#The Hidden History of American Oligarchy

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

By Thom Hartmann

Kevin Roberts, who heads the Heritage Foundation (largely responsible for Project 2025) just implicitly threatened Americans that if we don’t allow him and his hard-right movement to complete their transformation of America from a democratic republic into an authoritarian state, there will be blood in the streets.

“We’re in the process of taking this country back,” he told a TV audience, adding: “The reason that they are apoplectic right now, the reason that so many anchors on MSNBC, for example, are losing their minds daily is because our side is winning. And so I come full circle on this response and just want to encourage you with some substance that we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

He’s not wrong. America has been changed as a result of a series of corrupt rulings by Republicans (exclusively; not one of these rulings has been joined by a Democratic appointee) which have changed America’s legal and political systems themselves.

As Roberts notes, this is really the largest issue we all face, and our mainstream media are totally failing to either recognize or clearly articulate how radically different our country is now, how far the Republicans on the Court have dragged us away from both our Founder’s vision and the norms and standards of a functioning, modern democratic republic.

First, in a series of decisions — the first written by that notorious corporatist Lewis Powell (of “Powell Memo” fame) — Republicans on the Court have functionally legalized bribery of politicians and judges by both the morbidly rich and massive corporations.

This started with Powell’s 1978 Bellotti opinion, which opened the door (already cracked a bit) to the idea that corporations are not only “persons” under the Constitution, but, more radically, are entitled to the human rights the Framers wrote into the Bill of Rights (the first ten amendments).

Using that rationale, Powell asserted that corporations, like rich people (from the Buckley decision that preceded Belotti by two years), are entitled to the First Amendment right of free speech. But he took it a radical step farther, ruling that because corporations don’t have mouths they can use to speak with, their use of money to spend supporting politicians or carpet-bombing advertising for a candidate or issue is free speech that can’t be tightly regulated.

Citizens United, another all-Republican decision with Clarence Thomas the deciding vote (after taking millions in bribes), expanded that doctrine for both corporations and rich people, creating new “dark money” systems that wealthy donors and companies can use to hide their involvement in their efforts to get the political/legal/legislative outcomes they seek.

Last week the Republicans on the Court took even that a huge step farther, declaring that when companies or wealthy people give money to politicians in exchange for contracts, legislation, or other favors, as long as the cash is paid out after the deed is done it’s not a bribe but a simple “gratuity.”

So, first off, they’ve overthrown over 240 years of American law and legalized bribery.

Last week they also gutted the ability of federal regulatory agencies to protect average people, voters, employees, and even the environment from corporations that seek to exploit, pollute, or even engage in wage theft. This shifted power across the economic spectrum from a government elected by we the people to the CEOs and boards of directors of some of America’s most predatory and poisonous companies.

Finally, in the Trump immunity case, the Court ruled that presidents are immune from prosecution under criminal law, regardless of the crimes they commit, so long as they assert those crimes are done as part of their “official” responsibilities. And who decides what’s “official”? The six Republicans on the Supreme Court.

These actions — corporate personhood, money as speech, ending the Chevron deference to regulatory agencies, and giving the president life-and-death powers that historically have only been held by kings, shahs, mullahs, dictators, and popes — have fundamentally altered the nature of our nation.

It’s almost impossible to overstate the significance of this, or its consequences. We no longer live in America 1.0; this is a new America, one more closely resembling the old Confederacy, where wealthy families and giant companies make the rules, enforce the rules, and punish those who irritate or try to obstruct them.

In America 2.0, there is no right to vote; governors and secretaries of state can take away your vote without even telling you (although they still must go to court to take away your gun).

They can destroy any politician they choose by simply pouring enough cash into the campaign system (including dark, untraceable cash).

The president can now go much farther than Bush’s torturing and imprisoning innocent people in Gitmo without legal process: he can now shoot a person on Fifth Avenue in plain sight of the world and simply call it a necessary part of his job. Or impoverish or imprison you or me with the thinnest of legal “official” rationales.

America 2.0 is not a democracy; it’s an oligarchy, as I wrote about in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy. The South has finally — nearly — won the Civil War.

While it will be months or more likely years before all of these new powers the Republicans on the Court have given the president, rich people, and corporations begin to dawn on most Americans, they will, step-by-step transform this country into something more closely resembling Hungary or Russia than the democracies of Europe and Southeast Asia.

The only remedy at this late stage in this 50+ yearlong campaign to remake America is a massive revolt this fall at the ballot box, turning Congress — by huge majorities — over to Democrats while holding the White House.

If we fail at this, while there will be scattered pockets of resistance for years, it’ll be nearly impossible to reverse the course that America’s rightwing billionaires have set us on.

There has never been a more critical time in the history of our nation outside of the last time rich oligarchs tried to overthrow our democracy, the Civil War. Like then, the stakes are nothing less than the survival of a nation of, by, and for we the people.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

This day in history

NEXT WEEKEND (June 7–9), I'm in AMHERST, NEW YORK to keynote the 25th Annual Media Ecology Association Convention and accept the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity.

#20yrsago Bradbury goes nuts over Fahrenheit 9/11 title https://web.archive.org/web/20051219090823/https://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=38776

#15yrsago Ryanair serious about charging to use toilets in-flight, may charge extra “breathing fee” for inhaling during flight https://www.theguardian.com/business/2009/jun/02/ryanair-airline-oleary-toilet-charge

#15yrsago Jo Walton on THE SPACE MERCHANTS https://web.archive.org/web/20090612060824/http://www.tor.com/index.php

#15yrsago Roald Dahl on vaccinating your kids https://web.archive.org/web/20090606123639/http://www.childalert.co.uk/absolutenm/templates/newstemplate.asp?articleid=291&zoneid=2

#15yrsago Canadian copyright lobbyists leaned on “independent” researchers to change report on file-sharing https://web.archive.org/web/20090605230056/http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/4025/125/

#10yrsago Russia’s army of paid astroturfers message-bomb western coverage of Ukraine https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/maxseddon/documents-show-how-russias-troll-army-hit-america

#10yrsago A scarf woven from Jay Lake’s genome https://fishwrapper.wordpress.com/2013/08/12/jays-genome-project-part-3/

#10yrsago Riis’s “How the Other Half Lives”: photos of NYC slumlife in the Gilded Age https://web.archive.org/web/20140625121238/http://www.authentichistory.com/1898-1913/2-progressivism/2-riis/index.html

#10yrsago The more your job helps people, the less you’re paid (and vice-versa) https://www.salon.com/2014/06/01/help_us_thomas_piketty_the_1s_sick_and_twisted_new_scheme/

#10yrsago It’s not Net Neutrality that’s at stake, it’s Cable Company Fuckery https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpbOEoRrHyU

#10yrsago Critical thinking vs education: Teaching kids math without “correct” answers https://powersfulmath.wordpress.com/2014/04/30/who-or-what-broke-my-kids/

#10yrsago Piketty’s methods: parsing wealth inequality data and its critique https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/05/30/pikettys-errors-arent-mistakes-theyre-questions-and-he-answered-them/

#5yrsago That woman who got fired for comparing Michelle Obama to an ape is now going to jail for defrauding FEMA https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/woman-who-called-michelle-obama-ape-sentenced-jail-defrauding-fema-n1012936

#5yrsago The army of contractor-linguists who power Google Assistant say they had their wages stolen https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/may/28/a-white-collar-sweatshop-google-assistant-contractors-allege-wage-theft

#5yrsago Rumor: DoJ is going to investigate Google for antitrust violations https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/31/doj-preparing-antitrust-probe-of-google---dow-jones.html

#5yrsago Stop saying “robots are coming for your job”; start saying “Your boss wants to replace you with a robot” https://gizmodo.com/robots-are-not-coming-for-your-job-management-is-1835127820

#5yrsago Ted Chiang’s “Op Ed From the Future”: socialized transhumanism vs American oligarchy https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/27/opinion/ted-chiang-future-genetic-engineering.html

#5yrsago Report from the Fed reveals that “economic growth” is a highly localized phenomena, masking widespread financial desperation https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/06/st-louis-fed-study-shows-rising-level-of-financial-desperation-among-the-poor-hidden-by-aggregates.html

#5yrsago All weekend, California Democrats booed neoliberal would-be presidents who talked down the Green New Deal and Medicare for All https://memex.craphound.com/2019/06/03/all-weekend-california-democrats-booed-neoliberal-would-be-presidents-who-talked-down-the-green-new-deal-and-medicare-for-all/

#5yrsago Speech Police: vital, critical look at the drive to force Big Tech to control who may speak and what they may say https://memex.craphound.com/2019/06/03/speech-police-vital-critical-look-at-the-drive-to-force-big-tech-to-control-who-may-speak-and-what-they-may-say/

#1yrago Washington State's capital gains tax proves we can have nice things https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/03/when-the-tide-goes-out/#passive-income

[nothingnessreality]

last vote

This may be your last chance to vote in a real election.

Here is something that most people don’t know. According to the American Psychiatric Association (APA), about 1.5% of all males are psychopaths and about 4% are sociopaths. A psychopath is defined as a person who is born with zero empathy, and thus sees all people as just objects to be used. Sociopaths on the other hand also have no empathy but are made that way growing up, and so do mostly petty crimes.

So if you combine the two we have 6 million Americans who have no empathy, but that gets worse because this is on a scale from the lowest empathy to the highest and there are another 10 million Americans who have little to no empathy or caring for others outside the people they know. They are antisociety.

This 16% of Americans, believe it or not, is fairly normal, but in the last 40 years the number of Americans who only care about their family and friends has grown to well over 100 million Americans, a third of America!!! They are now the Radical Right, Trump cult. If this doesn’t shock you then maybe you have become one of the 100 million who are antisociety.

Why is that, and why have we become so divided? The answer is simple; we have been divided on purpose.

One Australian study found that 1 in 5, 20%, of corporate CEOs and lawyers are psychopaths! Other studies now show that when most people become wealthy they lose their caring for anyone outside their circle, So today 75% of the wealthy have no feeling or caring for anyone outside their circle. Thus they are antisociety in general, and many, 20% to 50%, are psychopaths. In other words this group of rich people don’t care if you live or die, and most would kill you if you stood between them and their money.

There are around 600 billionaires in the US, and if just 20% are psychopaths or sociopaths, which is easily true, we are talking about at least 100+ billionaires who would love to take control of the US, and do not care who they hurt doing it. With their billions they could easily create a secret group which would have all the money they would ever need to pay for subversion, propaganda, or anything else they needed to divide us. Guess what, that is just what is happening.

A large group of sociopathic billionaires, which the New York Times thinks may be around 400 members, has started a secret group who’s major goal is to take as much control of America as they can, and turn it into an oligarchy, where only they can vote. Because they have kept what they are doing a secret, what is going on has only started to come to light in the last ten years.

We now know that the head of this subversive organization is Charles

Koch, CEO of Koch industries. He has an annual income of 110 billion, according to Forbes. His Father was cofounder of the John Birch Society, in the 1950s, and before starting the John Birch Society he wrote a 30 page anti communism booklet, which contained a way that the US could be taken over. It was poorly thought out, but his two sons are now using the writings of Vladimir Lenin to try and do it for real. The John Birch Society is the most radical right wing organizations in American history, and was condemned by the Republican Party at the time, but all of their radical ideology has now become main steam Republican ideology, through the uses of propaganda and subversion.

At minimum 75%+ of Republicans are now as radical right wing as they can get. They hate society, government, blacks, gays, Unions etc., and think they should have total free will, to hell with the other 320 million Americans.

Some of the first members of the Koch organization were Richard Mellon Scaife, heir to the Mellon Banking and Gulf Oil; Harry and Lynde Bradley, defense contracts; John M. Olin, chemical and munitions Companies; Coors brewing family, and the DeVos family of Amway marketing.

I call them the Oligarchy because that is what they are trying to do, become the Oligarchy over the US, where only the wealthy can vote, and the 4 keys to subversion they use are Fear, Intimidation, Distraction, and Division. It has worked. We now are more divided than ever, in the whole of our history.

The Oligarchy budgeted 800 million to buy the president in the 2016 campaign, and every republican presidential candidate, except Donald Trump, had signed on and pledged allegiance to the oligarchy. Yes, literally signed a contract. Donald Trump used his own money to get elected by creating a cult following, just like Adolf Hitler did in Germany, and Benito Mussolini did in Italy. The oligarchy denounced Trump during the campaign, but once he got elected they made a deal with him to use members of the oligarchy in his cabinet.

Trump keeps saying he will be president for 12 more years. Where is he getting that? The president is term limited to 8 years and he has already had 4. I speculate that it may be part of the deal. Once they take control of the US he gets to have 12 more years.

So, for the past 4 years the Koch oligarchy has been setting up the US from the inside of the government to take control of it. Including packing the courts with their Judges, all trained at the Federalists Society, which is an oligarchy sponsored foundation for Lawyers.

Between 2015 to 2017 Mitch McConnell refused to seat any of Obama’s 100+ federal judges, including Merrick Garland for the Supreme Court. Then when Trump was elected McConnell quickly filled all the seats with Federalist Society Judges.

Keep in mind that it was the Radical Right Bolshevik party that took over Russia in the 1920s, and made Vladimir Lenin their leader. It was the Radical Right fascist party that took over Italy in 1922, and made Benito Mussolini their leader. It was the Radical Right Nazi party that took over Germany in 1933, and made Adolf Hitler their leader, it was the Radical Right Red Guard

that took over China in 1966, and made Mao Zedong their leader, and the list goes on. It is always the Radical Right that takes over a country and turn the country into an authoritarian government, and that is now happening in the US. It looks like it is our turn; the US now has a Radical Right that would rival any of these.

