by Tom Sullivan

So what if 2001 arrived 20 years late? Take a stress pill.

Techie Re-Animators are reviving dead musical acts via hologram. “Part concert, part technology-driven spectacle,” reports Mark Binelli for New York Times Magazine.

Peter Shapiro, 47, owns the Capitol Theater in Port Chester, N.Y., an hour north of Manhattan. He produced the five concerts of the Grateful Dead’s 50th-anniversary “Fare Thee Well” tour. The show grossed over $50 million in 2015. Last April, the start-up Eyellusion brought a holographic Frank Zappa show to Shapiro’s venue. Zappa died in 1993:

“But here’s the headline,” Shapiro went on. “Look at who’s gone, just in the last couple of years: Bowie, Prince, Petty. Now look who’s still going but who’s not going to be here in 10 years, probably, at least not touring: the Stones, the Who, the Eagles, Aerosmith, Billy Joel, Elton John, McCartney, Springsteen. That is the base not just of classic rock but of the live-music touring business. Yes, there’s Taylor Swift, there’s Ariana Grande. But the base is these guys.”

The Zappa-rition itself had a kind of Weekend at Bernie’s aspect, Binelli writes, “making me hyperaware of the sunglasses covering the lifeless eyes of the corpse propped up between living people (in this case, a hot backing band composed predominantly of musicians who had toured with Zappa over the years).” The projection was a shade brighter and less substantial than the live musicians, “like a ghost struggling to fully materialize.”

Farther west this morning, the FAA still has not answered who or what is in control of swarms of drones spotted flying night formations over Colorado and Nebraska since late December.

The Denver Post reports:

A newly formed task force is on the hunt for a “command vehicle” that might be controlling the mysterious clusters of drones that witnesses say have been flying grid patterns in northeast Colorado and western Nebraska most nights for several weeks.

The command vehicle could be a “closed box trailer with antennas or a large van,” the Phillips County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement Monday, hours after about 75 people from a variety of state, local and federal agencies met in Brush to discuss the ongoing situation.

[…]

Representatives from the Federal Aviation Administration, the FBI, the U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigations, the U.S. Army, the Colorado Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, and a wide variety of local law enforcement agencies stretching from Nebraska to Colorado Springs attended Monday’s meeting, Yowell said.

Estimated to have 6-foot wingspans, the drones are spooking not just local residents. Authorities in attendance at the meeting spilled out into the hallway.

An assortment of private and federal agencies denies the drones are theirs. Then again, governments lie in times of war, except, perhaps, when it comes to assassinating foreigners remotely via computer.

If these stories echo 2001: A Space Odyssey, it is not as if humans had not already handed control of our ship of state to a soulless, homicidal animatronic. Before that, they’d handed their personal information to soulless computers in private hands. They’d allowed governments to track their movements with cute phone apps and identify them on the streets with ubiquitous cameras and facial recognition software.

Perhaps not even swarms of voters under 45 can save us now and this is just “A Taste of Armageddon.”

Cross-posted from Hullabaloo.

by Tom Sullivan

Sowing chaos is one of the acting president’s go-to moves. Donald Trump has spent time at his Florida golf resort issuing assassination orders, threatening to commit war crimes, issuing notices to Congress via social media, demanding Iraq pay for the U.S. invasion (or else U.S. troops will not leave), and spilling who-knows-what official secrets to dinner guests/spies. What his allies describe as the acts of a brilliant tactician are simply an expression of Trump’s feral instinct for getting the best of others by keeping them off balance. The more desperate he becomes, the more cornered he feels, the more chaos he will sow.

When Trump is not sowing chaos, he is inflaming racial, social and ideological divisions within the country both to keep his base unified and his adversaries unorganized. Fear of the Other he keeps on his utility belt.

E.J. Dionne writes that if polarization helps Trump’s base, it hurts progressives. They need coalitions, not only among African Americans, Latinos and city dwellers, but also “blue-collar and non-college-educated whites” from swing states:

Moreover, the left and center-left believe that public action is a positive good, that social solidarity is a realistic possibility and that a society thrives when it shares benefits and burdens equitably. When we live in our bunkers of hatred, none of these dispositions has a chance.

Dionne cites Sen. Sherrod Brown’s (D-Ohio) 2018 reelection in Ohio “by seven points in a state Trump carried by eight.” Brown writes in “Desk 88” about where he failed:

“We lost medium-sized industrial city after medium-sized industrial city, small town after small town, rural community after rural community. Pretty much all of them.”

