the entire planet in a Greenhouse Gas Chamber? Of course not.

The first 300 times I heard “but Hillary” and “but Obama” automatically thrown up as responses to left criticisms of Trump, I shrugged and went along. One can cite dozens if not hundreds of my own publications and talks on how awful the Inauthentic Opposition party, the Democrats is, with special attention to Obama and the Clintons and the role they and their neoliberal party have played in birthing the fascistic Trumpenstein presidency.

The second 300 times I heard “what about Hillary,” “what about Obama,” and “what about the Democrats” in response to principled left criticisms of the Trump presidency, I said “okay, fine, but perhaps you have observed by now that the president’s name is Donald Trump, not Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton and the white-nationalist GOP now has all three branches of government [though the Democrats got half of Congress in January of 2019] Please consider that the current titular chief of the American Empire is always Public Enemy #1 and that Trump is particularly noxious in ways that numerous serious thinkers reasonably identify as fascistic. You are sounding like a badly broken record. Your what-aboutism is starting to sound like inverted lesser-evilism.”

After the third 300 times I heard the reflexive what-aboutist response to Trump on “the left,” I started removing people from my in-box and drone-bombing them out of my “social media” lists. Actual leftists don’t need perpetual harangues on the awfulness of the Democrats. We’ve understood the other capitalist-imperialist party’s dismal dreadfulness since and before Upton Sinclair called the Democrats and Republicans “two wings of the same bird of prey” (in 1904). Failing to grasp that one can oppose both Donito Assolini and the corporate-Wall-Street CIA Democrats at one and the same time is a form of not being able to walk and chew gum at the same time. It’s not very bright.

Principled and actual leftists ideally want the Trump-Pence regime overthrown through a mass popular rebellion that confronts not just Trump and Trumpism but the whole damn capitalist, imperialist, racist, sexist, and ecocidal system, Democrats included, that gave rise to Trump. Radical/actual leftists (myself included) have been advocating for that since the day Trump graduated from the Electoral College.

The actual Left at its best has always understood that it must oppose racism, Nativism, ethno-centrism, and sexism in the process of building popular and working-class solidarity in the struggles for reform and revolution. Yes, elite Democrats criticize Trump and the Republicans from a “progressive-neoliberal,” bourgeois-identitarian standpoint. We know that. But that standpoint has nothing to do with actual and principled Left politics and it is offensive to merge such politics with the neoliberal identity politics of the corporate Democrats and media. Calling Trump out as a racist and a sexist as one part of a movement for working-class revolution is not the same as former Obama National Security Adviser Susan Rice calling Trump a racist and sexist as part of her advocacy for a more robust U.S. imperialism. Anti-racism/-sexism/-nativism/-homophobia/-nationalism/-chauvinism is part and parcel of the struggle of the working and lower class many against the obscenely wealthy and disastrously powerful Few.

Trump and his base are fundamentally and quintessentially racist. This is obviously the case both anecdotally and statistically. Almost as moronic as the Trumpenleft notion of Trump as a “peace president” (tell it to the people of Yemen, the soon-to-be-assaulted Syrian Kurds, the Palestinians, and the thousands of people who have lost relatives and friends to Trump’s stealthily record-setting drone war campaign) is the claim that he was voted into office by the (white) working-class due to his economic-populist rhetoric. Trump’s voting base was disproportionately affluent and congealed primarily not around “populist” economic grievance against neoliberalism but rather around a neo-fascistic conjuncture of political authoritarianism and white racial/racist identity[1]. The number of white working-class voters who shifted from voting for Obama in 2012 to Trump in 2016 – a key part of the silly Trumpenproletarian narrative – is “much less than one half of one percent of Americans, at most,” according to the statistically astute left political scientist Anthony DiMaggio, whose forthcoming book Rebellion in America: Citizen Uprisings, the News Media, and the Politics of Plutocracy (Routledge, 2020) demolishes the ridiculous Trumpenproletarian (“Trump’s white working-class base”) narrative. DiMaggio reports that “voters in areas harmed by manufacturing loss were more likely to choose Hillary Clinton than Trump.” The “real story of 2016,” DiMaggio recently wrote me, was the neoliberal “Democrats’ demobilization of working-class voters, not Trumps cultivation of them.”

“The real working-class revolt against neoliberalism in 2016 and 2020.” DiMaggio ads, “went/goes through the Sanders campaign, which itself draws on left movements, including Occupy, Madison, and Fight for 15. ‘Researchers’ claiming that Trump was voted in by the working-class laughably conflate Trump and Sanders by claiming that both are meaningful manifestations of working-class revolt against plutocracy.” The claim is absurd: “Sanders,” DiMaggio notes, “opposes plutocracy. Trump is the most extreme embodiment of it in modern U.S. history.”