The best-documented book on the Koch’s and their syndicate, and how secretive they are, comes from an investigative reporter of the New York Times, Jane Mayer. Her book is called “Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right.”

Another book that shows, beyond any doubt, what the Koch syndicate is trying to do comes from Nancy MacLean, a social historian, who stumbled across a large stash of secret documents left behind after the death of a member of the Koch syndicate. Her book, after going though these secret files, is called “Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America.”

If you want to know more about how Trump created a cult following read: “The Cult of Trump” by Steven Hassa. Dr. Hassa is a psychologist who studies cults. He got started because when he was a young man in college he got sucked into a Cult, and has first hand knowledge of how they work.

Too many Americans live in the illusion that it can’t happen here, but it absolutely can and is. If you refuse to believe that this is true you had better open your eyes, and do some research. Before you say this is hype you should at least read Nancy MacLean’s book. I can guarantee you that if they get control of the US your civil rights will be gone, and the first things they will do will be to ban all guns and get rid of anyone who is a threat to the government.

Today the Koch syndicate is well over 100 think tanks whose main goal is to take controls of America. Most of these foundations are charitable foundations on the surface, but in the basement is a large staff that does nothing but look for ways to subvert, radicalize, and divide American Democracy.

The more divided we become, the more control they have. They can use the Electoral College to their advantage, and that is how Trump got elected; this is why we are so divided, it is on purpose. The Oligarchy now literally owns just about every Republican in the House and Senate, who does just as they are told. Their only allegiance is to the Republican Party, and it is 100% controlled by the oligarchy.

If Trump gets reelected, and that is very likely because of the oligarchies use of voter suppression, and use of the Electoral College, it will be all over, the end of American Democracy. Because by the end of his next term they will have massed so much control working from inside the government that there will be no turning back, and I’m betting if this happens the US will split up because the blue states won’t cooperate with an authoritarian government, and the world’s longest standing constitution will melt away.

The reason Trump was able to con so many people is because they where set up before hand by the propaganda coming from the Koch syndicate, which, as I said, is a spin off of the John Birch Society, which had a surge of

membership in 2010. So, you better wake up as to what is really going on or the US will become an oligarchy where only the rich can vote.

Don’t think for a second that the Democratic Party leadership doesn’t know about this. A number of them have endorsements in the front of Nancy MacLean’s book, “Democracy in Chains.” But if they talk about it in public it will be turned into a political football. Joe Biden has said, “If Trump gets elected it may be the end of America as we know it.” So, this may be your last chance to vote in a real election.

[collapsedsquid]

Francis was introduced to this school of thought by his study of Vilfredo Pareto, whom he discovered through the work of James Burnham. Pareto was an early-twentieth-century Italian sociologist who sought to construct a “science of power” (in ­Burnham’s words) by observing recurring patterns of change in political history. With this approach, ­Pareto believed, it was possible to discern universal laws of social organization. He argued that all political societies, except for the most primitive, were dominated by an elite minority. Even modern societies that called themselves democratic in fact functioned as oligarchies. Pareto did not endorse elite government in the form of aristocracy, and he denied that elites were better, wiser, or more virtuous than the multitude. Elites were simply inevitable, and political history was the story of how the composition of the dominant class “circulated” over time, according to the changing character of a nation.

Pareto explained minority rule through its use of ideology, whose nature, he argued, was hidden even from its beneficiaries. Elites governed society largely for their own benefit, but they rarely ruled through violence or intimidation. They ruled through myths, stories, and ideals that justified their domination by endowing it with moral credibility. Pareto was one of the first scholars of ideology, and he carefully examined discrepancies between the abstract content of political rhetoric and its real-world uses. He distinguished between the “formal” and “real” meanings of political ideology. The formal meaning of an ideology is communicated by its explicit concepts and values, and can be understood philosophically. Its real meaning is revealed through its intended effects on political behavior, which are disguised by its rhetoric. Though Pareto saw ideologies as self-serving, he did not believe their sole purpose was to deceive the masses. They reflected a genuine human desire, shared by both rulers and ruled, to live together on the perceived basis of morality rather than force.

Francis used Pareto’s work to explain the impotence of American conservatism. Why had conservatives, despite election victories, failed to reduce the size of government or stop social liberalization? Francis had a cynical view of Republican politicians, attacking even Reagan at the height of his popularity. But he placed the blame on conservative intellectuals, who had made two compounding errors. The first was to take the formal meaning of liberalism at face value. Under the popular slogan “ideas have consequences,” they had assumed that liberal ideas, rather than the political interests they advanced, were their primary enemy. Francis’s writing in the 1980s frequently attacked influential conservatives such as Irving Kristol, George Will, and Richard John ­Neuhaus, criticizing their “esoteric” preoccupations. While conservatives were staging conferences to ponder the moral foundations of democracy, liberal intellectuals were perfecting strategies for seizing institutional power. Neuhaus may have offered “formal defenses” of traditional institutions, ­Francis complained, but his respect for civil debate only served to “legitimize managerial control.”

Tradcaths at First Things wrote a piece on Sam Francis

[boiledleather]

‘The Americans’ Season Six Premiere Recap: Orders of Magnitude

Elizabeth Jennings sits in a cafe in Mexico City and learns that the leader of the Soviet Union will be murdered if he agrees to deactivate his country’s top-secret plan for retaliatory nuclear annihilation. She learns this not in a warning, but in a demand for her assistance. Making an end-run around her superiors back home, a man from the Soviet army has come to recruit her to spy on Gorbachev’s team at a disarmament summit. Her job is to make sure that the Strangelovian project — codenamed “Dead Hand,” because why fuck around — is not on the bargaining table. If it is, she is to report back, and history will change forever.

As she learns this information, which will culminate in her receipt of a necklace with a poison pill hidden inside in order to protect the sanctity of Dead Hand should she ever be captured, Peter Gabriel’s “We Do What We’re Told” rises in volume on the soundtrack, higher and higher, until the only reason we can make out her contact’s words is because we can read their subtitled translations. It’s a clever callback to The Americans‘ first episode and its use of “In the Air Tonight” by Phil Collins — another eerie solo standout from a Genesis alum that was famously used in the soundtrack for Miami Vice some thirty years ago. But it’s also away to focus our attention not on the mission, but the shock of receiving it. The Americans deploys quiet and wordlessness as effectively as any show on TV; so many of its standout performers (Noah Emmerich, Brandon J. Dirden, Costa Ronin) are strikingly soft-spoken, and many of its best moments consist of characters just standing and staring at something they can only just bear to see. This isn’t an option in the middle of receiving your marching orders, so the show does the next best thing: It drowns them out. Elizabeth herself is quiet, but there’s a tumult in her head.

[...]

Watching The Americans in 2018 is a much different experience than watching The Americans in 2013 — not just because it’s much better show than it was during that first season (a reasonably enjoyable thriller and not much more), nor because during the 2012 election liberal pundits treated Mitt Romney describing Russia as our enemy as a gaffe while now many of those same pundits are out to start a new Cold War against the country and its ex-KGB leader. You get a little closer when you start talking about why — Russian meddling in 2016 election and influence peddling with its Electoral College–appointed winner Donald Trump and his minions — but only if you treat that as the starting point rather than the finish.

Should even the worst of the allegations against the Putin and Trump governments turn out to be true, they’re basically just tit for tat if you go back to what happened after Gorbachev, when America helped establish an oligarchy by kicking off a capitalist fire sale in the country, and intervened directly and more or less openly to ensure Putin predecessor Boris Yeltsin presided over it. A slightly, but only slightly, less dramatic looting of the commons by corporations, their wealthy viziers, and their paid representatives in the United States government took place here at home. And there’d be no Trump on whose behalf to meddle if our own grotesque racism, sexism, xenophobia, gutting of the social safety net, and worship of money hadn’t made him possible.

In short, it’s much, much harder than it used to be for all but the most blinkered patriots, liberal or conservative, to look at America and Russia’s recent history and see good guys and bad guys. History is a palimpsest, rewritten as we go. And as with Elizabeth in that cafe, things that used to be sound perfectly clear are getting harder and harder to hear.

I reviewed the final season premiere of The Americans for Decider, where I’ll be covering this very special show until the end.

[aboutanancientenquiry]

1/ Market socialism: you claim an ability to read my thoughts and unmask my true intentions. But in fact, when you describe what you perceive as the "hidden truth" behind the “fashionable” market socialism, it seems that you have vaguely in mind Oskar Lange’s model from the 1930′s, a model structured around a board of central planners trying to “imitate” the market. However, it would be easy for you to find with a bit of research on the net that when many socialists talk today about market socialism, they don’t have Lange’s model in their minds, but a true socialist market of freely interacting, democratically self-managed cooperatives of producers.

More generally, your thesis is that every imaginable form of socialism (and it seems that, like most American conservatives, you include in this term even versions of mixed/pluralist economy) would lead inevitably to overconcentration of power, authoritarianism, totalitarianism, and domination of the society by a few autocrats. But you don’t offer any arguments for this thesis of yours. You just assert that you read the mind of the “Socialist” and what you find hidden there is always the vision of an authoritarian-totalitarian society and the secret ambition of becoming autocrat. I repeat that this is for me just conservative prejudice and rhetoric, not a reasoned political thesis.

2/ Friedman and greed: I find Friedman’s excerpt that you quote rather hypocritical. Capitalism is not mainly about the pursuit of the interests of “the scientist, the philanthropist, and the missionary”. It is mainly about the pursuit of the personal egoistic and material interest and of the accumulation of capital and wealth. It is a standard argument of apologists of capitalism that the capitalist market miraculously uses individual vices (egoisme and greed) to produce the best possible economic and social outcome. But of course obviously this faith in the alchemy of the capitalist market is far from reality: how the unlimited interplay of the private interests and of the “enlightened” egoism of the individuals would have always as result the best possible outcome for all, in complex societies and economies characterized by vast asymmetries of economic and social power and of information, but also by important negative externalities of the actions of the individuals (above all the impact on the environment)? The conservatives today refuse to think about these problems or rather denounce loudly every serious attempt to think and act on them as the first steps toward the "Hell of Totalitarian Communism”. On the contrary, conservatives of Friedman’s type try always to rehabilitate even further individual egoism and greed and to dismantle almost all the limits that societies has put on them in the last 200 years in order to “civilize’ and “humanize’ capitalism.

3/ I find a bit funny that you see every socialist and leftist as a closeted authoritarian, pretending that you somehow know beyond any doubt our secret intentions and ignoring the struggles and sacrifices of leftist people for democracy and freedom in many places of the world, when you cite in the same text as authority Milton Friedman, a person who had no problem to collaborate with and assist the Chilean far-right criminal dictator Pinochet. I remind that Pinochet’s dictatorship was only one among the many (usually US-backed) pro-”free market” right-wing dictatorships in power in developping countries during the period of 1970-1990, which imposed on their societies through violence policies inspired by Friedman’s Chicago School, often with the active involvement of Friedman's disciples. More generally, history proves that in societies with excessive inequalities of wealth, the risk of a capturing of the political power by an economic oligarchy or even of a tyranny serving the interests of this oligarchy is always real. And the capitalism of the last decades (especially the American capitalism) tends exactly to widen vastly economic and social inequalities and to concentrate on a perhaps unprecedented scale wealth and economic and social power in the hands of a capitalist oligarchy...

Response To Post On Socialism, Free Enterprise and Greed.

https://aboutanancientenquiry.tumblr.com

The Conservative: 'Greed is an individual flaw, but in the System of the Free Enterprise the interplay of the greed of the individuals produces the best possible economic outcome at the level of the whole society.”

philosophicalconservatism.com

"The greed of the individual" is not what we claim yields the best economic outcome, the "free pursuit of individual interest" does. They are not the same. Allow me to quote the economist Milton Friedman:

"Self-interest is not myopic selfishness. It is whatever it is that interests the participants, whatever they value, whatever goals they pursue. The scientist seeking to advance the frontiers of his discipline, the missionary seeking to convert infidels to the true faith, the philanthropist seeking to bring comfort to the needy - all are pursuing their interests, as they see them, as they judge them by their own values."

We contend that it is by allowing individuals to freely pursue their own "individual interests" (as defined above) that one produces the best economic outcome. You do also obviously allow for greed, but so does every other political system, because they all feature human beings. The real question, as Friedman observed is: under which system does greed do the least amount of damage? The point in my original post was that the practical danger posed by greed under the Free Enterprise system pales in comparison to the danger that it poses under the unrestrained and unchecked power of absolute Socialist autocrats. This is due not only to the potential harm caused by the concentration of so much power under that second type of system, but also due to the exclusivity of the arrangement. In other words, because all of your eggs have been placed in one basket, if this one institution is corrupted the entire society is corrupted and has no external resource for correction.

This stands in contrast to the Free Enterprise system which not only features multiple centres of economic power, but far more importantly, it features multiple competing centres of economic power. Additionally, they are impermanent centres of power due to the operation of the free market which commonly replaces old business outfits with new ones (and on the basis of productivity). Finally, the system is also overseen by a limited government.

