Trump and the Resistance

We want Pence – he is worse, and that better for us.

I agree with Bill Hicks. If Trump and the Tea Party Republicans are all that stops a coalition of Country Club Republicans and Wall Street Democrats from degrading Social Security . . . . and a lonely few Legacy New Deal Berniecrats make up the balance of power by supporting the Tea Trumpers in protecting SocSec from the Second Hander Randers and the Catfood Clintonites, why should I make life hard for these Legacy New Deal Berniecrats?

I shouldn’t. And I won’t.

It is the DLC-type Hamilton Project type Third Way Democrats behind Clinton and Obama who are the enemy. It is they who should be purged, burned and destroyed. It is they who should be exterminated from political existence and wiped off the face of the political map.

Shouldn’t we oppose Trump where he is wrong on policy, which will probably be most of the time, and support him if he happens to be right about something?

What we are seeing now is a radical agent inside the system. We haven’t had a President from outside the political system within my lifetime. The last one was Ike, and he had been in enough rooms with enough Presidents to be something of an insider even if his appeal was that he was an outsider. Every other President since then came up through the system — was a city councillor, then a mayor or state legislator, then a governor or a U.S. Congressman, or even a former Vice President (in the case of LBJ, Nixon, George H.W. Bush).

The thing is, most of our checks and balances are matters of tradition, without any real mechanism to enforce them. They work only because everybody who is part of the system agrees implicitly to abide by these traditions. Courts can rule against the President, but if he has the support of the federal law enforcement machinery as well as of the military, courts cannot enforce their judgements. Yet almost always Presidents do abide by court rulings. Why? Because that’s part of the system, and the system has been good to them. They aren’t going to go against a system that has been good to them.

Pence came up through the system. He uses the system for his own agenda, of course, but obedience to the unspoken rules of the system is deeply engrained in him after all these years of public life. If a court rules against him, I’m pretty sure he’d abide by the ruling. Trump… who knows? And that’s what makes me nervous about Trump. Reports are that he at least strongly considered ordering CBP to ignore the court order. Given that CBP is happy to have Obama’s leash taken off of them, it’s likely CBP would have done so. Then what? Luckily people talked him down. This time. That may not be always true. And remember, once we cross this Rubicon, then as long as he has the support of Federal law enforcement and the military, democracy is done. Even impeachment is off the table, because what is the enforcement mechanism for impeachment? Once he decides to ignore a court order, why should he give any more obedience to Congress? Hopefully Trump is too scatter-brained and self-absorbed to go grasping for absolute power like that on purpose. But with dark eminences like Bannon behind him stroking his levers? We may find out more than we wanted about just how weak the fundamental structures of our democracy really are.

“So, the Resistance are doing something effective, and important: They are showing up to town halls and holding their congress members feet to the fire. This is what the Tea Party did, and it works.”

Oh good god, what an utterly silly idea that is. Screaming continuously and not allowing other people to talk is not political activism, it is a child throwing a tantrum. What the Tea Party did was throw out of office any legislator who did not vote in accordance with party principles. The net result was a Republican Party sufficiently unified that it was able to block a Democratically controlled Congress take control of Congress and the White House.

Democrats have not been able to implement more than minute traces of our agenda, and that badly, even when we had a majority in both houses and had a Democrat in the White House, and managed to lose both control of government altogether because half of our legislators vote against the Democratic agenda and get reelected.

To solve that we don’t need to go to town ha;;s and throw temper tantrums, we need to throw the DINOs out of office and elect actual Democrats who will vote along Democratic party lines in the legislature.

http://www.politico.com/story/2017/02/mike-flynn-nsa-aide-trump-234923

More fun. Personally I hope they eat each other alive.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/federal-agents-conduct-sweeping-immigration-enforcement-raids-in-at-least-6-states/2017/02/10/4b9f443a-efc8-11e6-b4ff-ac2cf509efe5_story.html?utm_term=.0da226d94f3e

Trump is moving and hard. I have zero sympathy for these folks. Their presence is a slap in the face of all who came here legally and after intrusive vetting.

Nor do I care about anchor babies. The parents either take them with them till they are adults at which point they can come here to open arms, give them over to family members who are US Citizens, or give them up to adoption. If they didn’t want those choices, too bad, should have thought of that before breaking the law.