“Rural and small town voters don’t think either party is going to do anything for them, but they vote Republican because they think Democrats will do something to them: take their guns or raise their taxes, or enact an environmental law that will put them out of work,” he writes.

[…]

“I will never be one,” he writes, “who says that people in rural and small-town America vote against their own interest; who am I to say what is their self-interest? But we as progressives have work to do.”

Trump and his allies rely on discouraging everyone from seeing citizenship as a project broader than bunkered self-interest. Democrats of a different era warned against falling into the kind of trap Trump has set. Brown quotes Sen. Robert F. Kennedy from the day after the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.:

“When you teach a man to hate and fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color or his beliefs or the policies he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you threaten your freedom or your job or your family, then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies – to be met not with cooperation but with conquest, to be subjugated and mastered.”

Trump and his allies in Congress may view the world that way, but the country cannot afford its citizens to view each other that way, as tempting as that is and as many who do.

Dionne’s invocation of public action as a positive good recalls a favorite quote about elections. Country Living last November posted 25 quotes about voting, most of them anodyne. My favorite (not included) is from former Colorado Senate Majority Leader Ken Gordon (D-Denver):

“We think that voting actually is not just a private vote for the person who gets the vote, but a public good, and that the more people who vote, the more legitimate the elected officials are, and that they represent the actual values of the electorate.”

Many fellow citizens have bought into the false notion that self-interest and individual achievement is what made America great. In fact, cooperation did. Alvin York did not win WWI. Audie Murphy did not win WWII. Dwight Eisenhower did not build Liberty ships nor the interstates. Neil Armstrong did not get to the moon on his own.

What progressives need to rekindle is the spirit that made those achievements possible. That will require not simply resisting the toxic bait Trump will throw out and social media will splash in front of our eyes in 2020. It will take actively countering it. And it will take encouraging younger voters to take collective action this year to get the country out of the ditch into which the #okboomer generations see their elders have driven the world.

I keep showing people the 2018 chart at the top (and did again in a statewide webinar Sunday). It displays North Carolina population by age from 18 to 99 (in blue). Below that in orange is voter registration from November 2018. At the bottom in green is early voting voter turnout by age from 18 to 99. (I don’t have the final vote numbers. Don’t ask.) Assume the green turnout curve would be taller with final totals but the shape wouldn’t change. Trust me, other states look the same.

Notice in the blue on the left side which age cohort has the raw power in population to run this country (but doesn’t) and to the right the shrinking age group (mine) that dominates American politics because more of them vote (the hump at the bottom right). If we hope to get this country out of the ditch, encouraging people under 45 to use the power that’s already theirs is how that happens. This is your challenge in 2020. It is something we have to do together.

Cross-posted from Hullabaloo.

by Tom Sullivan

Compassion has been a dwindling resource for years in this country. Especially for the sort of people who would separate refugee parents from their small children and blame them for it. Especially especially when they claim the Jesus Christ Stamp of Approval for both the policy and its sponsor in the Oval Office.

I’ve argued since my earliest days on [Hullabaloo] that as much as we like to believe people’s voting choices are rational (and insist ours are), that’s not reality. There is a visceral component all our book-learning misses. Insisting people vote rationally is as nonsensical as establishing literacy or ideological requirements before granting citizenship rights to infants. It makes sense voters should make decisions more rationally, but they don’t.

Yascha Mounk examines in The Atlantic the notion people voted for George W. Bush because, as a poll question revealed, “most undecided voters would have preferred to drink a beer with Bush rather than his opponent, John Kerry.” What if the question gets it backwards? What if people actually preferred the candidate they felt “would rather have a beer with them.”

Mounk explains:

The original formulation of the beer question invites the question of why voters would care so much about something that is exceedingly unlikely to happen. If you invert it, however, voters start to look a lot less irrational. After all, they can’t foresee all the decisions politicians will need to make once in office, and have few ways of holding them accountable if they don’t follow through on their promises. So they need to estimate which politicians are most likely to understand and advance their interests.

A candidate’s attitudes toward “people like me” thus become a powerful heuristic. If a candidate generally likes people like me, then it seems plausible that he will look out for my interests in a wide range of scenarios. If he dislikes people like me—if he would hate sharing a beer with me, and secretly thinks I’m trash—then he is far more likely to sell me out.

