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joomma · 2 years ago

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pluralsword · 5 months ago

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Even if that is the case it is still really, really stupid even from their own point of view to do this because at this point the opposition wants the centrists dead too. there's been a shift in american politics that has been in swing since the Southern Strategy and Barry Goldwater's coup of the old Republican party. Forty years ago, the idea of a Republican ex-President staging an insurrection among many other things and not dropping out after when exposed would have been considered preposterous what with Nixon having resigned after the Watergate scandal only a decade before. Fast forward to 2004 where the uncertainty of what to do with capitalism as it stumbled through making a mess in the 90s is replaced with all the awfulness of the Middle Eastern conflicts and the Patriot Act underway and you have a much higher uptick in irreverent nationalism among the Republican Party. There's significant concern about the Florida recount in Gore vs. Bush. The neoliberalism of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and the corporations behind them yars before has changed both parties for the worse, realigning a lot of political goals around the rot economy, and having long created a strong opposition towards the USA (and many other countries) becoming a social democracy (and in the case of many other countries as well, the atomization of their public institutions and community practices) as it was on course to be back in the 70s. Things are very bad. Moderate Republicans are starting to become frustrated with partisan gridlock.

The Great Recession forces some sort of reckoning between the Democrats and Republicans to have some sort of socioeconomic response, but it is not as broadly radical as the New Deal, thanks to neoliberalism/neoconservatism. American exceptionalism continues. The country is on it's way to recovery economically, and it turns out there's a small segment of the country who unsurprisingly cannot handle having a black man in office for President and they spout all sorts of conspiracy theories about him and his policies - and it is during his second term that most moderate Republicans in Congress who haven't switched to the Democrats do so, because they're so fed up with their party careening further to the far right.

I don't think we can give the DNC credit for trying to hold the country hostage with fascism that would kill them too. That's too many dimensions of chess (and certainly not go). The centrists still think the 'old rules' are in play when it comes to political losses. Even some people who vote for the neofascist candidate don't actually believe that he will obviously attempt to destroy democracy during his second term. If the DNC truly believed they were at risk, they would have had far more to say about the attacks on the democratic process much sooner than all the weird angles they chose far after worse things happened. We're not sure the centrists in it have really accepted reality. They're too insulated by their wealth and power for all the good it does them with how they use it.

There are veteran political operators for the Democrats who helped them win Presidencies such as e.g. for Bill Clinton in the past who are in shock at the Presidential debate the other week. Some think Biden should drop out.

What is going on with the ex-President since 2015 onwards is not how politics used to work. Even President Bush Jr., who as mentioned above, won on terms that are deeply contested because of how the recount was mishandled, did not have the same bombastic attitude that Trump does. Not even Teddy Roosevelt, the progressive conservative imperialist who was very much at the furthest extreme of the national level of the Republican Party over 100 years ago and tried and lost a third term bid as an independent, known for his bombastic demeanor and speeches including that infamous one about the American empire (in support of it) to the Navy, was not such a flagrantly sexually harassive misogynist and so openly corrupt as to leave boxes of classified documents everywhere.

What comes to mind is the racist Horton ad during the 1988 election by George H.W. Bush vs Michael Dukakis. The ex-Pres constantly spits out the level of awfulness that ad involved. Even H. W. Bush would have been a bit embarrassed for his own racism to go on and on like that openly instead of unsaid or only quietly said, simply done and carried out.

Honestly, this last eight years have felt like the re-emergence of the volatile era of early American politics in the first years after the Constitution when Congressional representatives would get into brawls in Congress. And we pity the fact that the DNC centrists can't grip that this is where we are.

Post that will get me labelled a psyop but honestly the moment that a party realizes that "you might not like us but you have no choice but to vote for us because otherwise the fascists win" is an effective way to rake in votes it practically ensures that they'll never take any actual meaningful action against the fascism problem. They gotta keep the fascists around bro they're their electoral strategy.

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gatekeeper-watchman · 5 months ago

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Stop listening to the fearmongers! Rep. Comer said once said, “The Democratic Party is trying to lead this country on a Socialist agenda”. What is Socialism? You may know what it really is; or, when you really stop to ask yourself and think about it, you may not. Frankly, most people don’t. They couldn’t sit down and write a paragraph about it to save their lives. I know one thing for sure. Over the years, the word has become a pejorative. The minute it is spoken and heard, people become angry, caused by its poor and incompetent governance and abuse in the past. We get mad, we argue, we fight, and the discussion ends. All is lost. So, let’s not use this word. We can gain nothing.

We are a nation of three hundred plus million people, each have their own opinion, thus three hundred million ideas. Also, there are always those who go off in their own directions; but, given responsible knowledgeable leadership with integrity and reliable information, we can usually arrive at reasonable decisions and get things done. With that in mind, let’s start from there.

First, as indicated above, there may be some exceptions, but Democrats are not “trying to lead this country on a Socialist agenda”. In our nation, the very rich and powerful have been plundering the income and wealth of we the people, slowly reducing the standard of living of the common citizen over the past forty years. Look it up. Google it. The Democrats are just trying to get back our country for the people to whom it belongs and provide them their fair share of the economy. Every able-bodied citizen is entitled to the value of his (or her) productivity. Livable wages in accordance with the worth of their productivity are the right of everyone. Those who for reasons beyond their control are unable to produce should be provided appropriate aid or relief. So also, are equal opportunity, quality healthcare, education, and the right to vote the right of everyone. These should be inscribed in our Constitution. A healthy, educated, and prosperous people make for a strong and prosperous nation—call it what you will.

Lastly, our nation is in the condition we find it because of neglect, neglect of the people, and neglect of those who govern us. A democracy by its very definition must have the participation of the people to survive. First, they must vote, in support of which, they must be and stay informed. Mental laziness is the plague of all of us—just some more than others. Also, those who govern us must be honest and govern with integrity, putting the country ahead of party, patriotism, and service ahead of self. Without both of these on an overall basis, a democracy will ultimately fail. Dictatorship will inevitably take its place. Failure of loyalty is a prescription for failure. Do not forget those famous words, “United we stand, divided we fall”. From: Steven P. Miller @ParkermillerQ, gatekeeperwatchman.org Founder and Administrator of Gatekeeper-Watchman International Group, Friday, July 12, 2024, Jacksonville, Florida., Duval County, USA., X … @ParkermillerQ

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miamigotv · 5 months ago

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OPENING Ceremony - TO HIALEAH 4TH OF JULY FIREWORKS SHOW 2024

The opening ceremony for the Hialeah 4th of July Fireworks Show 2024 was a vibrant and exciting event! There was a variety of entertainment, including live music, food stalls, and of course, a spectacular laser light show, fireworks display, on the Apex 5040 GEN3 stage to celebrate Independence Day. The ceremony includes speeches from local dignitaries, patriotic performances, and other festive activities designed to bring the community together. The City of Hialeah is located in Miami-Dade County, Florida. It's the sixth-largest city in Florida and is part of the Miami metropolitan area. Known for its strong Cuban and Hispanic influence, Hialeah has a rich cultural fabric that's reflected in its vibrant community, cuisine, and annual events. Hialeah operates under a strong mayor-council government system, where the mayor has significant administrative powers. The city council consists of members elected from individual districts within the city. This municipal structure enables both centralized decision-making and representation that reflects the diverse interests of its residents. The city's economy is robust, with a good mix of retail, manufacturing, and healthcare industries. It's well-known for its parks, recreational facilities, and has a history tied to horse racing, most notably at the Hialeah Park Race Track, a historic site. Education is also a priority in Hialeah, with numerous public and private schools as well as higher education institutions like Miami Dade College's Hialeah Campus contributing to the community's educational landscape.