Speaking of absurdity, the notion of an “other left…that supports Trump” is a self-cancelling and Orwellian farce. A “left” that backs a creeping fascist, racist, sexist, white-nationalist, climate change-denier like Trump is not a “left” remotely worthy of the label. Two plus two equals four. It does not equal nine.

Trump is not just another vile Republican president. Apart from Gerald Ford and with the possible exception of the horrid George H.W. “What We Say Goes” Bush, it is true, each Republican president since Dwight Eisenhower has gotten progressively more reactionary, racist, nationalist, evangelically backed, and fascistic. Still, quantity changed to quality with the orange monstrosity. Fascism-dismissing left intellectuals living in bougie enclaves on the East or West coast should come out to the flyover zones and see what’s afoot in the nation’s absurdly over-represented “flyover zones.” They should also attend a Trump rally. Trump has broken the mold, leaping into full-on herrenvolkish white nationalism. He has taken palingenetic nationalism, openly virulent racism, nativism, sexism, the war on truth, and ecocidalism to lethal new levels along with a brazen authoritarianism that openly merges the imperial U.S. presidency with personal corruption, the encouragement and cultivation of right-wing political violence, and the brazen abrogation of bourgeois law. Trump is the first U.S. president in modern history who can reasonably be expected not to honor the results of an election that does not go his way. (Just how much of the neo-fascistic, arch-authoritarian Trump difference is about ideological commitment and how much of it is about venal and malignant narcissism-gangsterism is an open question but there should be no doubt that Trump45 represents a historical departure with strong fascistic leanings.)

The Trumpified GOP base is not just the same old nasty Republican electorate. Much of this distinctly non-proletarian cohort has passed proto-fascistic tipping points.

“Leftists” who cannot forthrightly and unambiguously oppose the racist-sexist white nationalist pig Donald Trump and his vicious backers should simply retire their self-identification as, well, leftists. Trumpenleftism is a terminally oxymoronic condition of Orwellian self-cancellation. Its strange proponents should resist its allure or prepare to enter the Red-Brown Hall of Shame along with such epic historical buffoons as the “third period” German Communist Party leadership (“After Hitler, Us”) of the early 1930s.

Postscript: Against False Equivalency

Serious portsiders must not fall for false equivalencies regarding the problem of how to respond to “deep state” actions. The neofascistic brute Trump is now facing a political crisis including likely impeachment and possibly even removal because top CIA operatives and other “national security” elites caught Trump flouting long-established presidential norms by using the imperial policy leverage of his office to extort help from a foreign country in his re-election effort. That offense falls short of many offenses in what progressives know to be a long list of Trump administration crimes and abuses. The list includes: acceleration of Ecocide; criminal construction of concentration camps on the border; violation of international amnesty rights; violation of the Constitution on domestic emoluments; violation of the Constitution on foreign emoluments; incitement of violence; interference with voting rights; discrimination based on religion; illegal war; illegal threat of nuclear war; abuse of presidential pardon power; obstruction of justice; politicizing of prosecutions; failure to reasonably prepare for and respond to Hurricanes Harvey and Maria; separating children and infants from families; tax fraud and public misrepresentation; assaulting freedom of the press; supporting a coup in Venezuela; unconstitutional declaration of emergency; instructing Border Patrol to violate the law; refusal to comply with subpoenas; Declaration of Emergency without basis to violate the will of Congress; illegal proliferation of nuclear technology; illegal removal of U.S. from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.

Seen against this vast record of transgression, Ukraine Gate seems like a comparatively minor misdeed and a rather intra-elite matter. Still, no self-respecting leftist would call or lead a demonstration defending the Trump presidency against the “deep state’s” effort to remove it just over UkraineGate and obstruction of justice. That is not our fight against the “deep state.” Imagine a different scenario, however: the “deep state” going after a social democratic or liberal president (say, a President Bernie Sanders or a President Liz Warren) – or for that matter a revolutionary Left president (I can dream) – for trying to implement a great social-democratic program like universal Single Payer health insurance and/or an existentially necessary Green Jobs and climate justice program. In this scenario, it would be the duty of any self-respecting Left to hold mass protests on behalf of the president’s actions. So, no, being “okay” with (or at least not resisting) the power elite’s removal of Trump over something like UkraineGate (which does in fact involve a brazen abuse of power by the Malignant Freak in the White House) does NOT mean (as numerous Trumpenlefties have tried to tell me online) that one would also be “okay” with the power elite’s removal of a liberal or left president for trying to do something decent and progressive. The former does not put us in the streets. The latter does.