Morris Berman extols the greatness of Mexico, and I’ll take him at his word. I have no problem with Trump deporting illegal immigrants. They undercut wages, they cause their nations of origins slide deeper into depravity due to brain drain, they use up precious medical resources that we cannot afford to give away and will make single payer an impossibility (doctors are fleeing their profession in droves and no one wants to be a GP anymore), and when automation hits, it will mean 20 million plus more people with no jobs. The modern left remind me of a manic depressive overloaded on emotions and feelings.

Trump will do none of these things.

Indeed. Queerty is correct. Why do any of you believe otherwise when the evidence has long been that he is playing you for fools, manipulating your hatreds for his own ends and for those of the cabal that’s ruling with him?

The belief is so strong, though, the hatreds so deep rooted, that judgment is clouded and critical thinking is abandoned.

The mantra has been that “if he does thus and so” (something his defenders want or something he’s said that they they want to hear) “then he’ll be a success and will be re-elected”, etc. “No matter what else happens, as long as he does this or that, he wins.”

Guess what? He’s not doing “this or that.” In many cases, he’s doing just the opposite — or trying to — which should clue you to some facts.

First, even rule by diktat has inherent limitations in our rickety system. He’s running up against some of them. Many of his ukases have no force of law; they’re essentially nothing more than press releases. Those that do have the force of law are also subject to judicial review, as we’re seeing with the ban. His consistent style is to alienate the very people he needs as allies to achieve his objectives, whatever they may actually be. He screwed the pooch by attacking the integrity of the courts (whatever you think of the courts) and that’s pretty much the end of that little exercise is “fulfilling his promises.”

He’s done nothing on behalf of labor, and there’s no sign he intends to. Just the opposite.

He’s been saber rattling and warmongering — and screwing it up — even more than the Dems and the hated Clintons. He’s not withdrawing troops from anywhere, and his generals are telling him he must deploy more troops to more theatres and engage in more hostilities with more enemies. His response to the failed Seal Team 6 raid in Yemen is to lie about it and to utterly ignore the slaughter in the village to focus on the loss of a single team member. That’s a good sign of what is to come.

There’s no indication he will “save” Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the IHS or any other social or health care program that doesn’t enrich him and his cronies. Just the opposite.

The dream/hope that the Trump regime will somehow create a better future for us all (well, except for the Undeserving) is similar to the Hope that Obama would do so. He didn’t. Nor will Trump.

What you’re getting is chaos.

Note: the Resistance is far more than the Democratic Party apparat. Much as you may fear them, they are nowhere near controlling this. The Resistance ultimately is matching Trump’s chaos with their own.

And it won’t end well.




“Sure, there’s been setbacks, but it’s worth remembering that the polls are, well, probably wrong, as they were running up to the election. ”

No, the national polls were correct. Hillary won the popular vote within the standard error margins of the polls. The polls are also correct now in Trump’s approval/disapproval ratings.

“The Resistance ultimately is matching Trump’s chaos with their own.”- Ché Pasa

Well said,

From the outside I can’t tell if chaos/spectacle is the plan or a means to enact a plan.

Do you think this resistance will follow a similar path to that of Occupy Wall Street?

anonome,

The polls are still wrong. An anonymous poll taken by Rasmussen Reports shows 53% of likely voter approve of Trump. That is key, and shows he is gaining support.

People will not answer polls honestly if a living person is asking the question, but do so honestly when talking to an automated machine.

So Trump is gaining support.

I agree with Queerty–Trump has already backed down on drug prices, on NAFTA his insiders are already backing down:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/eriksherman/2016/12/06/nafta-is-here-to-stay-even-under-trump/#1ff2fd78560f

But as the deal to keep Carrier jobs in Indiana was a lot less than it seemed, and no template going forward, the talk about NAFTA already appears to have been just that. Forget a teardown of the agreement. According to a report in The Hill, Trump’s transition team is already backpedaling on the claim that the days of NAFTA as the country has known are numbered.

The Hill quoted Anthony Scaramucci, the Trump transition team senior advisor on the impact of NAFTA, in a talk in front of a group of business leaders as saying, “I don’t think we’re looking to rip up NAFTA as much as we are looking to right-size it and make it fairer.” He continued, “I don’t think anybody in the administration from the top to the bottom is looking for protectionism. We understand the economic harm and the impact that would take.”

Instead of a complete renegotiation, the Trump team is talking about adjustments and modifications of some unspecified form.

