Month: December 2020

Greenwald: The Threat of Authoritarianism in the U.S. is Very Real, and Has Nothing To Do With Trump

Since leaving The Intercept, its cofounder and Pulitzer Prizing winning,

Glenn Greenwald. He won a Pulitzer for his journalistic work with Edward Snowden

investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald has returned to his journalistic roots by blogging at substack.

Glenn’s most recent opinion piece is entitled “The Threat of Authoritarianism in the U.S. is Very Real, and Has Nothing To Do With Trump.”

I like Glenn because he is an independent thinker. He does not follow the current of established media but offers “out of step” insights and analysis that we should all take seriously.

I have excerpted the article below. It is a bit long, but well worth your time:

Asserting that Donald Trump is a fascist-like dictator threatening the previously sturdy foundations of U.S. democracy has been a virtual requirement over the last four years to obtain entrance to cable news Green Rooms, sinecures as mainstream newspaper columnists, and popularity in faculty lounges. Yet it has proven to be a preposterous farce.

In 2020 alone, Trump had two perfectly crafted opportunities to seize authoritarian power — a global health pandemic and sprawling protests and sustained riots throughout American cities — and yet did virtually nothing to exploit those opportunities. Actual would-be despots such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán quickly seized on the virus to declare martial law, while even prior U.S. presidents, to say nothing of foreign tyrants, have used the pretext of much less civil unrest than what we saw this summer to deploy the military in the streets to pacify their own citizenry.

But early in the pandemic, Trump was criticized, especially by Democrats, for failing to assert the draconian powers he had, such as commandeering the means of industrial production under the Defense Production Act of 1950, invoked by Truman to force industry to produce materials needed for the Korean War. In March, The Washington Post reported that “Governors, Democrats in Congress and some Senate Republicans have been urging Trump for at least a week to invoke the act, and his potential 2020 opponent, Joe Biden, came out in favor of it, too,” yet “Trump [gave] a variety of reasons for not doing so.” Rejecting demands to exploit a public health pandemic to assert extraordinary powers is not exactly what one expects from a striving dictator. . .

. . . The hysterical Trump-as-despot script was all melodrama, a ploy for profits and ratings, and, most of all, a potent instrument to distract from the neoliberal ideology that gave rise to Trump in the first place by causing so much wreckage. Positing Trump as a grand aberration from U.S. politics and as the prime author of America’s woes — rather than what he was: a perfectly predictable extension of U.S politics and a symptom of preexisting pathologies — enabled those who have so much blood and economic destruction on their hands not only to evade responsibility for what they did, but to rehabilitate themselves as the guardians of freedom and prosperity and, ultimately, catapult themselves back into power. As of January 20, that is exactly where they will reside.

The Trump administration was by no means free of authoritarianism: his Justice Department prosecuted journalists’ sources; his White House often refused basic transparency; War on Terror and immigration detentions continued without due process. But that is largely because, as I wrote in a Washington Post op-ed in late 2016, the U.S. Government itself is authoritarian after decades of bipartisan expansion of executive powers justified by a posture of endless war. With rare exception, the lawless and power-abusing acts over the last four years were ones that inhere in the U.S. Government and long preceded Trump, not ones invented by him. To the extent Trump was an authoritarian, he was one in the way that all U.S. presidents have been since the War on Terror began and, more accurately, since the start of the Cold War and advent of the permanent national security state.

The single most revealing episode exposing this narrative fraud was when journalists and political careerists, including former Obama aides, erupted in outrage on social media upon seeing a photo of immigrant children in cages at the border — only to discover that the photo was not from a Trump concentration camp but an Obama-era detention facility (they were unaccompanied children, not ones separated from their families, but “kids in cages” are “kids in cages” from a moral perspective). And tellingly, the single most actually authoritarian Trump-era event is one that has been largely ignored by the U.S. media: namely, the decision to prosecute Julian Assange under espionage laws (but that, too, is an extension of the unprecedented war on journalism unleashed by the Obama DOJ). . . 

. . .Whether the U.S. was a democracy in any meaningful sense prior to Trump had been the subject of substantial scholarly debate. A much-discussed 2014 study concluded that economic power has become so concentrated in the hands of such a small number of U.S. corporate giants and mega-billionaires, and that this concentration in economic power has ushered in virtually unchallengeable political power in their hands and virtually none in anyone else’s, that the U.S. more resembles oligarchy than anything else:

The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence. Our results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.

The real political powers in America today.

. . . But the premises of pre-Trump debates over how grave a problem this is have been rendered utterly obsolete by the new realities of the COVID era. A combination of sustained lockdowns, massive state-mandated transfers of wealth to corporate elites in the name of legislative “COVID relief,” and a radically increased dependence on online activities has rendered corporate behemoths close to unchallengeable in terms of both economic and political power.

. . . The lockdowns from the pandemic have ushered in a collapse of small businesses across the U.S. that has only further fortified the power of corporate giants. “Billionaires increased their wealth by more than a quarter (27.5%) at the height of the crisis from April to July, just as millions of people around the world lost their jobs or were struggling to get by on government schemes,” reported The Guardian in September. A study from July told part of the story:

“The combined wealth of the world’s super-rich reached a new peak during the coronavirus pandemic, according to a study published by the consulting firm PwC and the Swiss bank UBC on Wednesday. The more than 2,000 billionaires around the world managed to amass fortunes totalling around $10.2 trillion (€8.69 trillion) by July, surpassing the previous record of $8.9 trillion reached in 2017.”