That’s rational, but likely subconscious. It’s a gut-level measure of likedability, rather than likability, Mounk theorizes. It might explain Joe Biden’s stickiness at the top of Democratic presidential polls. His style suggests “he does not sit in judgment of either his would-be supporters or their loved ones. If there’s one thing that’s easy to believe about Biden, it is that he’d love to get a beer with you—and your dad, and your mother-in-law, and even your crazy uncle.”

Maybe it’s not just name recognition. Maybe it comes natural to Biden. Maybe it’s a degree of emotional intelligence.

Mounk adds:

Most Americans spend relatively little time thinking about public policy. Politicians who give the impression that they are quick to disparage any contrary opinions, or to dismiss voters who express the right values in the wrong ways, are likely to fail the real beer test.

This is a lesson Democrats should urgently take to heart. According to a recent poll, most Americans fear that the Democratic Party doesn’t really want them. Asked whether they feel that “people like me are welcome in the Democratic Party,” only 44 percent of all voters and 38 percent of independents agreed.

Uh-huh. Americans in general vote more with their guts than with their heads, agreed. But what makes columns warning Democrats to “change their ways” especially annoying is they guilt-trip the left for harboring feelings the right feels no shame in expressing openly. Hillary Clinton’s public “deplorables” comment was unwise and it was insensitive. But don’t expect conservative magazines to reprimand Republican voters for being insensitive. Or to remind millions of Trump fans to check their disdain for lefties at the coliseum door if they want to bridge the political divide. They don’t want to. The Republican Party’s internal 2012 “autopsy” advised them minority voters felt “Republicans do not like them or want them in the country.” Rank-and-file Republicans ignored that advice and gave the world Donald Trump and their middle fingers. When was the last time public polling asked about that?

Even so, Democrats will be sending canvassers to knock doors across the country this year. If they’re smarter than the 2016 Clinton campaign, they won’t simply be working a base-turnout strategy. They’ll do some persuasion. And if they’re as smart as they think they are, they’ll check their condescension at the door.

I wrote in this space in September 2014 about a Georgia Republican state senator saying, “I would prefer more educated voters than a greater increase in the number of voters.” It wasn’t even a proper dog whistle. Fran Millar was complaining about African Americans being allowed to vote on Sunday at South DeKalb Mall:

Yet, I sometimes hear the same from lefties about poor, white, Republican voters. Occasionally, they just blurt out that voters are stupid. More often it’s couched in a dog-whistle complaint about people voting against their best interests. Which, if you think about it, is just a more polite way of saying the same thing.

As a field organizer in the South, I remind canvassers that, no, those voters are not stupid. They’re busy. With jobs and kids and choir practice and soccer practice and church and PTA and Friday night football and more. Unlike political junkies, they don’t keep up with issues. They don’t have time for the issues. When they go to the polls they are voting to hire someone to keep up with the issues for them. And when they look at a candidate — your candidate — what they are really asking themselves is simple: “Is this someone I can trust?”

One of my favorite southernisms is, “I wouldn’t trust anyone my dog doesn’t like.” That, I caution canvassers, is how most Americans really vote, like it or not. And if you don’t purge the thought, those “low information” voters? They will know you think they’re stupid before you do. Right before you ask for their votes.

Cross-posted from Hullabaloo.

by Tom Sullivan

Good advice for 2020. Not a resolution, exactly, but some decent advice for those who remember 2016 too well. From the “A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on” Department, Farhad Manjoo offers some tips in a New York Times op-ed for surviving 2020 in the disinformation age. Here’s a key one:

Virality is a red flag. Suspect it. If I were king of the internet, I would impose an ironclad rule: No one is allowed to share any piece of content without waiting a day to think it over.

People who should have known better shared a lot of misinformation/disinformation during the 2016 campaign. We know now about Russian trolls, ads purchased through phony Facebook accounts, and fake news from Macedonia. Facebook became so toxic it was something to avoid. Political discussions on social media? Don’t have political discussions on social media.

The 2016 item I remember best was a viral post about Hillary Clinton’s joint fundraising agreements with states. It arrived via a sibling. The author was an actress from the 1970s and 80s who I’d last heard about when she had a psychotic break in 1996. Diagnosed with bipolar disorder, she went on to become a mental health advocate. (She took her own life in 2018.) The detailed post purported to document the ways in which Hillary Clinton had bought the loyalties of the DNC and state party organizations. And maybe it did. But in the Internet Age what the lengthy post did not do was provide a single hyperlink to original source material. That should have been a red flag. But it confirmed what people already believed and that made it shareable.

But knowing what we know now about 2016 (to quote the sage), “Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?”