(And as for quoting a Forbes article, one of the reasons I like many others disbelieved Clinton’s disavowal of TPP because Wall Street openly didn’t believe she was serious about it all. Likewise, neither do I believe Trump when Wall Street doesn’t believe he’s serious about taking away their handouts and goodies. If that were truly the case, the market would be tanking instead of soaring, and fast).

As for HB-1 visas, or immigration as a whole, they are not the huge job-killer they are made out to be, even given worst-case assumptions, but a ‘wag the dog’ distraction to blame the distress of American workers on something other than bad Fed policy, outsourcing, bad monetary policy, bad fiscal policy, market deregulation, union-busting, and low tax rates on the rich–all of which are major players in the saga of the looting of America. The very reason that the Republicans (and Trump) point the finger at immigrants is that they want the looting to continue. Moreover, on immigration, it’s only the non-white immigrants who are blamed; even if you buy the fallacious economic argument white immigrants would be just as much to blame as non-whites, but you hear nary a pip about them.

Trump may (or may not) address some of the issues, but he’s going the completely opposite direction he needs to regulation and taxes if he wants to help American workers, so even if he takes some of the steps he’s promised I really don’t think he’s going to deliver to his base. You have to do it as the whole package.

As for foreign policy issues, I certainly hope that Trump will seek good relations with Russia, unlike the MSNBC talking heads who are currently going ballistic over this, I don’t see the Trump people telling Putin “we’re going reverse Obama’s sanctions and work you” as something vaguely treasonous. But the problem is here is that Bannon is also seeking his own “crusade” against Islam and also has talked of a shooting war with China, and Trump has appointed a full-throated rightwing Zionist to be Israeli ambassador, all of which is just as nutty as Clinton’s and Obama’s unnecessary poking the Russian bear. Improvement? I don’t see one overall.

I think Lisa pegged it well–Trump, like Obama, had an opportunity to be a historic president, flipping the Republican party against the will of its own leadership to the left of the current corporatist Democrats. Instead, he made a foolish and unnecessary deal for the Cruz vote, you’re seeing this now in his appointments and it may cripple him. Then again, Trump himself is a plutocrat, his entire business model caters to his fellow plutocrats (he hurts them, he hurts his business) so maybe expecting good things from him was unrealistic.

Tom: ” Clinton not Reagan killed the New Deal”

Clinton and Reagan killed the New Deal.

There, fixed that for you.

Also, you need to actually primary some of those Dems in addition to threatening it.

Knowing where the tipping point for things is good. Even if the initial heavy lifters are spent to discouragement, it’ll still be there. For example, general faith in the corporate media may rapidly fall soon, in spite of all the bloggers who’ve put in all the hours then quit believing they’ve failed.

I still way back at wondering when the fundies will figure out that they’ve been kleptocratic tools. And why do Catholics ignore commentary from their supreme leader, including phrases such as “an unjust socio-economic system and wars”, not to mention what Jesus taught. What makes them know the ‘real truth’ way down at the minion level, while the one wearing the shoes closest to Jesus is in league with the dark forces of progressivism?

I agree with bits and pieces of what has been said, and disagree with others. Basically, it comes down to this

The Democrats are your enemies.
The Republicans are your enemies.
Trump is your enemy.

None of them are going to save you. When they look on you, they don’t even see you as belonging to the same species they do. If I had to describe how they view you, it would be as food. You are the cattle from which they are going to carve their next steak from. You have to be twisted like a pretzel to think any of them are on your side, let alone your saviors.

Forget “resist’. Fight them. Fight them all. Fight them all the time. Yes, make their lives miserable. These are people with big egos who prize their comforts and privileges. It will wear on them if every time they appear in public they face rotten eggs and cabbages.

In the town in which I live, there is a murder every day and 20-30 overdoses. This is violence that the Democrats and Republicans, the rich and elites are doing to us. And it is only the most obvious form. The no jobs, the crap jobs, the no real healthcare, the poor schools, and now the push for charter schools, not because they will make education better but because privatizing education is the next logical locus of looting. I have to wonder not so much if but when some of the gun toting bubbas, gang members, and addicts are going to pull their head out of their asses long enough to decide that if they are on their way out anyway, why not take out a bank president or one of the community’s prominent movers and shakers with them? Of course, I can already imagine the hysterical reaction of our Establishment of the rich and elites to this. Violence is only violence, is only well and truly beyond the pale, –if it is directed against them.