. . . Employees are now almost completely at the mercy of a handful of corporate giants which are thriving, far more trans-national than with any allegiance to the U.S. A Brookings Institution study this week — entitled “Amazon and Walmart have raked in billions in additional profits during the pandemic, and shared almost none of it with their workers” — found that “the COVID-19 pandemic has generated record profits for America’s biggest companies, as well as immense wealth for their founders and largest shareholders—but next to nothing for workers.”

. . . These COVID “winners” are not the Randian victors in free market capitalism. Quite the contrary, they are the recipients of enormous amounts of largesse from the U.S. Government, which they control through armies of lobbyists and donations and which therefore constantly intervenes in the market for their benefit. This is not free market capitalism rewarding innovative titans, but rather crony capitalism that is abusing the power of the state to crush small competitors, lavish corporate giants with ever more wealth and power, and turn millions of Americans into vassals whose best case scenario is working multiple jobs at low hourly wages with no benefits, few rights, and even fewer options.

. . . The dominant strain of U.S. neoliberalism — the ruling coalition that has now consolidated power again — is authoritarianism. They view those who oppose them and reject their pieties not as adversaries to be engaged but as enemies, domestic terrorists, bigots, extremists and violence-inciters to be fired, censored, and silenced. And they have on their side — beyond the bulk of the corporate media, and the intelligence community, and Wall Street — an unprecedentedly powerful consortium of tech monopolies willing and able to exert greater control over a population that has rarely, if ever, been so divided, drained, deprived and anemic.

All of these authoritarian powers will, ironically, be invoked and justified in the name of stopping authoritarianism — not from those who wield power but from the movement that was just removed from power. Those who spent four years shrieking to great profit about the dangers of lurking “fascism” will — without realizing the irony — now use this merger of state and corporate power to consolidate their own authority, control the contours of permissible debate, and silence those who challenge them even further. Those most vocally screaming about growing authoritarianism in the U.S. over the last four years were very right in their core warning, but very wrong about the real source of that danger.

10 Stats That Will Blow Your Mind

The Daily Poster is the blog of investigative journalist David Sirota. A few

David Sirota

days ago he posted an article reminding his readers of the gross economic inequities that characterize the US. Inequities that have only gotten worse during the pandemic.

For the Old Testament prophets, long-term disparities between the haves and the have-nots — that were ignored or caused by the rich — was a primary identifying trait of a wicked society.

Truly righteous rulers worked to close such economic chasms.

By Old Testament, prophetic standards, the United States (including the majority of its leaders) is an extraordinarily wicked place, heaping more and

Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, a wholly owned subsidiary of corporate elites; enemy of the American people

more guilt upon itself while racing towards divine judgment.

I have excerpted Sirota’s article below:

As the fight to provide one-time $2,000 survival checks crescendos in Washington, it can be difficult to grasp the size of the figures being thrown around. Can our country afford the proposal? Is the cost worth it? 

Let’s look at the economic and social devastation unfolding throughout the country. Even before the pandemic, 40 percent of Americans were struggling to afford at least one basic necessity and a stunning 78 percent of full-time workers were living paycheck-to-paycheck according to figures from 2017. Half a million people were counted as homeless in 2018 alone. 

The pandemic has made things worse: In the spring, 22 million jobs were lost which could take as long as four years to recover without significant relief. As of June, roughly 14 million workers and their dependents had lost employer-based health insurance. The number of Americans impacted by food insecurity is now projected to hit 54 million — up from 35 million pre-pandemic. More than 14 million American households are at risk of eviction and more than 336,000 Americans have died from the virus. . . 

. . .So, with all of this in mind, can the world’s richest nation afford one-time $2,000 survival checks? Should Congress filibuster the defense bill for as long as it takes to force Mitch McConnell to allow a vote on the aid? Is there a double standard at play when it comes to government largesse for rich people and support for everyone else? Are $2,000 checks good policy? Is Congress even listening to the public?

Read these ten stats and then you decide.

1. The total cost of $2,000 checks ($465 billion) is less than half the amount that American billionaires have made during the pandemic ($1 trillion). The total cost of the checks is less than the amount that just 16 American billionaires increased their net worth by during the pandemic ($471 billion).

2. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk gained more wealth during the pandemic ($158 billion) than Congress just authorized for additional unemployment benefits for millions of Americans ($120 billion). 

3. Jeff Bezos’s personal wealth increased more every second of 2020 ($2,800) than Congress is considering giving Americans who are facing eviction, starvation and bankruptcy ($2,000).

4. Congressional lawmakers are being paid $3,300 of government money every week to come up with ways to block $2,000 checks to millions of Americans.

5. It took Congress less than a month to pass legislation giving a $700 billion bailout to bank executives during the financial crisis. It has taken Congress more than 8 months to even seriously consider a far less expensive bill to give $2,000 checks to millions of Americans during this economic crisis.

6. A $2,000 survival check would give the average soldier more money than the proposed 3 percent military pay increase that is included in defense legislation that Sens. Bernie Sanders and Ed Markey are filibustering in order to force a vote on the survival checks.

7. The richest 5 percent of Americans received more in Trump tax cuts in 2020 ($145 billion) than Congress is spending on increased unemployment benefits for millions of Americans during the economic crisis ($120 billion).

8. In 2016, “children, elderly, disabled people, and students made up around 70 percent of the poor,” according to the People’s Policy Project. Unlike unemployment benefits, $2,000 checks would help them.

9. About 60 percent of Georgia households make less than $75,000, meaning Georgia Republican senators allowing $2,000 checks to be blocked would deny aid to roughly 2 million of their state’s households as they run for reelection.