Now in your full comment you assert that the truly fashionable kind of Socialism today is something known as "Market Socialism" which you insist is distinguishable from central planning. You describe it as a collection of cooperative business firms that are "coordinated by a socialist market". Those two words "coordinated by" are the only really important ones here. The American Conservative does not oppose voluntary Socialism; if a group of like minded people want to come together and create a little voluntary Socialist commune that is their own business, they can do that now. What we oppose is political Socialism. And so likewise, groups of individuals can voluntarily come together and create cooperative business firms if they like. But you are not talking about voluntary, non-political, non-coerced arrangements. The business firms that you are talking about will not be coordinated by "a market" as you say, they will be coordinated by a central planning board which will supposedly imitate a market, and which will vow to be responsive instead of dictatorial. So in other words, it is the same model of autocracy, but with a mildly different set of promises. But the problem with the old autocracy was not simply that it didn't make the right promises, it was that it didn't even keep the promises that it made.

You see when you decide that instead of carefully handling human greed you are actually going to try to abolish it, all you actually do is willfully blind yourself to its presence and operation ( in your body of morally pure autocrats) and consequently you render the human race more susceptible to its perils than it ever was before. And of course history attests to this.

[jasonfields]

THE GREAT RESET waged by the Elites

-jason fields

Soon, if not already, you are going to start hearing about the publicly known agenda now named #TheGreatReset. Re-Sloganed locally as needed. It’s a positive thing it seems at first.

Right now, VERY LARGE global organizations and governments are readying the roll out of far reaching plans to “save” our economy, and our Planet and our People.    These Super Orgs are hoping to get the opportunity to reset ALL things, and finally reign in the chaos.  Country by Country, State by state, City by City. A once and and for all time FIX to “save” the PLANET. Even in the U.S., under the guise of our democracy, for as long as the illusion holds. They have been salivating over the idea of a pandemic for many years, and China is leading the example in controlling populations.

Global Elites, leaders, heads of state, very large foundations and some billionaires around the world have loosely banded themselves together concertedly with the power of nations and a public vision to SAVE US from this current dire economic and covid crisis alike, while resetting all structures in order to control all things , and finally be able to control the "coming climate crisis” for good. And they are fully aligned to profiteer on the chaos. Their vision pamphlet at the World Economic Forum discussed in Davos this year reads “COVID 19 : The Great Reset”   Sounds positive.  And any negative associations will be considered lies of course.

We already know Covid is being weaponized as a tool by various power hungry Entities around the globe. HUGE RETURNS on investment for the ELITE Power Brokers gobbling up entire systems.  AND forever Affecting us.  Swooping up what middle class business owners could not hold together during lockdowns.  For Control of all sorts in the name of cutting emissions, but the acts will be played out by global giants in the spirit of greed and control.  Deals cut all across the globe to lockdown entire nations states to kill economies for reset. 

These global players have a plan to “save” things. It's going to be #TheGreatReset of everything globally. It is packaged as a plan to save the world from coming climate and economic disaster. And to “redistribute wealth”.  Killing the upper and middle class and feeding it to the poor while giving immunity to the Elites. Its mission is public. Not currently hiding.

This alignment would usually be a failure.  Normally it would be IMPOSSIBLE to achieve full government control in the US, pre-covid and post-covid. The ripe window to strike is during CHAOS.   They need to consolidate power in the business sectors in order to dial emissions to planet-saving levels. Even their own literature reads:

“COVID-19, the great reset”. Right now; done by 2030.

This is not a Theory. This is the open and searchable agenda of the World Economic Forum, as well as the International Monetary Fund, and this agenda was greatly discussed at the last world forum in Davos. IMF, by the way, has the financial means to “save nations”.  Many many poor nations are irreversibly indebted to the IMF.  It’s a type of hidden control and colonialism by elites puppet masters.

One of the slogans of the European reset campaign is that by 2030, “We will all own nothing, and we will all be happy.”

One of the key components of the agenda is to replace ownership of ALL things including replacing all businesses owners with government stewards, shareholders stepping aside.

This effort will solve the “imminent climate crisis” by perfectly dialing in global emissions for all businesses with ultimate state control.  By making these fundamental changes, they believe the earth will be saved from the “evils of capitalism” so that we can finally return all businesses to net zero emissions. Not some things... But this time, once and for all things.  From food to production to healthcare and education and you best believe all media and free speech.

With power brokers, the ends justify the means. With Planet Savers it will be the same. An army of young people indoctrinated with the word EQUITY.  And the fearful public will let the government break every process if they they believe their life depends on it.  Versus let's just agree we need to do something about our national crises together.

National production resources will be ruled by Government stewards and people who are supposedly not susceptible to greed and power and such. You wanna talk about fascism? This far-left agenda looks more fascist than anything I’ve ever seen. It’s about control.

This oldish globalist agenda would not usually concern me, because up to this point the USA has been IMMUNE and has still remained free. A beacon of hope, with its own issues. This agenda would be impotent. BUT not anymore post-covid.

Covid was necessary to pull this agenda off. It’s now or never. Regular and sustained chaos is required. Supply chains forever broken and remade. Numerous countries involved will lose some of their remaining freedoms. Many country leaders have been bought to join the Global Elite and Shut the Entire Country Down to cripple the middle class buffer.   

It will require these fascist tactics in order to fully control the regular people who were keeping the food on the table and keep running going efficiently. Don’t be distracted by the covid part. This is not a Covid argument. Nor is this an election argument.

You say: CHECKS and BALANCES will keep our Union together and free of Communist or Fascist rule.  Normally Yes, BUT NO!  The balance WILL be exploited Exactly during the Virus.  Control is never given back historically.  Who needs the house and senate when you have the fearful populist masses, a fixed system, and a common enemy painted by the coordinated state press as evil science denying viral killers trying to steal democracy.

Once FACIST or Oligarchy Control is achieved, historically, and 100% for all time, it is never given back.  Not without blood. And not without paying its global masters.  Free thinking lost forever.

America's small businesses were far too powerful for the elites to control. Our sense of freedom was too strong to give up. Our middle class was too independent. Chaos and hunger must strike first, in order to break our spirit and consolidate power; at least some, as much as they can get.

GREED is Thick and the elites just tasted it. For the last nine months, they tasted a little taste of the glory and GREED.Global elites in 9 short Covid months have added 20% to their billions. And Many doubling and tripling assets. And that is nothing compared to the power consolidated.

Could it happen here?

During the great depression era, the good average German people would have never let the Nazis take complete fascist rule without first experiencing deep economic devastation, confusion and disunity and CHAOS. Watch history. Chaos is required by the movement. They need us dependent, they want to feed us in food lines, and take care of our every need. Again, not a covid argument. They will create the chaos so that they can be the ones to bring it back into order as to their playbook. They will take whatever jurisdiction they can get their hands on. Entire countries and sectors under control.

They believe they would do a better job using OUR bodies as a national resource than we can.

And we will be happy.

Sounds blissful. If there was ANYWHERE ELSE IN THE FREE WORLD LEFT to ESCAPE TO.

I don’t know about you but I am deathly in love with FREEDOM.

And if THEY only succeed in fully controlling half or a third of the free world, they would be delighted. They will make millions of people believe that the Earth's future existence depends on it. And the time is now.

Here is how.   They have already cataloged each one of us individually, to destroy any little part of our lives if we don’t comply, and they will give their low ranking thugs access to the extensive harvested digital database of YOU.

Privacy is personal safety. Do I have something to hide? In the future, Yes a lot of things; like, the whereabouts of my children at all times, my business plans, my location etc.

Great Britain and Europe and Australia are already lining up to “reset” their countries unbeknownst to their people. It is just being slowly rolled out in a controlled message of HOPE . This is not a partial reset. This is the Great Reset.  US is looking at the face of its Manchurian Candidate.

Most Americans only get their news sources from comfortable and synchronized sources that have the deepest pockets of influence and legal team.   They don’t even know who owns that Media outlet, and who bought it for a billion last week. Follow the money.  Check your Media Bias Chart.    Compare notes with your friends who think differently and utilize far different news sources.   Is the media being fair?  What is not being told?  Who is the audience?

Fast forward. It will all seem innocent until we see political parties launch their own partisan police force just like all Fascists and communist movements do to ensure compliance in the streets. By then, the fight for freedom gets much harder, and completely underground.   At this point you actually will need Jesus to help you make it through.  Nothing in the natural will help you then.

This year, countries are soon to roll out with things like the Virus Passport and will use it with various levels of control of your movements and privileges. As the limit of each country's people is tested, other countries and governors will watch and be emboldened with this power grab      orgasm. (Excuse me). Governors who throw house party dinners with scientists and doctors while cancelling our Thanksgiving.  (not a covid opinion) just reality.

The enemy is not within. It’s not our neighbors. It’s not the Democrats, it’s not the Republicans. It's not the upper class. It is the Power Brokers, the global elite conveniently aligned to snatch power in this once-in-a lifetime grand opportunity of Covid. The Elites are also rightly afraid of the peaceful masses, after watching all these other countries be overthrown recently.

I challenge you to take a look at who’s in charge of the global economic forum, and what their beliefs are. Look at their collective capacity to make this GreatFlip. Do this, if only to be informed about what powerful people are doing and what other nations are doing. Hidden mass human rights violations around the globe...uhhh, Fox didn’t tell us that? A Fox would not kill a Wolf either. The Elites are almost powerful enough to destroy what’s left of the free world. Their power is YOU.

But not yet…

Do not be divided or you will give them the very Power they need to pull it off.

Ask yourself, “Why was 2020 so bad?” It's not just any one catastrophe, but hundreds and thousands of disasters. Chaos economics. Other elites may not align exactly to each others causes. Yet, they WILL AND ARE united by greed and are participating because it pays HUGE power dividends to the ruling class, and a large amount of wealth is transferred from the middle class and upper class as smaller businesses get gobbled up and destroyed by the economic blow. Again, not a covid argument. Chaos and public fear is necessary to pull this off.

Much worse, a common core value within the upper ranks of the World Economic Forum leaders is to seek solutions to keep the world's population down. It’s kind of a religion. Do your own research. But it’s important considering it’s the personal hope and mission of Bill Gayytes to save the world by lowering the population, and since he’s so involved in our vaxx-s. Will you be his sacrifice? “Do it for Bill?” This is Not a vaxs argument. I am just going to allow you to jump ahead of me in line. Please go first. I'll wait for round 2, But in many countries, you do not get to choose; you have to just trust that your leaders have your best in mind for your race while they catalog you and suppress your movements.….while any deaths in dark corners of the world will be blamed on covid despite the bullet wounds to increase fear and weed out dissenters. Follow these forceful tactics to their evil sources, the lowdown governor types and their nursing home horrors of fear.

Thank you for listening. Honestly, I predict that these global elites and the media outlets that they own will be greatly embarrassed, and the governors consolidating control, are going to overplay their hand in the USA and fail. God Save us! Maybe they’ll have another shot in 20 years. But we can’t go through this sleeping. Do not let yourself be split from your family and neighbors by Facebook algorithms. Stick with your people and love them anyway; they are not the problem. 

We must not be divided. Do not get caught up in rumors. If you watch the news,turn that Sheeeiiit off for a week and READ broad and various news sources. Challenge your current narrative as if you would have to defend professionally, what are your sources. Know your media biases. Do not limit your findings from only one bias. Hear the spin on both sides. No gaslighting allowed for yourself or your family members. Respect and love your family, aside from their perspectives.

Save your country by doing these little things. Build bridges to people nearby you that you could bless and let them know that you are looking out for them during this time. This will help cure the slow onset of mental illness for thousands of people around the world. if we did this contagious thing. Or maybe you think the govt would be better served mandating government workers to program the love work, the feeding, the monitoring and mental care, and the job placement? Maybe your grandmother won’t die alone if the government helps give company.

More importantly, SAVE AMERICA. Do not let 1-2 term politicians make you so filled with hate that you are willing to compromise and divide. Unless they divide us, they have no power.

Unfortunately, it seems we may have just handed over the KEYS of hate and division with one botched election; and half of America making partisan decisions to not hear the case or see it. 

Just gaslight it. Hear no evil, see no evil. The worst kind of case. Instant result.

Fair elections is all we have. No democracy without it. This is a dangerous problem. 60% of Americans think this will be the last hope of a real election. USA over. We handed them the blind hate they needed. Without hate, we can act with fair judgement and process. But, with mass public hate, the process can be subverted by the people. Hear no Evil. 

The news today covering this is an Act of War on American people. Must remove orange guy, shut down the evidence, perfectly divide the nation… Please do not go there in your heart. Not a perfect candidate nor a bad candidate is worth dividing people by subverting justice. These temporary leaders are not worth dividing over. If we let this happen it will be shortly followed by being herded and corralled by fear to full control. They will use the manufactured violence to justify taking guns, and voices forever silenced.  You then go to work for the dark side, or you starve.

Once the internet is fire-walled, we have reached the point of no return on the stranglehold of power. It's going to be a paranoid beast in its fascist infancy. But, right now, this is a hidden sneaky elite class war being waged and it’s being painted as hate amongst the poor and busy masses, who are freshly being divided by Facebook algorithms. You want to talk about woke?

I pray that the poor masses would not turn on each other to be used like pawns in the next six months.

It is important that you value freedom, and the process, MORE than you love politics. If not, you will have participated in handing our collective Power of the People over to the STATE to never return.