Endnote

1) For the real story and data on Trump’s base, see Konstatin Kilibard and Daria Roithmayr, “The Myth of the Rust Belt Revolt: Donald Trump Didn’t Flip Working-Class White Voters. Hillary Clinton Lost Them,” Slate, December 1, 2016; Kim Moody, “Who Put Trump in the White House?” Jacobin, January 11, 2017; Anthony DiMaggio, “Election Con 2016: New Evidence Demolishes the Myth of Trump’s ‘Blue-Collar’ Populism,’ Counterpunch, June 16, 2017; Eric Draitser, “Donald Trump and the Triumph of White Identity Politics,” Counterpunch, March 24, 2017; David Norman Smith and Eric Hanley, “The Anger Games: Who Voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 Election, and Why?” Critical Sociology, February 9, 2018, In the most sophisticated and statistically astute analysis of the 2016 Trump electorate produced so far, Smith and Hanley found the white Trump base was differentiated from white non-Trump voters not by class or other “demographic” factors (including income, age, gender and the alleged class identifier of education) but by eight key attitudes and values: identification as “conservative”; support for “domineering leaders”; Christian fundamentalism; prejudice against immigrants; prejudice against blacks; prejudice against Muslims; prejudice against women, and a sense of pessimism about the economy. Strong Trump supporters scored particularly high on support for domineering leaders, fundamentalism, opposition to immigrants and economic pessimism. They were particularly prone to support authoritarian leaders who promised to respond punitively to minorities perceived as “line-cutters”—“undeserving” others who were allegedly getting ahead of traditional white Americans in the procurement of jobs and government benefits—and to the supposed liberal “rotten apples” who were purportedly allowing these “line-cutters” to advance ahead of traditional white American males. Support for politically authoritarian leaders and a sense of intolerance regarding racial, ethnic and gender differences are two sides of the same Trumpian coin. The basic desire animating Trump’s base was “the defiant wish for a domineering and impolitic leader” linked to “the wish for a reversal of what his base perceives as an inverted moral and racial order.”
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Re: Congratulations, Stupid.

Postby Belligerent Savant » Sun Oct 13, 2019 1:14 pm

.

Actual leftists don’t need perpetual harangues on the awfulness of the Democrats. We’ve understood the other capitalist-imperialist party’s dismal dreadfulness since and before Upton Sinclair called the Democrats and Republicans “two wings of the same bird of prey” (in 1904). Failing to grasp that one can oppose both Donito Assolini and the corporate-Wall-Street CIA Democrats at one and the same time is a form of not being able to walk and chew gum at the same time. It’s not very bright.


Apparently the 2 most prolific posters here (and perhaps their 2 or 3 followers as well) fail to grasp this -- they do NOT operate with the understanding of the Democrat Party as the other "capitalist-imperialist" Party (or at least, they post here under the guise of being ignorant of this), which in turn explains most of their repeated output (almost exclusively in the form of copy-pasted material from media platforms that appear to take great pains to occlude or suppress this otherwise self-evident premise).

We can't event get to the START LINE of many of the presumed understandings raised in that article because so much of the time and space here is wasted sifting through, or lamenting, all the DUMB State-sponsored propaganda pasted in incremental dumps throughout the day. Expressing any frustrations pertaining to this obvious detriment is met with, and ultimately culminates in, the usual shitshow observed over the past week (fake/false cries of "personal attacks"; repeated proclamations that what they do here -- thread flooding/SPAMMING -- falls within literal interpretation of forum guidelines and is therefore allowed to permit unchecked, etc.)

All of this is to say: articles such as the above will largely fall on deaf ears here, though it may be worth sharing, regardless, for the lurkers who likely know better than the few regulars that remain.


Edit to add: belaboring the point. The above is my last on this exhausting topic.
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Re: Congratulations, Stupid.

Postby Grizzly » Sun Oct 13, 2019 11:33 pm

bump^^^^
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Re: Congratulations, Stupid.

Postby Karmamatterz » Mon Oct 14, 2019 1:55 pm

All of this is to say: articles such as the above will largely fall on deaf ears here, though it may be worth sharing, regardless, for the lurkers who likely know better than the few regulars that remain.


Yes, at least one lurker here who appreciates this and knows better.

Thanks B.S. and Jack.
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Re: Congratulations, Stupid.

Postby liminalOyster » Tue Nov 12, 2019 12:45 am

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