The Machinery of the GOP Fascist Takeover

The machinery that is killing our democracy:

Newsweek, on the data miners and Big Data tycoons who rigged this election.

The brain tricks they are using:

A Berkleyside profile of George Lakoff who explains how America has been hypnotized.

Lesson being:

Big money + obedient people will defeat smart people + humane/democratic values?

Bigotry is stronger than Tolerance?

Unreason is stronger than Reason?

Tribalism defeats inclusive Democratic Values?

Are we all fascists deep down?

Are we all predators? Is fellow feeling dead?

Now that the Washington Post has decided the target of the Russian cyber attack (the Democratic Party) was actually to blame for what happened (are rape victims and robbery victims and fraud victims basically to blame?), does that mean open societies are doomed?

Do we need to cross that line to defend ourselves? Do we need to start arming schoolchildren to prevent the next mass shooting? Do we need to descend to their level to beat the undemocratic and malevolent forces? Do we need to validate the rightwing's accusations in order to defeat them? To defeat lies to we need to lie more and better? There is a Churchillian question in this: “Is this what we are fighting for?”

There must be some available jujitsu devices we should be developing and using. We have the most creative technical minds on the planet. Why aren’t they engaged on the side of liberal democracy?

Is it because there is a basic autocratic strain that defines Silicon Valley? Are they basically more interested in their opportunities to control us than enabling us to empower ourselves? (Do they believe fascism will set them free? Corporations are favored under fascism. They are constrained under democracy. Maybe they are tired of that.)

Have we gone back to the medieval belief system the Enlightenment and our own Revolution overturned?

Does the recent [victory] of Trumpism and Putinism prove that Might makes Right?

Does it prove that possession is 9/10 of the law? That the man with the gun wins the argument? That Power = Truth? Is that God’s Will? Are we to understand that God and Putin agree in principle?

“We won. You lost. Shut up. Bow down. Do as you’re told. Pay the rich. Screw the poor.”

Is that what we’ve learned? Is that what the American experiment has arrived at? Maybe we’ve arrived at our Julius Caesar moment. Is Trump Caesar or Nero? Or is he Caligula?

While we are soul searching and self questioning the tyrants are busy.

The Meanness Of Republican Policies

Is there something about being a Republican that makes you anti-woman and anti-working people?

Jonathan Chait of NY Magazine summarizes the Republican mindset pretty well: "Conservatives have made all kinds of practical arguments for the Republican health-care bill. They have made a smattering of moral arguments, too, such as the principle that people with more expensive medical needs have failed to make healthy choices and deserve financial punishment for their failings. What is telling about the gender debate is that it lacks even the pretext of personal responsibility. There is no case to be made that women ought to pay more for insurance because they chose to be female. There is no principle at all except that people who have more ought to keep it."

There seems to be a simpleminded self-centered misanthropy in Republican thinking, or at least in the thinking of the Republicans writing our laws right now. I say right now because Republicans used to be cheap without being mean. I know it's not just racism, but racism is in there. It's not just sexism but sexism is in there. Consider some of the shit these Republican white men say about people who are not white men. People who are not white men come in for a lot of abuse from Republicans, and their voters seem to like this about them. It gets them elected.

"We have folks who try to get pregnant in this state so that they can get a free trip to the city, and we have folks who want to carry their baby past the point of being able to have an abortion in this state so that they can have a free trip to Seattle.” ~Rep. David Eastman (R/Alaska)

"Just like Jesus said, ‘The poor will always be with us.’ There is a group of people that just don’t want health care and aren’t going to take care of themselves. Just, like, homeless people … I think just morally, spiritually, socially, [some people] just don’t want health care. The Medicaid population, which is [on] a free credit card, as a group, do probably the least preventive medicine and taking care of themselves and eating healthy and exercising. And I’m not judging…” ~Rep. Roger Marshall (R/Kansas)

(Oh, but he is judging.)

Meanwhile, in the Senate, a whole parliament of judgmental and punitive white men are figuring out how to fix healthcare in America in a way that covers white men but not other kinds of people.

Fixed the way you might fix a dog, is what they are planning.

Schlaraffenland

Schlaraffenland is a mythical land of milk and honey and idleness. The kind of thing charismatic tyrants promise the peasantry to keep them docile and obedient.

Promises are a kind of narcotic. Democracies do their own promising but because the people are in charge of their government and have to pay for the things they enact they tend to be less lavish. This self-denial can be redirected to withhold the good life from the people who work for a living and deliver it only to those who own for a living. The wealthy few become the inhabitants of this utopia we meant for ourselves. This has been the end-result of Reagan's sunny promises, a wonderland for the lucky few and a diminished reality for the many.

Your Daily Trump–––Debate Edition

A warning about playing drinking games during the debate...