To Liberty,

Jason Fields

[garudabluffs]

Dark money : the hidden history of the billionaires behind the rise of the radical right 

Why is America living in an age of profound economic inequality? Why, despite the desperate need to address climate change, have even modest environmental efforts been defeated again and again? Why have protections for employees been decimated? Why do hedge-fund billionaires pay a far lower tax rate than middle-class workers? The conventional answer is that a popular uprising against "big government" led to the ascendancy of a broad-based conservative movement. But Jane Mayer argues that a network of exceedingly wealthy people with extreme libertarian views bankrolled a systematic, step-by-step plan to fundamentally alter the American political system. Their core beliefs -- that taxes are a form of tyranny; that government oversight of business is an assault on freedom -- are sincerely held. But these beliefs also advance their personal and corporate interests: Many of their companies have run afoul of federal pollution, worker safety, securities, and tax laws. The chief figures in the network are Charles and David Koch. The brothers were schooled in a political philosophy that asserted the only role of government is to provide security and to enforce property rights. When libertarian ideas proved decidedly unpopular with voters, the Koch brothers and their allies chose another path. If they pooled their vast resources, they could fund an interlocking array of organizations that could work in tandem to influence and ultimately control academic institutions, think tanks, the courts, statehouses, Congress, and, they hoped, the presidency. These organizations were given innocuous names such as Americans for Prosperity. Funding sources were hidden whenever possible. This process reached its apotheosis with the allegedly populist Tea Party movement, abetted mightily by the Citizens United decision -- a case conceived of by legal advocates funded by the network. And their efforts have been remarkably successful. Libertarian views on taxes and regulation, once far outside the mainstream and still rejected by most Americans, are ascendant in the majority of state governments, the Supreme Court, and Congress. Meaningful environmental, labor, finance, and tax reforms have been stymied. Jane Mayer spent five years conducting hundreds of interviews -- including with several sources within the network -- and scoured public records, private papers, and court proceedings to trace the byzantine trail of the billions of dollars spent and to provide vivid portraits of the colorful figures behind the new American oligarchy.

[we-arnold-lockshin-blog]

Tyranny USA

Факты, которые  подконтрольные ЦРУ СМ»И»  в России скрывают...

Dictatorship USA – Run By A Plundering and Murderous Ruling Class  — 2019 (381)

A Dictatorship Disguised As A Democracy

TheRutherfordInstitute, May 8, 2019

What characterizes American government today is not so much dysfunctional politics as it is ruthlessly contrived governance carried out behind the entertaining, distracting and disingenuous curtain of political theater.

The players come and go, the protagonists and antagonists trade places, and the audience members are quick to forget past mistakes and move on to the next spectacle.

All the while, a different kind of drama is unfolding in the dark backstage, hidden from view by the heavy curtain, the elaborate stage sets, colored lights and parading actors.

Behind the footlights, those who really run the show are putting into place policies which erode our freedoms and undermine our attempts at contributing to the workings of our government, leaving us none the wiser and bereft of any opportunity to voice our discontent or engage in any kind of discourse until it’s too late.

While mainstream America has been fixated on the drama-filled reality show being televised from the White House, the American Police State has moved steadily forward.

Set against a backdrop of government surveillance, militarized police, SWAT team raids, asset forfeiture, eminent domain, overcriminalization, armed surveillance drones, whole body scanners, stop and frisk searches, roving VIPR raids and the like—all of which have been sanctioned by Congress, the White House and the courts—our constitutional freedoms have been steadily chipped away at, undermined, eroded, whittled down, and generally discarded.

The American people have been treated like enemy combatants, to be spied on, tracked, scanned, frisked, searched, subjected to all manner of intrusions, intimidated, invaded, raided, manhandled, censored, silenced, shot at, locked up, and denied due process.

None of these dangers have dissipated.  They have merely disappeared from our televised news streams.

You can call it the age of authoritarianism. Or fascism. Or oligarchy. Or the American police state.

Whatever label you want to put on it, the end result is the same: tyranny.

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Перед нами - коварный и опасный мошенник, расист, лжец и фашист Дональд Трамп, порочный Конгресс, нацистские ФБР - ЦРУ, кровавые милитаристы США и НАТО >>> а также и лживые, вредоносные американские СМ»И».

Нынешние киевские власти — фашистские агенты американского империализма...  Именно то, чего хотят Трамр/ США и в Венесуэле!

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Правительство США жестоко нарушало мои права человека при проведении кампании террора, которая заставила меня покинуть свою родину и получить политическое убежище в СССР. См. книгу «Безмолвный террор — История политических гонений на семью в США» - "Silent Terror: One family's history of political persecution in the United States» - http://arnoldlockshin.wordpress.com

Правительство США еще нарушает мои права, в течении 15 лет отказывается от выплаты причитающейся мне пенсии по старости.  Властители США воруют пенсию!!  

ФСБ - Федеральная служба «безопасности» России - вслед за позорным, предавшим страну предшественником КГБ, мерзко выполняет приказы секретного, кровавого хозяина (boss) - американского ЦРУ (CIA). Среди таких «задач» -  мне запретить выступать в СМИ и не пропускать отправленных мне комментариев.   А это далеко не всё...

Арнольд Локшин, политэмигрант из США

BANNED – ЗАПРЕЩЕНО!!

ЦРУ - ФСБ забанили все мои посты, комментарии в Вконтакте, в Макспарке, в Facebook (“a dangerous account”), в Medium.com... и удаляют ещё много других моих постов!

[reimaginingsocieties-blog]

Unaccounted Power is Dragging Global Society Into An Orwellian Dystopia

By Dr. Nozomi Hayase. Article from http://www.theeventchronicle.com/study/unaccounted-power-dragging-global-society-orwellian-dystopia/#

“WikiLeaks dropped a bombshell on the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Code-named “Vault 7”, the whistleblowing site began releasing the largest publication of confidential documents, that have come from the top secret security network at the Cyber Intelligence Center.

Long before the Edward Snowden revelations, Julian Assange noted how “The Internet, our greatest tool of emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen.” He decried the militarisation of the Internet with the penetration by the intelligence agencies like NSA and GCHQ, which created “a military occupation of civilian space”.

Now, WikiLeaks’ latest disclosures shed further light on this cyber-warfare, exposing the role of the CIA.

At a recent press conference from the Ecuadorian embassy in London, Assange explainedhow the CIA developed its own cyber-weapons arsenal and lost it after storing it all in one place. What is alarming is that the CIA became aware of this loss and didn’t warn the public about it. As a result, this pervasive technology that was designed to hide all traces, can now be used by cyber-mafias, foreign agents, hackers and by anyone for malicious purposes.

Part one of this WikiLeaks publication dubbed “Year Zero”, revealed the CIA’s global hacking force from 2013 to 2016. The thousands of documents released contain visceral revelations of the CIA’s own version of an NSA. With an ability to hack any Android or iPhone, as well as Samsung TVs and even cars, they spy on citizens, bypassing encrypted messaging apps like Signal and Telegram. The Vault 7 leaks that exposed the CIA’s excessive power is of great importance from a point of view of security for individual privacy. But it has larger significance tied to the mission of WikiLeaks.

Opening Government into the Deep State

Describing itself on its site as “a multi-national media organisation and associated library”, WikiLeaks aims to open governments in order to bring justice. In the speech at the SWSX conference in Texas, delivered via Skype in 2014, Assange described the particular environment that spawned the culture of disclosure this organisation helped to create.

He noted how “we were living in some fictitious representation of what we thought was the world” and that the “true history of the world” is “all obscured by some kind of fog”. This founder and editor in chief of innovative journalism explained how disclosures made though their publications break this fog.

The magnitude of this Vault 7 cache, which some say may be bigger than the Snowden revelations, perhaps lies in its effect of clearing the fog to let people around the world see the ground upon which the narratives of true history are written.

Since coming online in 2007, WikiLeaks has published more than 10 million documents. Each groundbreaking disclosure got us closer to where the real power of the world resides. In 2010, WikiLeaks rose to prominence with the publication of the Collateral Murder video. With the release of documents concerning U.S. Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, they hit on the nerves of the Pentagon —the central nervous system of the Military Industrial Complex. With the release of the U.S. Diplomatic Cables, they angered the State Department and came head to head with this global superpower.

Last year, this unprecedented publisher with its perfect record of document authentication, began to blow the cover off American democracy a step further to clear the fog. WikiLeaks played an important role in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. The DNC leaks disrupted the prescribed script of corporate sponsored lesser of two evils charade politics. The publication of the Podesta emails that revealed internal workings of the Clinton campaign, gave the American people an opportunity to learn in real time about the function of the electoral arena as a mechanism of control.

With the demise of the Democratic Party, led by its own internal corruption, the cracks in this façade widened, unveiling the existence of a government within a government.

People are beginning to glimpse those who seek to control behind the scenes – anonymous unelected actors who exercise enduring power in Washington by manipulating public perception.

This unraveling that has been slowly unfolding, appeared to have reached a peak last month when Trump’s former National Security Adviser, Michael Flynn resigned. He was forced to do this on the grounds that leaked classified information revealed he was lying about his phone conversation discussing sanctions with the Russian Ambassador.

WikiLeaks now entered its 10th year. The momentum continues, bringing us to a new pinnacle of disclosure. At the end of last year, in anticipation of this new release, WikiLeaks tweeted, “If you thought 2016 was a big WikiLeaks year, 2017 will blow you away.” During the dramatic takedown of General Flynn, the media created a frenzy around unconfirmed claims that Russia was meddling with the U.S. election and Putin’s alleged ties with Trump, creating another fog of obfuscation. It was in this climate that WikiLeaks published documents showing CIA espionage in the last French presidential election.

History Awakening

The idea of a shadow government has been the focus of political activists, while it has also been a subject of ridicule as conspiracy theories. Now, WikiLeaks’ pristine documents provide irrefutable evidence about this hidden sector of society. The term ‘deep state’ that is referenced in the mainstream media, first hit the major airwaves in 2014, in Bill Moyers’ interview with Mike Lofgren. This former congressional staff member discussed his essay titled “Anatomy of the Deep State” and explained it as the congruence of power emerging as a “hybrid of corporate America and national security state”.

We are now watching a deep state sword-fight against the elected Caesar of American plutocracy in this gladiator ring, surrounded by the cheers of liberal intelligentsia, who are maddened with McCarthy era hysteria. As the Republic is falling with its crumbling infrastructure and anemic debt economy, far away from the coliseum, crazed with the out-of-tune national anthem, the silent pulse of hope begins to whisper.

WikiLeaks unlocked the vaults that had swallowed the stolen past. As the doors open into this hidden America, history awakens with dripping blood that runs deep inside the castle. As part of the release of this encrypted treasure-trove of documents, WikiLeaks posted on Twitter the following passphrase; “SplinterItIntoAThousandPiecesAndScatterItIntoTheWinds.” These were actually words spoken by President John F. Kennedy, a month before his assassination. His exact words were “I will splinter the CIA into a thousands pieces and scatter it into the wind” – which shows his attitude toward the CIA as an arm of the deep state and what many believe to be the real reason for his assassination.

The secret stream of history continues, taking control over every aspect of civil life and infecting the heart of democracy. The U.S. has long since lost its way. We have been living in a fictitious representation of the flag and the White House. It is not judicial boundaries drawn by the Constitution or even the enlightenment ideals that once inspired the founders of this country that now guide the course of our lives. Tyranny of the old world casts its shadow, binding Congress, the Supreme Court and the President into a rule of oligarchy. CIA documents revealed that the U.S. Consulate in Frankfurt was used as a covert hacking base, while CIA officers work under the cover of the State Department to penetrate with these intelligence operations. The Wall Street Journal now reports that President Trump has given the CIA expanded authority to carry out drone attacks, which was power that prior to that had only been given to the Pentagon.

Decisions that radically alter the direction of our society are not made in a fair democratic election, a public hearing or the senate floor. They are made in the FISA Court and secret grand juries, bypassing judicial warrants and democratic accountability. This hidden network of power that exists above the law entangles legislators, judges and the press into a web of deception through dirty money and corrupt influence. It controls perception of the past, present and future.

The Internet Generation

As the deep state comes to the surface, we are able to see the real battle on the horizon. What is revealed here is a clash of values and two radically different visions of a future civilization. In his response to the Vault 7 publication, Michael Hayden, the former CIA director was quick to lay blame on the millennials. He said, “This group of millennials and related groups simply have different understandings of the words loyalty, secrecy and transparency than certainly my generation did”. To him, these young people are the problem, as if their different cultural approach and instincts must be tempered and indoctrinated into this hierarchical system, so they know who their masters are.

Who are these people that are treated as a plague on society? This is the Internet generation, immersed with the culture of the free-net, freedom of speech and association. They believe in privacy for individuals, while demanding transparency for those in power. Peter Ludlow, a philosopher who writes under the pseudonym Urizenus Sklar, shared his observation of a cultural shift that happened in 2011. He noted that WikiLeaks had become a catalyst for an underground subculture of hackers that burst into the mainstream as a vital political force.

Assange recognised this development in recent years as a “politicisation of the youth connected to Internet” and acknowledged it as “the most significant thing that happened in the world since the 1960s”.

This new generation ran into the deep state and those who confront it are met with intense hostility. Despite his promise of becoming the most transparent government, Obama engaged in unprecedented persecution of whistleblowers. Now this dark legacy seems to be continuing with the present administration. Vice president Mike Pence vowed to “use the full force of the law” to hunt down those who released the Intelligence Agency’s secret material.

As these conflicts heat up, resistance continues in the Internet that has now become a battleground. Despite crackdowns on truthtellers, these whistleblowers won’t go away. From Manning to Snowden, people inside institutions who have come to see subversion of government toward insidious control and want change, have shown extraordinary courage.

According to a statement given to WikiLeaks, the source behind the CIA documents is following the steps of these predecessors. They want this information to be publicly debated and for people to understand the fact that the CIA created its own NSA without any oversight. The CIA claims its mission is to “aggressively collect foreign intelligence overseas to protect America from terrorists, hostile nation states and other adversaries”. With these documents that have now been brought back to the historical archive, the public can examine whether this agency has itself lost control and whose interests they truly serve.