10. As Republicans try to block the $2,000 check legislation, a new national survey found that 78 percent of Americans support it, even as some pundits insist that the proposal is “divisive.”

Lee Atwater and the Religious Right

[This is the second in a series looking at the growing carnality of American evangelicalism through its assimilation to right-wing politics. You can read the first post here.]

Politicians rarely if ever tell the you the bare-naked truth. They know that if they did, they probably would not get (re)elected. No, politics is not about honesty. It’s about power – gaining power, keeping power, using power, and accumulating more power.

Power and influence are the coin of the realm.

Which is not necessarily a bad thing. It all boils down to how is this power used, and who benefits from the use of this power?

The real beneficiaries of this political power are those who give power hungry politicians the most money. Because money wins elections. No, money is not “speech,” as the wealthy, powerful members of the Supreme Court have ruled (for their own partisan purposes).

No, money is power.

Those with the most money have the power to become the most influential. This is why the American political establishment works, not as a democratic body, but as a plutocratic oligarchy, which means the American people are ruled by an elite cabal of rich people (mainly CEOs and corporations).

One of the practical consequences of our political reality is the fact that most political discourse happens in code. Coded language hides the truth. Code talk lets a politician tell people what they want to hear while leaving him/her free to do something entirely different.

Some of the oldest political code language in this country has to do with race, specifically the place of African Americans in our society and how they are treated by the powers-that-be.

The murder of George Floyd sparked a racial upheaval in America, an upheaval that both the political status quo AND the Religious Right are now working very hard to stamp out.

Future posts will examine the ongoing evangelical backlash against the Black Lives Matter movement.

For now, I want to explain the historical background to Donald Trump’s claims of voter fraud and how it is actually another example of code language for “too many blacks have the right to vote.”

It’s one more train wreck that no Christian should be riding.

History:

Lee Atwater with Senator Strom Thurmond

 Lee Atwater (1951-1991) was a cutthroat Republican party campaign strategist who got his start in North Carolina politics working with men like Sen. Strom Thurmond (who actively opposed all civil rights legislation in the US Congress).

He would eventually work for both presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush,

Atwater with president Reagan

helping them to win their presidential campaigns with something called “The Southern Strategy.”

In 1981, when he worked in the Reagan administration, Atwater gave an anonymous (at the time) interview where he explained how he used coded language to divide voters along issues of race.

Below is the relevant excerpt from that interview. Take a listen:

Atwater explains how using “more abstract language” about taxes or forced busing or states’ rights will hit the same racial/racist nerves that are plucked by using the N word.

Atwater with George H. W. Bush

In this way, white Southern voters understood that the candidate who wanted their vote was as concerned as they were (i.e. were as racist as they were) about maintaining white privilege and keeping “uppity” black folk in check when they heard about policies that they knew would continue to undermine development in the black community.

Opposition to forced bussing was code talk for “we have to keep black people segregated and away from our white children.”

“The War on Drugs” is another example of political code talk deliberately used to fill in for openly racist strategies attacking the black community (and political protesters).

In 1971 president Richard Nixon first declared his “war on drugs.” Almost

John Ehrlichman with president Nixon

immediately, America’s prison population skyrocketed from 300,000 to over 2.3 million. Two-thirds of those new prisoners were African-Americans. (See this article from the Equal Justice Initiative).

Many people know that story. What fewer people realize is that the war on drugs was another instance of code language for “let’s disrupt and oppress the black community.”

John Ehlichman was president Nixon’s chief domestic policy advisor. In 1994, Ehlichman gave a very candid interview to Harper’s Magazine. During that interview he had his own “Lee Atwater moment” where he admitted to the racist intent of Nixon’s war on drugs.

Here is Ehrlichman in his own words (all emphases are mine):

“You want to know what this [the war on drugs] was really all about?”

“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and Black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

Voila! The war on drugs became more code language for shutting down social protest movements and breaking up black communities.

Fast forward to 2020.

President Trump had a similarly candid moment setting up his intended code talk for subverting the 2020 election.

This past March (8 months prior to the election!) Trump gave an interview to Fox News where he loudly objected against the generous voting provisions that Democrats wanted to include in the COVID19 stimulus bill.

Provisions such as expanded mail-in voting, scheduling election day on a week-end, or making it a national holiday.

Why was Trump opposed to making it easier for more people to vote?

As he said (I have also listened to the original TV interview), “If you ever agreed to it [the expanded voting provisions], you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

One Democratic strategist noted, “The official position of the Republican Party for decades has been that they can’t win if people vote. Trump is just dumb enough to say it out loud.”

We will return to this issue of Republican voter suppression in future posts.

Republicans well understand that the majority of African-American voters in this country vote for the Democratic candidate. Therefore, it is in their political interests to prevent black people from voting. They just can’t say it that bluntly, or honestly.

So they talk in code. Like Trump.

It is no accident that all of the contested states where Trump has called for repeated recounts and gone to court in order to overturn results are states with large African-American communities. States in which the black vote for Biden undoubtedly played a large role in defeating Trump.

Political code language is frequently and intentionally used to hide racist intent.

It has a long history in this country.

In a similar vein, the long-standing Christian, evangelical concern for such things as Law and Order and social stability — i.e. the conservative defense of the white, privileged status quo — has always hidden the latent racism of the white church and provided its members with a conveniently “safe way” to express their inherent distrust of black America.

It’s happening again, right now, as evangelical leaders applaud Trump’s damaging efforts to overturn this election and disenfranchise millions of voters (largely people of color). We see it in evangelical leaders who condemn the Black Lives Matter movement, and as entire denominations call damnation down onto “critical race theory.”