From RawStory

Trump staffers tell the NYTimes that Trump is an idiot...

Reported by NYMagazine

Charlie Pierce says it like it is, but not the way Trump does...

Charlie Pierce on how Trump is normalizing STUPID

Republicans have a three step plan for screwing every American: defund/degrade/privatize…

From Salon

Trump’s healthcare plan would lose 20 million Americans their health coverage...

From PBS

Some logical jujitsu to flip Trump voters...

From Salon

The Ghetto Idea Is Enjoying A Renaissance

I came across a disturbing story on NPR today. It describes how the poor can be conveniently put in a box and forgotten.

By divvying people into rich (good people) and poor (bad people) conservatives can justify their greed and their habit of looking at people’s vulnerabilities as business opportunities.

But outside of nailing them to make their profits, the rich conservatives would rather pretend poor people don’t exist. They’ve been lucky and they seek to insulate themselves from the unlucky people.

Many of the less fortunate have gotten that way after encountering the sharp edge of rich people’s business schemes or political policies. But it’s hard to blame the rich. They can’t help themselves. Maximum profit and minimum responsibility is their religion.

The rich conservatives would like to avoid all responsibility for other people. Other people are there to profit from but never to be helped or looked out for. They’d rather put them on an ice floe and send them out to sea.

This selfishness has penetrated down into the working middle classes, whose margin of financial security has gotten thin. People in the striving middle classes are taught to emulate the rich in order to achieve financial security. Join the club by rejecting the poor.

We’ve become a selfish, uncaring society. Recent policies make poverty inevitable, inescapable and perpetual. These policies have mostly emerged from conservative and libertarian circles.

They put it more gently, but the philosophy is basically this: “I’ve got mine, fuck you.”

Oh, and "Praise Jesus."

Two Examples Show How The Legal System Is Stacked In Favor Of The Rich

This is what happens to people at the bottom of the justice system. Reported today at VOX.

This is what happens to the people at the top. Reported today in the New Yorker.

A 75 year old disabled man in Mississippi who did time many years ago for robbery is tried for marijuana possession. He is convicted and sentenced to life in prison, a mandatory sentence because of his 20-year old conviction for robbery. The Supreme Court refuses to consider his appeal. Apparently life imprisonment for marijuana possession is not cruel and unusual punishment. Or the Supreme Court can’t be bothered. This is what happens to people at the bottom of the system.

Meanwhile the SEC, the agency charged with investigating and bringing charges against the largest financial companies, hesitates to prosecute individuals who made billions by defrauding millions of ordinary Americans during the financial crisis.

Why?

Because the man at the SEC who was in charge of the case had seen the “devasting [sic] impact our little ol’ civil actions reap on real people more often than I care to remember. It is the least favorite part of the job. Most of our civil defendants are good people who have done one bad thing.”

People at the top level of massive multi-billion dollar frauds that ruined thousands of ordinary people’s lives are “real people” who “have done one bad thing” but a sad old disabled onetime felon who possesses pot is nobody.

The poor man in Mississippi is nobody that anybody running the system knows personally. Nobody the prosecutors care about. Prosecutors mingle with “real people” who earn massive fortunes, sometimes by fraud. The fraudulent seem very plausible, that is how they are able to commit the fraud. The larger the fraud, the more plausible and real they seem. Prosecutors don’t enjoy mingling with people at the lower end of the criminal spectrum where their misfortune and desperation makes them less plausible and less deserving.

Successful criminals who have massive fortunes and fabulous Manhattan apartments plus expensive homes in various luxury enclaves are real people but ex-cons who live quietly on a farm in Mississippi are not real people––at least in the eyes of the law. There have been multiple cases rejected by the right hand side of the Supreme Court, cases where a man has been proved innocent but is still facing the death penalty. The conservatives on the court shrug and say No. But the criminal who has stolen massive amounts of money from millions of unsuspecting Americans gets a pass. Someone who seems that real and that plausible must not have meant any harm. He can keep his houses and his money.

This is what Americans are angry about. This is what Bernie Sanders is listening to. This might be the kind of non-violent marijuana "offender" President Obama pardons. But we need to repair the system, not simply hope that occasionally a hand reaches down from the sky and corrects one or a handful of the terrible injustices. This is why electing a Democrat president is so vital this year. It would begin to redress the harm and rebalance the scales in favor of regular people.

How Our Kiss Up/Kick Down Tax Policy Could Be Fairer

Obama takes steps against too-big-to-fail banks. From VOX.

The Wall Street Journal thinks this is a bad idea, so it must be good for most people. Why not create a safer harbor for retirement savings than the predator filled waters of the financial sector, where the safest waters are reserved for the wealthy.

