Dec 31, 2017

In Praise of Short-Term Love



 So much in our culture emphasizes long-term love; it may be time to hear a word or two in praise of the short-term approach. This is a very thought-provoking presentation even though I have some reservations about some of its assumptions.

Dec 29, 2017

Physicists Declare the Future Might be Influencing the Past


Quantum physics, quantum mechanics and their cousins of scientific thought are difficult fields of study to grasp. It’s like the difficulties our human minds have comprehending time, or the theory that time isn’t linear.
In the past there was the double slit experiment, which seemed to prove beyond any doubt that by simply observing matter, it could change the way it is expressed (going from particle to wave behavior). Take a minute to think about what this means: if you observe matter, it might change just because you observed it.
Now, headlines are being made about how the future might actually be influencing the past: you heard that right.
Retrocausality is a term given to this theory: the idea of reverse causality, that the future might influence the past.
A couple physicists from North America examined some basic foundations for quantum theory and came to the conclusion that unless time was completely linear and nothing but linear, “measurements made to a particule could echo back in time as well as forward.” To understand firsthand what this means is difficult.
Well summarized by Science Alert:
“We all know quantum mechanics is weird. And part of that weirdness comes down to the fact that at a fundamental level, particles don’t act like solid billiard balls rolling down a table, but rather like a blurry cloud of possibilities shifting around the room.
This blurry cloud comes into sharp focus when we try to measure particles, meaning we can only ever see a white ball hitting a black one into the corner pocket, and never countless white balls hitting black balls into every pocket.
There is an argument among physicists over whether that cloud of maybes represents something real, or if it’s just a convenient representation.”
As far back as 2012, a physicist named Huw Price published a paper titled “Understanding Retrocausality –Can a Message Be Sent to the Past?.” In it, he suggests that if nothing restricts time to only move in one direction, time must essentially behave as strangely as particles and waves are known to in quantum physics.
“Critics object that there is complete time-symmetry in classical physics, and yet no apparent retrocausality. Why should the quantum world be any different?” Price asked.
This topic is a real rubix cube for the mind. Do you think time is linear? Do you think physicists are close to figuring this out, or far away? I’m inclined to believe they are far away from the truth, but that the truth must be very strange, and some particular people may be on the precipice of some discovery, possibly far outside the realm of academia.
Source: Science Alert

Dec 27, 2017

What Christmas Means by Chris Hedges

Image result for god of the oppressed christmas


In the early 1980s I was in a refugee camp for Guatemalans who had fled the war into Honduras. It was a cold, dreary winter afternoon. The peasant farmers and their families, living in filth and mud, were decorating their tents with strips of colored paper. That night, they said, they would celebrate the flight of Mary, Joseph and the infant Jesus to Egypt to escape the slaughter of the children of Bethlehem ordered by Herod. The celebration is known as the Day of the Holy Innocents.

“Why is this such an important day?” I asked.

“It was on this day that Christ became a refugee,” a farmer answered.

I knew Matthew’s biblical passage about the flight to Egypt by heart. I had heard my father, a Presbyterian minister, read it in services every Christmas in the farm town in upstate New York where I grew up. But it took an illiterate farmer, who had fled in fear with his wife and children from the murderous rampages of the Guatemalan army and the death squads, who no doubt counted friends, even relatives, among the dead, a man who had lost everything he owned, to explain it to me.


The story of Christmas—like the story of the crucifixion, in which Jesus is abandoned by his disciples, attacked by the mob, condemned to death by the state, placed on death row and executed—is not written for the oppressors. It is written for the oppressed. And what is quaint and picturesque to those who live in privilege is visceral and empowering to those the world condemns.

Jesus was not a Roman citizen. He lived under Roman occupation. The Romans were white. Jesus was a person of color. And the Romans, who peddled their own version of white supremacy, nailed people of color to crosses almost as often as we finish them off with lethal injections, gun them down in the streets or lock them up in cages. The Romans killed Jesus as an insurrectionist, a revolutionary. They feared the radicalism of the Christian Gospel. And they were right to fear it. The Roman state saw Jesus the way the American state saw Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. Then, like now, prophets were killed.

The radicalism of the Christian Gospel would be muted, distorted and denied by the institutional church once it came to power in the third century. It would be perverted by court theologians, church leaders and, in the 20th century, fascists. It would be mangled by the heretics in the Christian right to sanctify the worst aspects of American imperialism and capitalism. The Bible unequivocally condemns the powerful. It is not a self-help manual to become rich. It does not bless America or any other nation. It was written for the powerless, for those the theologian James Cone calls the crucified of the earth. It was written to give a voice to, and affirm the dignity of, those being crushed by malignant power and empire.

Undocumented parents living in mortal fear of being seized by immigration agents and being separated from their children, African-Americans living in the hellish violence of south Chicago, know the true meaning of Christmas. They feel what Mary and Joseph felt. Fear, even terror, is the foundation of Christmas.

“And the United States of America government, when it came to treating her citizens of Indian descent fairly, she failed,” the Rev. Jeremiah Wright thundered from his pulpit in Chicago in a 2003 sermon that, when it became publicized in 2008, saw presidential candidate Barack Obama turn his back on his pastor. “She put them on reservations. When it came to treating her citizens of Japanese descent fairly, she failed. She put them in internment prison camps. When it came to treating her citizens of African descent fairly, America failed. She put them in chains, the government put them in slave quarters, put them on auction blocks, put them in cotton fields, put them in inferior schools, put them in substandard housing, put them in scientific experiments, put them in the lowest-paying jobs, put them outside the equal protection of the law, kept them out of their racist bastions of higher education and locked them into positions of hopelessness and helplessness. The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing ‘God Bless America.’ No, no, no, not God Bless America. God damn America—that’s in the Bible—for killing innocent people. God damn America, for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America, as long as she tries to act like she is God, and she is supreme.”

Wright paid for his honesty. He spoke a core truth about the Gospel that few preachers dare to utter, lest their jobs and their status are jeopardized by the big donors in their congregations walking out. Preach the Gospel and you don’t last long in a cathedral or a well-heeled suburban church. The preachers there are skilled dissemblers. And this is why, in our moment of crisis, they have little to say. All institutions including the church, the theologian Paul Tillich reminded us, are inherently demonic. You can serve God or Mammon. You can’t serve both.

Writer James Baldwin said he left the pulpit to preach the Gospel. There is more Gospel in Baldwin than in most Sunday sermons or theological texts. Those who proclaim the Gospel are outcasts, including from the institutional church. They are often branded as heretics. They defy power. They stand with the oppressed. And when you stand with the oppressed you are treated like the oppressed.

“Being in jail on Christmas day is not just counter-cultural, but anti-cultural,” wrote the Rev. Daniel Berrigan from his cell on Christmas 1993, imprisoned for one of his many acts of civil disobedience. “The culture has no sense of Christ’s spirit. People spend billions of dollars in an orgy of consumption, exchanging presents while ignoring the plight of the poor and the demands of discipleship. As George Anderson of St. Al’s says, ‘We cannot mark Christmas without remembering—and taking up—the cross. Instead of marking this day with the cultural spirit of materialism, we sit here in poverty. The only gifts we have to give each other are a piece of bread and an embrace of peace in Jesus’ name. That is more than enough.”