#youtube

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genevalentino · 10 months ago

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#AmericaFirstPolicy #CentralizationofPowerintheBidenAdministration.EconomicGrowth #PaycheckProtectionProgram #theCARESAct #TrumpAdministrationeconomist

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akindplace · 2 years ago

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Sources in English: the nytimes,

the guardian

euronews

cnn

bbc

time

For a comprehensive reading on the whole story (2022 - 2023) Wikipedia

On some updates, up to 400 people arrested. The governor Ibaneis Rocha was temporarily suspended from power amidst accusations of being complicit with the invasion by allowing people to camp outside army headquarters for over 2 months, for not providing enough security and a perceived delayed response in sending stronger police forces to the area and for allowing police officers to leave their posts, and also firing the Secretary of Public Defense when the riot broke, leaving the whole area defenseless. Those who were camping outside of army headquarters asking for a military coup have been dispersed by the police (Brazil was under an extremely violent military dictatorship until the late 80s). Bolsonaro is still in Florida, where he fled to just before Lula was set to take power. Many world leaders, including Biden, condemned the attacks.

Please don't trust any sources that claim those "patriots" were fighting because of fraudulent elections. The election was won democratically, and those protests are in favor of a far-right military dictatorship like the previous one (mid 1960s to mid 1980s) that tortured and killed thousands, and sunk the economy to a deep depression. Those protests are from neofascists.

The former president's supporters invaded our National Congress and causing chaos and depredation after the former extreme right president lost the elections and left Brazil to hide in the U.S. the act is clearly inspired in the capitol's invasion after Biden won. Many of them came to the capital of Brazil, Brasilia, in November, set fire to buses, cars, have been camping outside army headquarters asking for the army to take over power in a military coup.

Those supporters also planned to blow a bomb at the international airport, going so a far as to set it but the police intervened. They came over in caravans last night planning on attacking the city today, the national congress being public patrimony that is representative of the democratic power in Brazil, and those people are trying to incite o violent coup. The local government of Brasilia is already being accused of not taking enough measures to keep those violent anti democratic protesters out of the area. So far, it seems there is no police there yet, the cavalry seems to be on their way.

Please don't support these people claiming the elections were fraudulent. We have one of the best electoral systems in the world to avoid fraud. The ex president was from the extreme right, defended torture during our past military dictatorship and was in favor of said dictatorship. He is already being accused of one of the biggest corruption scandals in the history of the country. He lost the elections fairly because of his extremism, corruption and incompetence as president.

Also remember the former president has left the country and all his supporters to hide in the US. As said, he is already being accused of several corruption crimes, including regarding the pocketing the money that should go towards buying of covid vaccines and letting 700k people die while the health system collapsed.

Translation of the cnn headlines: "just now: protesters invade the national congress".

For now I can't find sources in English because this just happened now at the beginning of the afternoon of this Sunday, January 8th, but as soon as there are, I'll post them.

#brazil #brasilia #tw violence #tw bomb #tw riots #tw fascism #tw coup #tw genocide mention #tw corruption #tw torture #tw dictatorship

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metalheadsforblacklivesmatter · 4 years ago

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It’s February!!

Hi everyone! It is Black History Month, LGBTQ+ History Month, and Aromantic Spectrum Awareness Week falls in this month as well! You can expect a lot of content from us here, so prepare for that!

I’ll try to focus on a particular subject whenever I post, but today is going to be a bit of a smorgasbord.

1. The 1619 Project

You might have heard this project mentioned once or twice and you can be forgiven for not being aware of the controversy surrounding the project in 2020; between BLM Protests, the start of (and horrific mishandling of) the Panama Canal we find ourselves living in, and murder hornets a lot was going on.

The entire goal of the 1619 project is to re-contextualize the understanding of American History, by accounting for the story of slavery. Even if you are a casual student of American history, it won’t take long to realize that our history is often told through the lens of white men--specifically rich white men. But, that’s not the only story of this country--America was built on the exploitation of Black men, women, non-binary and queer folks. Black and Native American narratives are often ignored in the teaching of history and the ahistorical understanding of our country leads to an ahistorical present.

It’s...how white people can hop on a private plane, fly to the Capitol, and attempt to overthrow our government “because they’re being oppressed”.

Anyways, whether you like the project or not, I challenge everyone to read more about out country’s history. If you haven’t dove into history at all outside of school, chances are that there is a lot that you need to learn--the way history is taught now does not invite American citizens to look at our country with a critical lens. To quote James Baldwin, “I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” Do not confuse patriotism with nationalism.

2. Centering Black Women

Teen Vogue (yes, Teen Vogue, do not look at me like that) recently published an op-ed that discusses the need for centering Black Women economically moving forward.

I’ll drop a link below, but one of my favorite quotes from the article really sums up the thesis quite well.

“Brittany Packnett Cunningham puts it best: “When Black people win, everybody benefits.” And she’s right. The agency of Black women, especially, is the cornerstone of American democracy, and failing to acknowledge that fact will ultimately stifle any economic growth and progress for the country, which hurts every single American, regardless of race and gender. With the recent appointments of Joelle Gamble, Cecilia Rouse, and Jones herself in key economic posts, there is reason to believe that the reality of Black Women Best is well underway with the Biden Administration.“

Read more here:

https://www.teenvogue.com/story/black-women-best-economy/amp?__twitter_impression=true

3. The Future

A conversation about Black history would not be complete without a conversation about our present and future.

Recent stories continue to not just display police violence against Black people, but specifically against Black children. Below are some stories--trigger warning being police brutality...

Rochester police handcuffing and pepper-spraying a nine year old girl:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/31/nyregion/rochester-police-pepper-spray-child.html#click=https://t.co/8QHKTC4agx

Last week sixteen year old Taylor Bracey was horrifically body slammed by a school resource officer; the article does have video of the officer slamming Taylor, as a warning:

https://abcnews.go.com/US/florida-teen-body-slammed-school-resource-officer-traumatized/story?id=75582344

According to her mother she is suffering from memory loss, headaches, blurry vision, and sleep deprivation.

The family is being represented by civil rights attorney Ben Crump who really sums it up well:

"He's supposed to be trained," he said. "It's foreseeable that children may get in altercations at school. You're not supposed to knock them unconscious. You're supposed to be the person who knows how to de-escalate the situation. It's just mind-boggling."

"This is the adultification of Black children -- that our children are seen as adults," he added. "No, no, this was a child."

Ben Crump has a petition that you can sign below:

https://act.bencrump.com/a/taylor-bracey?utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=social_organic&utm_content=013121

And it’s never a bad time to remember Tamir Rice (twelve) and Trayvon Martin (seventeen) and even recent incidents like Miya Ponsetto (aka “SoHo Karen”) who attacked fourteen year old black child because she accused him of stealing her iphone (and, infamously, looked like a whole mess trying to defend herself during a Gayle King interview by claiming that she was “only twenty-two”--of course Gayle snatched her up gracefully). I say all of this as a reminder that there has always been a pernicious “imagining” of the Black body and the adultification (seeing Black kids as older than what they are) of Black Youth is but one of the many very dangerous forms this form of racism takes shape today. Protecting Black women, protecting Black trans-women, protecting Black youth is important--and seeing these folks victimized by the law in every form needs to be fought against.

In short; defund the police (let’s have no resource officers in schools and more social workers/counselors!), challenge whatever prejudices and assumptions you may have, center Black women and Black female voices, and read up on your history kids.

#black history #BLM #1619 project #silentaugur #defund the police

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newstfionline · 3 years ago

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Monday, September 20, 2021

Biden’s Entire Presidential Agenda Rests on Expansive Spending Bill (NYT) Biden’s entire presidential agenda is riding on the reconciliation bill being crafted in Congress right now. No president has ever packed as much of his agenda, domestic and foreign, into a single piece of legislation as President Biden has with the $3.5 trillion spending plan that Democrats are trying to wrangle through Congress over the next six weeks,” Tankersley writes. “It is almost as if President Franklin D. Roosevelt had stuffed his entire New Deal into one piece of legislation, or if President Lyndon B. Johnson had done the same with his Great Society, instead of pushing through individual components over several years. If he succeeds, Biden’s far-reaching attempt could result in a presidency-defining victory that delivers on a decades-long campaign by Democrats to expand the federal government to combat social problems and spread the gains of a growing economy to workers. If he fails, he could end up with nothing. As Democrats are increasingly seeing, the sheer weight of Mr. Biden’s progressive push could cause it to collapse, leaving the party empty-handed, with the president’s top priorities going unfulfilled. … If Mr. Biden’s party cannot find consensus on those issues and the bill dies, the president will have little immediate recourse to advance almost any of those priorities.

