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Smooth-talking con artists are familiar figures in American folklore. The well-dressed hustler arrives in an unsuspecting town. He pitches some miracle cure or get-rich-quick scheme, door-to-door or from atop a soapbox. Then before his customers realize they’ve been duped, he steals away in search of his next mark. It’s a risky vocation, one that demands quick feet, a keen understanding of human nature, and a talent for telling stories that both arouse and reassure.
But when it comes to profiting off people’s hopes and fears, by far the most successful purveyors of lucrative lies and false promises are some of the denizens of this country’s palatial estates, corporate boardrooms, and corridors of political power. And unlike their small-time counterparts, they’re never on the run — despite the misery they leave in their wake. Enter Donald J. Trump, soon to be the 45th President of the United States.
At the smallest, crappiest newspaper in the world – even at a high school paper – no sane editor would publish a story that wasn’t backed by solid evidence. As the 20th century print journalism cliché goes, if your mother says she loves you check it out. So why are the nation’s most prestigious multi-Pulitzer-winning newsgathering organizations repeatedly claiming that hackers working for the Russian government stole emails belonging to the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton campaign manager John Podesta, and gave them to WikiLeaks?
Because the CIA says so.
Well, not the actual CIA. Some unidentified people who claim to have seen some report say so.
If our first fake news election turns out to mark the end of democracy as we know it, I think I can pretty precisely date when the end began.
More than 20 years ago, I and a bunch of other Washington journalists were packed into a classroom at American University for a weeklong boot camp designed to teach us about computers and this new-fangled thing that was just beginning to be called the internet. One of the guest speakers, a self-described “technology guru” for the then-fledgling Clinton administration gleefully informed us that we were all dinosaurs. Politicians like his boss, he said, would be able to use the internet to deliver their messages directly to the people, unfiltered by the media.
This is striking.
According to a recent Brookings study, on the matter of trade the Democratic Party's progressive leadership -- notably, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and DNC-chairmanship hopeful, Keith Ellison -- claims to represent the forward-looking interests of the party's base, while in reality it stands against them. Its Trumplike, populist outreach of TPP-bashing, for instance, is today's surest cloak of progressive piety, which, of course, Sanders & Co. proudly sports. Central to its sectarian, Everyman faith, however, is a regressive blindness. For the party's ultraprogressive leadership advocates that which looms most injurious to working- and middle-class Democrats at large.
Reports the NYT's Thomas Edsall, the Brookings study "analyzed the differences between those communities that supported Hillary Clinton and those that backed Donald Trump. [Its findings] suggest that Democrats who are calling for a return to progressive populism [essentially, a trade posture antithetical to President Obama's] will encounter more hurdles than they expect." Observes one of the study's authors:
Can you doubt that we’re in a dystopian age, even if we’re still four weeks from Donald Trump entering the Oval Office? Never in our lifetimes have we experienced such vivid previews of what unfettered capitalism is likely to mean in an ever more unequal country, now that its version of 1% politics has elevated to the pinnacle of power a bizarre billionaire and his “basket of deplorables.” I’m referring, of course, not to his followers but to his picks for the highest posts in the land. These include a series of generals ready to lead us into a new set of crusades and a crew of billionaires and multimillionaires prepared to make America theirs again.
It’s already a stunningly depressing moment -- and it hasn’t even begun. At the very least, it calls upon the rest of us to rise to the occasion. That means mustering a dystopian imagination that matches the era to come.
I have no doubt that you’re as capable as I am of creating bleak scenarios for the future of this country (not to speak of the planet). But just to get the ball rolling on the eve of the holidays, let me offer you a couple of my own dystopian fantasies, focused on the potential actions of President Donald Trump.
It’s impossible to read Volker Ulrich’s remarkable biography, “Hitler, Ascent: 1889-1939,” without being struck by the parallels between Adolph Hitler and Donald Trump.
1.They were both charismatic political leaders. Watching grainy newsreel footage of Hitler speaking, it’s difficult to imagine what a hypnotic spell he cast on his pre-war German audiences. Just as it’s difficult to understand the impact of Trump rallies on his devotees.
Ulrich says that Germans were captivated by Hitler’s passion and authenticity. That’s what Trump followers say about him.
2. Both men gave voice to the zeitgeist of their times. In Munich, Hitler claimed that Germany had been betrayed at the end of WWI, “stabbed in the back” by Jews.