Christmas is not about the virgin birth. It is not about angels. It is not even about a historical Jesus. There is no evidence that Jesus existed. To debate these topics is to engage in a theological Trivial Pursuit. The Christmas story is about learning how to be human, about kneeling before a newborn infant who is helpless, vulnerable, despised and poor. It is about inverting the world’s values. It is about understanding that the religious life—and this life can be lived with or without a religious creed—calls on us to protect and nurture the least among us, those demonized and rejected.

I have seen the infant Jesus in the United Nations feeding stations during the famine in Sudan, in the squalid and overcrowded refugee camps in Gaza, in the rubble of wartime Sarajevo and in America’s inner cities, where children go to bed hungry and live in fear. I have seen too the spirit of Christmas. As a boy I saw it in my father during civil rights demonstrations and in street protests against the Vietnam War, ones he joined as a minister and a World War II veteran. I saw it in his standing up for gays and lesbians at a time when the church chastised clergy who championed gay rights. I saw it when he gave his annual sermon to raise money for orphans, a sermon he never managed to complete. He tried each year to tell the stories of these abandoned boys and girls. His voice always gave way to tears. I listened, along with the hushed congregation, to my father weep for the infant Christ, unable to continue. There was an elderly woman in our church who set up the candles before every service. She struggled with dementia. She was often unsure which end of the candle was supposed to be inserted into the base. My father, without saying a word, would help her place the candle in the holder. He did this every week. These tiny, often unseen acts of kindness, ones that take place in war and peace, are humankind’s meaning.

I met with the Rev. Coleman Brown, the university chaplain and my professor, once a week when I was an undergraduate at Colgate University. He gave me books to read by Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, William Stringfellow, Martin Luther King Jr. and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. One winter’s afternoon, as sheets of snow fell outside his office window, he read to me T.S. Eliot’s poem, “Journey of the Magi.”

In this poem the wise men make the long and arduous journey to the infant Jesus. This is not only a physical journey. It is a spiritual journey. Eliot writes:

A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.

The magi turn their backs on their old world to embrace one that is alien, obscure and perplexing. They are full of doubt. They feel pain, not joy, “with the voices singing in our ears, saying that this was all folly.” There is no sudden epiphany. There is only bewilderment. They become aliens in their own land, “with the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly.” Faith, they find—this new faith—is exhausting and even disillusioning. Eliot concludes:

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

America is in terminal decline. It is enveloped by radical evil. Its corporate systems of power and empire exploit and kill with impunity. Its perverted values champion cruelty, mendacity and greed. It bows before the idols of money and power. It is severed from the human. It, like Herod and the Roman Empire, damns the infant Jesus. There is nothing easy about faith. It demands we smash the idols that enslave us. It demands we die to the world. It demands self-sacrifice. It demands resistance. It calls us to see ourselves in the wretched of the earth. It separates us from all that is familiar. It knows that once we feel the suffering of others, we will act.

Poet's Nook: "The Servant of Unity" by St. Teresa of Avila




Most men in power have not the strength or wisdom
to be satisfied with the way
things are.

The sane know contentment, for beauty is their lover,
and beauty is never absent from the world.

The farther away light is from one's touch
the more one naturally speaks of the
need for change.

Yes, overthrow any government inside
that makes you weep.

The child blames the external and focuses his energies there;
the warrior conquers the realms within
and becomes
gifted.

Only the inspired should make decisions
that affect the lives of many,

never a man who has not held God in his arms
and become the servant of
unity.

Musings





Let people realize clearly that every time they threaten someone or humiliate or unnecessarily hurt or dominate or reject another human being, they become forces for the creation of psychopathology, even if these be small forces. Let them recognize that every person who is kind, helpful, decent, psychologically democratic, affectionate, and warm, is a psychotheraputic force.

 ~ Abraham H. Maslow~

Dec 24, 2017

Slaves and Bulldozers, Plutocrats and Widgets by Kristine Mattis


There is not an industrial company on earth, not an institution of any kind – not mine, not yours, not anyone’s – that is sustainable. I stand convicted by me, myself alone, not by anyone else, as a plunderer of the earth. But not by our civilization’s definition. By our civilization’s definition, I’m a captain of industry and in the eyes of many, a kind of modern-day hero.
— Ray Anderson, (1934-2011) CEO of Interface, Inc.
We are living a collective illusion known as the civilized world. We feign concern for our horrendous conditions of poverty, socioeconomic inequality, deteriorating public health, and severe environmental degradation (to which climate change is merely one factor), but everything we do belies that distress. These issues comprise the largest risks to the survival of the human species, as well as the most significant amoral atrocities on the planet. Both individually and as a species, our health, safety, and ability the live a decent, dignified life have always been imperiled by these predicaments. Yet, we continue along with complete cognitive dissonance in that the crux of our lives – our jobs, our consumer culture – all contribute to, perpetuate, and exacerbate the unsustainable and morally reprehensible conditions of our existence. But while we are all marginally responsible for the multitude of calamities befalling us, the one group who bears the brunt of the blame for our social and ecological decay is the wealthy.

Have you looked around and seen just what humanity has done to our stunning Earth? We’ve bulldozed the beauty for bucks. Far too much of what was once a glorious paradise is now a complete disaster of unfathomable proportions. A disaster wholly of our own making. In America, and in most places around the world, from the moment we are born we are preparing for a future career, and  more specifically, for the lifelong goal of making money. But on the whole, most of the jobs we do end up being more detrimental than beneficial to society and the environment. We characterize work through measures of productivity, but producing more and more unnecessary, meaningless, and often useless products compromises our physical environment, which in turn, compromises the health of humans, other beings, and our entire planetary ecosystem.

So many of the things that form the basis of our civilization should not, and perhaps cannot, exist in a just and sustainable world. Items like arms and artillery, synthetic chemicalsconcentrated animal feeding operationsplasticsmartphones and other electronic gadgetrydo not feed a sustainable and equitable world but create more needless havoc. The irony, though, is that the very people who run the systems that incessantly construct and promulgate these harmful, redundant, or unnecessary products are the richest and most successful people on earth.

We define success in our society almost exclusively in terms of wealth, with its attendant power and sometimes, fame. Rich people are the recipients of adulation and reverence for nothing more than their accumulation of wealth and material products. We like to think that riches come by way of great intellect, talent, skill, and a strong work ethic, but in reality, monetary success is more a matter of inherited socioeconomic status, ambition, and determination, rather than ability and aptitude. Most of all, to achieve wealth means to have a myopic resolve, not only to look away from how the sausage is made, but to not care how the sausage is made.

The wealthy in our society then become the people with the most power and influence. While ironically, they are the people least deserving of our respect. They are the exact people whom we should look upon with the utmost skepticism and even disdain. They should not be in the position to make decisions about our collective lives and the workings of our society, because their financial success is completely antithetical to societal justice and sustainability.

It doesn’t take great acumen or diligence to make a lot of money; it takes a narrow-minded, insular, immoral, sometimes psychopathic view of life, in which personal pleasure and profit are the primary variables. It’s quite easy to do well financially and find personal satisfaction if the exploitation of humans, other animals, and the entire biosphere is left outside of the realm of your career consciousness. As Ray Anderson, CEO of Interface Carpet admitted,“For 21 yearsI never gave a thought to what we were taking from the earth or doing to the earth in the making of our products.” He built his fortune without consideration to the effects of his enterprise until someone brought the deleterious consequences to his attention.

We like to believe the cream rises to the top, but the truth is that the top is actually full of scum. We have seen in recent weeks, if we did not know already, that entertainment, politics, and indeed, all of the wealthiest industries are cesspools of moral depravity, especially at the apex.

There may be some exceptions, but scum is the rule. Some might call these people ambitious, some might call them razor-focused, others would call them sociopathic. It takes a careful regimen of willful  ignorance and/or denial to not consider all the harms that directly and indirectly result from avenues toward career achievements in the process of our normal lives – harms such as exploitation of labor, torture of animals, and toxic contamination and of food, water, and natural resources.
Material success requires rape and pillage, figuratively and literally. Donald Trump bragged that when you have the kind of wealth he has, you can treat women as objects and just “grab ’em by the pussy.” You can also exploit resources, exploit labor, befoul the environment, and endanger public health with few or no consequences. On a purely moral basis, only scum could have the hubris to consider others as mere playthings for their own enjoyment, to feel superior enough to warrant their extreme wealth which they did not earn but stole from the commons, and to believe that they deserve obscene riches when the majority of others do not even have basic life necessities.

How often have you heard the phrases “not that there is anything wrong with being rich,” or “I don’t begrudge him his wealth”? Wealth should be considered reprehensible. Wealth has always been in the hands of the few to the detriment of the many, and one’s access to it has always been almost wholly correlated with one’s socioeconomic status at birth. Yet we rationalize this immoral situation and pretend that the proverbial “pie,” of which we all need a slice, is infinite in size and that wealth is accessible to anyone. We assume that being rich is not only acceptable but aspirational. It is neither in a just and sustainable world.

On a finite planet every excess dollar, every excess material good, every extra home, car, garment, trinket, piece of food, or beverage that one person possesses essentially correlates to an item that another person does not have. When we normalize one person having more than he/she needs in a world where billions have far less than the bare minimum required to meet their basic needs, then we are obliged to rethink our morality. When a simple handbag can cost between $12K and $300K and we as a society see nothing wrong with that kind of excess in the face of poverty, hunger, homelessness, and disease, we are not only completely socially corrupt, we are spelling our own doom. Poverty only exists because excessive wealth exists and neither is compatible with a sustainable and humane civilization.

To achieve a sustainable world, we must relinquish our use of non-renewable resources, we must utilize renewable resources at a level in which they have the time and ability to replenish, and we must leave no waste that is not regenerative. To achieve an equitable world, we must relinquish our greed and desire for opulence, excess, and disproportionate influence. In fact, sustainability is also a function of equity. However, our current society is predicated on the antithesis of all such requirements.

Wealthy people gain their successes because they have tunnel vision. They are singularly focused on themselves, their careers, and/or on money. They do not take into consideration the externalities involved in their actions. They pay little mind to the exploitation involved in their pursuits. Ethics never supersedes ambition. Therefore, these are the exact people who should not be in charge of making policies for the benefit of society and should not be in charge of civic ventures. To be able to be so wealthy without shame, guilt, or acknowledgement that your own wealth impedes the lives of others is to be either ignorant or indifferent. We are facing global ecological and economic collapse. Who made this happen? The wealthiest people of the world. If you are rich you do not have the solution. You are the problem.

The world is run on slave labor, indentured servitude, animal and natural resource exploitation, and endless generation of waste and contamination. Material success comes with adopting a shortsighted view of the world – closing yourself off to your own connection to global anthropogenic climate change, toxification, and inequality.

So many of the wealthy who consider themselves socially and environmentally aware perceive no connection between their own wealth accumulation and the causes they claim to champion. Instead of curtailing their materialism, they rationalize it. Instead of acknowledging that their consumerism intensifies global resource extraction, they produce more products (often erroneously labeled “green”) to sustain their riches. When the wealthy are not hawking products for their for-profit activities, they have the audacity to solicit for charitable organizations that are only necessitated by the economic system that produces poverty and environmental devastation in the wake of their extravagant wealth. They ask donations from the majority of citizens who are barely making ends meet, when they themselves could surrender probably 90% of their accumulated wealth and not notice a marked change in their material status whatsoever. The elites who are not in denial about the problems we face want scientific and technological solutions – solutions that they can throw their money at and have others solve so they do not have to think about their own contribution to the problems.

But there are no silver bullets to end inequality and environmental destruction, while continuing with business as usual in civilized society. Science cannot save us. Scientific research itself relies on the same unsustainable production, consumption, use of resources, and waste as every other industry.
Technology mavens always tout the great social or biological service that their new technology will provide. Their innovations comes under the guise of helping the world, but the majority of the time, their creations are frivolous and do not do much more than use natural resources, create waste, and earn them exorbitant profit. At the university where I earned my doctoral degree there is a masters program in biotechnology and there’s a reason why their curriculum extends beyond just science, containing at least two required business courses. Of course, business is fundamental to their instruction because the principle purpose of our education, of our careers, is profit.

All of the harmful products and practices in our civilization – military arms, sweatshops, low wages, pesticides, plastics, throw-away items, excess of products, animal cruelty, overuse of medicine and surgery – only exist to increase revenue for the rich. None are fair or just or equitable or sustainable. Our societal justification of the above items just marks our collective delusion. These products and practices persist in the name of profit, and we rationalize their continuation just as we rationalize extravagant wealth.

When Senator Bernie Sanders was on TV decrying President Barack Obama’s half-million dollar speaking engagements on Wall Street, the anchors of the program said to him, “Wouldn’t you do it if you could?” Bernie replied, “I wouldn’t be asked.” Rather, he should have explained that anyone with integrity would not accept money they do not need for some sort of quid pro quo from a destructive and corrupt institution. The hosts of the show surmised that everyone would jump at the opportunity to earn money if they had the chance. It is precisely that sort of mindset that enables these broadcasters to inhabit their influential positions on a national television program and to earn millions of dollars. They demonstrate what unethical opportunists they, and most of the rich, actually are. Their lack of ethics is internalized and taken for granted by not only them, but most of the rest of our society. They are more than willing to be bought at whatever price for whatever service. “Just doing my job” does not serve as an excuse for immorality.

Nevertheless, there are people who have chosen lives based on conviction rather than money. Former Uruguayan President Jose Mujica and Seattle City Council member Kashama Sawant chose to earn the local average income for their official positions and donate the remainder of their salaries toward social justice work. Biologist and writer Sandra Steingraber donated a portion of her $100K Heinz Award prize toward the fight against hydraulic fracturing (fracking) rather than spend it on personal treats. Likewise, teacher Jesse Hagopian donated his $100K settlement for being unjustly attacked with pepper-spray by Seattle police toward social justice action. Not everyone is looking to cash in, and not everyone is seeking the next, biggest profit-making endeavor.

Living with integrity and simplicity is difficult. People do not choose to live this way because their personal sacrifice will change the world. They do so because it is the right thing to do. They do so because having too much means others don’t have enough. They do so because living by example allows others who care to see that a life of wealth and consumerism augments inequality and unsustainability; it is not the only way to live and need not be. They live this way because only by walking the walk rather than talking the talk will we ever start to achieve justice and sustainability to help preserve the future of our species.

In recent years there have been waves and wave of protests throughout the country and the world in response to myriad societal maladies. The best protest we can do in America now is to reject the bourgeois life – reject excessive wealth and the material components that come with it, reject profligate consumption, reject consumerism, reject wasteful holidays, reject wasteful trinkets,  reject all that is incompatible with what we purport to champion. For example, retired talk-show host David Letterman appears sincere in his dedication toward helping combat climate change, while at the same time, he remains co-owner of an auto racing team. In the world in which we currently live, auto racing is completely incongruent with climate change mitigation. We can’t pretend to value matters like justice and sustainability unless the way we live upholds those values. We can’t decouple our livelihoods from our lives.

The rich tend to ensconce themselves in their well-manicured communities, shop with abandon, and disregard the abject poverty, environmental degradation, and injustices all around them. They are in the process of spending small portions of their vast fortunes building survival bunkers to withstand either the revolutionary upheaval that may soon come as a result of immeasurable socioeconomic inequality, or the catastrophic ecological collapse that may result from reckless resource extraction and expenditure. How misguided or cynical are they to not realize that by renouncing their extreme wealth, they would need no such provisions and could play a large part in salvaging our civilization?
Need I even explain how the current tax scam pending on Capitol Hill will serve to enhance all of the socioeconomic, environmental, and public health calamities that are arising ever more rapidly and in quick succession? Need I elaborate on how our escalating climate-related weather catastrophes only reach the cataclysmic proportions they do because of the wealth disparities involved and because of the high-risk industrial components therein, that exist mainly to enrich the elite? Would these natural disasters be so disastrous if more people had the economic resilience that they deserve and if society took more precaution against the hazards of multibillion-dollar industries that manufacture products of questionable value while generating tremendous wealth to a select few?

We live n a time of unprecedented social disarray, ecological disrepair, public health decay, and moral depravity. Nearly every aspect of the way we live in modern industrial societies is completely unsustainable. Even if we were to transition to 100% solar energy tomorrow throughout the planet, the worst effects of climate change might be averted, but the plastic pollution that permeates the most far-reaching depths of the oceans would still remain, the persistent organic pollutants (POPs) and endocrine disrupting compounds (EDCs) that harm our own health and the health of the entire global ecosystem remain. Not only do they remain, but they continue to be produced, not out of necessity, but for the financial profit of the privileged few. The production of, consumption of, and waste stream from our global industrial society continues unabated. This is the system that forms the foundation of all of our lives in the civilized world, and this is the system that bestows excessive wealth to some while leaving others fighting for survival.

While it is indeed the system of capitalism that generates and sustains our societal injustice and ecological degradation, the system is comprised of people – people who could abdicate their fictional obligation to happiness via indefinitely-increasing earnings, people who can choose better, Without a preponderance of such people, no countervailing just and sustainable system can ever compete.
In 1964, Uruguayan journalist Eduardo Galeano interviewed the famous Argentinean hero of the Cuban revolution Ernesto “Che” Guevara. In the midst of a comprehensive conversation, Che stated to Galeano, ” I don’t want every Cuban to wish he were a Rockefeller.” To be sure, if we are remotely interested in a sustainable and equitable world, the attainment of wealth must be transformed from admirable to contemptible. With regard to the multitude of obstacles we face, Ralph Nader once wrote “only the super-rich can save us.” He’s right. They can save us by not existing.

Dec 19, 2017

The Permanent Lie, Our Deadliest Threat by Chris Hedges


The most ominous danger we face does not come from the eradication of free speech through the obliteration of net neutrality or through Google algorithms that steer people away from dissident, left-wing, progressive or anti-war sites. It does not come from a tax bill that abandons all pretense of fiscal responsibility to enrich corporations and oligarchs and prepares the way to dismantle programs such as Social Security. It does not come from the opening of public land to the mining and fossil fuel industry, the acceleration of ecocide by demolishing environmental regulations, or the destruction of public education. It does not come from the squandering of federal dollars on a bloated military as the country collapses or the use of the systems of domestic security to criminalize dissent. The most ominous danger we face comes from the marginalization and destruction of institutions, including the courts, academia, legislative bodies, cultural organizations and the press, that once ensured that civil discourse was rooted in reality and fact, helped us distinguish lies from truth and facilitated justice.
Donald Trump and today’s Republican Party represent the last stage in the emergence of corporate totalitarianism. Pillage and oppression are justified by the permanent lie. The permanent lie is different from the falsehoods and half-truths uttered by politicians such as Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. The common political lie these politicians employed was not designed to cancel out reality. It was a form of manipulation. Clinton, when he signed into law the North American Free Trade Agreement, promised “NAFTA means jobs, American jobs and good-paying American jobs.” George W. Bush justified the invasion of Iraq because Saddam Hussein supposedly possessed weapons of mass destruction. But Clinton did not continue to pretend that NAFTA was beneficial to the working class when reality proved otherwise. Bush did not pretend that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction once none were found.
The permanent lie is not circumscribed by reality. It is perpetuated even in the face of overwhelming evidence that discredits it. It is irrational. Those who speak in the language of truth and fact are attacked as liars, traitors and purveyors of “fake news.” They are banished from the public sphere once totalitarian elites accrue sufficient power, a power now granted to them with the revoking of net neutrality. The iron refusal by those who engage in the permanent lie to acknowledge reality, no matter how transparent reality becomes, creates a collective psychosis.
“The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed,” Hannah Arendt wrote in “The Origins of Totalitarianism.”
The permanent lie turns political discourse into absurdist theater. Donald Trump, who lies about the size of his inauguration crowd despite photographic evidence, insists that in regard to his personal finances he is “going to get killed” by a tax bill that actually will save him and his heirs over $1 billion. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin claims he has a report that proves that the tax cuts will pay for themselves and will not increase the deficit—only there never was a report. Sen. John Cornyn assures us, countering all factual evidence, that “this is not a bill that is designed primarily to benefit the wealthy and the large businesses.”
Two million acres of public land, meanwhile, are handed over to the mining and fossil fuel industry as Trump insists the transfer means that “public lands will once again be for public use.” When environmentalists denounce the transfer as a theft, Rep. Rob Bishop calls their criticism “a false narrative.”
FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, after ending net neutrality, effectively killing free speech on the internet, says, “[T]hose who’ve said the internet as we know it is about to end have been proven wrong. …We have a free internet going forward.” And at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, phrases such as “evidence-based” and “science-based” are banned.
The permanent lie is the apotheosis of totalitarianism. It no longer matters what is true. It matters only what is “correct.” Federal courts are being stacked with imbecilic and incompetent judges who serve the “correct” ideology of corporatism and the rigid social mores of the Christian right. They hold reality, including science and the rule of law, in contempt. They seek to banish those who live in a reality-based world defined by intellectual and moral autonomy. Totalitarian rule always elevates the brutal and the stupid. These reigning idiots have no genuine political philosophy or goals. They use clichés and slogans, most of which are absurd and contradictory, to justify their greed and lust for power. This is as true on the Christian right, which is filling the ideological vacuum of the Trump administration, as it is for the corporatists that preach neoliberalism and globalization. The merger of the corporatists with the Christian right is the marrying of Godzilla to Frankenstein.
“The venal political figures need not even comprehend the social and political consequences of their behavior,” psychiatrist Joost A.M. Meerloo wrote in “The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing.” “They are compelled not by ideological belief, no matter how much they may rationalize to convince themselves they are, but by the distortions of their own personalities. They are not motivated by their advertised urge to serve their country or mankind, but rather by an overwhelming need and compulsion to satisfy the cravings of their own pathological character structures. The ideologies they spout are not real goals; they are the cynical devices by which these sick men hope to achieve some personal sense of worth and power. Subtle inner lies seduce them into going from bad to worse. Defensive self-deception, arrested insight, evasion of emotional identification with others, degradation of empathy—the mind has many defense mechanisms with which to blind the conscience.”
When reality is replaced by the whims of opinion and expediency, what is true one day often becomes false the next. Consistency is discarded. Complexity, nuance, depth and profundity are replaced with the simpleton’s belief in threats and force. This is why the Trump administration disdains diplomacy and is dynamiting the State Department. Totalitarianism, wrote novelist and social critic Thomas Mann, is at its core the desire for a simple folktale. Once this folktale replaces reality, morality and ethics are abolished.
“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities,” Voltaire warned.
The corporate elites, who even in the best of times stacked the deck against people of color, the poor and the working class, no longer play by any rules. Their lobbyists, bought-and-paid-for politicians, pliant academics, corrupt judges and television news celebrities run a kleptocratic state defined by legalized bribery and unchecked exploitation. The corporate elites write laws, regulations and bills to expand corporate looting and plunder while imposing a crippling debt peonage on the public, including college graduates burdened by huge loans. They ram through austerity measures that dismantle state and municipal services, often forcing them to be sold off to corporations, and slash social programs, including public education and health care. They insist, however, that when we have grievances we rely on the institutions they have debased and corrupted. They ask us to invest our energy and time in fixed political campaigns, petition elected representatives or appeal to the courts. They seek to lure us into their schizophrenic world, where rational discourse is pitted against gibberish. They demand we seek justice in a system designed to perpetuate injustice. It is a game we can never win.
“Thus all our dignity consist in thought,” wrote Pascal. “It is on thought that we must depend for our recovery, not on space and time, which we could never fill. Let us then strive to think well; that is the basic principle of morality.”
We must pit power against power. We must build parallel institutions and organizations that protect us from corporate assault and resist corporate domination. We must sever ourselves as much as possible from the vampire state. The more we can create self-contained communities, with our own currencies and infrastructures, the more we can starve and cripple the corporate beast. This means establishing worker-run cooperatives, local systems of food supply based on a vegan diet and independent artistic, cultural and political organizations. It means obstructing in every way possible the corporate assault, including the blocking of pipelines and fracking sites, and taking to the streets in sustained acts of civil disobedience against censorship and the attack on civil liberties. And it means creating sanctuary cities. All of this will have to be done the way it has always been done, by building personal, face-to-face relationships. We may not ultimately save ourselves, especially with the refusal by the elites to address the ravages of climate change, but we can create pods of resistance where truth, beauty, empathy and justice endure.

We Are Standing On The Sinking Titanic by Rivera Sun



Blockade the gangplanks of the Titanic! Shut down the boilers of the ship! Storm the stairs from steerage and seize the wheel!
We have passed the point where token victories, small handouts, and crumbs from banquet tables will help us. We have struck too many icebergs and the hull of our society has been breached. Band-Aids on shredded steel will not hold back the floodwaters of injustice.
We are standing on the sinking Titanic. The politicians are huddled in half-empty lifeboats, refusing to come back. They built the ship that’s sinking. They mocked the worrywarts who pointed out the lack of lifeboats. They raced full throttle through the dangerous waters, ignoring the looming icebergs of climate change, poverty, economic collapse, growing inequality, fascism, mass surveillance, imperialism, racism, the police state, monopolistic domination, and more. The list of icebergs is too long … and we’ve crashed into them all. We are screaming on the deck, pounding on the windows, thrashing in the black icy waters … or drowned in steerage class, silent and entombed.
The left blames the right. The right accuses the left. Each tells us that if they were in charge, this disaster would never have happened.
But they were in charge. Every step of the way, the left and the right were in charge. The disaster happened. They built this ship that’s sinking. Stuffed with arrogance and greed, they plowed us all to our demise.
Truth is hard. It hurts. It terrifies. But, unlike comforting lies, the truth might set you free. The truth might save our lives.
You must break through the delusion that the oligarchs and corporate pawns will save us. You must starkly confront the terror that all the wealth, power, momentum, steering wheels, boiler rooms, and engines of our nation are in the hands of greed-deluded madmen and fortune-drunk madwomen. You must drop the wishful thinking that they will regulate the Titanic or enforce safety measures or turn a different direction or slow down or fix the ship.
We must save ourselves.
We must organize to blow the whistle on the flawed design plans. We must educate each other of the dangers. We must organize the dockworkers to refuse to load the ship. We must come en masse to block the gangplanks. We must boycott the tickets. We must tell our friends and neighbors to stay off the ship.
Or, if it is too late, if we find ourselves on this metaphorical Titanic, miles out to sea, then we must refuse to load the boilers in the engine room. We must rise up from the lower decks and seize the wheel. We must disrupt the oblivious party on the first class deck. We must slow the ship to navigate the disasters of these waters.
Bend the metaphor further. Bend it to breaking point. Dissect the anatomy of disaster. Pick through the pieces of the wreckage of history and learn! Our survival depends on it. How many people must drown in the icy waters before you will drop the comforting lies? Stand and face the truth.
The wealthy politicians and corporate pawns on the left and the right are striking up their marching bands and plastering the town with their posters. They call their ideas unsinkable. They sell us tickets to their Titanic. They want us to believe that if we vote them into power, somehow their flavor of greed will be more palatable as we sink. They promise to reward us by putting us in their lifeboats while the rest of the nation drowns – don’t make that devil’s pact.
The truth is hard. The truth is painful. The truth is terrifying. But the truth will set you free.
Here is the truth: we must save ourselves. For, if we keep stoking the furnaces of the rich and powerful, we will plow into the final iceberg, sink into the frigid waters, and drown.

Dec 18, 2017

Creating the 21st Century Internet by Kevin Zeese





Ajit Pai, the former Verizon lawyer who is chair of the FCC, went too far last Thursday in undermining the Internet when he led the dismantling of net neutrality rules. As a result, he has fueled the energy needed to protect Internet rights. It is time for Movement Judo, where the energy created by the overreach of the FCC is turned into energy not just to overturn the FCC’s decision, but to also create the Internet we need in the 21st Century.

Over the past few months, there has arisen an epic mass mobilization in support of net neutrality and national consensus, with a University of Maryland poll finding 83% support for the Internet being open and equal to all. There was a record number of comments to the FCC on this issue over the summer. More than 1.2 million calls and 12.5 million emails went into Congress through the coalition site, Battle For the Net, and more than 700 protests were held across the country for net neutrality on December 7. The Internet is important to all of us and politicians who do not side with the people will pay a heavy political price.

Dec 15, 2017

The Design Flaw at the Core of Humanity's Malaise by Judith Schwartz



Many of us—read: anyone paying attention—are worried about problems like climate disruption, biodiversity loss, toxins in our foods, income inequality and the hollowing out of towns. Such troubles seem impossible to solve, hopeless to untangle. But maybe our woes are not so complicated. Perhaps these interrelated challenges stem from a basic design flaw. And we can fix it.
I contend this messy moment reflects the fact that our “operating system” is outdated and not suited to our current circumstances. I’m talking about the economy: the system that runs our society’s conceptual software. For the way that we produce, trade, value and distribute goods and wealth interferes with our ability to address the major trials of our time. We have come to accept the present framework as inevitable, but that’s far from the case. The rules our economy plays by are not natural law, like gravity or the properties of the Periodic Table. Rather, they are the result of human decisions, the consequences of which were not apparent at the time.
There is stark irony in the fact that the stock market has soared while large chunks of the country have been covered by water from hurricanes or ash from wildfire. This suggests the gaping disconnect between finance and reality. There’s something screwy with the books when economic indicators rise in tandem with environmental calamity and loss of life and property. It’s reminiscent of the “big short”, when financiers bet and made money on failure in the housing market. If Wall Street’s got its numbers right, Earth futures are not looking so good right now.
One defect in our economic model is its dependence on growth. We know that resource and ecological limits dictate that we can’t grow indefinitely. And yet, because money is created by debt that must eventually be paid, the growth imperative is baked into the system. Economists have evaded the social and environmental costs associated with relentless growth by choosing not to count them. In a deft accounting trick, the negatives linked with profitable enterprise (like water and air pollution, landscape degradation, blighted downtowns) are deemed “externalities”. Again, this is a design flaw, which can be mended by internalizing such costs so that they are borne by the entity that creates the problem instead of by the public.
Understanding faulty design at the root of our economy can help clarify certain kinds of conflicts that frequently arise. Let’s take a scenario where an energy company wants to drill in a pristine area and that this will harm vulnerable species, increase greenhouse gases and disrupt local communities. The company claims the environmental damage is a small trade-off for boosting the economy and creating jobs. A functioning system wouldn’t require people to give up their assets and autonomy in order to be economically viable; indeed, those assets and agency are their basis of wealth. It has become standard to see such scenarios through a political lens—a matter about which “liberals” and “conservatives” hold different views. Instead, we can regard the fact that companies profit amidst human and environmental exploitation as a glitch in the system that could bring the whole thing down, like a kind of malware.   
If we’re going to grow, let it be natural wealth. Conventional economics is fueled by scarcity; too much productivity drives down prices and therefore competition. We’ve been mining our natural capital for so long—and with bigger and more destructive technologies—that we have forgotten how productive healthy ecosystems can be.  We can think of the scarcity premise as part of an obsolete operating system. An upgrade dedicated to building our resources will bolster security and create the conditions for abundance. In agriculture, for example, there’s evidence that farm subsidies support outmoded practices and discourage innovation. Not what one wants in an operating system. Our upgrade corrects that little hiccup so that farmers are rewarded for enhancing soil health, which in turn enhances water retention, biodiversity, and all-around resilience.
Once you’re attuned to the fundamental design errors, you’ll find evidence all over. For instance, we now have youth un- and under-employment (and resulting despair) and, at the same time, the emptying out of vast areas of the country. This is a major bug in the software. Fix it, and there could be incentives to learn and apply regenerative agriculture to degraded landscapes and languishing rural communities. You’ll notice also that underlying flaws trigger errors in related systems, such as politics, education and law. The legal system, for example, provides recourse for infringements on private property—but not necessarily for resources that we all share, like air, water, forests and soil. Talk about hacking the vulnerabilities in the system. It may seem risky to modify programming at this scale. But recall the Y2K bug everyone was worried about, and how the rollover went smoothly.
In an interview, author Raj Patel, who most recently co-wrote “A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet,” said that many people find it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. We need to appreciate the difference between human-devised systems—which, by definition, are negotiable—and the exigencies of nature, which are not. We need to understand that society’s working “software” was developed during a unique time of geographical expansion and rapid technological change, and that its algorithms neglected human, cultural and environmental costs.
We can choose to tweak or outright transform this model. Among several options: bring externalities into pricing and incorporate the value of ecosystems, as in The Economics of Ecosystems & Biodiversity initiative, which seeks to “make nature’s values visible; an emphasis on the Global Commons, as articulated by Johann Rockström of the Stockholm Resilience Centre; and recognition of the Rights of Nature, as has been instituted in Ecuador and Bolivia and applied to rivers in India and New Zealand.
Here’s a bold statement: If we place value on ecosystem function, we could turn around our environmental, social and economic problems and inequities right now. Businesses and policymakers would be motivated to preserve and enhance environmental conditions, rather than be heedless. Indigenous people would be respected for their ecological knowledge and practices. Entrepreneurial energy would shift away from the making and marketing of products no one really needs and toward creative ways of regenerating ecosystems: which, in turn, restore nature’s climate-regulating processes. An industrial agricultural model that wreaks havoc on landscapes and communities would give way to agroecological approaches like Permaculture, Holistic Management and agroforestry that rebuild natural and social wealth. What we need is the intention—and a design framework that supports human and ecological wellbeing.
Recognizing the design flaws in our default programming is the first step to envisioning what is possible. Let’s not forego the chance due to a failure of imagination of courage.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Judith Schwartz
Judith D. Schwartz is a longtime journalist who lives in Vermont. Her most recent book, Water In Plain Sight: Hope for a Thirsty World, has just been published by St. Martin's Press. Her previous book is, Cows Save the Planet (Chelsea Green Publishing). Her website is www.judithdschwartz.com.

Dec 13, 2017

Magical Thinking Is Stopping Us From Taking to the Streets by Paul Street

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The archplutocratic tax cut Washington politicians are working on this holiday season ought to be a call to arms for the United States’ populace. The nation’s economy is already so savagely unequal that the top 10th of its upper 1 percent owns as much wealth as its bottom 90 percent. Its corporations are raking in record profits. Half of its citizens have no savings. Half its population lives in or near poverty. Twenty-one percent of its children are growing up at less than the federal government’s notoriously inadequate poverty level, and 41 million Americans—12.3 percent of the population—are “food insecure.”

It is against the backdrop of this shocking disparity and related want that one should try to comprehend the regressive and malignant sociopathology of a Republican tax “reform” that:

● Drastically slashes the corporate tax rate without closing loopholes and deductions that allow the nation’s already cash-flush corporations to register their profits overseas.
● Does nothing to switch corporations’ focus from maximizing short-term returns to investing in the creation of more jobs and higher wages.
● Encourages corporations to invest in automation without offering any assistance to displaced workers.
● All but eliminates the estate tax for the nation’s richest families.
● Adds $1.5 trillion to the nation’s debt over the next decade, setting the stage for major slashes to the nation’s three biggest social insurance programs—Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare (they will be cut back in the name of “scaling back” so-called entitlement programs to “reduce the deficit”).
● Gives a major tax cut on profits multinational companies have stashed in offshore tax havens.
● Cuts taxes on “pass-through” businesses—a benefit that will be disproportionately enjoyed by the rich.
● Makes it easier for rich people to classify themselves as businesses to get a tax break.
● Increases the complexity of the tax code.
● Tightens deductions for lower- and middle-income wage-earners.
● Subsidizes private and religious schools, a boon to corporate school privatizers and the religious right.
● Repeals Obamacare’s individual mandate, which will leave millions without health insurance and raise the cost of health insurance.

The GOP tax “reform” rewards the already rich and punishes the poor at a time, The Atlantic notes, “when post-tax corporate profits have hovered at a record-level high for the last seven years, and the 1 percent’s share of total income is higher than at any time in the second half of the 20th century.” The just-passed Senate bill, likely to be “reconciled” with the right-wing House version and signed by Donald Trump before Christmas, grants what New York magazine calls “a huge windfall for the wealthiest Americans.” It is “certain to exacerbate income [and wealth] inequality at a time when the playing field is already heavily tilted towards the rich.” The New Gilded Age is slated to become yet more grotesquely unequal.

As some GOP congressmen have acknowledged, Republican legislators are acting at the command of their billionaire and millionaire “donor class.” “My donors are basically saying, ‘Get it done or don’t ever call me again,’ ” Rep. Chris Collins, R-N.Y., candidly told The Hill.
Adding authoritarian insult to plutocratic injury, the Senate tax bill was rammed through the upper chamber with brutal speed and barely a speck of public input. As John Cassidy notes in The New Yorker, “the process … [has] … been a travesty of the legislative process. … [T]here have been no public hearings, and the measure is being rushed through in a few weeks, with virtually no transparency.”

The speed-up and smash-through reflects Republicans’ awareness that a significant majority of the populace rejects the tax “reform” (it’s curious how commonly regressive measures are sold as “reforms”). A Nov. 15 Quinnipac poll found that just 25 percent of U.S. voters approve of the Republican tax plan. More than half (52 percent) disapprove. By a 59 to 33 percent margin, voters said that the plan “favors the rich at the expense of the middle class,” and 61 percent believe “the wealthy would mainly benefit.” Just 36 percent believe the plan will lead to an increase in jobs and economic growth.

This makes the Trump-GOP House and Senate tax bills “among the least popular pieces of major legislation in modern history, with the public rejecting it by a two-to-one margin,” Derek Thompson wrote.

So why don’t we see millions of Americans in the streets protesting the brazenly oligarchic tax heist being perpetrated in the name of “fairness,” “simplicity” and even “democracy”? I can’t answer that question in full here. The forces and factors that have turned tens of millions of Americans into an inert mass are numerous and complex. They deserve book-length treatment and have received it: See, for starters, Alex Carey’s “Taking the Risk Out of Democracy: Corporate Propaganda versus Freedom and Liberty”; Sheldon Wolin’s “Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism”; Chris Hedges’ “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle”; Henry Giroux’s “Terror of Neoliberalism: Authoritarianism and the Eclipse of Democracy”; and my own “They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy.”

Part of the answer lies in the pervasively disseminated belief that we the people get meaningful say on the making of U.S. policy by participating in the “competitive” biennial major-party and candidate-centered elections that are sold to us as “politics”—the only politics that matter. Showing how and why that’s a false belief was the mission of my last Truthdig essay, titled “U.S. Elections: A Poor Substitute for Democracy.”

A second populace-demobilizing form of n thinking that is keeping people quiescent in the face of abject racist, sexist, ecocidal and classist-plutocratic outrage is the belief or dream that Russiagate special prosecutor Robert Mueller will save us and our supposed democracy by putting together a slam-dunk case for impeachment and removal on grounds of collusion with Russia and/or obstruction of justice.

A remarkable 47 percent of the electorate already supports impeachment less than a year into Trump’s first year. But so what? There is an outside chance that the malignant quasi-fascist tumor that is Donald Trump can be cut out this way. As liberal commentator Peter Beinart notes in The Atlantic, however, the odds of impeachment are poor. This is because “impeachment is less a legal process than a political one,” and the partisan alignment in Congress favors Trump in ways that appear unbreakable, given Republicans’ control of Congress and the dogged determination with which Trump’s white nationalist base is deplorably determined to stand by its man, no matter how low he sinks. As Beinart explains:
Passing articles of impeachment requires a majority of the House. Were such a vote held today—even if every Democrat voted yes—it would still require 22 Republicans. If Democrats take the House next fall, they could then pass articles of impeachment on their own. But ratifying those articles would require two-thirds of the Senate, which would probably require at least 15 Republican votes. …That kind of mass Republican defection has grown harder, not easier, to imagine. It’s grown harder because the last six months have demonstrated that GOP voters will stick with Trump despite his lunacy, and punish those Republican politicians who do not. … Among Republicans, Trump’s approval rating has held remarkably steady. Trump’s approval rating among Republicans has not dipped below 79 percent since he took office. None of the revelations from Mueller’s investigation—nor any of the other outrageous things Trump has done—has significantly undermined his support among the GOP rank and file.
Meanwhile, Arizona’s Jeff Flake and Tennessee’s Bob Corker, the two Republican senators who have had the decency to openly challenge Trump, have lost much of their support from GOP voters in their states.

Also rightly skeptical about prospects for Trumpeachment is Newsweek’s liberal political editor Dalia Lithwick. She finds it distinctly possible now that the purported “rule of law” has become “a relic” in “our ongoing nightmare of creeping authoritarianism.” She says we may have to shed the “magical thinking” that tells us that the U.S. “is a nation of laws, not men” as we behold “the shocking norm-and-truth defiance of the GOP tax bill, the refusal of the GOP leadership to criticize or even comprehend the enormous violence done by Trump’s anti-Muslim tweets, the president’s staggering support for the candidacy of Roy Moore, the silent Republican collusion to the seating of demonstrably unfit judges, and the virulence of the White House’s attacks on the press.” As one Trump outrage has piled up on top of another this year, Lithwick reflects, “it’s become clear that absolutely nothing will persuade Trump supporters and Republicans in Congress that it’s time to disavow the president. Given that reality, it often feels like it wouldn’t be enough for Mueller to hand us a smoking gun and an indictment. What if they threw a conviction and nobody came?”
The Mueller investigation, Lithwick writes, has helped “numb us, and leads to a declining sense of agency. … So long as Mueller is working, filing documents, and convening grand juries,” we are lulled into believing that “nobody has to take to the streets.”

The chances of Mueller or some journalists coming up with blockbuster revelations powerful enough to shake Trump’s hold on the GOP and his white-nationalist base are low. Most Alabama Republicans still back alleged child molester Roy Moore. The great majority of conservatives get their news from the pro-Trump, right-wing media ecosystem, led by Fox News, talk radio and Breitbart. As Beinart notes, that media can be counted on to “downplay or distort virtually anything Mueller or the mainstream press discovers” and to depict any push for Trump’s removal as a provocative “ ‘left-wing coup.’ ”

It seems more likely that Trump will be removed from the White House by his insane, cardiology-defying McDonald’s diet than through constitutional defenestration.

Forget for a moment the fact that establishment liberals like Beinart and Lithwick likely exaggerate the significance and degree of Russian intervention in the 2016 election (a drop in the bucket compared with the influence of U.S. corporate and financial money). Forget also that impeachment would place the right-wing Christian Mike Pence in the Oval Office; that the tax bill is slated for Trump’s signing long before he could be gotten rid of through impeachment or—another fantasy—ejection on the grounds of the 25th Amendment; and that U.S. plutocracy reigns with corporate Democrats in office, too (review the neoliberal records of the Bill Clinton and Barack Obama presidencies). Those key points aside, Beinart and Lithwick offer wise and informed counsel on how impeachment is a pipe dream that helps keep citizens passive and, as Lithwick notes, off “the streets.”

Here I might add that the nightly roster of talk-show hosts and comedians making endless fun of the ridiculous bad grandpa in the White House (Trump is a truly a gift that keeps on giving for late-night comedy) may help feed the fantasy that Trump is just a passing dream and not a clear and present danger to democracy and life on earth.

In an important commentary in The New York Review of Books in March, Russian dissident Masha Gessen tried to warn U.S. liberals and progressives against putting their anti-Trump eggs in the Russia basket. Gessen felt that the Russiagate gambit would flop, given a lack of smoking-gun evidence and sufficient public interest, particularly among Republicans. Gessen also worried that the Russia obsession was a deadly diversion from issues that ought to matter more to those claiming to oppose Trump in the name of democracy and the common good: racism, voter suppression (which may well have elected Trump, by the way), health care, plutocracy, police- and prison-state-ism, immigrant rights, economic exploitation and inequality, sexism and environmental ruination—you know, stuff like that.

Some of the politically engaged populace noticed the problem early on. According to the Washington political journal The Hill, last summer, “Frustrated Democrats hoping to elevate their election fortunes have a resounding message for party leaders: Stop talking so much about Russia. … Rank-and-file Democrats say the Russia-Trump narrative is simply a non-issue with district voters, who are much more worried about bread-and-butter economic concerns like jobs, wages and the cost of education and healthcare.”

Here we are now, half a year later, careening into a dystopian holiday season. With his epically low approval rating of 32 percent, the orange-tinted bad grandpa in the Oval Office is getting ready to sign a viciously regressive tax bill that is widely rejected by the populace. The bill will be sent to his desk by a Congress whose current approval rating stands at 13 percent. It will be a major legislative victory for Republicans, a party whose approval rating fell to an all-time low of 29 percent at the end of September—a party set to elect an alleged child molester to the Senate.

The dismal, dollar-drenched Democrats, the party of “inauthentic opposition,” are hardly more popular. Their approval mark was 37 percent in a recent CNN poll, their lowest level in 25 years. Pervasive scorn for the party is richly appropriate, given its role as “the graveyard of social movements” and its long history of serving the nation’s financial, corporate and imperial ruling class. As the venerable progressive hero Ralph Nader recently told The Intercept:

There are some people who think the Democratic Party can be reformed from within by changing the personnel. I say good luck to that. What’s happened in the last twenty years? They’ve gotten more entrenched. Get rid of Pelosi, you get Steny Hoyer. You get rid of Harry Reid, you get [Charles] Schumer. Good luck. … Unfortunately, to put it in one phrase, the Democrats are unable to defend the United States of America from the most vicious, ignorant, corporate-indentured, militaristic, anti-union, anti-consumer, anti-environment, anti-posterity [Republican Party] in history.

“Unable” or unwilling? As two sharp Canadian correspondents recently wrote me in response to Nader’s reflections:
“ ‘Unable?’ No. Unwilling? Absolutely. The Democrats are ‘history’s second-most enthusiastic capitalist party,’ in the words of Richard Nixon strategist Kevin Phillips. They are dive artists. This is what they do: provide the illusion of opposition. “They are unreformable. Workers need their own party” (Matt Gardner).
“It is worse than merely being unable to defend working people from the Republicans. The Democrats are serially complicit in these multi-level attacks and the wars launched on the outside world” (Gabriel Alan).
The plutocratic tax “reform” right now is a perfect example. The GOP is likely to pass this epic fiscal robbery in the next few weeks—Merry Christmas, 1 percent—and the inauthentic opposition party, which essentially elected Trump last year (see this remarkable new volume) are blathering on endlessly about Russiagate while pathetically bemoaning that Trump is not being more “bipartisan,” on the model of the malicious right-wing president Ronald Reagan’s 1986 tax bill. MSNBC’s rambling rock star Rachel Maddow is a ferocious lioness on Russiagate and a whiny kitten on the arch-corporatist, Putin-like tax bill.

It’s surreal. An explosion of sex scandals, the interminable Russia madness, a bizarre embassy move in Israel, an Alabama freak show, a prolonged game of bizarre verbal-thermonuclear chicken between the insane clown president in Washington and the dear leader in Pyongyang combine with the National Football League, Netflix, online shopping and porn, endemic video-gaming, epidemic mass shootings and the mindfulness and happiness industries to run diversionary interference for the evermore drastic and dangerous upward concentration of “homeland” wealth and power. Meanwhile, the death knells of the coming environmental catastrophe Trump is dedicated to accelerating—with unmentionably climate change-driven “wildfires speaking apocalyptic destruction” across Southern California this week—ring across the land and the world, barely breaking into the presidentially obsessed news cycle.

Welcome to the de facto banana republic that is, as Noam Chomsky said, America’s “really existing capitalist democracy—RECD, pronounced as ‘wrecked.’ ”

Revolution, anyone?

The New Corporation

  The New Corporation ​is a 2020 documentary directed by Jennifer Abbott and Joel Bakan, law professor at the University of British Columb...