The Future of Civilisation

As the world’s first stateless 4th estate, WikiLeaks has opened up new territory where people can touch the ground of uncensored reality and claim creative power to participate in the history that is happening. In a press conference on Periscope, Assange made reference to a statement by the President of Microsoft, who called for the creation of a digital Geneva Convention to provide protection against nation-states and cyber-attacks. He then affirmed WikiLeaks’s role as a neutral digital Switzerland for people all over the world.

WikiLeaks is taking the first step toward this vision. After they carefully redacted the actual codes of CIA hacking tools, anonymised names and email addresses that were targeted, they announced that they will work with tech companies by giving them some exclusive access to the material. Assange explained that this could help them understand vulnerabilities and produce security fixes, to create a possible antidote to the CIA’s breach of security and offer countermeasures. WikiLeaks tweeted notifying the public that they now have contacted Apple, Microsoft, Google, Mozilla and MicroTik to help protect users against CIA malware.

The Internet unleashed the beast that grows its force in the dark. Unaccounted power is dragging global society down into an Orwellian dystopia. Yet, from this same Internet, a new force is arising. Courage of the common people is breaking through the firewall of secrecy, creating a fortress that becomes ever more resilient, as the network of people around the world fighting for freedom expands.

When democracy dies in darkness, it can be reborn in the light of transparency. The deep state stretches across borders, sucking people into an abyss of totalitarian control. At the same time, the epic publication of Vault 7 that has just begun, reminds us that the greatness in each of us can awaken to take back the power of emancipation and participate in this battle for democracy, the outcome of which could not only determine the future of the Internet, but of our civilisation.”

(Nozomi Hayase, Ph.D., a native of Japan, is a columnist, researcher, and the First Amendment advocate. She is member of The Indicter‘s Editorial Board and a former contributing writer to WL Central and has been covering issues of free speech, transparency and the vital role of whistleblowers in global society).

[clubofinfo]

Expert: As US federal debt approaches $21 trillion in a matter of months, an eye-popping equivalent amount seems to have gone cumulatively missing from government coffers over the past two decades. The missing $21 trillion was tabulated by a team of researchers led by Dr. Mark Skidmore, Morris Chair of State and Local Government and Policy at Michigan State University.  Skidmore’s team tallied up “undocumentable adjustments” – a euphemism for accounting prestidigitations – at the US Department of Defense (DOD) and Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) between 1998 and 2015. The study was verified by no less authority than Catherine Austin Fitts whose mainstream credentials included a stint in the George H.W. Bush presidential administration. The most shocking instance of such book-keeping legerdemain, amounting to a colossal $2.3 trillion, was admitted by then Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld on the noteworthy date of September 10, 2001. Rumsfeld was very specific in identifying America’s adversary: It was “closer to home”; it was the “Pentagon bureaucracy.” The September 11 terror attacks the very next day, however, consigned these trillions into a black hole of oblivion. Yet, the black hole kept accruing ominous mass over the years; readying itself for an event horizon that may suck in nations, stock markets, livelihoods and lives into a fatal vortex. Several imponderables remain: Who controls this hidden stash? Has the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) sought closure over this issue?  Is the internecine civil war within the US deep state in reality a tussle over this slush fund? Whatever the hypothesis, make no mistake: An “undocumentable” $21 trillion in limbo somewhere can fund revolutions, regime changes and wars anywhere.  It can not only fix spot prices for global markets but “spot narratives” in the global mainstream media as well. It can ensure any “days of rage” planned over US President Donald J. Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel would remain a damp squib until the time emerges to redraw the contours of the Middle East. Once tempers are skillfully stoked towards a Middle East endgame, global markets can be shorted to localize geopolitical attention. The “days of rage” may then be directed at local leaders who will be in desperate need of solutions to keep their regimes and societies intact. For an added perspective, consider this: Ever wondered how George Soros, with an official net worth of $8 billion, can threaten governments in a way Li Ka-Shing with a net worth of $33.7 billion cannot? In all likelihood, funds channelled into Soros’ transnational “human rights” hydras were never quite his in the first place. An activist billionaire is the perfect shill for deep state and transnational interests. Such snowballing suspicions must have weighed heavily on the Pentagon. It has finally decided to conduct its first audit in history by raising an army of 2,400 auditors from independent public accounting firms to see where the missing trillions as well as an inexplicable 44,000 US troops had disappeared to. It is rather conveniently late in the day for such an “audit” as the global economic deck seems to be stacked and ready to implode. Oligarchic Ascendancy The trillion-dollar drainage from US government agencies has occurred synchronously with the relentless wealth fractionation process worldwide, along with a rise in global socioeconomic volatility. As the chart below shows, a mere 80 individuals had the same amount of wealth as 3.5 billion people in 2014. This trend is expected to worsen through 2020 and beyond. According to a 2016 McKinsey report, around 540 million young people in 25 advanced nations, including the United States, face the prospect of becoming poorer than their parents. This brings up an Aristotelian dilemma. The Greek sage had equated a stable society with a strong middle class. Around 2,300 years later, financial whiz kids immersed in Reaganomics claim otherwise. The accrual of wealth among the few, according to the new wisdom, is supposed to generate more investments and jobs.  The reality is just the opposite: According to the US-based National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), about 10 percent of global GDP has been ploughed into offshore tax havens instead of national treasuries and factories. More ominously, this figure jumps to 15 percent for Europe and up to 60 percent for Gulf Arab and Latin American regions. The haemorrhage of trillions is not just limited to the United States. There are many more trillions available to the transnational oligarchy to reshape the global order. Furthermore, accelerating technological breakthroughs are already creating a permanent global underclass. Robots alone will displace 800 million workers by 2030.  This poses a quandary for highly-populated emerging powers like India where the richest one per cent own more than 53 per cent of the national wealth.  What will India’s unskilled, teeming millions do when factories adopt robots and related Industry 4.0 production paradigms? The “Make in India” initiative must be matched with “Train in India” and “Hire in India” programs. Time is of critical essence here to avoid mass population redundancy. Echoes from the 30s However, what happens when workers worldwide face mass redundancy? Rising global wealth inequality is now seen as a transnational threat, with a 2007 study by the UK Ministry of Defence presciently warning of a coordinated global middle class uprising in the coming years. This anticipated backlash has been attributed to a pervasive decline in mainstream news quality and a countervailing rise in cyber-activism. While debt levels continue to set new records in the West, its media is blissfully peddling red herrings on an unprecedented scale. Google’s decision to de-rank articles from RT and Sputnik is just the latest manifestation of the West’s desperation to control the information matrix. When the bubbles do burst, as they did during the Great Depression, the global oligarchy would face the collective ire of the masses. There is, however, a time-tested economic model for this sort of predicament. It is called Fascism.  In a post-bubble landscape, the poor and dispossessed will no longer provide a market for mass-market products while factories that produce them will sooner or later go bust. The only ironclad economic engines left revving – as historical patterns reveal – will be the ones focused on policing and militarization. An Updated NWO Henry Kissinger had long sensed this imminent déjà vu, and is currently advocating a pre-emptive solution in the form of a “New World Order” based on regionalized power centres. “The contemporary quest for world order,” Kissinger wrote in a 2014 Wall Street Journal essay “will require a coherent strategy to establish a concept of order within the various regions and to relate these regional orders to one another.” In a 2012 peer-reviewed paper titled ‘Class Warfare, Anarchy and the Future Society’, the author had reached a similar conclusion – from the opposite end of the Kissingerian worldview. The world would be convulsed by a series of manufactured crises to facilitate an international order governed by regional power centres.  The Kissinger solution appears like a plutocratic twist of the Gramscian Political Society; one where repressive state organs would be “counselled” by oligarchs propped by trillions from a transnational treasury. When societies get desperate and breadlines get longer, nationalist leaders would baulk at blocking the charities of the mega-rich. The folks in Kiev are still grateful for Victoria Nuland’s cookies even while their nation regresses into a Third World asylum. Imagine what a $21 trillion cookie jar can accomplish worldwide? Some regions like South Asia, however, lack the basic infrastructure to impose and integrate inter-regional orders of the kind advocated by Kissinger.  This is perhaps a reason why India is being courted with much alacrity by the West.  Australia, one of the quadrilateral security partners proposed for India is, however, staring at a $5.6 trillion housing bubble worth four times its GDP. A nation of 24 million people cannot carry such a burden, unless it can induce a massive destabilizing capital flight from Third World nations. When that happens, NGOs and social justice warriors worldwide can expect an unexpected bonanza in the opposite direction – in the form of cash and cookies to champion a new order in their hopelessly-impoverished societies! http://clubof.info/

[whatbensreading]

Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right

Jane Mayer

Ben's Rating: ★★★

Who are the immensely wealthy right-wing ideologues shaping the fate of America today? From the bestselling author of The Dark Side, an electrifying work of investigative journalism that uncovers the agenda of this powerful group.

In her new preface, Jane Mayer discusses the results of the most recent election and Donald Trump's victory, and how, despite much discussion to the contrary, this was a huge victory for the billionaires who have been pouring money in the American political system.

Why is America living in an age of profound and widening economic inequality? Why have even modest attempts to address climate change been defeated again and again? Why do hedge-fund billionaires pay a far lower tax rate than middle-class workers? In a riveting and indelible feat of reporting, Jane Mayer illuminates the history of an elite cadre of plutocrats—headed by the Kochs, the Scaifes, the Olins, and the Bradleys—who have bankrolled a systematic plan to fundamentally alter the American political system. Mayer traces a byzantine trail of billions of dollars spent by the network, revealing a staggering conglomeration of think tanks, academic institutions, media groups, courthouses, and government allies that have fallen under their sphere of influence. Drawing from hundreds of exclusive interviews, as well as extensive scrutiny of public records, private papers, and court proceedings, Mayer provides vivid portraits of the secretive figures behind the new American oligarchy and a searing look at the carefully concealed agendas steering the nation. Dark Money is an essential book for anyone who cares about the future of American democracy.

National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist* LA Times* Book Prize Finalist PEN/Jean Stein Book Award Finalist Shortlisted for the Lukas Prize

[nothingnessreality]

On this anniversary of 9/11 we have got to start facing the facts.

What is this:            

             This is microscopic photos of dust taken form 4 places around the three building that collapsed on 9/11. The red flecks are flecks from an explosive called “Superthermite-Super-Nano-Thermate-Thermitic. The only known source of which is the US military. This is proof that the buildings at the World Tread Center (WTC) where wired for a controlled demolition, prier to the terrorist attack. Some one, who knew the terrorist attack was coming, when into the three WTC buildings, the two towers, and building 7, and wired them with the Nano-thermate explosive and then shortly after the terrorist airliners crash into the building they set off the explosive, causing them to collapse, blaming the collapse on the terrorist.             Oddly, even though building 7 had not been hit by an airliner, it also collapsed. So clearly it had to have been demolished to cover the evidence that the build was wired for demolition. Who ever did this must have miscalculated. They must have believed that flight 93 was going to hit building 7, but that plane went down in Pennsylvania? National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) clamed that it had collapse because of a fire on the top floor, but never in the history of high-rise builds has one collapse from a fire on the top floor.

             The first person to study the samples above was Physics Professor Dr. Steven Jones of Brigham Young University. He was later forced to retire because some one in high places put presser on the University, but he is still doing 9/11 research out of his own pocket, but others also have looked at the samples, such as Dr. Niels Harrit, a 37-year Professor of Chemistry at Copenhagen University in Denmark, and he agreed that it was Nano-thermate explosive, and then suddenly all his grant money was pulled. Professor Harrit has put a video statement on line about the experience at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uW4Z3P8BER0

  Physics Journal Study

             Now, for the first time, a major physics Journal, Europhysics 47/4 2016, has published a study of the World Trade Center buildings collapsing on 9/11, and concluded that the 3 buildings were in fact a controlled demolition. The airplanes crashing into the buildings did not cause the buildings to collapse.

            The authors of the 9/11-study team said that the director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), who did the official report, admitted when pushed, that the buildings had collapsed at free fall speed. Free fall speed is the speed at which an object well fall freely in air when dropped. It is impossible for a building to collapse; up on it self, at free fall speed from the top down. This is because the act of crushing the building, as the top of the building pushes down, will slow the fall. The only way a building can collapse at free fall is if the building is demolished with timed explosives.

 Architects & Engineers

              This fact is the consensus also of 2,788 Architects & Engineers who have signed a petition, calling for a new official independent study. When the team that wrote the Europhysics article asked the NIST if thy could see the computer modals of the twin towers collapse, the NIST refused, stating "public safety." (What are they hiding-did they even have a computer modal?) Based on this statement the NIST must have come to the conclusion it did based on what was good for the public, and not what was true. In fact they never looked at the fact that the building could have been demolished, and there is new evidence that that was conscious decision.

            In the past few years the Architects & Engineers organization has pored over the NIST report and documented 25 places of concern with the report. Some are very bad errors like missing information in the computer model of building 7 that would make it more likely to collapse with a fire. On top of this, the samples of the dust where never looked at by the NIST, nor did that go out and get samples on their own, thus never even took the possibility that the building could have been demolished in to account.

            According to a long time employee the NIST first started to be corrupt under the Reagan administration, and lost it scientific independents, slowly become more politic over the year. 

 Dr. Leroy Hulsey.