The new fiduciary rule means financial advisors would once again be obligated to you rather than obligated to the financial giants who’d like to use the masses of lower income retirees like a cash machine. From SLATE.

Pulitzer Prize financial reporter David Cay Johnston discusses a few of the sneakier dodges available to the 1%.

Did you realize that the helpful folks who devise the simple, easy to use tax software are not really helpful at all but predatory?

Which is why they oppose any new policy that would make tax filing easier for everyone.

VOX reports on Elizabeth Warren's good idea.

Propublica reports how the Turbotax people lobbied Congress to keep our tax code more complicated. Complicated tax laws make them very very rich.

Maybe the worst policy in recent years is the one that makes college loan debt unforgivable. I mean, even the worst felons are paroled eventually, but college loans persist after the death of the college student who incurred them. College debt interest ought to be tax deductible like mortgage interest. You incurred the debt to open up a better career, why isn’t it a business expense? Why in god’s name is it now suggested we make it a tax deduction for corporations to pay off your debt for you, when your paying it off wasn’t deductible? Reported at SLATE.

From the PARIS REVIEW, some history on the crime of indebtedness.

The unfairness of our Kiss Up Kick Down economy is finally sinking in. People are angry and understand what they are angry about. Before we’ll see a fundamental shift we need a critical mass of understanding, a consensus that the system is screwed up and isn’t working. It’s not just unfair, it is dysfunctional. From NEW YORK MAGAZINE.

The 1% are hoarders. While we work long hours they rake in millions they haven’t earned without lifting a finger, and they hide it where it can’t be taxed for schools and bridges and water systems. Reported by EVONOMICS.

Even Goldman Sachs may be realizing the current system is not working. Reported by BLOOMBERG.

One thing has to change: we need to quit putting the rich above the law. I’ve seen this expressed in another nicely cynical way: “I’ll believe corporations are people when they hang one in Texas." Reported by PROMARKET.

This kind of corruption has happened before. Bill Moyers revisits the corruption of a few decades ago.

Cognitive Dissonance

Many Americans drive around and see prosperity. Nice shops, nice houses, nice communities. It’s a pleasant sight––but it’s not their life. If you are prosperous and feel your prosperity is secure this is nice and reassuring. Life is good! If you are financially insecure or you have friends or family who are struggling it isn’t reassuring at all. How many of those you see walking and driving amid all the visible prosperity see it as an insult or a threat: “These people are fine and I am not.” Narrow prosperity is all show, and the system––the economy, the justice system, money-based politics, even the larger churches––only serves and protects the few. The economy is increasingly excluding working people from prosperity; for them these visible riches are an insult. We watch the affluent on TV and read about them in glossy magazines. Is this entertainment? They are not us and we will never be invited to their party. We have become the pathetic figures in old movies, the ones pressing their noses hungrily to the window of the restaurant watching others eat. This set piece from old movies is the one that comes just before the hungry individual throws a brick, or a bomb. Vast inequalities are a recipe for violence. But before the violence erupts where we live we spend years ignoring how dysfunctional and impractical and inefficient these disparities are.

After a few decades of Kiss Up, Kick Down economics, the kicked may begin to hit back. Here are some relevant stories from the NC News Observer, The Guardian, The Washington Post and Salon.

In NC black voters are required to take a spelling test to vote; whites aren’t.

In FL the anti birth control crowd think that elementary schools and dentists and podiatrists can fill the gap created by their shutting down reproductive health centers.

The burden of taxes removed from the lucky people who own for a living is shifted onto the people who work for a living in the shape of penalties and fees, which are compounded if they haven’t got the ability to pay.

Want to start a new business? Better be rich.

Before you eat that shrimp cocktail realize that it’s probably the product of slave laborers.

Wage Theft: The Old Evil That Won't Die

VOX posted this recent article about Wage Theft

The Guardian posted this article earlier today.

The Nation published this story about the most common victims of wage theft: freelancers.

This article is about wage theft in Minnesota.

UCLA has this useful primer on what wage theft is and how it is done.

I’ve used the phrase Kiss Up/ Kick Down a lot recently. This is a perfect example. Laws in this and most countries protect property from people, which means the laws protect people with property from the people who work for them. The unpropertied, unwealthy people who work for a living are easy to exploit, at least partly because the laws are not there to protect them, and when the laws are there the legal system isn’t. The legal system often treats labor laws like a body rejecting a transplanted organ. The ideas that protect property from people begin from the premise that property is sacred and people are a damned nuisance. Property may like to have casual laborers to do occasional odd jobs but once the work is done they’d like them to move along, preferably without demanding their wages. Granted, this is an antique and obsolete idea, fully repudiated by the protections written into law since the New Deal. The Reagan Revolution was organized around the hope that these worker protections could be undone.