Also it is insufficient to know what you are fighting against –I don’t like that word “resist”–, you need to know what you are fighting for. And as I keep saying that means a vision of the society you want. Such a society is not that hard to imagine: we pledge to make sure that each of us has the basic building blocks for a decent and fulfilling life. For most people that is a meaningful job paying a living wage, good education, healthcare, housing, and retirement.

Finally a note on immigration. It isn’t a big deal. It’s an enormous deal. 15% of the US population is foreign born. That’s around 49 million. And the foreign born make up about 17.5% of the labor force or around 28 million.

As long as we keep running back and forth between the Democrats and Republicans, as long as we delude ourselves into thinking that we can expect anything good from them, then we will remain their cattle. And as long as we watch dopey news reports about this sad and touching immigrant story or that one, and not look at the overall numbers and the strains those numbers are putting on our society, we will just waste our time and energy, and play into the hands of our lords and masters.

Why do you persist in suggesting that Trump intends to improve the lives of the working class, let alone that he has some sort of secret amazing plan to unplug the US from the world economy and put it into a 1950s snowglobe, where it will live forever building snowmen with its cousins until Mother calls it in for hot cocoa? That isn’t going to happen. How could you think it was going to happen? How is anyone allowing themselves to think that these things are possible, let alone likely? The way Americans think about working-class jobs is anachronistic. They will never be able to find a Big White Daddy powerful enough to build them a time machine that will allow them to relive their parents’ lives, but with a flat screen and less heart disease. The sooner they accept it, the less miserable they’ll be.

I mean, I’m sure there will be a temporary boom in the extraction industry. And maybe in some limited national infrastructure projects? Maybe not. But those activities will be primarily focused on wealth creation for the already obscenely wealthy, not comprehensive economic retrogression, and those jobs will be shit for the people who actually work them. (As were the long-gone “good” blue-collar union jobs they pine for, but that’s another issue.)

Normally I like your blog a lot, & read it often — but this baseless Trumpish optimism is beginning to worry me. I started getting suspicious when you suggested that Trump was winning life because he shits on a gold toilet and fucks anorexic white chicks with $10,000 weaves. I don’t know what it is about Trump that makes hard-leftists want to admit that he’s a rake, but he has a way about him. Maybe the same thing that makes them grudginly acknowledge that Putin is actually pretty clever? It’s odd! I don’t like it.

StewartM:

“I don’t think [the Trump admin is] looking to rip up NAFTA as much as we are looking to right-size it and make it fairer.”

(And as for quoting a Forbes article, one of the reasons I like many others disbelieved Clinton’s disavowal of TPP because Wall Street openly didn’t believe she was serious about it all.)

Agree completely that Clinton and Trump have been liars on this. And I’ll add that during their campaigns neither Sanders nor Stein ever promised to rip up the TPP, let alone NAFTA. Neither went beyond a lukewarm personal opinion, “I think maybe the TPP might be not such a good thing.” Therefore I never believed either was offering to take a crowbar to the skull of these globalization pacts.

Therefore it’s clear that if one’s goal is to rip up NAFTA and the rest of it, as mine is, it’s delusional to look to ANY existing system politician, any element of this electoral system, anyone ensconced within it, to do so. As with everything else, there’s simply no substitute for doing the hard, perhaps long work of movement-building from outside the system and against it. Only then could anyone even talk about running political candidates against it.

Of course this “resistance” shows zero signs of being the beginning of such a thing. Most of them are at least implicitly pro-globalization, and if they care at all about what Trump has done regarding the globalization pacts, they probably deplore his claim that the TPP is dead.

(As for Trump, he followed up his words about the TPP with an ardent offer to Britain to conclude a standard corporate globalization (aka “free trade”) pact with them. And so far as I know the TTIP is a going venture as far as Trump is concerned, and we have to look to the European people to avert it. I won’t be surprised when the TPP comes back soon under a new name.)

@ Hugh

You say:

“I have to wonder not so much if but when some of the gun toting bubbas, gang members, and addicts are going to pull their head out of their asses long enough to decide that if they are on their way out anyway, why not take out a bank president or one of the community’s prominent movers and shakers with them?”

Well, Hugh, that would seem to be a step into new ground for you, and I have to ask, what took you so long? And, how much longer before you will bring the same wondering attitude to the possible spontaneous action of patriots generally, as opposed to the already-clearly-doomed losers?