 The 9/11 Architects & Engineers truth organization paid Dr. Leroy Hulsey a Professor of Civil Engineering at University of Alaska, Fairbanks Alaska, to do a simulation of the collapse of WTC Building 7, which was not hit by an airliner, to see if a fire could have collapse the building. The NIST report stated that it was a fire that caused the building 7 to collapse. On September 6, 2017 Dr. Hulsey presented the results of the study and conclude that a fire could not have caused WTC Building 7 to collapse.

  Sherlock Holmes

             It really doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure out who demolished the WTC building. Just standard crime investigation procedure - means, motive, and opportunity is needed. So who did this? That someone would have had to have the means, motive, and opportunity to do it? That someone had to have known that the airplanes were going to be hijacked. That someone had to have access to the military’s Nano-thermitic explosive, and the manpower to wire the building, with out being seen, with explosive.  Thus the only people who had the means, and opportunity to coordinate the demolition had to have been the US government – the Bush administration, most like the CIA and/or the US military working together.

             The CIA was the only player who knew the airliners were going to be hijacked, and had the explosive and man power to do it. The CIA amended they know of the hijacking long before it happened, in the NIST report. They just argued that some one “didn’t connect the dots,” or they would have stopped it. Plus they were the only ones who would have had the resources to obtain Nano-thermitic from the military, or get the military to do it. But why, what motive would the CIA, on it own, have for doing this? Why would they need to plaint a faults flag?

             The finger clearly points to Dick Cheney as the architect. It is a known fact that he spent so much time at the CIA that some reporters reported it because they thought it was odd, for a vice president. On the day of the attack he ordered a military drill and ordered the military aircraft to remained ground, over the objection of some officers. When the NIST was doing its investigation he refuted to let Bush testify without him being present. What was he afraid of? Bush may not have known fully what was going on.

 Oligarchy

             To plain the demolition of three building like this was no short term, off the cuff, idea. To go to all this trouble to create a terrifying enemy to hold up to the Americans people makes it clear that something very big was going on in the dead of night. Someone was setting up the greatest con in American history. Thus, it is my theist that much more is going on here then most people are willing to accept. Something much bigger has to be going on under the cloak of darkness, and the CIA or some rogue unit at the CIA, is part of that group. That group has to be the Oligarchy working to take control of the US. Let me lay it out.

 Psychopaths

             The first thing we must understand here is the psychopathic threat in the US. The American Psychiatric Association (APA) says that one to two percent of all males are born as Psychopaths. In the APA’s Diagnoses and Statistical Manual (DSM) psychopath is a sub type of “Antisocial Personality Disorder.” Psychopaths are defined as individuals who are born with the inability to have empathy. In other words they don’t have the ability to see people as people; to them people are just objects to be used. A common trait of psychopaths is that most are smart, charming, and cunning; the true definition of the charming devil, pure evil. This would mean that there are close to two million male psychopaths in the US alone - where are all these psychopaths at?

             Studies find that the most common profession for psychopaths is corporate executives and lawyer. One Australian study has found that about one in five, twenty percent, of corporate executives are psychopaths, and about the same number of inmates in prison were also psychopaths. In other words because of their charm and cunning they meanly seek out money and power and are quit successful at it. Easley two thirds of all billionaires are Psychopaths or Sociopaths. Thus a very large number of the supper rich are psychopaths.

             Thus it is naïve to believe that psychopathic rich people are not running many areas of government; especial in places like the CIA or there is a rogue unit in the CIA that stays hidden even for the director of the CIA. Think about this, it is estimated that the United States has a black budget of over $50 billion a year! Do you really believe that some smart psychopathic CIA rouge unit couldn’t be able to pull a fraction of this money off, to do anything they wish? In fact psychopaths would be idea for work in the CIA, and the CIA is so big that it would be ease for a group to stays hidden.  Psychopaths wouldn’t hastate for a second to blow up 2300 people to meet some goal – if they knew they could get away with it. Thus, because the Republican Party is the party of corporate executives there can be little doubt that a high percent in the Republican leadership are psychopaths or sociopaths – including Mitch McConnell and Dick Cheney. No one would make a better politician then a psychopath. Were there may be some psychopath in the Democratic Party; there is not likely many. This is simple because most Democratic start from grass root organization in lieu of a purpose. Some do become drunk with the money and power as their carrier goes forward, but they are not psychopaths, just corrupt - mose latter.

 CIA

             When Truman created the CIA in 1947, he put Allen Dulles in charge. Allen Dulles had been a corporate lawyer (That alone raises a 1 in 5 chance he was a psychopath), and he had many buddies in the US corporate world. Then on top of that He had been head of OSS in Switzerland in WW2, and arranged a lot of deals with the Nazis for US corporations. In other word he was an arms dealer in WW2, and thus almost for sure a psychopath. It is known that He set up a covert dirty tricks unit (DTU) in the CIA. Even though there is a congress oversight committee, any claver psychopath could easily hide anything he wanted to do. Proof of this can be seen from the data that Edward Snowder soled from the National Security Agency (NSA). Even president Obama was socket by what Snowder uncovered, and was unaware of the level of spaying on US citizens.

 Start of the Present Oligarchy

             In the 1950 around 50,000 Americans, out of a population of 150 million at the time, belonged to the communist party, but communism as first envisioned by Karl Marx was anti-fascist, and pro working class. American Communist were responding to a disillusionment with capitalism after the great depression, and social and economic causes including the rights of African Americans, workers, and the unemployed. Many American Communist were alarmed by the rise of Nationalists in Spain, and Nazis in Germany. At the time the Soviet Union was a non-fascist.

            The corporate moguls saw communist ideas (like corporations owned by the workers), as a threat to their wealth, and begin organizing into an Anti-Communism Syndicates, and began an anti-communism propaganda campaign. The first of these groups was the John Burch Society. Soon after the wealth syndicate formed they hooked up with Dulles and his DTU.  There is good evidence of this. The CIA has manipulated foreign counters for US corporations in the past, and it is know that Dulles did CIA favors for his corporate buddies. One example of this is the CIA’s involvement in Center America (who now hate us), in which the United Fruit Company benefited, and then gained control over the banana market. In other word the CIA destroyed the local banana market, which was taken over by an American corporation. This is why many in the world including the Middle East hate America. America is the villain here, and it comes through the CIA.

            The anti-communism campaign was very successful, and the Syndicate saw that they could use their propaganda to take more control of the U.S. They know that to do this they would have to con a large voting block of people into voting against there own self-interest. America already had natural divisions, red and blue, but there were common bonds that kept them in check. The Syndicate then started working though the Republican Party and sit up think tanks around the US. These think tanks are a fact, and no one knows what goes on in them, or where the dark money comes from for them.

            In the past few years two studies, one by Princeton University, and one by the France economist Thomas Piketty, have shown that the US government is now under so much control by the extreme wealthy, that the US should now be classified as an Oligarchy, and not a Republic. In other words, The US is no longer a Democratic Republic. A group of very rich psychopaths have direct control over the Republican legislators in Congress with Mitchell McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, controlling the senate. This may start to change now that he Democrats have control of the House. The Republican party and psychopathic oligarchy are one in the same, and thanks to new books like Dark Money by Jane Mayer of the New York Times, we now know who is the leader of the oligarchy, i.e. The Koch brothers. The oligarchy has a vast network of over 200 propaganda out lets, and holds secret meets with other super rich members. The Times has no been able to infiltrate this group and doses not know how many members there are. I am sure that not all of the propaganda that is blamed on the Russians comes from Russia.

            People like Grover Norquist are not making Republican candidates sign a contract  for his own personal agenda, and cutting there funding if they don’t do as they are told. In other words Republican candidates are under the complete control of the oligarchy or they are gone. They know that they can’t get elected with out the oligarchy’s dark money. Some one is paying Mr. Norquist big money to do it. In fact a former Republican senator, George Voninovich, admitted that in 2008 Republicans were ordered to block everything President Obama wanted even if it was good for the country. Who was doing the ordering? It has to be obvious it is the oligarchy.

             It is a now a fact that the oligarchy has over a two hundred non-profit foundations around the country, which are will funded and spew out a stream of propaganda to purposely divide this county, and a large percentage of Republicans in Congresses do just as they are told or there funding is gone. They are nothing but puppets of some rich group or “Syndicate.”

            Thus we must give up the myth that we just have a two political party’s with different opinions. We clearly have a fascist organization taking control of the U.S.

I use the term fascist because that appears to be there goal. A hint comes from 9/11 and there need for an enemy of the state. Fascists use an enemy to control people, and this time it is Muslims and immigrants. The official definition of Fascism comes from Benito Mussolini. Every study of the personality of conservatives I have seen says that the underlying personality of conservatives is a fear of life. In fact a new brain scans comparing conservatives to liberals shows that conservatives have a larger right amygdale. Amygdale being a deeper brain structure that processes more emotional information—specifically fear-based information. Conservatives then are the targets to be propagandized by the demolition of the WTC building.

            As a result of the demolition of the building on 9/11 we now have the “Patriot act” giving the government total surveillance of American citizens, the president can declare Martial Law at will, and the Bush administration, all oil men, had an excuse to go to war to get Iraq’s oil. Now the American people are more afraid and divided then ever. Everyone seems so baffled as to why the US is so divided. It seems to me the answer is clear, it is divided by design. The syndicate’s Con game has worked better then anyone would had though, and we just, very will, may see the collapse of the U.S. before it is over.

[rtawngs20815]

Hey, Here Are Some People Who Really, Really Should Not Run For President

March 2017 is probably far too early to start considering the next presidential election, and who the Democrats might send into the breach to take on Donald Trump (assuming he runs for re-election, of course). That said, there’s already an awful lot of rumor and sigh in the news transom about people having sudden-onset political stirrings, including those setting their sights on a 2020 presidential run.

Some of them are the last vestiges of the Clinton network, still high on that old Third Way supply, banking on the belief that the country isn’t yet done with late-1990s nostalgia. But a new group of would-be candidates is on the rise ― extravagantly wealthy wannabes stirred both by the Clinton-era Democratic Party embrace of meritocratic elites and the success of Trump’s outsider run. And if they all have something in common, it’s that they are all the worst possible people for the Democrats to run for office, if you consider the lessons of the 2016 election.

What were those lessons? Well, for one thing, 2016 was the year that the Democratic Party’s obsessions with the professional class finally caught up with it. Amid roaring calls for solutions to widely felt economic inequities, Hillary Clinton ran a campaign largely based on social niceties and boardroom diversification, with some incremental crumbs thrown the way of middle- and working-class strivers.

None of it added up to a compelling enough case against the GOP’s con-man class-traitor to win the election. (And tellingly, some taken-for-granted Democratic strongholds fell to Trump at the exact moment Democrats needed them most.) But if there’s one thing both political parties share, it’s that they are slow to learn their lessons. The fear that the Democrats might stay the course, despite Clinton’s failings, suffused the atmosphere in the recent Democratic National Committee election ― and those who wanted a decisive change are still not sure they’re getting one with the election of former Obama Labor Secretary Tom Perez. That some of the Clinton family’s most dedicated hangers-on feel like they are the person to run for office in the Trump era likely won’t soothe their ravaged souls, either.

And then there are the unfortunate side effects of Trump’s win itself, which has apparently touched off a whole new round of thinking as to whether it would be a good idea to examine this moment in history ― in which a brash billionaire-celebrity outsider has ascended to the highest political office in the world ― and consider whether the time is right to have more brash billionaire-celebrity outsiders try to run for president.

That every single day of the Trump presidency has been a scintillating demonstration of the Peter Principle seems to not deter anybody. Instead, the event of a complete and utter billionaire buffoon with no political experience has suggested to a slew of other buffoons that, hey, why not me?

A century or two of yawning inequality has left us with no shortage of such buffoons. Hundreds of these folks have ascended to the dizzying heights of our American oligarchy ― or were born there ― and now gaze downward, gripped with the firm conviction that they should run all that they see below. “Stay in your lane,” once the byword of America’s true and most successful innovators, is advice too easily chucked aside by today’s captains of industry. And so, “meritocracy” has become something of a dirty word.

Nowadays, those who have found success in one area are just as likely not to think that their success is translatable to other endeavors. When this turns out not to be the case, comical hijinks ensue. Perhaps the apotheosis of this rich-people folly came when New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg thought it would be a good idea to appoint his friend, Hearst executive Cathleen Black, to the position of New York City schools chancellor ― despite the fact that her relevant experience could best be summed up as “not any.”

It was a huge disaster, but did anyone learn a damn thing from this experience? (Hmmm, let me check: Oh, yeah, Betsy DeVos is the U.S. secretary of education. So, no, nobody did.)

Still it’s one thing for Republicans to consider running the play ― they’ve obviously managed to make it work, at least in the narrow electoral sense. And their billionaire was no obscure figure. Entering the election with 100-percent name identification, and a years-long run in American living rooms as a fictional, all-knowing business leader, gave Trump legs up that your random billionaire lacks.

Replicating either side of the last presidential election is a losing move for Democrats. But it’s a very tempting one: It’s a notion that allows the easy-breezy fantasy that a massive party overhaul isn’t necessary, and that all of their problems can be ameliorated by either billionaires with quick fixes and cash on-hand, or Clinton 2016-redux candidates with better data and marketing.

With that in mind, here are a bunch of people whose political ambitions should be extinguished with all deliberate haste.