Child care in the US is a ‘broken market,’ Treasury report finds (Yahoo Money) A Treasury Department report this week characterized the U.S. child care system as “unworkable” as Democrats push reform that experts say is an “overdue and critical investment.” The average American family with at least one child under age 5 uses 13% of their income to pay for child care, according to the report, nearly double the 7% that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services considers affordable. Additionally, less than 20% of the children eligible for the Child Care and Development Fund—a federal assistance program for low-income families—are getting that funding. “Child care is a textbook example of a broken market, and one reason is that when you pay for it, the price does not account for all the positive things it confers on our society,” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in a statement on Wednesday. “When we underinvest in child care, we forgo that; we give up a happier, healthier, more prosperous labor force in the future.”

Inspiration4 Astronauts Beam After Return From 3-Day Journey to Orbit (NYT) After three days in orbit, a physician assistant, a community college professor, a data engineer and the billionaire who financed their trip arrived back on Earth, heralding a new era of space travel with a dramatic and successful Saturday evening landing in the Atlantic Ocean. The mission, which is known as Inspiration4, splashed down off the Florida coast at 7:06 p.m. on Saturday. Each step of the return unfolded on schedule, without problems. Within an hour, all four crew members walked out of the spacecraft, one at a time, each beaming with excitement as recovery crews assisted them.

Haitians on Texas border undeterred by US plan to expel them (AP) Haitian migrants seeking to escape poverty, hunger and a feeling of hopelessness in their home country said they will not be deterred by U.S. plans to speedily send them back, as thousands of people remained encamped on the Texas border Saturday after crossing from Mexico. Scores of people waded back and forth across the Rio Grande on Saturday afternoon, re-entering Mexico to purchase water, food and diapers in Ciudad Acuña before returning to the Texas encampment under and near a bridge in the border city of Del Rio. Junior Jean, a 32-year-old man from Haiti, watched as people cautiously carried cases of water or bags of food through the knee-high river water. Jean said he lived on the streets in Chile the past four years, resigned to searching for food in garbage cans. “We are all looking for a better life,” he said.

Three Weeks After Hurricane Ida, Parts of Southeast Louisiana Are Still Dark (NYT) For Tiffany Brown, the drive home from New Orleans begins as usual: She can see the lights on in the city’s central business district and people gathering in bars and restaurants. But as she drives west along Interstate 10, signs of Hurricane Ida’s destruction emerge. Trees with missing limbs fill the swamp on either side of the highway. With each passing mile, more blue tarps appear on rooftops, and more electric poles lay fallen by the road, some snapped in half. By the time Ms. Brown gets to her exit in Destrehan 30 minutes later, the lights illuminating the highway have disappeared, and another night of total darkness has fallen on her suburban subdivision. For Ms. Brown, who works as an office manager at a pediatric clinic, life at work can feel nearly normal. But at home, with no electricity, it is anything but. “I keep hoping every day that I’m going to go home and it’ll be on,” she said. Three weeks have passed since Hurricane Ida knocked down electric wires, poles and transmission towers serving more than one million people in southeast Louisiana. In New Orleans, power was almost entirely restored by Sept. 10, and businesses and schools have reopened. But outside the city, more than 100,000 customers were without lights through Sept. 13. As of Friday evening there were still about 38,000 customers without power, and many people remained displaced from damaged homes.

Favela centennial shows Brazil communities’ endurance (AP) Dozens of children lined up at a community center in Sao Paulo for a slice of creamy, blue cake. None was celebrating a birthday; their poor neighborhood, the favela of Paraisopolis, was commemorating 100 years of existence. “People started coming (to the city) for construction jobs and settled in,” community leader Gilson Rodrigues said. “There was no planning, not even streets. People started growing crops. It was all disorganized. Authorities didn’t do much, so we learned to organize ourselves.” The favela’s centennial, which was marked on Thursday, underscores the permanence of its roots and of other communities like it, even as Brazilians in wealthier parts of town often view them as temporary and precarious. Favelas struggle to shed that stigma as they defy simple definition, not least because they evolved over decades. Paraisopolis is Sao Paulo’s second-biggest favela, home to 43,000 people, according to the most-recent census, in 2010. Recent, unofficial counts put its population around 100,000.

The barbecue king: British royals praise Philip’s deft touch (AP) When Prince Philip died nearly six months ago at 99, the tributes poured in from far and wide, praising him for his supportive role at the side of Queen Elizabeth II over her near 70-year reign. Now, it has emerged that Philip had another crucial role within the royal family. He was the family’s barbecue king—perhaps testament to his Greek heritage. “He adored barbecuing and he turned that into an interesting art form,” his oldest son Prince Charles said in a BBC tribute program that will be broadcast on Wednesday. “And if I ever tried to do it he ... I could never get the fire to light or something ghastly, so (he’d say): ‘Go away!’” In excerpts of ‘Prince Philip: The Royal Family Remembers’ released late Saturday, members of the royal family spoke admiringly of the late Duke of Edinburgh’s barbecuing skills. “Every barbecue that I’ve ever been on, the Duke of Edinburgh has been there cooking,” said Prince William, Philip’s oldest grandson. “He’s definitely a dab hand at the barbecue ... I can safely say there’s never been a case of food poisoning in the family that’s attributed to the Duke of Edinburgh.” The program, which was filmed before and after Philip’s death on April 9, was originally conceived to mark his 100th birthday in June.

Relations between France and the U.S. have sunk to their lowest level in decades. (NYT) The U.S. and Australia went to extraordinary lengths to keep Paris in the dark as they secretly negotiated a plan to build nuclear submarines, scuttling a defense contract worth at least $60 billion. President Emmanuel Macron of France was so enraged that he recalled the country’s ambassadors to both nations. Australia approached the new administration soon after President Biden’s inauguration. The conventionally powered French subs, the Australians feared, would be obsolete by the time they were delivered. The Biden administration, bent on containing China, saw the deal as a way to cement ties with a Pacific ally. But the unlikely winner is Britain, who played an early role in brokering the alliance. For its prime minister, Boris Johnson, who will meet this coming week with Biden at the White House and speak at the U.N., it is his first tangible victory in a campaign to make post-Brexit Britain a player on the global stage.

Hong Kong’s first ‘patriots-only’ election kicks off (Reuters) Fewer than 5,000 Hong Kong people from mostly pro-establishment circles began voting on Sunday for candidates to an election committee, vetted as loyal to Beijing, who will pick the city’s next China-backed leader and some of its legislature. Pro-democracy candidates are nearly absent from Hong Kong’s first election since Beijing overhauled the city’s electoral system to ensure that “only patriots” rule China’s freest city. The election committee will select 40 seats in the revamped Legislative Council in December, and choose a chief executive in March. Changes to the political system are the latest in a string of moves—including a national security law that punishes anything Beijing deems as subversion, secession, terrorism or collusion with foreign forces—that have placed the international financial hub on an authoritarian path. Most prominent democratic activists and politicians are now in jail or have fled abroad.

The Remote-Control Killing Machine (Politico/NYT) For 14 years, Israel wanted to kill Iran’s top nuclear scientist. Then they came up with a way to do it while using a trained sniper who was more than 1,000 miles away—and fired remotely. It was also the debut test of a high-tech, computerized sharpshooter kitted out with artificial intelligence and multiple-camera eyes, operated via satellite and capable of firing 600 rounds a minute. The souped-up, remote-controlled machine gun now joins the combat drone in the arsenal of high-tech weapons for remote targeted killing. But unlike a drone, the robotic machine gun draws no attention in the sky, where a drone could be shot down, and can be situated anywhere, qualities likely to reshape the worlds of security and espionage.