It has always been my voting strategy that Trump will either help regular folks as he promised, or he will help clarify their thinking as he is apparently already beginning to clarify yours.

(OTOH, nobody ever went broke by underestimating the intelligence of the American public. So, there’s that . . .)

@ Queerty

“First, wealth is never evidence of competence.”

“With regard to the Presidency, there is no evidence that Trump meant to win or has any understanding of how he won.”

Congratulations. The fact that two of the most facially moronic statements ever entered into the Internet information stream originated from one mind, and appeared in one idiotic comment, represents a demonstrable new low in the intelligence level of the human species.

You are a true pioneer.

“You are a true pioneer.”

Something stinks in your playpen
The mule is dead and rotting
(You’re gonna lose)
You’re hanging out with your best friend
‘Cause you’re too afraid of pushin’
(You’re gonna lose)
The baboon crawled in your mouth and ate your brain
You think maybe you wanna be famous
(You’re gonna lose)

But I’m not talking to you
I’m not talking to you
Not talking about you

Since back in the day when JFK
Pioneered the use of amphetamine
(You’re gonna lose)
Since 1984 when the president’s wife
Was a plain old Hollywood cocksucker
(You’re gonna lose)
Isn’t it time that you made up your mind
And leave behind those childish things?
(You’re gonna lose)

But I’m not talking to you
I’m not talking to you
Not talking about you

Queerty is right: wealth is not a direct measure of competence, especially competence and governance, unless you believe wealth accrues in a contextual vacuum to intelligence and hard work, in which case, I have a seat at Trump University to sell you.

Same thing for winning elections: reveals little about competence at governance. It does reveal some intelligence and organizational skill, but if winning elections meant competence at governance, would we be in this predicament in the first place?

Peter, did you ever answer the question a number of threads ago on what “Clintonism” really means to you, apart from a putative personality cult of Hillary Clinton?

Ambiguous scope of negation — a non-existent nit at which you are pointlessly picking.

Now you are really being silly. This is not a legal document in which every word gets to be parsed talmudically. These are blogs in which mistakes of this sort are commonly made. I really don’t believe that you actually understood queerty in the way your Talmudic (or lawyerly) self feels you can get away with so you can have the pleasure of putting him down.

@ Mandos et al

OK, have it your way. Words have no actual meaning. It’s all about the mind reading. Serious writers can just re-define any words willy-nilly to mean whatever convoluted thoughts they are ‘feeling.’

That explains all the drivel the left has been putting out. Now I get it.

It also explains why all you can do is lose, lose, lose, and then lose some more.

Keep it up, I’m sure you’ll get a different result someday.

“Here’s one story on a company the Trump campaign hired.”

This article is strange.

” The ‘authentic’ candidate, the roaring id who supposedly disdained traditional campaign pollsters and consultants, had quietly hired this British company in June and paid them millions.”

“A lot of vendors refused to work for Trump because they didn’t believe he had a cat’s chance in hell of winning. Cambridge Analytica did the opposite. We invested in Trump.’”

“There are reports that their main investor is the secretive hedge-fund billionaire Robert Mercer — and that this switch from Cruz to Trump tracked his allegiances.”

“A company spokesman called reporters before election day to say that Trump had only a 20 per cent chance of winning. That was increased — in an internal assessment — to 30 per cent as people went to vote.”

Trump hired them.

They invested in Trump by allowing Trump to hire them.

One of Trump’s big funders might own them.

They have the secret of winning campaigns, but they worked for Trump after working for Cruz, who lost to Trump.

They thought Trump would lose.

While we’re at it, here’s Michael Anton on Trump:

“Trump himself—no man of ideas, to say the least—is unsuited to the task of thinking through what his popularity means or how to build on it. Others will have to do the real work.”

http://www.unz.com/article/toward-a-sensible-coherent-trumpism/

@ Queerty

You really are a hopeless moron.

Read a basic text on logic, and stop embarrassing yourself.

“After reading these comments and about the petty snowflake Resistance I doubt Trump has much of substance to worry about. The real power he is facing now is the deep state establishment with the Silicon Valley power players and their influence in the courts.”-Peter

The Resistance is just another piece on the board and each piece on the board is worth thinking about. Regardless of their individual strength, all pieces are capable of restricting your or attacking you in some way that has yet to be revealed.

I might think the Resistance has the strength/utility of a pawn (not the knight some wish it to be) but that is far less important than the overall pattern/picture emerging.