I will have a great deal more to say about all of these things. Stay tuned.

We all  have got to learn how to read The Code.

What Do Jesus and Rush Limbaugh Have in Common?

In previous posts I have mentioned that whenever I take a road trip I view it as an opportunity to imagine myself a social anthropologist conducting

Rush Limbaugh

primary research on what people are listening to out in the hinterlands.

Thus, when I am not listening to a favorite CD, I am tuned in to either conservative talk radio or local Christian programming (not for the music but the news, commentary, sermons, or call-in Bible answer man shows).

My most recent trip confirmed not just the close similarities, but the near

Shaun Hannity

identity of political-social views on secular and Christian broadcasting. There is no difference whatsoever. And that should send a chill down every disciples’ spiritual spine.

Of course, every talk show was a monolithic barrage of “Stop the Steal” nonstop — usually, asserted with ranting, anger, and fear-mongering, not to mention the repeated threats of looming violence if “the radical, leftist cabal” that stole the election from Trump didn’t move over and get out of the way.

I could not find a single instance of rational, evidence-based conversation or

WASHINGTON, DC – JANUARY 24: Jay Sekulow, personal attorney for U.S. President Donald Trump, speaks during a news conference during the Senate impeachment trial against President Donald Trump. (Photo by Alex Wroblewski/Getty Images)

debate, much less analysis, about the presidential election, the recounts, the court challenges, or the future of this country on a secular radio station.

Worse yet, the Christian broadcasts were no different.

Whether the programming was syndicated or regional, Christian commentators were reading from the same hyper-partisan play book: anger, fear, threats of armed uprisings, calling hell fire onto the leftists, socialists, Marxists, antifa-ists, critical race theorists, and Black Lives Matters communists who are determined to destroy America by turning it into a totalitarian, anti-Christian nation.

The ignorance and misinformation spewed like sewage from a fire hose.

Pat Robertson

The Christians had no more interest in honest conversation, or an examination of the facts available, than the did the Rush Limbaugh crowd. I doubt if a single one of them had even a rudimentary understanding of what socialism really is or that the United States is already highly “socialist” in many ways – highly unjust ways that favor the rich and corporations almost exclusively.

Everyone is convinced that Joe and Kamala are raging socialists chomping at the bit to outlaw private property and confiscate everyone’s guns. Obviously, not a one of these people (broadcasters and callers both) knew the first thing about Biden’s or Harris’ careers.

The truth of the matter is that both Biden and Harris are dyed in the wool crony-capitalists, corporatists, center-right party stalwarts so heavily indebted to Wall Street that I’m surprised either of them has an independent thought in their head.

Jan Crouch, founder of the Trinity Broadcast Network, with Oral Roberts

Their souls are owned by the same brand of neoliberal economics that continues to fuel the gaping chasm of income inequality that curses sick Americans – especially people of color – to wait in bread lines longer than anything seen in this country since the Great Depression, and to die of covid19 at higher rates than any other country in the civilized world.

The American evangelical church has become nothing more than cheap, shallow reflection of the cultivated ignorance, narrow mindedness, and xenophobia that has always marked American conservatism.

That ghoulish political contortion has become the face of the Republican party AND the Religious Right (read: evangelicalism).

This post is my brief introduction to short series I will write in the next few weeks.

David Brody, political reporter for CBN, author of the book, “The Faith of Donald Trump”

In this series I will have a great deal more to say about the incestuous mánage à tois that has developed between evangelicalism, the Republican party, and American anti-intellectualism.

I will begin by focusing on the role that virulent, Republican racism has to play in both (1) the Republican demonization of the Black Lives Matter movement and (2) Donald Trump’s campaign to persuade his base that this election was stolen.

Stay tuned.

How Bad Will Joe Biden’s Foreign Policy Be? This Bad…

With the exception of president-elect Biden’s verbal commitment to rejoin the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) — the nuclear arms agreement president Obama signed with Iran — I see little reason to be optimistic about Biden’s approach to foreign policy and America’s endless wars.

Joe has predictably stacked his cabinet picks with corporate war-mongers who never saw a new weapons system or a foreign intervention they didn’t love.

Below you can watch Abby Martin’s survey (about 10 min.) of these individual’s resumes. Even if they all do not all survive the Senate approval process, their selection already tells us everything we need to know about Biden.

As Abby notes, “You just couldn’t find a nicer gang of war criminals.”

Retired Col. Lawrence Wilkerson

For a more wide-ranging analysis, listen to Aaron Mate’s interview with retired Army colonel, Lawrence Wilkerson (22 min.) below or click here:

Chris Hedges on “The Great Delusion”

Chris Hedges

Today’s Opinion piece from journalist Chris Hedges is entitled “The Great Delusion.”

Personally, I do not fear the end of the world.

I do fear the increasing magnitude of human suffering that will inexorably pave the way for the final Apocalypse.

And I deeply lament the sinister role now played by the evangelical church in advancing Satan’s goals.

By only reading the book of Revelation as if it were a human history horoscope, the evangelical church (in league with the Religious Right) remains blind to the fact that it has long been conquered by the Beast.

John the Seer warns God’s people that only those “who overcome” will stand victorious in the end.

And that charge ain’t describin’ much of evangelicalism today.