Bob Iger: Who, pray tell, is Bob Iger? Well, for a while, he was a member of Trump’s Strategic and Policy Forum, a collection of CEO heavyweights who were going to help Trump #MAGA, for which Iger was well suited as the chief executive of Walt Disney. SInce then, it’s been reported that he is mulling making a run for the White House in 2020. Hmmm, maybe he hasn’t thought through this whole politics thing? Apparently not, considering that his inspiration to maybe run for president stems from the fact that he says “a lot of people ― a lot ― have urged me to seek political office.” I mean, maybe set your sights a little lower, first time out?

J.B. Pritzker: Having endeavored mightily to paint the past two Republican presidential nominees as out-of-touch wealthy elites ― and having failed to distinguish their own last presidential nominee as something different ― are Democrats stupid enough to make an about-face and run their own billionaire?No, J.B. Pritzker wouldn’t make it out of Iowa without a negative vote total. But even though he’s recently been sniffing around the possibility of running in the Illinois gubernatorial election, that hasn’t stopped him from floating to friends that he’s considering making a run for the White House as well ― or so we’re told by one recipient of such a flatulent flotation. Pritzker, an heir to the Hyatt Hotel fortune, had designs on being commerce secretary under Hillary Clinton, just as his sister Penny Pritzker was under Obama. Just stop.

Sheryl Sandberg: According to some election-year rumors, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg was in the running to serve as Hillary Clinton’s treasury secretary. Since then, she’s been rumored to be considering a White House run, amid occasional denials. At the same time, she has recently been more open to Trump’s overtures. She was one of those Silicon Valley leaders who met with Trump prior to the inauguration. As Slate’s Helaine Owen notes, Sandberg made no public mention of the Women’s March that took place afterwards, a curious move for the “Lean In” maven ― at least until you consider the fact that “Lean In” is a disingenuous brand-washing scheme, and that Sandberg is especially unwilling to criticize her C-suite peers for crimes against women in the workforce.

Howard Schultz: The Starbucks CEO has said “never say never” to a presidential run. Indeed, Schultz would be the fever-dream candidate of the No Labels set: his political “brand,” insofar that he has one, is essentially based around his core belief that everyone in politics should be a lot nicer to each other. This worldview most famously manifested itself in the short-lived March 2015 “Race Together” campaign, in which Schultz ― after having mostly eliminated manual espresso machines in Starbucks stores ― tasked baristas with bridging America’s racial divide. If you want a president who believes that all of America’s problems can be solved by constantly throwing corporate culture at them, he’s your guy.

Mark Zuckerberg: Hey, let’s see: Do we really want the founder and CEO of Facebook ― a business that depends on learning as much about your private life as possible, more and more every single day, always probing and collecting, never ceasing in its sleepless drive to know everything about you, better than you could possibly know yourself, until the very idea of “privacy” becomes an obsolete concept and individual autonomy is subordinated to a set of bloodless algorithms and advertisers are straight-up living inside your dreams ― to be our president? I dunno, man. As Big Brother might say, that sounds doubleplusungood!

Chelsea Clinton: Anyone else notice how after the election, Chelsea Clinton has been slowly creeping into our lives? There’s been this gradual ramping up of Total Chelsea Clinton Awareness, and along with it, the gradual ramping up of yet another Clinton’s political career ― even though, up until now, Chelsea Clinton has essentially been nothing more than a lodestar for other people’s money to find their way into Clinton bank accounts. (I read here that she was paid $600,000 to do journalism? Holy cats, how long did it take Jimmy Breslin to make $600,000?) Anyway, she’s been tweeting lately ― tweets that feel a little too clever, but not enough to be thought of as “edgy” ― the sort of social media output that makes you want to look for hidden wires. Hillary Clinton got a lot of stick ― unfairly so ― for lacking authenticity, but her daughter’s recent re-emergence feels like a ghost in the shell being willed into existence by a team of P.R. firms. We don’t suspect we have to fear a run in 2020 from Chelsea. But let’s please add every year in the future, ever, to that safe space.

Terry McAuliffe: The biggest beneficiary of the Clinton family to not have actual Clinton family DNA (probably, anyway!), McAuliffe revived his political career by winning the 2013 gubernatorial election in Virginia. It was close. Too close, considering he was running against a throwback Christian conservative ideologue in the form of Ken Cuccinelli. During the 2016 campaign, McAuliffe distinguished himself by telling reporters at the Democratic National Convention that Hillary Clinton was definitely going to support the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal after the election. The TPP, if you recall, was the thing convention-goers booed and jeered more lustily than Donald Trump. McAuliffe and his spin-team later tried to walk this back, saying that it was just McAuliffe who supported the TPP, which ― is still not good? Anyway, he is basically kooky, has a lot of funny-money connections, and suffers from the fact that Virginia has a one-term term limit for governor, leaving him with an itch that has to be scratched, probably with a huge pile of donor money that could be put to any number of more productive purposes.

Andrew Cuomo: The Clintons and Cuomos have never been particularly warm to each other, but the two political dynasties, eternally orbiting one another, have managed to seamlessly apply the transactional-slash-triangulating political style they share in common to their interpersonal relationships. Now, as rumors mount that Cuomo is considering a White House bid, he’s welcoming former Clinton campaign staff into his fold, where they’ll likely discover similarities to their natural habitat. Liberals have, in recent months, thrilled to Cuomo’s stance on fracking and his defense of immigrants, but they’re setting themselves up for huge disappointments. Cuomo, who is astonishingly petty and mean-minded, has done more to dampen the fortunes of New York’s Democratic Party than New York Republicans have. And he’s corrupt as all get-out to boot ― his most notable accomplishment as governor was to shut down the Moreland Commission anti-corruption inquiry as soon as the probe starting sniffing around targets with ties to the governor ― and getting away with it.

That, right there, is a murderer’s row of the exact wrong candidates for the Democratic Party, who’d be better advised to begin the hard work of rebuilding their party’s foundations and restoring a deep bench of new policymakers with fresh ideas. This is not the moment to try to lock arms with a gaggle of dilettante 1-percenters, promising to do what Trump pulled off. And it’s certainly not the time to try to revive the fortunes of their political cousins ― the broken remnants of the Clinton machine.

Drown these candidacies in the bathtub, right now.

Ryan Grim contributed.

~~~~~

Jason Linkins edits “Eat The Press” for The Huffington Post and co-hosts the HuffPost Politics podcast “So, That Happened.” Subscribe here, and listen to the latest episode below.  

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2mTj4As

[repwincoml4a0a5]

Hey, Here Are Some People Who Really, Really Should Not Run For President

March 2017 is probably far too early to start considering the next presidential election, and who the Democrats might send into the breach to take on Donald Trump (assuming he runs for re-election, of course). That said, there’s already an awful lot of rumor and sigh in the news transom about people having sudden-onset political stirrings, including those setting their sights on a 2020 presidential run.

Some of them are the last vestiges of the Clinton network, still high on that old Third Way supply, banking on the belief that the country isn’t yet done with late-1990s nostalgia. But a new group of would-be candidates is on the rise ― extravagantly wealthy wannabes stirred both by the Clinton-era Democratic Party embrace of meritocratic elites and the success of Trump’s outsider run. And if they all have something in common, it’s that they are all the worst possible people for the Democrats to run for office, if you consider the lessons of the 2016 election.

What were those lessons? Well, for one thing, 2016 was the year that the Democratic Party’s obsessions with the professional class finally caught up with it. Amid roaring calls for solutions to widely felt economic inequities, Hillary Clinton ran a campaign largely based on social niceties and boardroom diversification, with some incremental crumbs thrown the way of middle- and working-class strivers.

None of it added up to a compelling enough case against the GOP’s con-man class-traitor to win the election. (And tellingly, some taken-for-granted Democratic strongholds fell to Trump at the exact moment Democrats needed them most.) But if there’s one thing both political parties share, it’s that they are slow to learn their lessons. The fear that the Democrats might stay the course, despite Clinton’s failings, suffused the atmosphere in the recent Democratic National Committee election ― and those who wanted a decisive change are still not sure they’re getting one with the election of former Obama Labor Secretary Tom Perez. That some of the Clinton family’s most dedicated hangers-on feel like they are the person to run for office in the Trump era likely won’t soothe their ravaged souls, either.

And then there are the unfortunate side effects of Trump’s win itself, which has apparently touched off a whole new round of thinking as to whether it would be a good idea to examine this moment in history ― in which a brash billionaire-celebrity outsider has ascended to the highest political office in the world ― and consider whether the time is right to have more brash billionaire-celebrity outsiders try to run for president.

That every single day of the Trump presidency has been a scintillating demonstration of the Peter Principle seems to not deter anybody. Instead, the event of a complete and utter billionaire buffoon with no political experience has suggested to a slew of other buffoons that, hey, why not me?

A century or two of yawning inequality has left us with no shortage of such buffoons. Hundreds of these folks have ascended to the dizzying heights of our American oligarchy ― or were born there ― and now gaze downward, gripped with the firm conviction that they should run all that they see below. “Stay in your lane,” once the byword of America’s true and most successful innovators, is advice too easily chucked aside by today’s captains of industry. And so, “meritocracy” has become something of a dirty word.

Nowadays, those who have found success in one area are just as likely not to think that their success is translatable to other endeavors. When this turns out not to be the case, comical hijinks ensue. Perhaps the apotheosis of this rich-people folly came when New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg thought it would be a good idea to appoint his friend, Hearst executive Cathleen Black, to the position of New York City schools chancellor ― despite the fact that her relevant experience could best be summed up as “not any.”

It was a huge disaster, but did anyone learn a damn thing from this experience? (Hmmm, let me check: Oh, yeah, Betsy DeVos is the U.S. secretary of education. So, no, nobody did.)

Still it’s one thing for Republicans to consider running the play ― they’ve obviously managed to make it work, at least in the narrow electoral sense. And their billionaire was no obscure figure. Entering the election with 100-percent name identification, and a years-long run in American living rooms as a fictional, all-knowing business leader, gave Trump legs up that your random billionaire lacks.

Replicating either side of the last presidential election is a losing move for Democrats. But it’s a very tempting one: It’s a notion that allows the easy-breezy fantasy that a massive party overhaul isn’t necessary, and that all of their problems can be ameliorated by either billionaires with quick fixes and cash on-hand, or Clinton 2016-redux candidates with better data and marketing.

With that in mind, here are a bunch of people whose political ambitions should be extinguished with all deliberate haste.

Bob Iger: Who, pray tell, is Bob Iger? Well, for a while, he was a member of Trump’s Strategic and Policy Forum, a collection of CEO heavyweights who were going to help Trump #MAGA, for which Iger was well suited as the chief executive of Walt Disney. SInce then, it’s been reported that he is mulling making a run for the White House in 2020. Hmmm, maybe he hasn’t thought through this whole politics thing? Apparently not, considering that his inspiration to maybe run for president stems from the fact that he says “a lot of people ― a lot ― have urged me to seek political office.” I mean, maybe set your sights a little lower, first time out?

J.B. Pritzker: Having endeavored mightily to paint the past two Republican presidential nominees as out-of-touch wealthy elites ― and having failed to distinguish their own last presidential nominee as something different ― are Democrats stupid enough to make an about-face and run their own billionaire?No, J.B. Pritzker wouldn’t make it out of Iowa without a negative vote total. But even though he’s recently been sniffing around the possibility of running in the Illinois gubernatorial election, that hasn’t stopped him from floating to friends that he’s considering making a run for the White House as well ― or so we’re told by one recipient of such a flatulent flotation. Pritzker, an heir to the Hyatt Hotel fortune, had designs on being commerce secretary under Hillary Clinton, just as his sister Penny Pritzker was under Obama. Just stop.

Sheryl Sandberg: According to some election-year rumors, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg was in the running to serve as Hillary Clinton’s treasury secretary. Since then, she’s been rumored to be considering a White House run, amid occasional denials. At the same time, she has recently been more open to Trump’s overtures. She was one of those Silicon Valley leaders who met with Trump prior to the inauguration. As Slate’s Helaine Owen notes, Sandberg made no public mention of the Women’s March that took place afterwards, a curious move for the “Lean In” maven ― at least until you consider the fact that “Lean In” is a disingenuous brand-washing scheme, and that Sandberg is especially unwilling to criticize her C-suite peers for crimes against women in the workforce.

Howard Schultz: The Starbucks CEO has said “never say never” to a presidential run. Indeed, Schultz would be the fever-dream candidate of the No Labels set: his political “brand,” insofar that he has one, is essentially based around his core belief that everyone in politics should be a lot nicer to each other. This worldview most famously manifested itself in the short-lived March 2015 “Race Together” campaign, in which Schultz ― after having mostly eliminated manual espresso machines in Starbucks stores ― tasked baristas with bridging America’s racial divide. If you want a president who believes that all of America’s problems can be solved by constantly throwing corporate culture at them, he’s your guy.

Mark Zuckerberg: Hey, let’s see: Do we really want the founder and CEO of Facebook ― a business that depends on learning as much about your private life as possible, more and more every single day, always probing and collecting, never ceasing in its sleepless drive to know everything about you, better than you could possibly know yourself, until the very idea of “privacy” becomes an obsolete concept and individual autonomy is subordinated to a set of bloodless algorithms and advertisers are straight-up living inside your dreams ― to be our president? I dunno, man. As Big Brother might say, that sounds doubleplusungood!

Chelsea Clinton: Anyone else notice how after the election, Chelsea Clinton has been slowly creeping into our lives? There’s been this gradual ramping up of Total Chelsea Clinton Awareness, and along with it, the gradual ramping up of yet another Clinton’s political career ― even though, up until now, Chelsea Clinton has essentially been nothing more than a lodestar for other people’s money to find their way into Clinton bank accounts. (I read here that she was paid $600,000 to do journalism? Holy cats, how long did it take Jimmy Breslin to make $600,000?) Anyway, she’s been tweeting lately ― tweets that feel a little too clever, but not enough to be thought of as “edgy” ― the sort of social media output that makes you want to look for hidden wires. Hillary Clinton got a lot of stick ― unfairly so ― for lacking authenticity, but her daughter’s recent re-emergence feels like a ghost in the shell being willed into existence by a team of P.R. firms. We don’t suspect we have to fear a run in 2020 from Chelsea. But let’s please add every year in the future, ever, to that safe space.

Terry McAuliffe: The biggest beneficiary of the Clinton family to not have actual Clinton family DNA (probably, anyway!), McAuliffe revived his political career by winning the 2013 gubernatorial election in Virginia. It was close. Too close, considering he was running against a throwback Christian conservative ideologue in the form of Ken Cuccinelli. During the 2016 campaign, McAuliffe distinguished himself by telling reporters at the Democratic National Convention that Hillary Clinton was definitely going to support the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal after the election. The TPP, if you recall, was the thing convention-goers booed and jeered more lustily than Donald Trump. McAuliffe and his spin-team later tried to walk this back, saying that it was just McAuliffe who supported the TPP, which ― is still not good? Anyway, he is basically kooky, has a lot of funny-money connections, and suffers from the fact that Virginia has a one-term term limit for governor, leaving him with an itch that has to be scratched, probably with a huge pile of donor money that could be put to any number of more productive purposes.

Andrew Cuomo: The Clintons and Cuomos have never been particularly warm to each other, but the two political dynasties, eternally orbiting one another, have managed to seamlessly apply the transactional-slash-triangulating political style they share in common to their interpersonal relationships. Now, as rumors mount that Cuomo is considering a White House bid, he’s welcoming former Clinton campaign staff into his fold, where they’ll likely discover similarities to their natural habitat. Liberals have, in recent months, thrilled to Cuomo’s stance on fracking and his defense of immigrants, but they’re setting themselves up for huge disappointments. Cuomo, who is astonishingly petty and mean-minded, has done more to dampen the fortunes of New York’s Democratic Party than New York Republicans have. And he’s corrupt as all get-out to boot ― his most notable accomplishment as governor was to shut down the Moreland Commission anti-corruption inquiry as soon as the probe starting sniffing around targets with ties to the governor ― and getting away with it.

That, right there, is a murderer’s row of the exact wrong candidates for the Democratic Party, who’d be better advised to begin the hard work of rebuilding their party’s foundations and restoring a deep bench of new policymakers with fresh ideas. This is not the moment to try to lock arms with a gaggle of dilettante 1-percenters, promising to do what Trump pulled off. And it’s certainly not the time to try to revive the fortunes of their political cousins ― the broken remnants of the Clinton machine.

Drown these candidacies in the bathtub, right now.

Ryan Grim contributed.