So Peter, the French, Russian, and Chinese Revolutions happened in “good economic times”? Who knew? certainly not the French, Russians, and Chinese. You must get paid by the word, because content-wise there is no there there in your writing.

realitychecker, I have written about revolution for years and how we are in a pre-revolutionary time now. Revolutions occur as a response to violence and they are themselves violent because those in the old regime make them so. Their regimes are inherently violent, and they will hold on to power using all the violence at their disposal, which is why often only violence can remove them.

Currently, our ruling class acts with complete impunity in its looting, and looting is violence. That would be different, not necessarily better, if the Jamie Dimons, Lloyd Blankfeins, and Koch brothers of this world had to live with the real and immediate knowledge that a bullet was out there with their name on it. I mean they would still loot, but a lot of the enjoyment would be gone. They deserve to live in fear because they and theirs because they have filled the lives of a couple hundred million of their co-citizens with fear, fear of getting sick, getting old, losing a job, a house, drowning in debt. And as I have written for years when revolution comes, many of them will end up hanging from lamp posts, and they should. But while there is some emotional satisfaction in the idea of them getting theirs, a few gun-toting “spontaneous patriots” outside of creating some chaos will accomplish very little. The current criminal ruling class and elites will only be removed by the organized actions of tens of millions of us. And while revolutionary justice has some appeal, and in some cases, may be necessary, I am far more interested in building a society which works, is sustainable, and which we really want to live in.

@ Hugh

I grant that you have frequently written ‘around’ the question of revolution, but it seems you got a bit more explicit in your comment above. I was just recognizing that edgier quality that comes with explicitly acknowledging that some direct violence might be required to displace an oppressive regime.

That, of course, puts you way out ahead of most lefties we see on the Internet. It is much more common to see lefties dream about a magical solution that gets them everything they want without even having anybody’s feelings get hurt.

Purely as an analytical matter, I despair at being associated with people who are so blind to the realities of what it takes to displace entrenched power such as you accurately described above. It really makes it impossible for me to have any respect for such mewling fools. But I’ve been stuck there for decades.

Btw, I never said a “few” spontaneous patriots. But I do recognize that mass organization is no longer possible. So, the menu of possibilities is clearly limited.

The times are strange. I know a number of folks who have sincerely devoted their lives to education or the arts or the media, what have you, who are truly disgusted and depressed by the Trump situation. I worked in media for years (out for the last five years) and long ago gave up any hope that it would make any difference. So while I am disgusted, I am a bit more grounded than others. All this said, however, I don’t see much happiness on the part of Trump supporters. To be sure, there is the occasional Skeeter type talking about ‘making America great’ but on that side of the divide there is a strange silence. Where is the huge crowd that was going to take to the street, win back America, and bring back the 50s?

Indeed, the anti Planned Parenthood marches were dwarfed Saturday by the pro.

Strange times.

Yes, I thought so. He can dish out the grammatical nitpickery, but he cannot take it without getting snippy. Total sour grapes there.

OK, let’s take a poll–how many here have ever seen anybody with a writing style like Mandos’?

(Shorter Mandos: “Look, Mommy, I’m a published author; my ridiculously convoluted comment showed up on the Internet!”)

Just can’t take you seriously. Sorry.

@ Mandos: smile, and along those lines:

“Science was always there, and it was important for improving many practical aspects of human life, but it was never the main engine propelling a nation towards some just, balanced, and ‘livable’ society. When employed by an enlightened system, science had played an important role in building a much better world, but it was never the other way around.

The progress was always triggered and fueled by human emotions, by seemingly irrational and achievable dreams, by poetry and wide scale of burning passions. The finest concepts for improvement of civilization were frequently not even logical; they were simply born out of some beautiful human instincts, intuitions and desires (logic was applied later, when practical details had to be nailed down).

Now ‘knowledge’, rationality and ‘logic’, at least in the West, are forcing human feelings into the corner. ‘Logic’ is now even replacing traditional religions. Obsession with ‘facts’, with ‘understanding’ everything, is actually becoming absurdly extreme, dogmatic, even fundamentalist.

All this fanatical fact collecting often feels unreal, ‘metallic’, cold and to many of those who are coming from ‘the outside’ (geographically or intellectually), extremely unnatural.”

~ andre vltchek http://bit.ly/2kXGlkA

channeling uncle albert: ““Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”

do any of you consider that ‘as death lurks over our left shoulders, just out of sight’? considering that it might come in the next five minutes is this what you want to be doing/saying to other humans with whom you actually might entice by less strident/histrionic/ad hominem communications?