Newt Gingrich openly bragged recently at the Heritage Foundation that the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress were going to “break out of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt model.” That “model,” of course, created what we today refer to as “the middle class.”
Ever since the election of Ronald Reagan, Republicans have been working overtime to kneecap institutions that support the American middle class. And, as any working-class family can tell you, the GOP has had some substantial successes, particularly in shifting both income and political power away from voters and towards billionaires and transnational corporations.
In July of last year, discussing SCOTUS’s 5/4 conservative vote on Citizens United, President Jimmy Carter told me: “It violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy with unlimited political bribery…” He added: “[W]e’ve just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors…”
Trump’s economic plan has sent stocks ripping higher for six weeks straight. But what’s going to happen to stock prices when Congress gives Trump’s plan a big thumbs down? Has anyone thought about that yet?
And what about the Fed? Does anyone seriously think that Fed chairman Janet Yellen is going to sit on her hands while Trump launches a $1 trillion fiscal stimulus package that triggers a sudden burst of growth followed by a sharp uptick in inflation?
No, Yellen’s not going to sit on her hands. She’s going to raise rates to prevent the economy from overheating which is going to throw cold water on Trump’s pro-growth government-spending plan.
Frida Berrigan’s family made a anti-Trump protest angel for the top of their Christmas treethis year. (WNV / Frida Berrigan)
I picked up a call from an unfamiliar local number. It was someone organizing to give toys to needy families. “We picked your family,” she said happily. I stumbled and stuttered over myself a little as I tried to be gracious while also clear: We do not need or want the beautifully wrapped, ready-made Christmas morning her group had envisioned for our kids. “Thank you so much for thinking of us, but we try to downplay the whole presents part of Christmas,” I managed. “But I know there are lots of people who would really appreciate your generosity.”
The whole presents part of Christmas kind of seems like the biggest part of it, right? The average American plans to spend more than $900 on gifts this holiday season. That is planned spending, which we know is vulnerable to the last minute “oooh” factor, as well as the mistake of bringing your children with you to the store.
Funny that Donald Trump named a bankruptcy lawyer as our next ambassador to Israel. His skills would be put to better use to prevent Trump from bankrupting America.
David M. Friedman’s nomination as ambassador raises deep concerns that already divide American Jews and could threaten the civic activism crucial to challenge the president-elect’s anticipated agenda.
Friedman has already dubbed J Street, a national Jewish organization critical of Israel, “far worse than capos” – Jews who cooperated with the Nazis. He also opposes a two-state solution and calls for annexing the West Bank. I have mixed feelings about Friedman’s positions, but drawing comparisons to anyone associated with Hitler is crude conduct. He at least must repudiate this kind of language if he hopes to earn any confidence of most Americans.
These are the times that try men’s and women’s souls. With inauguration day just weeks away, if you must curl up in a ball in front of a fireplace or elsewhere, why not do it with a book or two that we hope can put the upcoming Trump years in perspective and context? We asked some of our website contributors and past Moyers & Company guests to give us their ideas as to some appropriate material that might help us through the coming months of uncertainty… and incredulity.
Bill Moyers, by the way, recommends Sheldon Wolin’s Democracy Incorporated and Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death: “Together these two books explain how we got to the Age of Trump.”
Please add your own recommendations in the comments section.
I was reading a story tonight about the poison pen letters Donald Trump sent to then Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond about the government-backed wind farms that Trump felt was ruining the scenery of his Scottish golf course. I was struck by one of the many blustering insults Trump hurled in Salmond’s direction: other countries are “laughing at you” for promoting wind farms, Trump declared.
This is of course a line Trump has been pushing for decades: that other countries or other people are “laughing at us” for being weak, dumb, etc. etc. It is obviously a notion that occupies his mind: the fear of being laughed at for weakness, failure, stupidity. He can’t get away from this theme, no matter how successful he is: he comes back to it again and again. Suddenly I thought: shouldn’t we join our august president-elect in his anxiety-ridden quest to find out who might be laughing at him? So I took up his favorite mode of communication, Twitter, and sent him the few helpful messages below. I would encourage everyone who is as concerned as I am about the precarious mental health of our impending leader to take up the cause, and tell Trump just who is laughing at him. It’s your patriotic duty.
It is no coincidence that anti-Russian propaganda is being ramped up at the same moment the Syrian government is poised to retake its country from terrorists. Barack Obama and the rest of the war party are left to sputter nonsensical statements because their grand plan to realize the neocon Project for a New American Century is in very big trouble.