Manjoo continues:

Social networks and even governments are looking into ways to curb viral misinformation, but this fight will define our age. The root of the problem is that humans are weak, gullible dolts; every day many of us, even people who should know better — folks with fancy jobs and blue check marks next to our handles — keep falling for online hoaxes. Virality hijacks our better instincts, and because so many of the internet’s business models benefit from instant popularity, there’s a great deal of money and power riding on our failings.

There is only one long-term fix: that a critical number of us alter how we approach viral content. Let’s all consciously embark on a mind-set shift. In 2020, question anything that everyone’s talking about, especially if it fits all your priors, or there’s some kind of ad money involved. (Hint: There’s always ad money involved.) If you can’t stop sharing, at least slow your roll. The stakes are enormous; there’s no room for error. Strive to be better, please.

Good advice. In a world where Don LaFontaine could declare “Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible,” critical thinking skills are neither held in high regard nor taught. Even people whose judgment is generally reliable screw up. One “bit” of mine is to loudly poke a finger at someone’s chest and declare, “Oh, yeah? Well I’m not as smart as I think I am!”

Cross-posted from Hullabaloo.

by Tom Sullivan

Conservative resentment of whites’ flagging demographic dominance became more pronounced over the 2010s. Hugh Hewitt might blame liberal snootiness if he likes (he does), but that’s not why over the last decade Republicans needed “surgical” gerrymandering like Viagra for keeping up their membership in Congress.

Hewitt complains Donald Trump’s opponents are “millions whose self-regard was greater than their esteem for the people’s vote” even while admitting, yes, yes, we know Trump lost the 2016 popular vote.

But against that resentment, the GOP’s own “autopsy” on the 2012 race found former Republican voters described the party as “scary,” “narrow minded,” and “out of touch,” a party of “stuffy old men.” Younger voters rejected them. Minorities thought “Republicans do not like them or want them in the country.” Rather than adjust course, Republicans spent the decade resembling those remarks.

Charles Gaba used Twitter Monday to illustrate how much America has changed and how much the Republican Party has not. Membership in the House caucuses tells the tale.

📣 UDPATE: OK, I've added Native American/Alaskan (4 total) and Asian/Pacific Islander (13). Several members fall into multiple categories, of course…Rep. Bobby Scott is a member of the CBC but is also Filipino by birth, etc.) pic.twitter.com/8pObFqby7J

— Charles Gaba ✡️ (@charles_gaba) December 29, 2019

At Salon, David Daley (“Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count“) provides a brief history of REDMAP, the Redistricting Majority Project that flipped state houses red in 2010 and gave Republicans a decade of heavily gerrymandered district maps in Wisconsin, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan. Ensuring minority rule became a goal for pocket-Constitution-carrying Republicans. Once in control, the minority dug in, passing voting restrictions. Florida Republicans undermined a state constitutional amendment restoring voting rights to felons. In Texas, they made it a felony to cast an ineligible ballot by accident, which happens among immigrants and ex-felons unsure of their voting status. Several states passed legislation making it more difficult to mount voter registration drives, etc.

Daley concludes his grim summary of a democracy hijacked:

We stand on the verge of the next redistricting cycle, which will begin in 2021, without the prospect of intervention from the federal courts, with the gerrymander wars headed south and the prospect of states using citizen population, rather than total population, to draw state legislative districts, all, again, with the goal of standing athwart demographic change and shouting “stop.”

Republicans found rigging democracy is easier than persuading voters their policies have merit. While accusing the left of looking down its maternalistic nose at voters and knowing what’s best for them, Republicans have chosen to trade democracy for the mere appearance of it. That is what its shrinking base demands.

U.S. population growth has seen a steady decline since 2015, new census data shows, stemming from both “a lack of migrants’ entering the country” and “a drop in so-called natural increase, which is the difference between births and deaths.” White population decline has the GOP base spooked.

“In 1980, nearly half of U.S. counties — 1,412 of them — had populations that were almost exclusively (98 percent or more) white,” the Washington Post reported in 2015. “Thirty years later, only 149 counties — fewer than five percent — fit that same description.” Pew reported this year that 109 U.S. counties have become majority nonwhite since 2000.

Robert Jones (“The End of White Christian America“) explains it is not guns or religion driving support for Trump, but “their belief that ‘making America great again’ necessarily entails restoring white Christian demographic and political dominance.” To that end, the Constitution and the rule of law are disposable.

Explaining away Trump supporters as racist is an oversimplification. This goes much deeper than racism to something much more primal. This political moment is about power and who is unwilling to share it.

Cross-posted from Hullabaloo.

by Tom Sullivan

Misdirection is perhaps the magician’s most powerful tool. With it, they make us believe one set of events is taking place when the truth is something else entirely. Magicians manipulate human attention to mystify and entertain. Propagandists manipulate it to misinform, confuse and divide. Politicians use misdirection to avoid accountability for acts they’d rather not see the light of day. Bright, shiny objects, even metaphorical ones, sometimes have a way of drawing our attention all by themselves.

The nation’s capitol, for example. While many of us focused on what happened inside the Beltway, others were winning seats in state houses, redrawing state and congressional districts, and neutering democracy.

After 40 years of foreign policy and economic failures capped by the collapse of 2008, the Great Recession, and “inequality at century-high levels,” one might think Republicans — and Democrats — would question neoliberalism’s laissez-faire approach to politics, global trade, and social philosophy, writes Ganesh Sitaraman (“The Great Democracy”). Especially on the right, the response went beyond “ostrichlike blindness” to doubling down on failure.

But look! See! A record-high stock market. Shiny!

Neoliberalism’s radical individualism fostered a fracturing of the social contract and a balkanization of the political community. Demagogues rushed into the vacuum “to inflame racial, nationalist, and religious antagonism, which only further fuels the divisions within society.” Not to mention undermining “the preconditions for a free and democratic society.”

Missing the forest for the trees, instead of contemplating rejection of failed premises and looking for new solutions, Washington sought instead technocratic tweaks to the prevailing status quo, Sitaraman writes at The New Republic:

The solutions of the neoliberal era offer no serious ideas for how to confront the collapse of the middle class and the spread of widespread economic insecurity. The solutions of the neoliberal era offer no serious ideas for how to address the corruption of politics and the influence of moneyed interests in every aspect of civic life—from news media to education to politics and regulation. The solutions of the neoliberal era offer no serious ideas for how to restitch the fraying social fabric, in which people are increasingly tribal, divided, and disconnected from civic community. And the solutions of the neoliberal era offer no serious ideas for how to confront the fusion of oligarchic capitalism and nationalist authoritarianism that has now captured major governments around the world—and that seeks to invade and undermine democracy from within.

That does not mean no minds ever change, Charles Blow explains for the New York Times. The decade has brought more change outside the Beltway. Being gay went mainstream. Support for marijuana legalization became so mainstream even former speaker of the House, John Boehner, became a spokesperson. Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, the #MeToo movement, the Women’s March, March For Our Lives, climate activism, etc. reawakened civic activism.

Blow adds:

Mass shootings have become part of the American motif. Republicans and the gun lobby have resisted efforts to address the epidemic of gun violence in this country, so the carnage has become an ambient terror in our society. The mass shootings have not only increased in frequency, they have become more deadly.

In September, The Los Angeles Times analyzed more than 50 years of mass shootings and found: “Twenty percent of the 164 cases in our database occurred in the last five years. More than half of the shootings have occurred since 2000 and 33 percent since 2010. The deadliest years yet were 2017 and 2018, and this year is shaping up to rival them, with at least 60 killed in mass shootings, 38 of them in the last five weeks.”

But are these shootings dismissed as terrorist attacks or the work of individual madmen trees in a larger forest? Shiny distractions from what’s really going on?

Are the dominant governing structures of the last 40 years, those faulty ideas that exacerbated social disintegration, global instability, the undermining of democracy, and record economic inequality causing (or at least contributing to) the social unraveling? Are technocratic tweaks insufficient to meet the historic moment?

Sitaraman concludes:

In 1982, as the neoliberal curtain was rising, Colorado Governor Richard Lamm remarked that “the cutting edge of the Democratic Party is to recognize that the world of the 1930s has changed and that a new set of public policy responses is appropriate.” Today, people around the world have recognized that the world of the 1980s has changed and that it is time for a new approach to politics. The central question of our time is what comes next.

But like the old light-bulb joke, first the political class has to want to change. Or is making them change our job?

Cross-posted from Hullabaloo.

.

by Tom Sullivan

“Trump is the first president since at least the Civil War to so directly kindle the nation’s political conflicts,” Ron Brownstein writes at The Atlantic. Aw, come on. Now he’ll think he’s the new Lincoln.

Brownstein’s larger point is battle lines are drawn. They have not budged much since 2016. Donald Trump is the president of red America (read: rural) and punisher of blue America (read: metropolitan). The 2020 elections will be a cage match between the future vs. the past, between the Democrats’ “coalition of transformation” and Republicans’ “coalition of restoration.”

Readers know that the latter’s shrinking demographic footprint is being inflated by anti-democratic structural advantages states with smaller populations possess in the Senate and the Electoral College. Not to mention by vigorous efforts among Republicans to suppress the votes of young people and nonwhites. Given those factors, a Republican coalition built on “small states that remain mostly white and Christian” may yet hang onto power for a few more election cycles. “[B]oth parties live in constant fear that even the tiniest of blunders will lead to victory for the other,” Brownstein writes:

That the parties are growing in their differences only compounds that fear. Election outcomes now produce whiplash-inducing reversals in policy outcomes, since the two sides represent coalitions with such divergent priorities and preferences. Polling by the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute captured that separation: In an October survey, 92 percent of voters who approve of Trump say Republicans are working “to protect the American way of life against outside threats,” while 75 percent of voters who disapprove of him say the GOP has been taken over by racists. Conversely, three-fourths of Trump approvers say Democrats have been taken over by socialists, while three-fourths of those who disapprove of him say the Democratic Party is endeavoring to make capitalism work better for average Americans.

As much as social-cultural differences are widening the divide, like much of human conflict this is about relative power. Plus, an unrealistic understanding of humans — shaped by the botched economic models of the last half-century — as rational economic actors. (We’ll be looking more at that in this space soon enough.)

Danielle Allen argues this morning at the Washington Post:

[T]here are three fundamental blind spots in our most recent paradigms of political economy. The first is a description of human beings as “rational actors,” whose decisions rest on essentially utilitarian forms of calculation. The second is a depiction of society as consisting of millions of Robinson Crusoes, all wholly independent of one another. The third is a failure to recognize the value in forms of coordination achieved other than through the price mechanism.

One might argue those blind spots in economic theory have contributed to the red-blue divide as much as cultural differences. Generations have learned to see one another as competitors in a zero-sum game of power and money in a society that perceives money as power and a perverse measure of virtue. Our economic model for Man has eroded cooperation among communities as much as technological change. The resulting tension drives social and racial animus among those for whom community has shrunk to kin and church. Where healthy communities are welcoming, threatened ones become suspicious and insular.

More than red hats and racism is at work here. More than immigration, too.

Cross-posted from Hullabaloo.

by Tom Sullivan

I’ve written for a decade about the Midas cult possessed with turning every human interaction into a transaction (gold). The cult believes any product or service provided by “we the people” that might even in theory be provided by the private sector is a crime against capitalism.

I’ve described the modern corporate model for capitalism as another of those “invention gone wrong” tales common in fiction. In Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” (1818) and in films since the early 20th century, those wayward human inventions are always technological or biological. In lived reality, they are legal: corporations, “artificial persons” conceived in law and born on paper (once, anyway).

In this Dutch mini-documentary, Anand Giridharadas (“Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World“) has the number of “market world” and those who benefit from it at the expense of everyone else.

https://twitter.com/AnandWrites/status/1209932420297965569?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

Here is the full 30-min. documentary:

Giridharadas describes the plutocratic class behind the Second Gilded Age and the “win-win” ideology plutocrats use to promote it (and themselves) [timestamp 9:30]:

The idea of win-win has become a very crucial gospel of this market-world religion. And what win-win-ism says is that it is possible to fight for the least among us, it is possible to fight inequality, reduce poverty, without hurting those on top. In fact, in ways that enrich and create profit for those on top. Now, this is an amazing promise. I mean, what a notion, right? If you apply this to other domains, you say, Wow! We can empower women in ways that will increase men’s power? Wow! How do you do that? Wow! We can end slavery in ways that will make white plantation owners even richer than they were before? Wow! What a great promise. Sounds wonderful, right? Well, it’s a lie. It’s a lie.

The lie shows up when the one percent — the people who benefit most — burnish their self-images by trying to do good for the people harmed by the system they themselves created.

Giridharadas in essence extends Upton Sinclair’s 1934 “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” Rich people promote ideas that justify their elevated place in society, as they have since the age of kings [timestamp 24:10]:

Through their patronage of ideas festivals, things like TED, publications, etc., the plutocrats have fostered a kind of set of court thinkers within the palace who supply the justifications for their rule. And some of these people were never serious thinkers to begin with, but some of them were serious who got tempted into [being] the kind of thinkers who don’t challenge the fundamental dynamics and equations of a winners-take-all society.

Where Giridharadas’s analysis falls short is in emphasizing the players to the exclusion of the underlying legal structure that created and sustains the current plutocracy. That structure is fundamental to the modern corporate form humans created half a century after “Frankenstein” first appeared in print. As I’ve suggested, that system has since metastasized. It had help:

Post-Reagan, deregulated capitalism has long looked like something out of Mary Shelley or science-fiction films, a creature we created, but no longer control. Billionaires and their acolytes see only its benefits, but as Jeff Goldblum’s Dr. Ian Malcolm says in The Lost World: Jurassic Park, “Oh, yeah. Oooh, ahhh, that’s how it always starts. Then later there’s running, and then screaming.” Where once We the People held capitalism’s leash, now we wear the collar.

Whether it’s turning your child’s education from a shared public cost into a corporate profit center; or turning the principle of one-man, one-vote into one-dollar, one-vote; or carbon tax credits and accounting tricks for addressing rising sea levels; questioning the universal application of a business approach to any human need or problem prompts the challenge, “Do you have something against making a profit?” A more subtle form of red-baiting, this ploy is supposed to be a conversation stopper. Yes? You’re a commie. Game over.

“We are not fated to live this way,” historian Steve Fraser told Bill Moyers five years ago. Indeed, there have been “capitalist acts between consenting adults” (Robert Nozick) since before Hammurabi. Capitalism in its present form is a new isotope toxic to those who fuel it with their labor. It is system in which the people no longer govern. They are ruled by those who would make serfs of us again, telling us only by their being kings can the rest of us flourish.

We can imagine a better world, Giridharadas believes. We can end the age of capital and usher in the age of reform. Let’s hope we find the will to create it.

Cross-posted from Hullabaloo.

by Tom Sullivan

“I never understood wind,” the president began before launching into another incoherent monologue on wind turbines.

On construction sites across the South of my youth, such monologues from co-workers began, “Now, I’ll tell you what’s the truth….” You knew what came next would be a doozy.

“I never understood wind,” Donald Trump told the Turning Point USA conference Saturday. “I know windmills very much, I have studied it better than anybody.”

Here we go. The rest was word salad.

Trump’s puffing his encyclopedic knowledge of all things has brought him the allegiance of millions of credulous followers. So credulous, in fact, that he is not the only scammer scamming them. Dark money groups unaffiliated with his campaign have appropriated Trump’s logo and likeness to raise $46 million so far that is not going into his campaign:

The groups mimic Trump’s brand in the way they look and feel. They borrow the president’s Twitter avatar on Facebook pages, use clips of Trump’s voice in robocalls asking for “an emergency contribution to the campaign” and, in some cases, have been affiliated with former Trump aides, such as onetime deputy campaign manager David Bossie. But most are spending little money to help the president win in 2020, POLITICO found.

The unofficial pro-Trump boosters number in the hundreds and are alarming the actual operatives charged with reelecting the president: They suck up money that Trump aides think should be going to the campaign or the Republican National Committee, and they muddy the Trump campaign’s message and make it harder to accumulate new donors, Trump allies say.

“There’s nothing we can do to stop them,” said Kelly Sadler, a spokeswoman for America First, the one super PAC authorized by Trump. “This is a problem for the campaign, as well as us, as well as for the RNC.”

And for the country in general. Keeping critical-thinking education out of public schools works for predators until they have competitors. Most of the money comes from donors giving $200 or less.

Much of the money raised by these groups goes to “management services” and fundraising expenses. A growing number of such outfits hawk “MAGA merchandise alongside photos and conservative memes, videos and photos.” The Presidential Coalition, a group run by former Trump deputy campaign manager, David Bossie, began spending significant sums to support Trump only after an Axios reported it spent only 3 percent on political activity.

If he weren’t so busy “counterpunching” (as supporters call flinging insults via Twitter), Trump might free up enough attention span to get angry about this.

Michael Lewis, author of “Moneyball” and “The Big Short,” wrote in “The Fifth Risk” that Trump got plenty angry when he found out Chris Christie was raising money to pay transition staff:

Trump was apoplectic, yelling: You’re stealing my money! You’re stealing my fucking money! What the fuck is this?

Trump really dislikes others making money off his brand.