@ bob mcmanus

“So why, serious question for you and the crowd, does the right and neoliberals have the victories and power?

Brains? Commitment? Organization? And if one of these, why?”

Just rest assured, it CAN’T be because of competence lol.

Oronville Dam in CA about to break. Thousands being evacuated.

But on the positive side this has energised the ‘left’, ‘progressives’ and even ordinary people who now realise they are at real risk.

And it has exposed the Democratic elites (and the various ‘left’ parties around the world) for what they are. In so many ways they are to blame for this, signing up to the neo-liberal economic paradigm and the neo-conservative worldview. Desperate to create their fantasy ‘centre’ party that would rule forever while throwing just about everyone under a bus and who saw anyone left of about Genghis Khan as a bigger enemy than the religious right (who I might note they were quite happy to deal with). How’s that working out for you now?

People wonder why the Dems let all the States get controlled by the GOP as well as the reps and senate…but it was quite cynically deliberate. To them they were better ‘allies’ to push their policies than those ever so hated ‘left’ or ‘ordinary’ people

So there are going to be some big changes there soon, with all the energy that is flowing..and the feelings of betrayal and the realisation that the Dem elites, by and large, agree with everything the right want economically and would be happy to throw every LGBTI person, every woman, every non ‘christian’, every poor person, every POC, etc under a bus to achieve that.

Trump (and his ‘religious right’ mates) is so crude and nasty, so ‘in your face’ that people are now facing the truth, that a lot had hidden from or ignored. Well they can’t do that any longer.

The real majority is now waking up.

From the outside, the Deep State apparatus looks strong, even unbeatable. But it is, IMO, in the final stages of necrosis. Like the Soviet Union, the Deep State has cut itself off from information transfer from its periphery. Only the core is still left alive, leaving the rest of the body to succumb to creeping gangrene.

The town hall actions are a bad sign. They are based on camera time, not face time. The Deep State (now Zombie State) used the msm as a top-down signalling device, but that mechanism is dying as well. Fewer and fewer people listen, and fewer still react to its posturings. It is fascinating that the Trump Insurgency, which is distinct from the Trump administration and distinct even from Trump himself, has a distributed command-and-control system running rings around the Zombie State.

@RC

Sorry, but this gasbag venting went beyond the usual overheated steam and I didn’t say ‘telling but did say ‘encouraging’.

I’ll continue to support the spirit of revolution and how it might happen, hint you need the military, but I’ll continue to distance myself from mouth breathers who can’t defend their idiotic statements.

Legend has it there was once this impenetrably powerful structure called the USSR, which fell apart amazingly quickly. For some reason such concentrated power lost the its ability to hold itself together.

Bob,

To answer your question I have no idea why the rightwingers have all the power.

I watch the protests and wonder where were these people in the states that mattered on November 8?

This morning on the ‘progressive’ Chicago radio station I heard a guest say that the Republican establishment will soon tire of Trump. WTF! They had a year and a half to get tired of Trump.

There’s the argument that they wanted Trump because is so dumb that he’ll sign anything they put in front of him. Maybe. But couldn’t that be said of all the morons who ran on the Republican side of the game?

ProNewerDeal : Ian, I have read this idea, but not what the Amendments the Rs are planning on enacting if they get this State legislature-based Constitutional Amendment.

http://inthesetimes.com/article/19811/constitutional-convention-of-states-alec-balanced-budget-corporate-america

“This “dry run,” held in Williamsburg, Va., produced drafts of six different proposed amendments. One would effectively require a balanced budget by mandating a congressional supermajority in order to increase the national debt; one would establish congressional term limits; another would abolish the federal income tax and require a supermajority for other federal taxes; one would vastly curtail federal legislative and executive jurisdiction by reining in the commerce clause; one would allow three-fifths of the states to nullify a federal law; and one would allow congressional override of regulations.

There are concerns however, even within the movement, that a real convention could go beyond its stated goals, drafting amendments above and beyond the six above. To address fears of a “runaway convention,” Convention of States has claimed that the convention will be bound by the subject matter of the resolutions: limiting the federal government.”

@Peter

The Soviet state and the US state do have one important thing in common, however: a failure of collective intelligence over an extended time frame. Two systems can both fail, since the failure of one does not guarantee the success of the other. Indeed, you could argue the moment of the West’s greatest triumph, December 26, 1991, perversely accelerated the decline of its stable “partner.”