Israeli army arrests last 2 of 6 Palestinian prison escapees (AP) Israeli forces on Sunday arrested the last two of six Palestinian prisoners who escaped a maximum-security Israeli prison two weeks ago, closing an intense, embarrassing episode that exposed deep security flaws in Israel and turned the fugitives into Palestinian heroes. The Israeli military said the two men surrendered in Jenin, their hometown in the occupied West Bank, after they were surrounded at a hideout that had been located with the help of “accurate intelligence.” The prisoners all managed to tunnel out of a maximum-security prison in northern Israel on Sept. 6. The bold escape dominated newscasts for days and sparked heavy criticism of Israel’s prison service. According to various reports, the men dug a hole in the floor of their shared cell undetected over several months and managed to slip past a sleeping prison guard after emerging through a hole outside the facility. Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip have celebrated the escape and held demonstrations in support of the prisoners. Taking part in attacks against the Israeli military or even civilians is a source of pride for many Palestinians, who view it as legitimate resistance to military occupation.

Jaw-dropping moments in WSJ's bombshell Facebook investigation (CNN Business) This week the Wall Street Journal released a series of scathing articles about Facebook, citing leaked internal documents that detail in remarkably frank terms how the company is not only well aware of its platforms’ negative effects on users but also how it has repeatedly failed to address them. Here are some of the more jaw-dropping moments from the Journal’s series. In the Journal’s report on Instagram’s impact on teens, it cites Facebook’s own researchers’ slide deck, stating the app harms mental health. “We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls,” said one slide from 2019, according to the WSJ. Another reads: “Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression ... This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups.” In 2018, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said a change in Facebook’s algorithm was intended to improve interactions among friends and family and reduce the amount of professionally produced content in their feeds. But according to the documents published by the Journal, staffers warned the change was having the opposite effect: Facebook was becoming an angrier place. A team of data scientists put it bluntly: “Misinformation, toxicity and violent content are inordinately prevalent among reshares,” they said, according to the Journal’s report.

#headlines #news

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not-immune-to-propaganda · 3 years ago

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So many posts on here telling us to "Listen to actual Cubans"

Bestie Florida isn't Cuba and Cubans are not a monolith. I have met Cubans in Cuba and abroad who were supportive, neutral or critical of their government. Some in Cuba idolize Fidel and don't like the current president, didn't even like Raùl very much. Some appreciate the opportunities the Revolution has brought but still want more direct democracy. Hell, a lot of them long for the good old days before the Special Period (collapse of the Soviet Union), before the touristic sector split the country's economy in two.

"Patriotic Cubans standing up against Communism" has literally been US Propaganda 101 since Bay of Pigs and you are falling for it. Even if you don't agree with state socialism, the only way to better life for Cubans is to stand up to US imperialism and end the Blockade N O W.

#soscuba #cubacontraelbloqueo #unblock cuba #cuba #imperialism

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reading-writing-revolution · 4 years ago

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December 30, 2020

Heather Cox Richardson

Dec 31

And so, we are at the end of a year that has brought a presidential impeachment trial, a deadly pandemic that has killed more than 338,000 of us, a huge social movement for racial justice, a presidential election, and a president who has refused to accept the results of that election and is now trying to split his own political party.

It’s been quite a year.

But I had a chance to talk with history podcaster Bob Crawford of the Avett Brothers yesterday, and he asked a more interesting question. He pointed out that we are now twenty years into this century, and asked what I thought were the key changes of those twenty years. I chewed on this question for awhile and also asked readers what they thought. Pulling everything together, here is where I’ve come out.

In America, the twenty years since 2000 have seen the end game of the Reagan Revolution, begun in 1980.

In that era, political leaders on the right turned against the principles that had guided the country since the 1930s, when Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt guided the nation out of the Great Depression by using the government to stabilize the economy. During the Depression and World War Two, Americans of all parties had come to believe the government had a role to play in regulating the economy, providing a basic social safety net and promoting infrastructure.

But reactionary businessmen hated regulations and the taxes that leveled the playing field between employers and workers. They called for a return to the pro-business government of the 1920s, but got no traction until the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, when the Supreme Court, under the former Republican governor of California, Earl Warren, unanimously declared racial segregation unconstitutional. That decision, and others that promoted civil rights, enabled opponents of the New Deal government to attract supporters by insisting that the country’s postwar government was simply redistributing tax dollars from hardworking white men to people of color.

That argument echoed the political language of the Reconstruction years, when white southerners insisted that federal efforts to enable formerly enslaved men to participate in the economy on terms equal to white men were simply a redistribution of wealth, because the agents and policies required to achieve equality would cost tax dollars and, after the Civil War, most people with property were white. This, they insisted, was “socialism.”

To oppose the socialism they insisted was taking over the East, opponents of black rights looked to the American West. They called themselves Movement Conservatives, and they celebrated the cowboy who, in their inaccurate vision, was a hardworking white man who wanted nothing of the government but to be left alone to work out his own future. In this myth, the cowboys lived in a male-dominated world, where women were either wives and mothers or sexual playthings, and people of color were savage or subordinate.

With his cowboy hat and western ranch, Reagan deliberately tapped into this mythology, as well as the racism and sexism in it, when he promised to slash taxes and regulations to free individuals from a grasping government. He promised that cutting taxes and regulations would expand the economy. As wealthy people—the “supply side” of the economy-- regained control of their capital, they would invest in their businesses and provide more jobs. Everyone would make more money.

From the start, though, his economic system didn’t work. Money moved upward, dramatically, and voters began to think the cutting was going too far. To keep control of the government, Movement Conservatives at the end of the twentieth century ramped up their celebration of the individualist white American man, insisting that America was sliding into socialism even as they cut more and more domestic programs, insisting that the people of color and women who wanted the government to address inequities in the country simply wanted “free stuff.” They courted social conservatives and evangelicals, promising to stop the “secularization” they saw as a partner to communism.

After the end of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, talk radio spread the message that Black and Brown Americans and “feminazis” were trying to usher in socialism. In 1996, that narrative got a television channel that personified the idea of the strong man with subordinate women. The Fox News Channel told a story that reinforced the Movement Conservative narrative daily until it took over the Republican Party entirely.

The idea that people of color and women were trying to undermine society was enough of a rationale to justify keeping them from the vote, especially after Democrats passed the Motor Voter law in 1993, making it easier for poor people to register to vote. In 1997, Florida began the process of purging voter rolls of Black voters.

And so, 2000 came.

In that year, the presidential election came down to the electoral votes in Florida. Democratic candidate Al Gore won the popular vote by more than 540,000 votes over Republican candidate George W. Bush, but Florida would decide the election. During the required recount, Republican political operatives led by Roger Stone descended on the election canvassers in Miami-Dade County to stop the process. It worked, and the Supreme Court upheld the end of the recount. Bush won Florida by 537 votes and, thanks to its electoral votes, became president. Voter suppression was a success, and Republicans would use it, and after 2010, gerrymandering, to keep control of the government even as they lost popular support.

Bush had promised to unite the country, but his installation in the White House gave new power to the ideology of the Movement Conservative leaders of the Reagan Revolution. He inherited a budget surplus from his predecessor Democrat Bill Clinton, but immediately set out to get rid of it by cutting taxes. A balanced budget meant money for regulation and social programs, so it had to go. From his term onward, Republicans would continue to cut taxes even as budgets operated in the red, the debt climbed, and money moved upward.

The themes of Republican dominance and tax cuts were the backdrop of the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001. That attack gave the country’s leaders a sense of mission after the end of the Cold War and, after launching a war in Afghanistan to stop al-Qaeda, they set out to export democracy to Iraq. This had been a goal for Republican leaders since the Clinton administration, in the belief that the United States needed to spread capitalism and democracy in its role as a world leader. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq strengthened the president and the federal government, creating the powerful Department of Homeland Security, for example, and leading Bush to assert the power of the presidency to interpret laws through signing statements.

The association of the Republican Party with patriotism enabled Republicans in this era to call for increased spending for the military and continued tax cuts, while attacking Democratic calls for domestic programs as wasteful. Increasingly, Republican media personalities derided those who called for such programs as dangerous, or anti-American.

But while Republicans increasingly looked inward to their party as the only real Americans and asserted power internationally, changes in technology were making the world larger. The Internet put the world at our fingertips and enabled researchers to decode the human genome, revolutionizing medical science. Smartphones both made communication easy. Online gaming created communities and empathy. And as many Americans were increasingly embracing rap music and tattoos and LGBTQ rights, as well as recognizing increasing inequality, books were pointing to the dangers of the power concentrating at the top of societies. In 1997, J.K. Rowling began her exploration of the rise of authoritarianism in her wildly popular Harry Potter books, but her series was only the most famous of a number of books in which young people conquered a dystopia created by adults.

In Bush’s second term, his ideology created a perfect storm. His administration's disastrous response to Hurricane Katrina, which killed more than 1,800 people and caused $125 billion in damage in and around New Orleans in 2005, revealed how badly the new economy had treated Black and Brown people, and how badly the destruction of domestic programs had affected our ability to respond to disasters. Computers permitted the overuse of credit default swaps that precipitated the 2008 crash, which then precipitated the housing crisis, as people who had bet on the individualist American dream lost their homes. Meanwhile, the ongoing wars, plagued with financial and moral scandals, made it clear that the Republicans optimistic vision of spreading democracy through military conflict was unrealistic.

In 2008, voters put Black American Barack Obama, a Democrat, into the White House. To Republicans, primed by now to believe that Democrats and Black people were socialists, this was an undermining of the nation itself, and they set out to hamper him. While many Americans saw Obama as the symbol of a new, fairer government with America embracing a multilateral world, reactionaries built a backlash based in racism and sexism. They vocally opposed a federal government they insisted was pushing socialism on hardworking white men, and insisted that America must show its strength by exerting its power unilaterally in the world. Increasingly, the Internet and cell phones enabled people to have their news cater to their worldview, moving Republicans into a world characterized by what a Republican spokesperson would later call "alternative facts."

And so, in 2016, we faced a clash between a relentlessly changing nation and the individualist ideology of the Movement Conservatives who had taken over the Republican Party. By then, that ideology had become openly radical extremism in the hands of Donald Trump, who referred to immigrants as criminals, boasted of sexually assaulting women, and promised to destroy the New Deal government once and for all.

In the 2016 election, the themes of the past 36 years came together. Embracing Movement Conservative individualist ideology taken to an extreme, Trump was eager enough to make sure a Democrat didn't win that, according to American intelligence services, he was willing to accept the help of Russian operatives. They, in turn, influenced the election through the manipulation of new social media, amplified by what had become by then a Republican echo chamber in which Democrats were dangerous socialists and the Democratic candidate, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, was a criminal. Thanks to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision which permitted corporate money to flow into election campaigns, Trump also had the help of a wave of money from big business; financial institutions spent $2 billion to influence the election. He also had the support of evangelicals, who believed he would finally give them the anti-abortion laws they wanted.

Trump lost the popular vote by almost 3 million votes but, as George W. Bush before him, won in the Electoral College. Once in office, this president set out to destroy the New Deal state, as Movement Conservatives had called for, returning the country to the control of a small group of elite businessmen who, theoretically, would know how to move the country forward best by leveraging private sector networks and innovation. He also set out to put minorities and women back into subordinate positions, recreating a leadership structure that was almost entirely white and male.

As Trump tried to destroy an activist government once and for all, Americans woke up to how close we have come to turning our democracy over to a small group of oligarchs.

In the past four years, the Women’s March on Washington and the MeToo Movement has enabled women to articulate their demand for equality. The travel ban, child separation policy for Latin American refugees, and Trump’s attacks on Muslims, Latin American immigrants, and Chinese immigrants, has sparked a defense of America’s history of immigration. The Black Lives Matter Movement, begun in July 2013 after George Zimmerman was acquitted of murdering teenager Trayvon Martin, has gained power as Black Americans have been murdered at the hands of law enforcement officers and white vigilantes, and as Black Americans have borne witness to those murders with cellphone videos.

The increasing voice of democracy clashed most dramatically with Trump’s ideology in summer 2020 when, with the support of his Attorney General William Barr, Trump used the law enforcement officers of the Executive Branch to attack peaceful protesters in Washington, D.C. and in Portland, Oregon. In June, on the heels of the assault on the protesters at Lafayette Square, military officers from all branches made it clear that they would not support any effort to use them against civilians. They reiterated that they would support the Constitution. The refusal of the military to support a further extension of Trump's power was no small thing.

And now, here we are. Trump lost the 2020 election to Democrat Joe Biden by more than 7 million votes and by an Electoral College split of 306 to 232. Although the result was not close, Trump refuses to acknowledge the loss and is doing all he can to hamper Biden’s assumption of office. Many members of the Republican Party are joining him in his attempt to overturn the election, taking the final, logical step of Movement Conservatism: denying the legitimacy of anyone who does not share their ideology. This is unprecedented. It is a profound attack on our democracy. But it will not succeed.

And in this moment, we have, disastrously, discovered the final answer to whether or not it is a good idea to destroy the activist government that has protected us since 1933. In their zeal for reducing government, the Trump team undercut our ability to respond to a pandemic, and tried to deal with the deadly coronavirus through private enterprise or by ignoring it and calling for people to go back to work in service to the economy, willing to accept huge numbers of dead. They have carried individualism to an extreme, insisting that simple public health measures designed to save lives infringe on their liberty.

The result has been what is on track to be the greatest catastrophe in American history, with more than 338,000 of us dead and the disease continuing to spread like wildfire. It is for this that the Trump administration will be remembered, but it is more than that. It is a fitting end to the attempt to destroy our government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

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gravitascivics · 4 years ago

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A GENERAL INABILITY

Funny how national events – or events that capture the national attention – stir one’s memory. To this writer, the attack on the national Capitol last January 6th was such an event. He recalled something he read some years ago. That being the late Christopher Lasch’s book, The Culture of Narcissism.[1] When Lasch wrote that book, he seemed to be motivated in part to explain the prevalence of leftist, anti-war demonstrators and of the then popular cultist movements. It seems that what he had to say then, in the late seventies, has relevance today.

His basic area of concern is how bourgeois society has lost its ability to meet challenges. Not only was the Western world unable to think of big solutions, but there also seems to be a lack of willingness to even try. And that state is not a reaction to a lack of such challenges; they are out there and threaten to overwhelm those societies, including the US. One can say that even though Lasch wrote this work some thirty years ago, his concerns are still affecting those nations today.

It is as if classical liberalism,[2] a central strain of belief in the West, has lost its ability to account for multinational corporations or be able to sustain a welfare state. More targeted in his comments is that that liberalism’s approach, that of science, has not developed effective policies to address the ongoing human/social problems that keep afflicting the West.

For example, while the loss of manufacturing jobs in the West to developing, low wage countries – mostly in Asia – has left behind segments of those western countries in dire economic straits, none of the western countries seem to devise the policies that would meet that challenge. Here is one account of this lack of development:

Even if the loss of manufacturing jobs in advance economies may have contributed relatively little to aggregate inequality in advance economies, the negative consequences appear to have been sizable and persistent for some groups of workers and their communities. Expanding access to programmes that facilitate the reskilling of displace workers and reduce the costs of their reallocation, as well as strengthening safety nets and targeted redistribution policies, can help soften the blow imposed by structural transformation and help ensure that the gains of productivity growth are shared more broadly.[3]

While this transformation has been going on since the seventies, this cited account was written in 2018. In all that time no meaningful program has been developed to provide the reforms that would reestablish those workers’ prior standing. They, the dispossessed, instead have become prime candidates for radicalization.

Lasch writes, “The natural sciences, having made exaggerated claims for themselves, now hasten to announce that science offer no miracle cures for social problems.”[4] Why this interruption to a history of ongoing successes and advancements? According to Lasch, one change has been significantly less reliance on the study of history.