Below are a few excerpts from Hedges. You can read the entire piece here:

Joe Biden and the systems managers of the deep state and empire are returning to power. Trump and his coterie of buffoons, racists, con artists and Christian fascists are sullenly preparing to leave office. U.S. pharmaceutical corporations are starting to disseminate vaccines to mitigate the globe’s worst outbreak of COVID-19 that has resulted in more than 2,600 deaths per day. America, as Biden says, is back, ready to take its place at the head of the table. In the battle for the soul of America, he assures us, democracy has prevailed. Progress, prosperity, civility and a reassertion of American prestige and power are, we are promised, weeks away. 

But the real lesson we should learn from the rise of a demagogue such as Trump, who received 74 million votes, and a pandemic that our for-profit health care industry proved unable to contain, is that we are losing control as a nation and as a species. Far more dangerous demagogues will arise from the imperial and neoliberal policies the Biden administration will embrace. Far worse pandemics will sweep the globe with higher rates of infections and mortality, an inevitable result of our continued consumption of animals and animal products, and the wanton destruction of the ecosystem on which we and other species depend for life.

“One of the most pathetic aspects of human history,” Reinhold Niebuhr wrote, “is that every civilization expresses itself most pretentiously, compounds its partial and universal values most convincingly, and claims immortality for its finite existence at the very moment when the decay which leads to death has already begun.”

Biden’s appointments are drawn almost exclusively from the circles of the Democratic Party and corporate elite, those responsible for the massive social inequality, trade deals, de-industrialization, militarized police, world’s largest prison system, austerity programs that abolished social programs such as welfare, the revived Cold War with Russia, wholesale government surveillance, endless wars in the Middle East and the disenfranchisement and impoverishment of the working class. The Washington Post writes that “about 80 percent of the White House and agency officials he’s announced have the word ‘Obama’ on their résumé from previous White House or Obama campaign jobs.” Bernie Sanders, apparently rebuffed in his efforts to become secretary of labor in the Biden administration, has expressed frustration with the Biden nominations. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was denied a seat by House Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee because of her support for the Green New Deal. The message of the Biden administration to progressives and left-wing populists is very clear – “Drop dead”. . . 

 . . . The perpetuation of the deeply unpopular wars and onerous neoliberal policies by the Biden administration will be accompanied by a fevered demonization of Russia, most recently blamed for cyber-attacks.  A new Cold War with Russia will be used by the corporate Democrats to discredit domestic and foreign critics and deflect attention from the political stagnation and the corporate pillaging of the country. It will allow MSNBC and The New York Times, which spent two years slogging empty Russiagate conspiracies, to disseminate a daily stream of emotionally charged rumors and shady accusations about Russia.  Cable celebrities such as Rachel Maddow will hyperventilate night after night about Russia while ignoring the corruption of the Biden administration.  The only reason Russia is not blamed for rigging the election in 2020, as opposed to 2016, by the Democratic Party is because Trump was defeated. . . 

. . . The belief that we can maintain current levels of consumption, especially of animal products, capitalist expansion, imperial wars, a reliance on fossil fuels and abject subservience to unfettered corporate power, which has solidified the worst income inequality in human history, is not a form of hope but suicidal self-delusion. We are not headed under the policies of the Biden administration and the global ruling elite for the broad sunlit uplands of a new and glorious future, but economic misery, vast climate migrations, waves of new and more virulent pandemics, of which COVID-19 is a mild precursor, along with irreversible ecological systems collapse and frightening forms of societal breakdown, authoritarianism and neofascism.         

Global warming is inevitable. It cannot be stopped.  At best, it can be slowed. Over the next 50 years the earth will most likely heat up to levels that will make whole parts of the planet uninhabitable. Tens, perhaps hundreds, of millions of people will be displaced. Millions of species will go extinct. Cities on or near a coast, including New York and London, will be submerged. . . 

. . . One of the lessons I learned from covering wars and revolutions as a foreign correspondent is that the political, economic and cultural systems that are erected by any society are very fragile. The façade of power remains in place, as I saw in Eastern Europe during the 1989 revolutions and later in Yugoslavia, long after terminal rot has consumed the foundations. This façade fools a society into thinking the structures of authority remain solid, impervious to collapse. So, when collapse comes, which should have been long predicted, it appears sudden and incomprehensible. The ensuing chaos is disorienting and frightening. The cognitive dissonance between the perception of power and its rapid dissolution feeds self-delusion.  It creates, as I witnessed in the former Yugoslavia, what anthropologists call crisis cults, as well as bizarre conspiracy theories, fascism and the embrace of inchoate violence to purge society of the demons blamed for the national debacle. Hatred becomes the highest form of patriotism. The vulnerable are scapegoated. Intellectuals, journalists and scientists rooted in a fact-based world are despised. Ruling elites and ruling structures lose all credibility. This collapse is often a portal to a world of nihilism and blood-drenched fantasy. 

After four years of lies, the stoking of racist violence, stunning ineptitude, rampant corruption and an abject failure to cope with a national health crisis, Trump expanded his base by 11 million votes. This should be a huge, flashing red light. Worse, 70 percent of Trump voters, 51 million Americans, believe that “radical Left Democrats” and the deep state rigged the elections through “voter fraud,” including the importation of Venezuelan voting software, illegitimate mail-in ballots and the wholesale destruction of Trump ballots by election officials. One hundred and twenty-six Republican House members joined a lawsuit filed by 18 Republican state attorneys general asking the Supreme Court to overturn Biden’s victory. The vast majority of Republican senators refused to acknowledge the election results following the November vote. Electors from the Electoral College were forced in several states to deliver their votes to state legislatures under armed guard. Some two dozen armed protesters carrying American flags and chanting “Stop the Steal” descended on the home of Democratic Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson. Seven hundred members of the white nationalist group the Proud Boys took over streets in Washington last weekend to protest the alleged theft of the election, leading to more than three dozen arrests, four stabbings, the vandalizing of four Black churches, and Black Lives Matter banners and signs ripped down and burned.