“I have to look askance at anyone who encourages other people to do their killing and dying for them while promising some utopian future under their guidance”

And yet Peter, you fell for a third rate grifter like Trump and are one of his biggest, if not biggest, and looniest, defender here. The joke is you are projecting. The description above is not of me, but your erstwhile savior. Much as it sticks in your craw, if you want a sane and decent society you are going to have to go through people like me. Rather than making a bunch of empty promises like Trump or really any other politician I try to figure out what kind of lives people want and work out the roadmap to get them there. The problem is that most people don’t know what they want, or come up with lists filled with contradictory items that don’t and can’t be fit together, or only look at what they or their small group want and ignore everyone else’s hopes and wishes.

In a lot of ways, all this boils down to the three points that are the essence of any adult decision: What do you want? What can you do? And what can you live with? It may make your blood boil that gasbags like me keep pointing out that 2 + 2 = 4 and you may want to follow the Great Leader who says it’s 56 or whatever number you want it to be but it is not going to change the underlying facts, and that’s what people like me hammer on. All it is going to do is waste your life and perversely keep you that much longer from what you keep saying you want.

It’s specious to think the Russian people have ever been able to control or choose their government . Some people there may pine for the social benefits they enjoyed under the USSR but they aren’t going to get that either.

Until Trump exploded our rigged system and then used it to be elected things weren’t that much different in effect here with manufactured consent produced when necessary along with staged selections of status quo figureheads. Trump with those voters who support him have some power to challenge the status quo while this so called resistance, actually the establishment, is desperately looking for ways to stop him and return to the status quo.

The latest eruption of leaks from the Clintonite appointees in the IC, CIA, if verified and traced could be treasonous. They claim that for political reasons critical intelligence is being kept from the President and disrupting the flow of national security information to the President must be a high crime.

Russia has attempted to make alliance with illiberal forces in order to return to a nation-state world order that Russia thinks is more favorable to its interests. However, the political orientation of those very forces makes them extremely unreliable — if they can turn a profit from a conflict with Russia, they eventually will try to do so, or they subscribe to weird theories that eventually end up at right angles to Russian interests (e.g. Iran conflict), even if they make alliances of convenience.

The price that Russia pays for trying to oust the mainstream anti-Russian policy establishment is making a mortal enemy of political movements that were previously at best indifferent to Russia. Social liberals now perceive Russia as deliberately treating them and their movements as collateral damage. As the Trump administration now seems to be gradually dragged into the mainstream on Russia policy, Russia is not gaining the policy foothold/ear it wants in Washington, while having actively made further enemies.

Still lots of time left for this to change, but that’s the current trend.

“By this time some readers may be asking for a profile of the 74% of the final 45,000 who voted against the rich and powerful. Who are these people? Well, they are us. All of us. I have never heard of a vote so uniform: whether Republican 72% or Democrat 77%; Male 74% or Female 75%; White 75% or Black 74%; Rich 70% or Poor 79%; Christian 74% or Muslim 72%; Graduates 68% or not 76%; they all agreed. They have all had it with the rich and powerful.”

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/02/grantham-twas-capitalism-killed-capitalism.html

However (as usual) they can’t work out the all solutions:
“Measures of income equality are correlated positively with everything valuable in a cohesive society. Exhibit 4 shows nine of these clear correlations, for which the US shows poorly in all! How far away this is from the widely-held belief that the US is best or nearly best at everything that matters. The way to improve this situation, though, is fortunately straightforward: Increase taxes on capital and on the very rich, perhaps slowly over a number of years, and increase the effort on worker training and education. ”

The above is partially correct, but (as I keep repeating) you have to sort out the financial system, first, reduce it in size greatly, cut off the ‘money pump’ that leads to fake capital growth, corporate concentration and reductions in innovation and competition.

Secondly you have to nationalise ‘natural monopolies’, as they are simple ‘rent extraction’ systems that at best offer no public or economic good and (more commonly) at worst suck the life out of an economy, being critical components of the ‘rentier’ model.

Unless you fix those 3 (financial system, concentration, rentier) attempts to stimulate the economy by infrastructure spending (etc) are doomed, as they extract it all with no benefit to society and in fact usually leave general society stuck with the bill and worse off (they also inflate costs massively).