~~~~~

Jason Linkins edits “Eat The Press” for The Huffington Post and co-hosts the HuffPost Politics podcast “So, That Happened.” Subscribe here, and listen to the latest episode below.  

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2mTj4As

[grgedoors02142]

Hey, Here Are Some People Who Really, Really Should Not Run For President

March 2017 is probably far too early to start considering the next presidential election, and who the Democrats might send into the breach to take on Donald Trump (assuming he runs for re-election, of course). That said, there’s already an awful lot of rumor and sigh in the news transom about people having sudden-onset political stirrings, including those setting their sights on a 2020 presidential run.

Some of them are the last vestiges of the Clinton network, still high on that old Third Way supply, banking on the belief that the country isn’t yet done with late-1990s nostalgia. But a new group of would-be candidates is on the rise ― extravagantly wealthy wannabes stirred both by the Clinton-era Democratic Party embrace of meritocratic elites and the success of Trump’s outsider run. And if they all have something in common, it’s that they are all the worst possible people for the Democrats to run for office, if you consider the lessons of the 2016 election.

What were those lessons? Well, for one thing, 2016 was the year that the Democratic Party’s obsessions with the professional class finally caught up with it. Amid roaring calls for solutions to widely felt economic inequities, Hillary Clinton ran a campaign largely based on social niceties and boardroom diversification, with some incremental crumbs thrown the way of middle- and working-class strivers.

None of it added up to a compelling enough case against the GOP’s con-man class-traitor to win the election. (And tellingly, some taken-for-granted Democratic strongholds fell to Trump at the exact moment Democrats needed them most.) But if there’s one thing both political parties share, it’s that they are slow to learn their lessons. The fear that the Democrats might stay the course, despite Clinton’s failings, suffused the atmosphere in the recent Democratic National Committee election ― and those who wanted a decisive change are still not sure they’re getting one with the election of former Obama Labor Secretary Tom Perez. That some of the Clinton family’s most dedicated hangers-on feel like they are the person to run for office in the Trump era likely won’t soothe their ravaged souls, either.

And then there are the unfortunate side effects of Trump’s win itself, which has apparently touched off a whole new round of thinking as to whether it would be a good idea to examine this moment in history ― in which a brash billionaire-celebrity outsider has ascended to the highest political office in the world ― and consider whether the time is right to have more brash billionaire-celebrity outsiders try to run for president.

That every single day of the Trump presidency has been a scintillating demonstration of the Peter Principle seems to not deter anybody. Instead, the event of a complete and utter billionaire buffoon with no political experience has suggested to a slew of other buffoons that, hey, why not me?

A century or two of yawning inequality has left us with no shortage of such buffoons. Hundreds of these folks have ascended to the dizzying heights of our American oligarchy ― or were born there ― and now gaze downward, gripped with the firm conviction that they should run all that they see below. “Stay in your lane,” once the byword of America’s true and most successful innovators, is advice too easily chucked aside by today’s captains of industry. And so, “meritocracy” has become something of a dirty word.

Nowadays, those who have found success in one area are just as likely not to think that their success is translatable to other endeavors. When this turns out not to be the case, comical hijinks ensue. Perhaps the apotheosis of this rich-people folly came when New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg thought it would be a good idea to appoint his friend, Hearst executive Cathleen Black, to the position of New York City schools chancellor ― despite the fact that her relevant experience could best be summed up as “not any.”

It was a huge disaster, but did anyone learn a damn thing from this experience? (Hmmm, let me check: Oh, yeah, Betsy DeVos is the U.S. secretary of education. So, no, nobody did.)

Still it’s one thing for Republicans to consider running the play ― they’ve obviously managed to make it work, at least in the narrow electoral sense. And their billionaire was no obscure figure. Entering the election with 100-percent name identification, and a years-long run in American living rooms as a fictional, all-knowing business leader, gave Trump legs up that your random billionaire lacks.

Replicating either side of the last presidential election is a losing move for Democrats. But it’s a very tempting one: It’s a notion that allows the easy-breezy fantasy that a massive party overhaul isn’t necessary, and that all of their problems can be ameliorated by either billionaires with quick fixes and cash on-hand, or Clinton 2016-redux candidates with better data and marketing.

With that in mind, here are a bunch of people whose political ambitions should be extinguished with all deliberate haste.

Bob Iger: Who, pray tell, is Bob Iger? Well, for a while, he was a member of Trump’s Strategic and Policy Forum, a collection of CEO heavyweights who were going to help Trump #MAGA, for which Iger was well suited as the chief executive of Walt Disney. SInce then, it’s been reported that he is mulling making a run for the White House in 2020. Hmmm, maybe he hasn’t thought through this whole politics thing? Apparently not, considering that his inspiration to maybe run for president stems from the fact that he says “a lot of people ― a lot ― have urged me to seek political office.” I mean, maybe set your sights a little lower, first time out?

J.B. Pritzker: Having endeavored mightily to paint the past two Republican presidential nominees as out-of-touch wealthy elites ― and having failed to distinguish their own last presidential nominee as something different ― are Democrats stupid enough to make an about-face and run their own billionaire?No, J.B. Pritzker wouldn’t make it out of Iowa without a negative vote total. But even though he’s recently been sniffing around the possibility of running in the Illinois gubernatorial election, that hasn’t stopped him from floating to friends that he’s considering making a run for the White House as well ― or so we’re told by one recipient of such a flatulent flotation. Pritzker, an heir to the Hyatt Hotel fortune, had designs on being commerce secretary under Hillary Clinton, just as his sister Penny Pritzker was under Obama. Just stop.

Sheryl Sandberg: According to some election-year rumors, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg was in the running to serve as Hillary Clinton’s treasury secretary. Since then, she’s been rumored to be considering a White House run, amid occasional denials. At the same time, she has recently been more open to Trump’s overtures. She was one of those Silicon Valley leaders who met with Trump prior to the inauguration. As Slate’s Helaine Owen notes, Sandberg made no public mention of the Women’s March that took place afterwards, a curious move for the “Lean In” maven ― at least until you consider the fact that “Lean In” is a disingenuous brand-washing scheme, and that Sandberg is especially unwilling to criticize her C-suite peers for crimes against women in the workforce.

Howard Schultz: The Starbucks CEO has said “never say never” to a presidential run. Indeed, Schultz would be the fever-dream candidate of the No Labels set: his political “brand,” insofar that he has one, is essentially based around his core belief that everyone in politics should be a lot nicer to each other. This worldview most famously manifested itself in the short-lived March 2015 “Race Together” campaign, in which Schultz ― after having mostly eliminated manual espresso machines in Starbucks stores ― tasked baristas with bridging America’s racial divide. If you want a president who believes that all of America’s problems can be solved by constantly throwing corporate culture at them, he’s your guy.

Mark Zuckerberg: Hey, let’s see: Do we really want the founder and CEO of Facebook ― a business that depends on learning as much about your private life as possible, more and more every single day, always probing and collecting, never ceasing in its sleepless drive to know everything about you, better than you could possibly know yourself, until the very idea of “privacy” becomes an obsolete concept and individual autonomy is subordinated to a set of bloodless algorithms and advertisers are straight-up living inside your dreams ― to be our president? I dunno, man. As Big Brother might say, that sounds doubleplusungood!

Chelsea Clinton: Anyone else notice how after the election, Chelsea Clinton has been slowly creeping into our lives? There’s been this gradual ramping up of Total Chelsea Clinton Awareness, and along with it, the gradual ramping up of yet another Clinton’s political career ― even though, up until now, Chelsea Clinton has essentially been nothing more than a lodestar for other people’s money to find their way into Clinton bank accounts. (I read here that she was paid $600,000 to do journalism? Holy cats, how long did it take Jimmy Breslin to make $600,000?) Anyway, she’s been tweeting lately ― tweets that feel a little too clever, but not enough to be thought of as “edgy” ― the sort of social media output that makes you want to look for hidden wires. Hillary Clinton got a lot of stick ― unfairly so ― for lacking authenticity, but her daughter’s recent re-emergence feels like a ghost in the shell being willed into existence by a team of P.R. firms. We don’t suspect we have to fear a run in 2020 from Chelsea. But let’s please add every year in the future, ever, to that safe space.

Terry McAuliffe: The biggest beneficiary of the Clinton family to not have actual Clinton family DNA (probably, anyway!), McAuliffe revived his political career by winning the 2013 gubernatorial election in Virginia. It was close. Too close, considering he was running against a throwback Christian conservative ideologue in the form of Ken Cuccinelli. During the 2016 campaign, McAuliffe distinguished himself by telling reporters at the Democratic National Convention that Hillary Clinton was definitely going to support the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal after the election. The TPP, if you recall, was the thing convention-goers booed and jeered more lustily than Donald Trump. McAuliffe and his spin-team later tried to walk this back, saying that it was just McAuliffe who supported the TPP, which ― is still not good? Anyway, he is basically kooky, has a lot of funny-money connections, and suffers from the fact that Virginia has a one-term term limit for governor, leaving him with an itch that has to be scratched, probably with a huge pile of donor money that could be put to any number of more productive purposes.

Andrew Cuomo: The Clintons and Cuomos have never been particularly warm to each other, but the two political dynasties, eternally orbiting one another, have managed to seamlessly apply the transactional-slash-triangulating political style they share in common to their interpersonal relationships. Now, as rumors mount that Cuomo is considering a White House bid, he’s welcoming former Clinton campaign staff into his fold, where they’ll likely discover similarities to their natural habitat. Liberals have, in recent months, thrilled to Cuomo’s stance on fracking and his defense of immigrants, but they’re setting themselves up for huge disappointments. Cuomo, who is astonishingly petty and mean-minded, has done more to dampen the fortunes of New York’s Democratic Party than New York Republicans have. And he’s corrupt as all get-out to boot ― his most notable accomplishment as governor was to shut down the Moreland Commission anti-corruption inquiry as soon as the probe starting sniffing around targets with ties to the governor ― and getting away with it.

That, right there, is a murderer’s row of the exact wrong candidates for the Democratic Party, who’d be better advised to begin the hard work of rebuilding their party’s foundations and restoring a deep bench of new policymakers with fresh ideas. This is not the moment to try to lock arms with a gaggle of dilettante 1-percenters, promising to do what Trump pulled off. And it’s certainly not the time to try to revive the fortunes of their political cousins ― the broken remnants of the Clinton machine.

Drown these candidacies in the bathtub, right now.

Ryan Grim contributed.

~~~~~

Jason Linkins edits “Eat The Press” for The Huffington Post and co-hosts the HuffPost Politics podcast “So, That Happened.” Subscribe here, and listen to the latest episode below.  

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2mTj4As