The American corporate media ignored the suffering of Syrians in the city of Aleppo until their captivity was broken by the Syrian Arab Army. Ever since 2012 ISIS and other terrorist groups sponsored by the United States, NATO, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar have held thousands of people hostage there. Turks picked the region apart, raiding Syrian factories and transporting them piece by piece back to their country.
The organizers behind Millennials for Bernie are raising money to create an anti-Trump movement headquarters in Washington DC that will be a base for sustained resistance against the next president and his administration.
“This house is supposed to be a place for everybody, regardless of what happened in the general election, to come together and fight,” said Moumita Ahmed, whose organizing helped millennials become involved in Sanders’ campaign and is setting up the house. “We are going to be there to hold him accountable and delegitimize literally everything that he is doing and not let him succeed.”
“Some of the things that are going to happen in this house are workshops, people coming in and talking about big organizing,” she continued. “We’re going to have parties. We’re going to have rallies that are going to be organized there. These are just basic ideas, but we know that once this house is available that people will come in and want to do more creative forms of resistance.”
— from Foreign Policy In Focus
The Golden Lemon Award had a number of strong contenders in 2016, including:
- General Atomics for its MQ-9 Reaper armed drone, which has a faulty starter-generator that routinely shorts out the aircraft. So far, no one can figure out why. Some 20 were either destroyed or sustained major damage last year. The Reapers costs $64 million apiece.
- Panavia Aircraft Company’s $25 billion Tornado fighter-bomber that can’t fly at night because the cockpit lights blind the pilot. A runner up here is the German arms company Heckler & Koch, whose G-36 assault rifle can’t shoot straight when the weather is hot.
- The British company BAE’s $1.26 billion Type 45 destroyer that breaks down “whenever we try to do too much with them,” a Royal Navy officer told the Financial Times. Engaging in combat, he said, would be “catastrophic.”
A great many fracking companies are going out of business with carbon fuel prices this low, because revenue doesn't cover the cost of production. Big producers like Exxon are being affected as well, via their balance sheets (source).
Just a reminder that there are many ways to stop the burning of carbon, in addition to negotiation and smooth, well-planned transitions. Those two are preferred, of course, but we don't seem to have those options any more, and yet we do need to stop burning carbon.
Other options include disrupting consumption and disrupting supply. Of these two, I prefer disrupting supply, since as I've noted before, if they extract it, someone will burn it. Both of these disruptions can be accomplished through legislation and/or executive action.
Barack Obama’s chance for a transformative presidency ended when he bowed to Official Washington’s foreign-policy establishment of neocons and liberal interventionists and bought into the elitist notion that the American people should be guided by propaganda, not informed by facts.
Although he began his presidency by promising transparency, Obama instead undertook an unprecedented crackdown on national security whistleblowers, prosecuting more than all other presidents combined. Meanwhile, he authorized partial and misleading releases of information about key events. Instead of an informed public, his administration sought maximum propaganda advantage, such as with the Aug. 21, 2013 sarin gas attack outside Damascus, Syria, and with the July 17, 2014 shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine.
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Why does the Trump-Pence campaign keep selling sway online, even after winning the presidency? From the mind that gave you Trump Air and Trump Steaks, here comes Trump’s highly branded America.
Fascism, at least the original variety invented by Benito Mussolini, was the merger of state and corporate power.
The state was to be supreme, of course, a state with a strongly militaristic character. Interestingly, both of Europe's premier fascist states starred a swaggering leader who was mistaken for a clown by some of his opponents.
That is, until it was too late.
Any resemblance to any new president-elect, living or dead to decency, is entirely deliberate. By the way, the other two weren't elected with a majority of the popular vote, either.
They didn't seem to mind.
Separated by 145 years are two like-minded, lawless pronouncements on the lawful powers of the U.S. presidency -- both issued, unsurprisingly, by lawless presidents themselves.
When asked, three years subsequent to his fall, if the nation's chief executive can act illegally in whatever he considers the nation's best interests, Richard Nixon replied that "When the president does it, that means it is not illegal." Scores earlier, Andrew Jackson is reputed to have said (the actual wording is probably apocryphal; the sentiment real) in response to an unfavorable Supreme Court ruling: "[The Chief Justice] has made his decision, now let him enforce it."
Nixon had lost political protection for his past crimes, and so he went down. Jackson retained his, and so, with impunity, he prevailed. The nation's highest, co-equal check on presidential power -- the U.S. Supreme Court -- was rendered impotent in the face of despotic audacity. (Jackson's 1832 realpolitik foreshadowed Stalin's keen appreciation of material executive power over conceptual authority: "How many divisions does the pope have?" Indeed, how many divisions did Justice Marshall have?)
The end result of every Islamist terror attack (or even alleged Islamist terror attack) is: 1. Heightened authoritarian powers for governments. 2. Demonization of law-abiding Muslims. 3. More money for war-profiteers, since more war is always the ultimate response. None of these outcomes advance the attackers’ cause in any way save one: more repression, demonization and war can lead to more ‘radicalisation’ of the people being repressed, demonized and bombed. Thus the responses, which are always the same, always reward the perpetrators of these atrocities by giving them the only thing they can get from the attacks: recruitment tools.
“So what are we supposed to do then?” comes the angry cry. Well, one thing we could do to begin breaking this deadly cycle is to quit living in a dreamworld and recognize what the actual policies of our governments are, what our governments are actually doing, and the actual consequences of these actual events. We have to be done with the childish notion that our greatness and goodness is forever being assaulted out of the blue by motiveless monsters who don’t appreciate how greatly good we really are.
A Brief History of the War on Christmas:
- Massachusetts Bay Colony Puritans bans Christmas celebrations before unbanning them
- Henry Ford blames the Jews
- The John Birch Society blames the Communists
- Peter Brimelow blames almost everyone, especially immigrants
- The American Family Association monetizes it
- Fox News’ John Gibson writes a book about it
- Fox News' Bill O'Reilly makes it one of his signature campaigns
If you’re more prone to saying “Happy Holidays” when greeting folks this holiday season, you may be a willing, or unwilling, combatant in the “War on Christmas.”
"Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves."
— Henry David Thoreau
I baked cookies the other day. Chocolate chip with those little nuts mixed in, the crumbly ones that get everywhere as soon as you crack the bag. I didn't do the Toll House thing, the easy stuff in a yellow tube you find in the aisle next to the yogurt. No, I went full Nana, hunting every shelf in the market for ingredients like a nearsighted quarterback doing check-downs after a busted play. Brown sugar, chocolate chips, butter, the crumbly nuts … I started to get worried when I found myself squinting at a row of bleach bottles looking for flour. As for the cookies, well … they exist. I sharpened the kitchen knives on the first one out of the oven. Didn't leave a mark.
The arcane Electoral College met in statehouses across America and ratified Donald Trump's presidency on Monday, despite throngs of protests and last-minute attempts urging 40 or so GOP electors to seek an alternative for the country’s good.
This was the closing chapter in a presidential election filled with anti-democratic features, the most recent being the elevation to the presidency of a candidate who lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes. But that’s hardly the only breakdown in a process ordinary citizens are raised to revere and soldiers are sent overseas to defend.
In a sense, human history could be seen as an endless tale of the rise and fall of empires. In the last century alone, from the Hapsburgs and Imperial Japan to Great Britain and the Soviet Union, the stage was crowded with such entities heading for the nearest exit. By 1991, with the implosion of the USSR, it seemed as if Earth’s imperial history was more or less over. After all, only one great imperial power was left. The Russians were, by then, a shadow of their former Soviet self (despite their nuclear arsenal) and, though on the rise, the Chinese were, in military terms at least, no more than a growing regional power. Left essentially unchallenged was the United States, the last empire standing. Even though its people rejected the word “imperial” as a descriptive term for their “exceptional” country -- just as, until oh-so-recently, they rejected the word “nationalist” for themselves -- the world’s “sole superpower” was visibly the only game in town.
Its military, which already garrisoned much of the planet, was funded at levels no other country or even groups of them combined could touch and had destructive capabilities beyond compare. And yet, with the mightiest military on the planet, the United States would never again win a significant war or conflict. Though its forces would be quite capable of taking the island of Grenada or briefly invading Panama, in the conflicts that mattered -- Korea and Vietnam -- victory would never come into sight. And it only got worse in the twenty-first century as that military fought an endless series of conflicts (under the rubric of “the war on terror”) across the Greater Middle East and Africa. In those years, it left in its wake a series of brutal sectarian struggles, ascendant terror movements, and failed or failing states and yet, despite its stunning destructive power and its modestly armed enemies, it was nowhere victorious. Never perhaps had an empire at its seeming height attempted to control more while winning less. (The power of its economy was, of course, another matter.)
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