Seeing Bannon, Trump turned on him and screamed: Why are you letting him steal my fucking money? Bannon and Christie together set out to explain to Trump federal law. Months before the election, the law said, the nominees of the two major parties were expected to prepare to take control of the government. The government supplied them with office space in downtown DC, along with computers and rubbish bins and so on, but the campaigns paid their people. To which Trump replied: Fuck the law. I don’t give a fuck about the law. I want my fucking money. Bannon and Christie tried to explain that Trump couldn’t have both his money and a transition.

Shut it down, said Trump. Shut down the transition.

Forty-seven million dollars is a lot of staff, mister president. You should pay attention more.

Cross-posted from Hullabaloo.

by Tom Sullivan

A friend who grew up with the culture observes evangelical Jesus is white, drives a pickup truck, wears a red hat, and carries an AR-15. Evangelicals’ conception of God, he believes, is a larger, grander version of themselves. It’s why they’ve adopted Donald Trump as their personal savior. Trump’s vocabulary is limited. He isn’t very bright. He is incurious and he doesn’t read. But like the God of the Old Testament, he demands adoration, he’s quick to anger, smites his enemies, and dwells in the sky (above Manhattan) in halls of gold.

They want to hit the lottery. He hit the birth lottery.

Evangelicals as a group may still consider Trump their earthly king, but a leading evangelical publication, Christianity Today, believes it’s time for him to go. Editor in chief Mark Galli begins, yes, Democrats have had it in for him from Day 1, and Trump did not have a meaningful opportunity to tell his side of the story during the House inquiry. Nevertheless:

The president of the United States attempted to use his political power to coerce a foreign leader to harass and discredit one of the president’s political opponents. That is not only a violation of the Constitution; more importantly, it is profoundly immoral.

The reason many are not shocked about this is that this president has dumbed down the idea of morality in his administration. He has hired and fired a number of people who are now convicted criminals. He himself has admitted to immoral actions in business and his relationship with women, about which he remains proud. His Twitter feed alone—with its habitual string of mischaracterizations, lies, and slanders—is a near perfect example of a human being who is morally lost and confused.

The impeachment hearing illuminated the president’s abuse of power and moral failings in a way the Mueller investigation did not. “This damages the institution of the presidency, damages the reputation of our country, and damages both the spirit and the future of our people,” CT continues. “None of the president’s positives can balance the moral and political danger we face under a leader of such grossly immoral character.”

Galli hesitates to ask the U.S. Senate to strip Trump of his office. But whether the Senate does, or voters do next November, Galli writes, CT’s “patient charity” towards Trump has run out.

“Unsavory dealings and immoral acts by the President and those close to him have rendered this administration morally unable to lead,” CT wrote of Bill Clinton in October 1998. Evangelicals’ partisan loyalty the sitting president now makes a mockery of their faith, Galli explains. The only way for the faithful to remain faithful is by removing Trump from office.

‘Tis the season

When last we saw Washington state Rep. Matt Shea, the Republican legislator was in eastern Washington interviewing young, biblical patriots training to fight a holy war. (God-warriors train to shoot pistols while doing one-handed cartwheels, Matrix-style.) Shea was also campaigning for eastern Washington to secede and form its own state. Shea was under investigation earlier this year into whether he had planned or participated in political violence. The investigation’s report has just been published, as well as forwarded to the FBI and to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, reports the Seattle Times:

The 108-page report found that beginning in November 2015, Shea, working with militia leader Ammon Bundy, helped “in the planning and preparation” of the Malheur takeover, a six-week conflict in which dozens of armed protesters occupied the refuge in rural Eastern Oregon. The standoff ended after one protester was shot and killed and dozens were arrested.

“Representative Shea, as a leader in the Patriot Movement, planned, engaged in and promoted a total of three armed conflicts of political violence against the United States Government in three states outside the state of Washington over a three-year period,” according to the report released Thursday. “In one conflict Representative Shea led covert strategic pre-planning in advance of the conflict.”

Immediately after the report was released, Rep. J.T. Wilcox, the Republican minority leader of the House, said Shea “has been suspended from any role in the House Republican Caucus.”

Shea may be about to be booted from the state legislature. That requires a two-thirds vote of the House and has only occurred once in the state’s 130-year history, the Times notes.

In an interview on Infowars this month, Shea called the investigation a “Marxist smear campaign” and “political warfare according to a Maoist insurgency model.” He also compared it to the inquiries into President Donald Trump, which he did again Thursday on Facebook.

Shea also said during the interview that he had “not been provided a meaningful opportunity to respond” to the investigation.

Despite investigators’ repeated attempts to offer him that opportunity, Shea refused to be interviewed. Just like the sky god.

Cross-posted from Hullabaloo.