The Divine Mr. M

~These seemingly endless and exhausting battles over Abortion Rights and Gun Rights are just distractions. Their purpose IS to 'distract and exhaust' us while Corporations devour The Commons. In the mean time, Accelerating Climate Change is relentlessly bearing down upon us.

Feb. 19th, 2017 at 2:22 AM

~I keep reading endless numbers of articles and essays about how Trump became president. And none of the them really seem to get it. Chris Hughes comes close, but he seems to have lost his mind. Can't blame him really, as everyone is dancing around the elephant in the room; we are in fact already IN Collapse, eg, The System is in Terminal Failure.

We are in Late Stage Capitalism. What that means is as the profit margins get narrower, The Owners need to squeeze harder to extract said profits. This has been going for a few decades now, but for the general public, the 'balloon went up' with the Crash of '09, which was the direct result of The Big Squeeze. Wall Street et al created a Housing Bubble of insane proportions via all manner of shady and even illegal marketing and accounting games.

When the shit hit the fan, they got their political lackeys to use Tax Payer Money to 'reimburse' them for their loses and left said Tax Payers out to dry. Roughly 40% of the American Middle Class Wealth was lost. FORTY PERCENT. That meant eroded tax bases, gutted pension funds, wrecked state and municipal bond portfolios.

That is what Obama inherited. And, being the Corporatist he is, he bunted economically. The perfect example is the ACA [which originated with The Heritage Foundation, a very right wing think tank]. He'd promised a Public Option over and over and over again on the campaign trail. Withing a month of his Inauguration, it had vanished, forcing thirty million Americans into the clutches of the Insurance Industry. [see The Big Squeeze]

Eight years later, after more and more of that kind of betrayal from the Democrats and the insane slavering obstructionism of the GOP, the American Electorate had come to hate the establishments of both parties. And two Insurgent candidates emerged from outside of each party; Bernie and The Donald.

We all know what happened. The 'undisciplined' Dems suddenly became Very Disciplined and sandbagged Bernie. And the infamously disciplined GOP fielded a slate of total buffoons and got its clock cleaned.

Even then, Hillary should have won. She did in fact 'win' The Vote. But her ground game sucked so badly [arrogance], and the Dems had alienated so much of their own base [more arrogance], she lost four states by roughly 120K votes in total.

And that boys and girls, is how Collapse works. The System becomes so rotten that a Black Swan like The Donald can end up in the White House. [EDIT: 5/5/22 At this point I made some noise about 'The Deep State gaming The System in order to fix the problem and do a reset' but they turned out to be fuckin' gutless and did fuck all, while The Owners, those traitorous scum, got their $1.4 trillion and so didn't give a fuck]

But we are still in Late Stage Capitalism and Collapse is still underway and no one has any real idea what to do about that ...except, of course, More Of The Same, which is a well known definition of insanity.

Toss the now inevitable Catastrophic Climate Change into the mix and one can be certain that the next century or so is going to be 'very interesting times' indeed.

You can kill yourself now if you wish....

~Here is some brutal irony for y'all: Donald Trump could have be a great president, maybe the greatest since FDR. He has long been a conman and as such could see clearly what a massive con job the present political setup is. He even talked about that back in 2016 when he was running, pointing in the GOP debates that he'd donated to everyone on the stage with him with the full knowledge that they'd 'owe him'. He talked about how American corporations were stripping America of its jobs and industries. That was a big part of how he won.

If he'd actually done something about those things once he got elected, he'd have become great...

...but he's just a conman who was running a Big Con and never expected to win. And he'd also 'poisoned the well' with his racism and homophobia and all his other flaws. And when he did win, he only saw that as an opportunity to Grift on a grand scale.

The California Highway Patrol used its SWAT team to evict a homeless family on Thanksgiving Eve. They were squatting in an empty house owned by CalTrans. The CHP also brutalized and arrested the neighbors who tried to stop them.

I'm looking at another 30 day ban on Facebook because I put an expletive in front of 'Russians', which they claim is 'hate speech'. For me, that is really just a pin prick, even tho it triggers my PTSD. We have food and a safe roof over our heads.

These two events are each at the far end of the scale, but they are still Corporate Abuse...and such is cumulative.

How long, and how much, of this non-stop abuse we it take before there is a real explosion?

PS Don't think things will change with Joe Biden. He's a Corporatist to his bones and is actually going to put Republicans into his administration.

~The consensus across the internet is that this is another Trump scam, that he's using his "I got's da Covid" to duck the rest of the debates, and then emerge in two weeks, all hale and healthy, saying "I beat it and I used hxawhatayamacallit and my shit smells like roses." Then he'll push on to a second term.