And he not only points out that there is a lack of objectified history (which scientific bias would prefer), but a history soaked in “moral dignity, patriotism, and political optimism.” That is a history that not only tells of the past but does it with a dose of encouragement, praise, or castigation when a historical tale merits such an account.

The assumption was that before the post-World War II period, the people were able and disposed to learn from the past, but now the message is that the past is irrelevant. It stems from the notion that now is modern and then was, well, then and irrelevant to modern challenges. And this sense for contemporary conditions and their qualitative qualities seems to have affected those in power up and down the political power grid. And when problems are not fixed or are not even meaningfully addressed, distrust by those in harm’s way follows.

Recently, after giving conservatives a healthy dose of criticism, this writer pointed out that liberals have their own shortcomings as well. He then stated that that criticism waited for another venue to express some of that message. Here it is. Yes, over reliance on government has led to the diminution of local governance. This nation, in many areas, has experienced over-governance by empowered, far-off bureaucracies with dehumanizing regulations about how local things should be done. Please do not interpret this with a non-nuanced eye.

It is not an either/or issue, but one of degree. In a world of multinational corporations with enormous power, it is often the case that only central governments can meet the challenges they, the corporations, create or ignore. The trick – as it is with most of life – is to hit the right combination. But there is more to this general problem area than merely not reading history. And addressing that other area or areas will be done at some later posting.

But for now, this posting leaves the reader with this quote from Lasch:

The inadequacy of solutions dictated from above now forces people to invent solutions dictated from below. Disenchantment with governmental bureaucracies has begun to extend to corporate bureaucracies as well – the real centers of power in contemporary society. In small towns and crowded urban neighborhoods, even in suburbs, men and women have initiated modest experiments in cooperation, designed to defend their rights against the corporations and the state. The “flight from politics,” as it appears to the managerial political elite, may signify citizen’s growing unwillingness to take part in the political system as a consumer of prefabricated spectacles … not a retreat from politics at all but the beginnings of a general political revolt.[5]

Well, now thirty plus years later, as events in Texas this last week indicate – and while the problems with the power there is due to the mismanagement of a state, not a national entity – that revolt still has a way to go.

Perhaps if the states’ civics curricula were guided not by a natural rights point of view – one that blends in with Lasch’s observation for a preference of objectified studies – but one guided by federation theory, then, at least, how young people are taught about government and politics might help.[6] It has come to this writer’s attention that the state of Florida is going to consider in its legislature’s next session a mandated change in its public schools’ civics curriculum to offer a more local emphasis. Hopefully, that comes about, and the resulting change will be effective.

If change along the lines that Lasch suggests does not take place, what then? He goes on to address the way this whole current situation creates the conditions that generates a generation of radicals such as those who took it upon themselves to attack the US Capitol. As hinted to above and reflecting the reason this writer presently took up this topic, when this blog again addresses it, it will share Lasch’s attempt at predicting in more detail.

[1] Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York, NY: ��W. W. Norton and Company, 1979).

[2] One can see classical liberalism as a main element of the natural rights view, that his blog claims has taken prevalence since World War II.

[3] Oya Ceasun and Bertrand Gruss, “The Declining Share of Manufacturing Jobs,” Vox(EU)/CEPR (May 25, 2018), accessed February 23, 2021, https://voxeu.org/article/declining-share-manufacturing-jobs . British spelling.

[4] Ibid., xiv.

[5] Ibid., xv.

[6] If the reader agrees, this writer’s book, Toward a Federated Nation, might assist educators and interested citizens to bring about such a shift. See Robert Gutierrez, Toward a Federated Nation: Implementing National Civics Standards (Tallahassee, FL: Gravitas/Civics Books, 2020). Available through Amazon.

#Christopher Lasch #radicalism #classical liberalism #civics education #social studies

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qqueenofhades · 5 years ago

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How did 9/11 affect the American psyche? I’ve heard people say that 9/11 is when America went insane, but I was born into the post-9/11 America, so it’s a bit hard for me to wrap my head around.

Oh man. You kids are asking the easy questions tonight, I see.

I’m not even sure I can adequately describe the effect that 9/11 had on the American psyche and the ways in which the entire world would be massively, almost unimaginably different if it had never happened, but here goes.

Basically, in the almost exactly ten-year period between the final collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the terror attacks in 2001, life for Americans was pretty damn good. They had won the Cold War, the economy was doing great, everybody was feeling rich and optimistic and like there was nothing but blue skies ahead. (Side note, I wonder if this resurgence of ‘90s nostalgia has to do with the fact that that’s the last time that we collectively felt safe.) The Columbine school shootings happened in 1999, back when that was completely still a shocking thing that nobody would expect, and not a semi-regular feature of the news every few months. I was 11 years old. Littleton was about an hour from where we lived at the time. I spent the whole morning crying about it and insisted on organizing a memorial service for the victims. The 2000 presidential election was bitterly contested between Bush and Gore, coming down to a handful of votes in Florida and the Supreme Court decision. Man, you also have to wonder how all of recent American history would have gone differently if Bush had lost.

Then…. 9/11. I was 13. It was an ordinary, sunny Tuesday, my dad came upstairs with a funny look on his face, and said that apparently the World Trade Center had been attacked. We didn’t have cable TV, so we didn’t watch any of it live, but I don’t remember that we discussed anything else for the whole day. We were at home, which was far away from the East Coast or where any of it was happening, so I don’t have any dramatic memories of seeing people freaking out or anything like that. At dinner that night, THAT NIGHT, my mom said that Osama bin Laden had probably done it. I repeat: everyone knew on the same night that it had happened that Osama was almost definitely responsible. You may note that Osama bin Laden was a Saudi national, all the hijackers were Saudi, and al-Qaeda was an organization with deep Saudi roots. (Remember the part where America attacked… Afghanistan? Yep. Seems legit. Then again, they weren’t the biggest oil producers in the region and a major US ally.)

It is impossible to overstate the shock that this caused. This had never happened. Even through both world wars and the long, dangerous 20th century and the turbulence and tension of the Cold War, there had never been an attack like this on mainland American soil. (And on that note, America got into World War II, despite all the heroic mythology about freeing the world from tyranny, because of the attack on Pearl Harbor, which in 1941 was an American territory. There were plenty of Nazi sympathizers among the establishment and government, and as soon as the war was over, America brought plenty of Nazis, including Wernher von Braun, to work in the space program. To say nothing of our problems with Nazis NOW. So yes.) The psychological effects were literally devastating for both Americans and many other people. Not to downplay the obvious horror of what happened on 9/11 and the people who were killed, but it turned America into a siege state. Everyone was terrified, and yet now we had a War on Terror, helpfully called a “crusade” by President Bush before European allies forced him to walk it back. His approval ratings hit 90%+ in the days after 9/11, and support to bomb Afghanistan – again, not in any way directly connected to this, aside from the fact that it was where Osama bin Laden had been active, and when the US government had armed him and fellow mujahadeen in the 1980s to fight against the Soviets, who had invaded in 1979, making it a Cold War proxy battlefield, and anyway – was MONUMENTAL. The whole public was behind this. International sympathy for America was incredible. Everyone was on our side and willing to say that we had been wronged. It didn’t really matter that Afghanistan was not really connected to this. Someone needed to suffer for this outrage. And boy, did they suffer.

Then came March 2003, and the infamous declaration that we were now going to invade Iraq, because Saddam Hussein (supported by the US in the 1980s Iran-Iraq War, in retaliation for Iran overthrowing their puppet shah in 1979, after CIA and MI6 staged a coup to remove Iran’s democratically elected prime minister in 1953 to protect their access to oil) apparently had weapons of mass destruction and was about to use them to kill more Americans. Everyone knew at the time that this was pretty much bullshit. But boy, did the Bush administration go hard to work selling it to us. The Department of Homeland Security was founded in 2002, after the attacks. The Patriot Act and other intrusive new surveillance methods and measures were quickly authorized. Americans became watched, spied on, mistrusted, and suspected of wrongdoing in ways never really tried on a large scale before. Any dissent was framed as taking the side of the terrorists; couldn’t you see that we needed all this to be safe? The state of national emergency that was declared after 9/11 was never actually revoked; we are all still living in it 19 years later. The culture of hyper-militarism, all these huge flags at sporting events and the visibility of these “Salute to Service” months and this aggressive fasciso-patriotism all grew up directly from the seeds of 9/11 and the sense of unforgivable affront to America, which could do what it wanted anywhere else in the world but could never forgive anyone for inflicting it in return.

It’s a mark of how badly all that public sympathy was mismanaged that by the time 2003 rolled around, the international community (except for Great Britain and Bush’s loyal compadre, Tony Blair) was… to say the least, skeptical of this Iraq adventure. It was pretty clearly a pretext to resume the Gulf War from Bush Senior’s tenure, unrelated to any actual justification or revenge for 9/11, and demonstrated the fact that far from resting on our laurels and feeling safe after winning the Cold War, America was now locked in mortal combat with an enemy that could be everywhere at any time. Nobody should feel safe, because the terrorists were out there. Despite the condemnation, Bush got re-elected in 2004, in part by painting his opponent, John Kerry, as someone who just couldn’t be trusted on national security. In short, Kerry, a Vietnam veteran, was “Swift Boated,” though he also did run a pretty wooden and uninspiring campaign. I just missed being old enough to vote in this election, though my parents and older sister all voted for Kerry, and Bush’s failings were a frequent subject of discussion in our house. He was getting more and more unpopular, was a figure of national ridicule, and yet this never actually discredited the whole War on Terror and the apparatus that sustained it. There were reports of war crimes, including Abu Ghraib, committed by the American forces. The indiscriminate torture and murder of detainees at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba was also an object of national concern, but allowed to keep happening. Less than 5 years after 9/11, and all this sympathy for America, America had… well, lost its mind.

So… yes. There’s an entire generation now that is too young to remember 9/11 and thinks that America has always been this way, but it is, again, completely impossible to overstate how 9/11 turned this sense of comfortable complacency and national prosperity upside down. Everything was now justified in the name of freedom, and any disloyalty was suspect. Our “The Greatest!!” state had to be repeated and reissued and emphasized at every point. Many innocent Americans died on 9/11, sure. But the way that it was turned into the worst violation that any country had suffered anywhere, led to the death of thousands of Afghans, Iraqis, American servicepeople, Muslims, and everyone else involved in the wars and the system that was built to sustain them, and turned America into this paranoid, brutal, out-of-control war-machine juggernaut is, it can be well argued, its worst and most lasting tragedy.

#politics for ts #anonymous #ask

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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 4 years ago

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* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

December 30, 2020

Heather Cox Richardson

It’s been quite a year.

In America, the twenty years since 2000 have seen the end game of the Reagan Revolution, begun in 1980.

And so, 2000 came.

As Trump tried to destroy an activist government once and for all, Americans woke up to how close we have come to turning our democracy over to a small group of oligarchs.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

#Letters From An American #Heather Cox Richardson #quotes #poltical #history #election 2020 #21st century #corrupt GOP #criminal GOP

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quakerjoe · 5 years ago

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American conservatism—the so-called “culture of life”—worships annihilation.

A decade ago, in my first public writing since leaving Capitol Hill, I warned that the Republican Party, in its evolution towards an extremist conservative movement allied with extremist Christian fundamentalism, was becoming like “one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe.” After Donald Trump’s enthronement as the decider of our fate, I analyzed the GOP’s descent into a nihilism that belied every one of its supposed “values.” They value only absolute power or ruin.

It is now long past time to cast off highfalutin’ Latinisms and simply call the Republicans and their religious and secular conservative allies what they are, and in unadorned English: a death cult. As the country reels from the coronavirus pandemic, our national government might just as well be run by the infamous People’s Temple of Jonestown.

By now we are benumbed by the all-pervasive arguments over relaxing workplace shutdowns and stay-at-home orders due to coronavirus. In any sane society, the issue would be how to institute the most efficient measures to defeat the pandemic in the shortest time and with the lowest loss of life. Instead, Trump and his merry band of lunatics have hijacked the national debate into a faux-serious discussion of when, oh, please, how soon, can we “reopen the economy?” Naturally, the media gamely continue to play along with this calculated bit of dezinformatsiya.

This has led to extreme callousness, like that shown by Texas lieutenant governor Dan Patrick, who opined that grams and gramps should be eager to shuffle off this mortal coil for the sake of their grandchildren.

There is abundant empirical evidence against this notion: voters in Florida, known as “God’s waiting room” for its geriatric population, are notoriously averse to paying one cent in state income tax to fund education or child health, let alone lay down their lives. In any case, the 69-year-old Patrick, who claims he’s willing to die for his proposition, did not relinquish the burdens of his office to volunteer as an emergency room orderly.

The whole extremely well-funded edifice of “economic conservatism” is equally a death cult, worshiping Mammon so fervently that it is eager to make human sacrifice upon its altar, just like the Mayans and Carthaginians.

There’s also Congressman Trey Hollingsworth of Indiana, who put a patriotic gloss on his Malthusianism, decreeing that “it is always the American government’s position to say, in the choice between the loss of our way of life as Americans and the loss of life, of American lives, we have to always choose the latter.”

Then, striking the pose of the Serious Adult in the Room correcting mischievous children, he intoned: “It is policymakers’ decision to put on our big boy and big girl pants and say it is the lesser of these two evils.” This encapsulates the stereotype of the economic conservative: Dickens’s Thomas Gradgrind, the rigid, condescending, and heartless pedagogue.

But some pronouncements from the Trump coalition offer more ethereal rationalizations than the mere pursuit of lucre. The news is replete with stories about evangelical ministers packing their megachurches like sardine cans in defiance of state orders for social distancing, as well as contempt for common sense.

We all know about that harebrained medicine man in Louisiana, Tony Spell, already arrested for violating the state’s prohibition of large gatherings, who continues his antics nonstop. Spell, who sounds as socially responsible as a blood tick, is proclaiming his parishioners ought to choose death: “Like any revolutionary, or like any zealot, or like any pure religious person, death looks to them like a welcome friend. True Christians do not mind dying. They fear living in fear.”

So much for fundamentalists’ vaunted “culture of life,” a slogan which the prestige media never presume to critique.

For a more socially upscale version of this sentiment, let us turn to First Things, a pretentious journal of alleged theology that dresses up its non-stop shilling for the GOP with high-toned words like “numinous” and references to the philosopher Erasmus.

Last month, its editor, R.R. Reno, wrote a piece called, “Say No to Death’s Dominion.” It is an extraordinary performance. Contrary to the title, he actually argues that death should be embraced. He does this by weaving an imbecilic theology that includes falsifying the history of the 1918 flu epidemic to make his basic point:

“In our simple-minded picture of things, we imagine a powerful fear of death arises because of the brutal deeds of cruel dictators and bloodthirsty executioners. But in truth, Satan prefers sentimental humanists. We resent the hard boot of oppression on our necks, and given a chance, most will resist. How much better, therefore, to spread fear of death under moralistic pretexts.”

Oh, I get it! So Mother Teresa and Dorothy Day were more depraved than Josef Stalin! Reno ends with this:

“Fear of death and causing death is pervasive—stoked by a materialistic view of survival at any price and unchecked by Christian leaders who in all likelihood secretly accept the materialist assumptions of our age. “

This insane rant against materialism would seem to contradict the crassly materialistic assumptions underlying economic conservatives’ advocacy for letting a deadly virus “wash over” the population, as Trump would say. But these views, at first sight blatantly opposed, can be reconciled.

And who better to reconcile God and Mammon than a grifter like Jerry Falwell, Jr., ringmaster of Liberty University and testifier to Donald Trump’s status as an emissary of the Almighty? Not only has Falwell continued the school year, virtually alone among American universities, and despite pleading from students and parents to close, he has now been sued for failing to refund fees for student activities that have been suspended.