Trump may be gone soon, but he leaves behind a party that is openly authoritarian, dismissive of democratic norms, an enemy to science and fact-based discourse and which attempted a coup d’état. The next time around they won’t be so disorganized and inept.  This hostility to democracy by one of the two ruling parties, supported by millions of Americans, many of whom were betrayed by Biden and the leaders of the Democratic Party, will not dissipate but grow, especially as the hammer of economic dislocation, including the looming evictions of millions of Americans, pummels the country. . .

. . . The decades-long corporate assault on culture, journalism, education, the arts, universities and critical thinking has left those who speak this truth marginalized and ignored. These Cassandras, locked out of the national debate, are dismissed as unhinged and depressingly apocalyptic. The country is consumed by a mania for hope, which our corporate masters lavishly provide, at the expense of truth. It is this delusional hope that will doom us. . .

. . . We cannot use the word hope if we refuse to face the truth. All hope rooted in self-delusion is fantasy. We must lift the filter from our eyes to see the danger before us. We must heed the warnings of our own prophets. We must destroy the centers of power that lure us and our children, like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, to certain doom. The walls, daily, are closing in around us. The radical evil we face is as real under Trump as it will be under Biden. And if this radical evil is not smashed, then the world ahead will be one of torment and mass death.

To Be Or Not To Be Vaccinated, That is the Question

I am not a virologist so I will not pretend to know more than I do (which is very little) about the new covid19 vaccines now becoming available to the public.

What the average person can know is that these will be the first RNA-based vaccines ever administered to the public. Rather than explain what that means, I will refer you to a few good articles explaining the differences between older vaccines (e.g. polio and small pox) and the newer, genetically manufactured vaccines built upon DNA and RNA (see here, here, and here).

Apparently, the new covid19 vaccines will not prevent you from becoming infected with the covid19 virus. But they will prevent you from developing the physical symptoms that typically arise after infection.

In other words, the vaccine will prevent you from getting sick, but it will not prevent you from catching the virus, being infected by the virus, and carrying the covid19 virus in your body.

This, of course, raises a very important question: will the hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions, of people being vaccinated all become asymptomatic carriers of the covid19 virus?

Will a vaccinated person be able to infect an unvaccinated person, causing them to become sick (and perhaps die)?

I posited my questions to a friend the other day whose son is a doctor in a busy Philadelphia hospital. He called his son on the phone and talked with him about my concerns.

Simply put, his answer to my question was: THAT is THE BIG unanswered question about this vaccine.

And no one knows the answer. Because this has never been done before.

“It’s all one enormous experiment,” says Dr.  Peter Doherty, a Nobel Laureate and professor of immunology at Melbourne University.

Indeed it is.

I have not yet decided what I will do. What are your plans?

 

Living in a Relativistic, Fact-Free World

I have not written anything so far about the election broo-ha-ha mainly because I hate to waste my time dealing with such blatant absurdity.

However, as the Christian Right/Republican/Trump mania continues — not just to the bitter end, but undoubtedly well beyond, all the way to the dregs of this seemingly bottomless tankard of paranoid, right-wing swill — I find some aspects of the nation’s tumult rather interesting.

I don’t know the numbers of confessing Christians who believe that Biden “stole” the election from Trump, or are now marching in “stop the steal”

An election worker places a ballot in a counted bin during a hand recount of Presidential votes on Sunday, Nov.15, 2020 in Marietta, Ga. (John Amis/Atlanta Journal & Constitution via AP)

protests.

The entire movement, if you can call it that, looks very much like a new religion, and not simply because so many evangelicals are a part of it.

But I intend to reflect more on that element in a future post…I will only say for now that, even setting aside all the partisanship and divisiveness, it is an extremely unhealthy approach to any sort of belief, whether political or religious.

I do know that, according to a Reuters p0ll, over half of all registered Republicans believe that Trump actually won the election. Almost 70% of Republicans think it likely (or definitely believe) that the vote count was “rigged” or fraudulent.

While I am as willing to believe in potential election fraud as the next person, the main problem with these accusations is the complete lack of evidence.

Yes, many stories are being told, but accusations alone are not evidence, and accusations based on second-hand stories, often without substantiation, are not evidence, either.

Though Trump acolytes repeatedly insist on having such evidence, they never actually produce anything even remotely relevant, much less convincing. So, it is extremely noteworthy that when Rudi Giuliani is in court, he NEVER says he is arguing a fraud case.

In fact, he claims the opposite when standing before a judge. He only uses the word fraud when speaking in public…where no one has the power to disbar him.

Below is a video clip of only one example illustrating just how flimsy are the Republican claims to possessing evidence of fraud.

Ms. Bee Nguyen is a member of the Georgia House of Representatives.  Recall that the state of Georgia had not one but THREE recounts. NONE of them produced any evidence of election tampering or fraud of any sort.

All of these recounts have been a huge waste of time and tax dollars.

Watch Rep. Nguyen debunk the so-called evidence a state colleague claims to provide as proof of Georgia election fraud. She dismantles this Republican fraud quite handily.

It would all be very funny were not so pathetic to see such partisan dimwits as her Republican opponent sitting in political office, misrepresenting the facts of the case, and fomenting the rising tide of political hatred.

As the late Senator Patrick Moynihan once reminded his senate colleagues: We are all entitled to our own opinions. But we are not entitled to our own facts.

Jericho March Speaker Says, “We have to align our spirituality to our politics.”

First a quick update: I have been away for a while for several reasons.

First, I have finished the manuscript for my next book which will tentatively have a title (I hope) along the lines of Like Birds in a Cage: Christian Zionism, Israeli War Crimes, and Palestinian Suffering.

While I wait to receive the remarks of my outside reader (an expert in the field selected by the publisher; it’s often called “peer review”) I have been slaving away at the marketing questionnaire given to me by the publisher. Yikes! What a task…

Second, I just returned from a multi-day trapping excursion trying to capture a new falcon. My peregrine was tragically killed by a coyote a few months ago in eastern Montana. So I am currently birdless. I was able to trap one falcon of the sort I want, but she was an adult and we are only allowed to keep  immature birds taken from the wild.

Anyway, I have a bundle of posts I intend to make in the days ahead reflecting on the current political-evangelical-Donald Trump industrial complex and its implications for the immediate future of American Christianity.

But for now I want to thank my friend Steve Tompkins, a pastor in Seattle, for sending me an article by Rod Dreher published in The American Conservative. It’s entitled, “What I Saw at the Jericho March.”

I have no affinity for Mr. Dreher’s politics, but he is a fellow Christian with important insights into the feverish pagan ceremonies now consuming certain “evangelicals” — at least, that’s what they call themselves.

Selected excerpts appear below or you can read the entire piece here:

Alex Jones speaking at the recent Jericho March in Washington D.C.

For my sins, I guess, I watched all six hours of the Jericho March proceedings from Washington today, on the march webcast. I say for my sins, but in truth, I decided to watch it because I am interested in what the activist Christian Right is saying, and how they are thinking, in the wake of Donald Trump losing the election.

Except he didn’t lose the election, according to them. It was taken from him. This is an article of faith, not to be doubted. If you doubt, you are a traitor, a coward, in league with the Devil. I’m not exaggerating at all. I saw an interview that the influential Evangelical broadcaster Eric Metaxas gave to the populist activist Charlie Kirk this week, in which he boldly claimed that patriots must fight “to the last drop of blood” to preserve Trump’s presidency, and that those who disagree are the same as Germans who stood by and did nothing to stop Hitler (Metaxas is best known as a biographer of Dietrich Bonhoeffer). In the same interview — I wrote about it here, in “Eric Metaxas’s American Apocalypse” — Metaxas said it doesn’t matter what can or can’t be proven in court, he knows, and we know, that the election was stolen. When Kirk, who is very sympathetic to Metaxas, asked him what he thought of where the cases stood, Metaxas blithely claimed that he is “thrilled” to know nothing about them.

. . .It’s one thing to claim that God told you to change churches, or something like that. It’s another thing to claim, especially if you have a national microphone, that God told you that the election was stolen, and that people need to prepare themselves to fight to the last drop of blood — an actual quote — to keep the libs from taking the presidency away from Trump. Watching the Jericho March, I saw that what I encountered for the first time in conversation with my friend over two decades ago is actually pretty common. Most of the Jericho March speakers, in one way or another, asserted their certainty about the election’s theft. The fact that courts keep throwing these Trump lawsuits out only proves how deep the corruption goes.

See how that works? They are willing to tear down the country for a belief that they cannot prove, but that they will not believe is disprovable.

. . .Retired Gen. Michael Flynn came onstage, saying that his MyPillow gave him the best sleep of his life. Then he recited the Our Father. Jesus, America, hucksterism: that was another theme of this rally. At times during the webcast, the screen would split, with the speaker on the left, and a My Pillow commercial on the right.

This Flynn speech was important, though. He said, “The Courts don’t decide the election, we the people decide.” But later: “The rule of law is at stake.”

Well, which is it? The rule of law in our Constitutional republic means that the courts operate in the name of We the People. Flynn declares mob rule over our constitutional institutions in the same speech in which he decried the loss of the rule of law. He obviously didn’t get the irony, nor, I’d wager, did a soul in that crowd.

He also told the people to ignore their minds and listen to their hearts, because in your heart is where you determine truth. It’s. All. About. Feeling. Don’t think, feel. This is 100 percent what Metaxas was saying this week on Charlie Kirk’s show: logic & evidence don’t matter if your heart tells you that Trump won. You watch: this movement is going to end up demanding that Gen. Flynn become the military dictator of America.

Rudolph Hess

Get this: at the height of Flynn speech, Trump appeared overhead in Marine One. Like an apparition! After Trump choppered off to the Army-Navy game, Flynn resumed his address. Every time they attack Trump, he said, they’re attacking you! Total identification of the collective with the individual man, Trump. I despise facile comparisons, but this is a core fascist trope. At the 1934 Nuremberg Party rally, Nazi functionary Rudolf Hess told the faithful, “The Party is Hitler! But Hitler is Germany, as Germany is Hitler!”

Chris Hedges on “The Collective Suicide of the Liberal Class”

As American democracy continues to circle the drain, the future of our body politic looks increasingly grim.

Chris Hedges

I had planned on writing a post about the long-term social effects of “Trumpism” and the president’s faux-legal efforts to overturn a democratic presidential election, but then I received Chris Hedges’ latest editorial in my inbox.

Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who wrote for many years for the New York Times.

Reflecting on his years as a foreign war correspondent, he also wrote an important book describing the addictive qualities of war-making entitled, War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. If you haven’t read it, you really should.

Hedges is one of my favorite journalists and political writers who offers a cogent analysis of America’s unhappy future in words far more eloquent than anything I would have written.