I have another hypothesis: yeah, it's a scam. That what he does; scams. However, I suspect a resignation is in the offing, 'for health reasons' of course. Then he'll 'slip out the backdoor' while shit blows up. Pence and the GOP will crash and burn. His base will lose their fucking minds. And The Donald will quietly fly out of the country while supposedly laying prostrate in a hospital bed.

Then, in a few months into Biden's first term, Trump TV will begin broadcasting from someplace nice and warm like Sochi. And there will his big fucking face grinning at us and talking smack about 'Sleepy Joe' and stirring shit in the heartland.

~By this point in an Election Year, I am usually able to make a prediction with a fair amount of certainly. [many of y'all scoffed when I said Trump had a real shot] But this year...who the fuck knows? All I can safely say is that this one is gonna be a clusterfuck, to quote The Donald, "like no one has ever seen before."

~I have been posting this paragraph quoting the Chris Hedges article linked below for a while now. But I realized that by breaking it up into individual sentences, it becomes a Bill of Indictment...

"The final stages of capitalism, Marx wrote, would be marked by developments that are intimately familiar to most of us.

Unable to expand and generate profits at past levels, the capitalist system would begin to consume the structures that sustained it.

It would prey upon, in the name of austerity, the working class and the poor, driving them ever deeper into debt and poverty and diminishing the capacity of the state to serve the needs of ordinary citizens.

It would, as it has, increasingly relocate jobs, including both manufacturing and professional positions, to countries with cheap pools of laborers.

Industries would mechanize their workplaces.

This would trigger an economic assault on not only the working class but the middle class - the bulwark of a capitalist system - that would be disguised by the imposition of massive personal debt as incomes declined or remained stagnant.

Politics would in the late stages of capitalism become subordinate to economics, leading to political parties hollowed out of any real political content and abjectly subservient to the dictates and money of global capitalism."

http://www.nationofchange.org/2015/06/02/karl-marx-was-right/

Sigh...

Your problem is that you, like so many others, are still trying to save The Republic. Sorry, pal, but The Republic died during the Reagan administration, both for the obvious reasons and because the Democrats abandoned the New Deal paradigm and became fully fledged Corporatists.

The Clintons are Corporatists. Obama is a Corporatists. And so is Smilin' Joe. That is just more of the same shit that makes The Rich richer, The Poor poorer and is sucking the life outta the Middle Class. We are now an Oligarchy.

RE Trump's supporters: "Trump hates what they hate and is destroying what they feel has been stolen from them. His base is happy to see it all burn down."

I support Bernie [and probably Warren] not because I think he'll save The Republic, but because I'm pretty sure his policies would make the last few decades of my life a bit easier.

As for the long run...? Well, I wrote the below about ten years ago:

TO DEFEAT THE CORPORATE CONFEDERACY TAKES PATIENCE AND GUILE

“Do not expect to defeat The Corporate Confederacy at the ballot box. Big Money can power its way through almost any election cycle. That is not however a call for Revolution. Big Money can power its way through those as well and rather unpleasantly.

Instead it must always be remembered that by its conscienceless and rapacious nature, the thing sows the seeds of its own destruction. Therefore what is required is both the ability to survive its collapse *and* to have another functional structure extent to replace it. Anything else is empty rhetoric.”

It's seems pretty clear y'all are operating from the Same Ol' Same Ol'. I understand. The future that confronts us IS Fucking Scary. [see Catastrophic Climate Change, Super AI, Nenotech, Genetic Engineering, etc] But the old paradigms ain't gonna save us...

~Some people get mad at me when I say I'm glad Trump got elected instead of Hillary. [I wanted Bernie, but...well, you know] The HilBots become positively apoplectic, getting as vicious as any Trumptard. But Hillary would have been just more of the same slow somnambulist slide into the Corporatist Abyss, like the proverbial frog in the pot. She is a not a 'liberal', but, like Obama before her, a Center/Right Corporatist who merely makes 'liberal noise' at the Dem base while selling out to her donors and adding money to the Clinton coffers. Really, what good are LGBT Rights when you can't afford your rent or put food on the table?

The Donald on the other hand is a nonstop horror show of Racism and Fascism, all so overt that even the most craven compromisers can no longer stomach it, as they each, one by one, puke him up. But this American Nightmare Realized was truly necessary. It has held up a mirror to us collectively and forced us to confront all of the many ugly truths about who we are as a Nation and a People.