Fundamentalist preachers’ love of money is no secret: it is only by packing churches that the collection plate will yield a bounteous harvest so that their missionary work can continue – perhaps logistically aided by the purchase of a $65-million Gulfstream executive jet. And why not? It would upstage Pat Robertson, who had a mere Learjet, and a rental at that.

Political observers often wonder about the bizarre conservative coalition of plutocrats and theocrats, believing it to be unstable. But the intersection of the heartless pecuniary motives of religious and economic conservatives is no coincidence. And beneath the Ebenezer Scrooge façade of economic conservatives is the same kind of perverted idealism that we see in Tony Spell or R.R. Reno.

The most cost-efficient industrial process is one that wastes the fewest resource inputs. Likewise, internal combustion engines have evolved to get better mileage even as they pollute less. And electric motors are even more fuel efficient and less polluting.

So how do we explain conservatives’ perverse hatred of the environment, even when there are no profits at stake, as well as their tenacious denial of climate change in the face of irrefutable data? Is it not much the same as the Bible thumper who bitterly condemns stewardship of the environment as Gaia worship?

There are other similarities. Since the 1970s oil shocks (and coincident with the rise of the New Right), an abiding feature on the American scene has been the survivalist, hoping for the national Götterdämmerung that will vindicate his having stockpiled 10,000 rounds of ammunition and a horde of Krugerrands. This dovetails with fundamentalists’ weird enthusiasm for the prospect of world annihilation that animates belief in the Rapture, the only difference being the technique by which the elect avoid the mass slaughter.

Firearms fetishism and a fascination with violence, war, and armed insurrection are also mainstays of right-wing ideology, hardly distinguishable from Jerry Falwell Sr.’s, proclamation that God is Pro-War. And how about the Ultimate Fighting Jesus? The NRA neatly intersects with “muscular Christianity,” revealing both ideological kinship and some very embarrassing gender insecurities that frequently irrupt in misogyny and homosexual panic.

There is no longer the slightest doubt in any sane person’s mind that not only are the GOP’s fundamentalist-extremist religious allies a death cult disguised as 501(c)3 tax-exempt charitable organizations. The whole extremely well-funded edifice of “economic conservatism” is equally a death cult, worshiping Mammon so fervently that it is eager to make human sacrifice upon its altar, just like the Mayans and Carthaginians.

“¡Viva la Muerte!”

“Long live death!” That was the defiant cry of José Millán-Astray y Terreros, a general in Francisco Franco’s fascist army during the Spanish civil war. It could just as well suit Trump’s foot soldiers.

- Mike Lofgren is a former congressional staff member who served on both the House and Senate budget committees. His books include: “The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government“ and “The Party is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted.”

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theamericanpatriot · 4 years ago

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Did you watch the election returns on Tuesday night?

Did you stay up all night?

At about midnight on the east coast, Trump led in all the battleground states by large margins. The betting odds were more than 75% for Trump to win. Then for some unexplainable reason, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Nevada all stopped counting their votes simultaneously.

They took a "pause", a “timeout” at around 1 AM and those states stopped counting any additional votes for the next 3 hours.

So what did they do for those 3 hours?

Well, they were not having coffee and doughnuts.

Let me point out a couple of things that will be food for thought on those with an open intelligent mind. Because let’s face it, if people were intelligent and had an open mind, they would see that what is happening is illegal and someone should be charged. But let’s face it, that will never happen.

Above all else, nothing will be done about anything because all of those states involved in this controversy have Democratic governors whose states are in a state of disarray.

Suddenly during the 3 hour shut down all those states found enough votes for Biden to catch up to Trump. At midnight in Michigan, Trump was ahead by 5% (400 thousand votes) with 80% of the votes already counted. When the next 10% of votes of about 400,000 had been counted from Wayne County (Detroit), suddenly Biden caught Trump with 90% of the votes in. Biden made up 5% with 10% of the total vote. That means that all the votes (close to 100%) from Wayne went to Biden. That also means that practically all registered voters voted in Wayne County. The same thing happened in Madison, Wis, In Raleigh, NC, in Las Vegas, NV, and is now happening in Philadelphia, Pa by Friday.

Not one pundit questioned why a shut down in counting votes happened in all these states simultaneously. Not one questioned how almost all of the newly counted votes in those battleground states went to Biden. Only NewsMax pointed out the coincidence of it happening in those states with Democrat governors with Trump ahead before the "pauses."

Wisconsin is now reporting 3,239,920 votes cast when there are only 3,129,000 registered voters on record. More people voted than actually registered. When questioned, the Democrat Sec of State says there are 3.6 million registered voters from late registrations. Even if there are 3.6 million registered voters, that means that 90% of them voted when the average was 55 to 60% across the USA.

The major news networks all refused to call the elections in Texas and Florida until almost all votes were counted. What is worse is that FOX called Arizona only 30 minutes after the polls closed with less than 50% of the votes. Arizona had a million outstanding votes in Republican Maricopa County with Biden ahead in the state by only 100,000 when Arizona was called for Biden.

Think about this for a moment my fellow patriots, the Democrats resisted from day one that Trump was elected with recounts, no peaceful transition of power, impeachment, 3 years of false accusations, with most of those accusations of Trump colluding with Russia to affect the 2016 election. Mueller, Comey,Clapper/Brennan with the FISA requests and the Steele Dossier paid by Hillary Clinton. 22 FBI agents lost their jobs because of spying on Trump. With all the riots, looting, and the violence continuing until election night, but now there is not one report of any of that, sounds a little one-sided doesn’t it. With all of the polls that proved to be wrong. $400 billion donations by Soros and Bloomberg for Biden. Wall Street with up to 4 to 1 in donations to Biden. The lack of coverage about the Bidens' relationships with China, Russia, Ukraine, Burisma, including what has been going on with Biden’s son. Then all of the reports about Covid-19 around the clock by the national media machines. With little mention of the progress that Trump has been doing with all of the record economic and international results that no President before him has been able to do.

Covid-19 became the reason for the unsolicited mail out of ballots by Democrat governors. It was used to scare voters and to distract them from Trump accomplishments. It was used as the reason to shut down economies in Democrat run states. Let's see what happens with Covid now that the Democrats and the media no longer need it.

So did those battleground states run by Democrats use ballot harvesting or any other types of election fraud?

How did the vote tallies change so dramatically after those Democrat governors "paused" in their election counts in the dead of night?

If the media, Democrats, and deep state could be in such collusion against Trump for 4 years, then how hard is it to question collusion in ballot counting last night by those Democrat governors?

What gets lost with a Biden election? For starters, any investigation of Biden with Burisma and China, the Barr investigations, the Durham investigations, the investigations of deep state players, and Constitution integrity with DC as a state and with packing the Supreme Court.

If you think that the media cartel was hard at work demonizing Trump for the last 4 years, with those broadcasts taking up to 94% of their broadcasting time, to produce negative Trump reports, then my fellow patriots it was in full swing last night at protecting those Democrat governors and their interests in those battleground states.

After everything that has been done, ask yourself these questions:

So why did all those Democrat stronghold cities take a "pause" to report their votes?

How did almost all the votes from Madison,Wisc go for Biden?

Almost 100% of registered voters, not just votes?

Did ballot harvesting happen?

How about in those other battleground states?

Who won the election?

The Average working American?

NO, we lost this election because the Democrats stole it from us. lost.

Election integrity has been lost because of one political party. And it continues to be lost because the people in power, the rich, the politicians, lawyers, and judges refuse to see it and do their job of preventing it.

No matter who won, America not only got less great, but is not America by any standard anymore.

Democrats had lots on the line so they practiced “the end justifies the means” just as Alinsky instructed. They cheated and the media helped.

Democrats had lots on the line so they practiced “the end justifies the means” just as Alinsky instructed. They cheated and the media helped. And we, the American People, lost out.

Buy those guns, stockpile on end-of-the-world necessities, because the shit just got real.

I am a patriot, are you?

#election #trump #biden #republican #democrat #electionnight

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