So, here is an excerpt of Hedges’ very insightful and very bleak forecast. Or you can read the entire article here:

Liberals who express dismay, or more bizarrely a fevered hope, about the corporatists and imperialists selected to fill the positions in the Biden administration are the court jesters of our political burlesque. They long ago sold their soul and abandoned their most basic principles to line up behind a bankrupt Democratic Party. They chant, with every election cycle, the mantra of the least worst and sit placidly on the sidelines as a Bill Clinton or a Barack Obama and the Democratic Party leadership betray every issue they claim to support.

The only thing that mattered to liberals in the presidential race, once again, was removing a Republican, this time Donald Trump, from office. This, the liberals achieved. But their Faustian bargain, in election after election, has shredded their credibility. They are ridiculed, not only among right-wing Trump supporters but by the hierarchy of the Democratic Party that has been captured by corporate power. No one can, or should, take liberals seriously. They stand for nothing. They fight for nothing. The cost is too onerous. And so, the liberals do what they always do, chatter endlessly about political and moral positions they refuse to make any sacrifices to achieve.          

Liberals, largely comprised of the professional managerial-class that dutifully recycles and shops for organic produce and is concentrated on the two coasts, have profited from the ravages of neoliberalism. They seek to endow it with a patina of civility. But their routine and public humiliation has ominous consequences. It not only exposes the liberal class as hollow and empty, it discredits the liberal democratic values they claim to uphold. Liberals should have abandoned the Democratic Party when Bill Clinton and political hacks such as Biden transformed the Democratic Party into the Republican Party and launched a war on traditional liberal values and left-wing populism. They should have defected by the millions to support Ralph Nader and other Green Party candidates. . . 

. . . The Biden administration resembles the ineffectual German government formed by Franz von Papen in 1932 that sought to recreate the ancien régime, a utopian conservatism that ensured Germany’s drift into fascism. Biden, bereft like von Papen of new ideas and programs, will eventually be forced to employ the brutal tools Biden as a senator was so prominent in creating to maintain social control – wholesale surveillance, a corrupt judicial system, the world’s largest prison system and police that have been transformed into lethal paramilitary units of internal occupation. Those that resist as social unrest mounts will be attacked as agents of a foreign power and censored, as many already are being censored, including through algorithms and deplatforming on social media. The most ardent and successful dissidents, such as Julian Assange, will be criminalized.

The shock troops of the state, already ideologically bonded with the neofascists on the right, will hunt down and wipe out an enfeebled and often phantom left, as we saw in the chilling state assassination by U.S. Marshals of the antifa activist Michael Reinoehl, who was unarmed and standing outside an apartment complex in Lacey, Washington, in September when he was shot multiple times. I witnessed this kind of routine state terror during the war in El Salvador. Reinoehl allegedly killed Aaron Danielson, a member of the far-right group Patriot Prayer during a pro-Trump rally in Portland, Oregon in August.

Compare the gunning down of Reinoehl by federal agents to the coddling of Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year-old accused of killing two protesters and injuring a third on August 25 in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Police officers, moments before the shooting, are seen on video thanking Rittenhouse and other armed right-wing militia member for coming to the city and handing them bottles of water. Rittenhouse is also seen in a video walking toward police with his hands up after his shooting spree as protesters yell that he had shot several people. Police, nevertheless, allow him to leave. Rittenhouse’s killings have been defended by the right, including Trump. Rittenhouse, who has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations for his legal fees, has been released on $2 million bail.

All the pieces are in place for our own descent into what I suspect will be a militarized Christianized fascism. Political dysfunction, a bankrupt and discredited liberal class, massive and growing social inequality, a grotesquely rich and tone-deaf oligarchic elite, the fragmentation of the public into warring tribes, widespread food insecurity and hunger, chronic underemployment and unemployment and misery, all exacerbated by the failure of the state to cope with the crisis of the pandemic, combine with the rot of civil and political life to create a familiar cocktail leading to authoritarianism and fascism.

Trump and the Republican Party, along with the shrill incendiary voices on right-wing media, play the role the antisemitic parties played in Europe during the late 19th and early 20th century. The infusion of anti-Semitism into the political debate in Europe destroyed the political decorum and civility that is vital to maintaining a democracy. Racist tropes and hate speech, as in Weimar Germany, now poison our political discourse. Ridicule and cruel taunts are hurled back and forth. Lies are interchangeable with fact. Those who oppose us are demonized as human embodiments of evil.

This poisonous discourse is only going to get worse, especially with millions of Trump supporters convinced the election was rigged and stolen. . .

. . .The constant barrage of vitriol and fabulist conspiracy theories will, I fear, embolden extremists to carry out political murder, not only of mainstream Democrats, Republicans Trump has accused of betrayal such as Georgia governor Brian Kemp and those targeted as part of the deep state, but also those at media outlets such as CNN or The New York Times that serve as propaganda arms of the Democratic Party. Once the Pandora’s box of violence is opened it is almost impossible to close. Martyrs on one side of the divide demand martyrs on the other side. Violence becomes the primary form of communication. And, as Sabastian Haffner wrote, “once the violence and readiness to kill that lies beneath the surface of human nature has been awakened and turned against other humans, and even made into a duty, it is a simple matter to change the target.”

This, I suspect, is what is coming. The blame lies not only with the goons and racists on the right, the corporatists who pillage the country and the corrupt ruling elite that does their bidding, but a feckless liberal class that found standing up for its beliefs too costly. The liberals will pay for their timidity and cowardice, but so will we.