Yes, many are suffering because of it, but to be brutally honest, not too many more than were already suffering and who would have kept suffering under HRC. And now many latent Progressives have been shocked awake.

Me, I was not all that surprised, but then I'm a pretty cynical son of a bitch. I've been sharpening my blades for a very long time.

At least now we're awake and those Racist Fascist sociopaths who dwell among us have revealed themselves in all their hideous glory, friend and family members we thought were 'good people' can now be seen as the monsters they are and handled accordingly.


What will come of all this, we shall see. Ain't gonna be pretty, that's for certain...

~The whole 'US Military Is Undefeatable" argument is not only Fascistic, it's false. It has lost nearly every war it's fought since the end of WW2.

The primary purpose of The Armed Citizen is not to fight a guerrilla war against the US Govt. It is to make the idea of such a conflict so awful to said govt, that they never seriously consider imposing nationwide Martial Law.

The AR-15 is largely a symbol. It's an okay weapon that is cheap and easy to manufacture. So easy it can [and is] produced in garages with 3D printers and a few machine tools.

But quite a few folks out here have much more serious weapons and tens of thousands of US Vets know how to build and deploy IED's.

There are insane right wing militias up in Idaho and at least 100,000 armed gang members in LA alone. Banning the AR is a bullshit band-aid that achieves absolutely nothing.

"In the gun control debate, one reason why self-defense against tyranny is brushed off so often is because a lot of folks making that argument love tyranny.

No conservative militia would defend their black and brown neighbors against state violence. None of them lift a finger against ICE. They always defend the most repressive elements of the state, from the police to the army. They always make excuses for grotesque wealth inequality. They’re happy to attack whistleblowers at the service of the deep state (the only reason some of them criticize it now is because they think it’s politically biased, as opposed to the enormous power it wields).

The vast majority of marginalized people, including myself, don’t believe that mainstream gun culture favors our freedom. It’s exclusively authoritarian, made by and for traditionalists, nationalists, and others like them. These people want to regulate what kind of marriage is legitimate, what bathrooms trans and non-binary people can use, whether their kids are gay or straight, who can come into the country, and so on. At their worst, they’ll kill us themselves. The idea that those same people will stop LARPing the American Revolution and actually fight tyranny today is hilarious. Nobody believes it.

It’s terrible, because the core argument is correct. Taking guns away from the public and leaving the state with the authority to use them is terrifying. The state is always the greatest purveyor of violence. In the US, where police regularly profile and kill black people for the most trival bullshit, robbing them of even the slightest chance of an equal playing field is incredibly dangerous. The old Black Panther Party was able to prevent police violence against black people by open-carrying guns, and because of this, conservatives at the time were strong proponents of gun control. Liberals love to quote Ronald Reagan on the topic …

"Americans don’t go around carrying guns with the idea they’re using them to influence other Americans. There’s no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons."

… but either don’t know or gloss over the fact that he was justifying a racist law, passed in response to the Black Panther Party resisting racist police.

We see the same reactionary underbelly of gun control today. The justification behind New York’s stop-and-frisk law “is to disarm likely suspects, although it has become a general law-and-order measure, particularly to enforce gun laws.” Existing laws, especially stop-and-frisk, disproportionately target black people. As much as authoritarians of different stripes would like to claim otherwise, laws are not neutral in practice. We are socialized into hierarchies. The existence of law is proof enough; the idea that we can isolate law in a vacuum, away from hierarchically-defined behavior, is absurd.

Gun control doesn’t just control the distribution of guns. It controls people. And more often than not, it controls marginalized people.

Back in 2012, there were 1,360 militia groups in the US. How many of those do you think were radical? Anti-racist? Anti-fascist? Can you even name one? Whatever answers you came up with, I’m sure they were deeply uncomfortable. This is not a position we want to be in. This is why a radical gun culture is overdue for us. This is why we need individual and communal self-defense. We’ve made some progress with organizations like Redneck Revolt, the John Brown Gun Club, Trigger Warning, the Huey P. Newton Gun Club, and probably a bunch of local groups I’m not aware of. But we’re still outgunned. Radicals need to make a complete break with liberalism on this front. That doesn’t mean fetishizing violence, as authoritarians do. It means recognizing that the freedom of one is the freedom of all. It means recognizing that this principle actually means something, and that you’re willing to do whatever it takes to defend it. It means a profound love for your neighbor — no matter what race, gender, or sexuality they are — that transcends any political or philosophical principle, and that love is not the same as being passive.

That’s what self-defense against tyranny really means."

via cyclideon: