This documentary cuts to the chase. Line 5 may not have busted a leak yet, or at least not under the Straights of Makinac but it has leaked elsewhere in its 60 year history, but Enbridge has had a history when it comes to leaks and spills beyond Line 5.
Line 5 should be shut down. The fresh water of the Great Lakes must be preserved and protected. Enbridge is not trustworthy and a rupture of Line 5 is inevitable — it’s not a matter of if but when.
The judge in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial seems determined to turn it into a shambles. Anyone think he would indulging in all this rightwing pro-defense nuttery if Rittenhouse was a leftist? It goes to the corruption and incompetence of the judiciary. More than this, it is another example of something in our society that should be straightforward and should work, but doesn’t. It’s like things that used to be marginal and embarrassing when they happened have become the new normal and totally unremarkable except as further evidence of our society shutting down and ceasing to function.
Tony Wikrent made a description and partial prediction of politics and society in America today so interesting that I think I will just copy-paste it here.
“Anthony K Wikrent
November 12, 2021 at 8:32 pm
Thank you for linking to Bouie’s op-ed discussing the Guarantee Clause regarding a republican form of government. It is, if you recall, a subject I have discussed in comments a few times in the past year or two, including links to some very good law journal articles on the Guarantee Clause.
My read at this point is that we are in a pre-civil war situation, with conservative and libertarians just itching to get on with killing the liberals (just like sothorons were itching, by spring of 1860, for a war to begin killing Yankees). This is the true context in which to view the Rittenhouse trial in Kenosha. The drift into a second civil war should properly be understood as the end result of the past 90 years organizing by rich reactionaries against the New Deal, and their attempt to restore the preponderance of power to capital versus labor. For all the short termism of a financialized economy, the rich reactionaries have had a stunning lomg game in mind, and the most impactful part is probably going to be the creation and propagation of “law and economics” and the (anti)Federalist Society seizure of control of the judiciary.
The drift into a second civil war is also the context in which to view the “left’s” demands for censorship, which Taibbi, Greenwald, and a few others have assailed repeatedly and, imho, unwisely. We must build the cultural capacity to limit the free speech of the rich, in much the same way the there are cultural limits on speech by military officers. It bears repeating that the ascendancy of the reactionaries, who are now poised to deploy the authoritarians they have cultivated within the population, has been a 90 year project. At various points, severe penalties and a cultural disapprobation of free speech would have avoided the present drive to war. For example, G. Gordon Liddy and Oliver North should never have been allowed to become stars of right-wing TV and talk radio.
And, a subject of the British crown, Rupert Murdoch, should never have been allowed to have control of major American media. The case of Murdoch points to the real vulnerability we face: there is no understanding of what a republic is, and how a republic must be defended. Hence, Madison writing about “aristocratic or monarchial innovations” sounds very strange to us today. But Ganesh Sitaraman, in his excellent book, The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution: Why Economic Inequality Threatens our Republic (2017), points out that Americans were culturally hostile and suspicious of aristocracy and monarchy up until World War Two and the Cold War, when the new foe to be guarded against became fascism, then communism.
This lack of republican culture allows Gitlin, Isaac, and Kristol, in their “An Open Letter in Defense of Democracy,” to purvey a series of frauds on public opinion. They write, ““Liberal democracy depends on free and fair elections, respect for the rights of others, the rule of law, a commitment to truth and tolerance in our public discourse.” This is certainly not untrue, but what they omit is crucial. First, this is supposed to be a republic, not a democracy. While a republic should have a democratic form of government, a republic is different because a regard for the General Welfare must be balanced against individual freedoms. There used to be a consideration of public virtue, in which citizens were expected to abandon their self-interests when they conflicted with the public good. For example, citizens should be expected to wear masks and embrace vaccine requirements in a pandemic, and any refusal or disobedience should be properly seen as an assault on the republic.
Second, in a republic, there is a positive requirement to do good. The exemplar of this is Benjamin Franklin, and the various organizations he helped create: a fire company, a library, a hospital, the American Philosophical Association, and so on. All of these resulted in the network that fought the Revolutionary War, then attempted to codify republicanism in the Constitution. But the compromise with slavery was a fatal flaw.
President John Quincy Adams, in his first annual message to Congress, summarized this positive requirement to do good:
The great object of the institution of civil government is the improvement of the condition of those who are parties to the social compact, and no government, in what ever form constituted, can accomplish the lawful ends of its institution but in proportion as it improves the condition of those over whom it is established. Roads and canals, by multiplying and facilitating the communications and intercourse between distant regions and multitudes of men, are among the most important means of improvement. But moral, political, intellectual improvement are duties assigned by the Author of Our Existence to social no less than to individual man
.
Law journal articles on the Guarantee Clause:
Bonfield, Arthur E., “The Guarantee Clause of Article IV, Section 4: A Study in Constitutional Desuetude”, [On the Constitutional guarantee of the federal government that each state shall have a republican form of government]
46 Minnesota Law Review 513 (May, 1961) https://scholarship.law.umn.edu/mlr/863/ https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/217205534.pdf
The drift into a second civil war is also the context in which to view the “left’s” demands for censorship, which Taibbi, Greenwald, and a few others have assailed repeatedly and, imho, unwisely.
Wow! wtf?
“unwisely” !??
I am not sure how to make sense of this.
Free speech / free press absolutism of the kind preached by Greenwald does leave unaddressed the problem of sorting out critical truth. When people can say and publish any damn thing they want, without any mechanism to identify and penalize fraud and misinformation then we are lost. Greenwald does not give enough attention to considering the difficulties introduced by the growing floodtide of fictions and conflicting claims, propaganda designed to activate deep prejudice and limbic responses. While he’s appearing on Fox, he might take some notice of polls showing how systematically misinformed Fox News viewers are. But, I credit Greenwald with articulating principles and sticking to them in a way that tribally partisan commentators are incapable of.
Matt Taibbi has addressed himself to a different problem: the abandonment by journalists of the professional obligation to ascertain the objective facts and communicate the facts of a reported case clearly, accurately and with skepticism of and due diligence with regard to repeating the claims of authority. He has decried the willingness of newsrooms dominated by young, inexperienced journalists to demand compliance with doctrines and etiquette of racial and social justice. In contrast to Greenwald’s doctrinaire libertarianism, Taibbi is directly addressing the need for social mechanisms, such as professional standards of journalism, to filter the flood as well as model good judgment.
That Carlos Slim effectively owns the New York Times, Jeff Bezos the Washington Post, Mrs Steve Jobs the Atlantic and so on thru the ranks of mainstream and prestige news organizations ought to be concerning, given the rapidly deteriorating quality of their journalism. The stealth right-wing agendas of Google and Facebook contribute to an effective censorship of the real left, under the guise of policing “disinformation” and a centre-left devoted to Russiagate and BLM and so on has cheered on this creeping fascism. Our partisan tribalism, which gives rise I am presuming to the talk of “civil war”, is driven in part by reckless narratives and careless opinion pressed from all sides and from underneath by social media. Large numbers of Americans are accustomed to believing all kinds of things that are not so, and to relying on loaded narratives built from slanders, omission and false implication.
I have not seen any sort of censorship call from the so-called “left” that I would regard as anything more than foolishness and stupidity aimed at empty targets. Maybe Tony is reading things I am not aware of.
I would tax commercial advertising of all kinds heavily enough to tip the balance of economics sharply against “free” advertising-supported apps and publications (and reduce the sheer volume of such “throwaways”; I would ban again advertising of prescription drugs; I would fund police investigation and prosecution of internet and phone solicitation frauds and ransom-ware; I would institute privacy regulations sufficient to destroy the Facebook model of selling click-bait hate and lies.
That said, the compulsive “othering” by tribal partisans, which afflicts many who lean Democratic by habit or history as well as Trumpist Republicans and talk-radio addicts, troubles me greatly. Many times I have read a critic of misinformation or disinformation who inexplicably finds examples only from “over there”. I honestly do not know how anyone could stomach either Sean Hannity or Rachel Maddow — and, yes, that is true equivalence. People who think “the problem” is confined to Murdoch’s Fox News need to join us in the 21st century already.
If I had the time to follow the Kyle Rittenhouse trial, I do not know where I would look for a trustworthy account. And, without that, it just looks like way too much work to me to do on my own. And, that is a serious problem for the country’s politics. I think it might get solved by building institutions with some integrity, as unlikely as the prospect seems. But joining the growing faction of the Democratic Party in bed with the intelligence/police/security services in a censorship project seems like a fast path to fascism.
The Kyle Rittenhouse Case is clear cut self-defense. Kyle did not initiate the fight, fled first, and only opened fired after being physically trapped and attacked. He fired only the minimal rounds necessary to eliminate the direct threat to his life from the mob, and then turned himself in.
Kyle’s father, grandmother, aunt, and uncle lived in Kenosha, and he worked there as a lifeguard, so it was his second hometown. Another fact everyone ignores.
Per documented video footage we see the white BLM crowd burning the city and trying to set an Asian owned gas station on fire. Over Mr. Blake’s shooting. Which by the way was justified as he was in the process of kidnapping 2 children in a stolen vehicle, had just assaulted and battered their mother, and resisted arrest.
An acquittal is just and warranted and the BLM terrorists and Antifa, who are burning down largely minority neighborhoods and killing largely minorities and getting away with it, need to be crushed and carted off to prison.
It also never ceases to amaze me how so few here realize the real fascist authoritarians are not the Republicans, but the Democrats.
But hey, ideology trumps actual facts on the ground.
Golladay, don’t you have a Nazi SS memorial you could be at? Rittenhouse was an underage murderous punk who went 4 hours from his home to carry his illegal assault rifle at night into a protest so he could feel “threatened” and kill people.
If he was such a law abiding citizen, how come he had an assault rifle that he couldn’t legally own with him? Why under-aged as he was, was he there at all? Where were his guardians? Why weren’t they there? You fascists make stories up to justify and excuse your criminality. Then you automatically believe them and act like they were carved in stone. And that makes them OK.
As for Greenwald, he had 4 years of Trump to exercise his criticism and scorn of Trump’s non-stop lies. What we got from Glenn was silence on Trump, criticism of Democrats, and appearances on Tucker Carlson. Wake up and smell the coffee. Whatever Greenwald was in the past, he is a rightwing nutjob now.
Glenn Greenwald is a hack and carny. How many principles does anyone have who could stay silent through four years of Trump? Or whose best bud is Tucker? The Bush years are long gone. It is remarkable how few of the icons from those times didn’t pack it in or try to sell out if they could. Ian is one of the few who didn’t give up the fight. Greenwald is just a self-important joke.
Golladay is a creature out of his time and place. His time was the 1930s and his place was Germany.
Just as a reminder in case anyone has forgotten, Thomas was openly calling for civil war in the aftermath of last year’s election. So keep that in mind when reading his “well ackhsully, Democrats are the REAL fascists” shtick.
On another topic, I think a lot of Ian’s readers are older and so it’s understandable that many of them miss the biggest danger around free speech these days. Back in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, the biggest danger involving free speech was government and/or corporate censorship of views. However, that’s not the case today. The biggest speech-related danger today is the fact that anyone can lie about anything and there is simply no mechanism in place to stop them from doing so. Furthermore, social media directly incentivizes people to lie, rewarding them with $$$ for pulling people in to their particular brand of fiction is.
I mean, take our very own Thomas as an example. Thomas doesn’t have a single thought in his head that some right-wing social media influencer didn’t put there. These people have a massive audience and they have thoroughly poisoned any chance of real, productive public discourse. It’s genuinely a crisis, and old views of looking at free speech simply aren’t equal to it.
And just in case anyone wants to give the classic “the best way to beat a lie is with the truth” answer, that’s simply not the case anymore. It’s not the most honest voices that win out today, it’s the loudest, and the loudest are the liars.
Bruce W: ‘That Carlos Slim effectively owns the New York Times, Jeff Bezos the Washington Post, Mrs Steve Jobs the Atlantic and so on thru the ranks of mainstream and prestige news organizations ought to be concerning’….
‘Twas ever thus, to a great extent. “You furnish the pictures. I’ll furnish the war,” as William Randolph Hearst said.
Bruce W: ‘I would tax commercial advertising of all kinds heavily enough to tip the balance of economics sharply against “free” advertising-supported apps and publications’
You damned Commie!
More to the point, however, advertising was_precisely_ what paid for the previous model of journalism. I’d have to struggle to think of any mass publication in the last half-century that ever made more than 50 percent of its revenues from subscriptions and newsstand sales. Google and Facebook eating up 80 percent of those advertising revenues is what’s largely finished that model off.
Also, a large part of the problem with ‘journalism’ today is two-fold and not going away now there’s an Internet.
That is:
(A) There’s a twenty-four hour cycle and everyone is competing on that rushed, short-term basis;
(B) It’s only clicks that get eyeballs on internet ads that pay for anything, so that’s all that counts.
It’s unfortunate. But in the age of the internet, expecting classified ads sections in printed newspapers to return so we can have real journalism again — because that is largely what largely supported that previous model of journalism — would be be as fatuous as expecting the return of the horse and buggy.
One can look at the vanished mediascape of the mid-20th century and those films that valorized it like THE SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS and ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN with appreciation and nostalgia. As H.L. Mencken said, “I had more fun doing news reporting than in any other enterprise. It really is the life of kings.”
Thanks everyone for the detailed replies. The problem Tony Wikrent identifies of the Rich people owning all the “speechfront property” should ideally first be addressed by repealing Clinton’s various pro-media-monopoly and media-consolidation laws and then re-breaking up all the monopolies Clinton sought this law to create. If Murchoch’s American citizenship can be legally revoked so that his media-ownership can be busted back down to what would be allowed to an alien, that would be good. Forced restoration of the Fairness Doctrine on radio. Other things like that and see if they work.
And see what can be done about digital social media monopolies which arose after all the laws for pre-digital communications were invented.
I also see a danger in accepting Mr. Wikrent’s view that the rich have too much freedom of speech at a philosophy-of-governance level because such acceptance in theory will certainly be used to ban Ian Welsh, Tony Wikrent, Naked Capitalism, etc. from any digital presence. The rich can always afford the best and most clever lawyers to do that with.
I think people have missed what seems to be Wikrent’s main point ( if I am correct myself) which is that the upper classes and the Overclass have spent the last 90 years working to repeal the FairDeal/New Deal/Square Deal and create the moral equivalent of Economic-Business Monarchy. They have been using their media properties to indoctrinate their armies of Humanoid Orcs for systematic Interahamwe-style mass politicide against all the kinds of people who would be considered not sufficiently pro-Republicanazi Fascistrumpanon to meet the upper class’s and the Overclass’s needs and desires. That’s the “civil war” that Wikrent notes that the Overclass and its “right wing” have been preparing for.
Just what the ha ha “left” ha ha is supposed to do to get ready for the Intrumpahamwe Militias has not been discussed or even faced up to as a possible near-term future issue.
Media consolidation meant that the assets of a paper being bought up would be sold off, newsrooms would be downsized, especially getting rid of more experienced, more expensive, staff, the size and coverage of the paper would be decreased, and of course the cost of subscriptions would be raised. Rinse, repeat, often. It became a self-reinforcing cycle. As papers got smaller and more expensive, readers left, followed by advertisers. The company would respond by cutting more staff, cutting the size of the paper even more and raising prices ever higher. A lot of papers aren’t much more than a glorified obits section with a couple pages of news articles attached.
This summer going through some old stuff, I came across some papers from about fifteen to twenty years ago. They were huge compared to the pamphlets they put out now. Technology didn’t do papers in. It was the greed and stupidity of big media companies that did.
I would say that it is not about the free speech rights of the rich but rather that although they are the fewest, the rich own all the speech. It would be a very different world if the rich had, and could control, no more speech than anyone else. That would really zuck for them.
I’m not one to comment here there or anywhere, but I gotta compliment Hugh for that last sentence even if it is kinda sorta, you know . . . something or another.
That Carlos Slim effectively owns the New York Times, Jeff Bezos the Washington Post, Mrs Steve Jobs the Atlantic and so on thru the ranks of mainstream and prestige news organizations ought to be concerning, given the rapidly deteriorating quality of their journalism.
Carlos Slim does not effectively own the NYZ Times.
Slim, 77, appears to still be the second-largest shareholder of the company. New York-based investment management firm BlackRock is now its largest with a stake of 8.1 percent.
It is hard to overstate what a failure COP26 was. With time run out and an existential threat coming, the international community just couldn’t be bothered to take it seriously or do anything about it.
advertising was_precisely_ what paid for the previous model of journalism. I’d have to struggle to think of any mass publication in the last half-century that ever made more than 50 percent of its revenues from subscriptions and newsstand sales.
“previous” being an operative term. the cost of physical production and distribution was proportionately huge in the previous model. and, let’s not overlook the fact that the ads themselves remained a scarce and valuable good in a multifarious bundle thru much of the newspaper era — some people bought the paper for the ads! or crossword puzzle. or the comix. or window washing and fish wrap. the news or sports was the bonus.
breaking the bundle into fragments and reducing the cost of publication and distribution by an order of magnitude (or 2) has pushed advertising and propaganda generally into a state of vast overproduction. news and propaganda production and distribution costs, already cheap, are subsidized into vast overproduction. like it or not, people are served both more than they can or want to pay attention to and also a quality of content skewed to the preferences of the advertisers paying for it rather than the needs of readers consuming that content upon force-feeding.
those are some of the reasons why I think taxing commercial advertising at a penalty rate designed to reduce its production generally makes sense. what remains scarce now is the attention of the viewer or reader — an individual with the same 24-hour day as the citizen of, say, 1850 who was lucky for a 8-page tabloid, twice a week.
Kyle as a 17 year old can carry a longarm legally in Wisconsin which the Judge granted in Jury Instructions and to disprove this, the state had to measure the barrel which they failed to do in court. So the Judge will likely throw that charge out on Monday.
Also, Kyle lives a half hour from Kenosha which is where he worked and where his father, grandmother, aunt, and uncle lived. It is in effect his second hometown.
We have ample video evidence of what was going on. At no point did Kyle spray the crowd with bullets. For the bulk of the night, his rifle was on its sling with the barrel to the ground while he put out fires, treated injuries, and formed a human wall to block a crowd of white BLM protestors from torching an Asian owned gas station.
Had that gas station gone up, it would have quickly spread into a section of minority owned homes.
This was all testified to in court by even prosecution witnesses.
It was only when Rosenbaum, a convicted child molester who had been just released from a mental hospital, attacked Kyle did things go south. Kyle first tried to flee, its on video, he was not there to start a fight and always deflected and defused any potential conflict.
Then some idiot in the crowd had to pull a handgun and open fire.
This is all on video. It was played in court from multiple angles and from multiple witnesses.
Self-defense clear as day.
@NR, you have selective reading and memory and are a literal fake news pusher. I don’t want a civil war, but people like you make it inevitable.
I myself have no intention to be caught up in a civil war to see what establishment elite takes a broken throne of a dead nation. I exited the system for the parallel society. The elites and their suckers can kill each other for all I care. If you want to join their struggle, good luck to yah. You will get nothing out of it but pain and misery.
Cause through all those years that the Sulzbergers have ran it, the NYZ Times has consistently been pro-war, pro-Wall Street, and an active agent of division that constantly tries to dice up the populace along any lines except economic class.
I crossed into Florida yesterday. While NJ isn’t Austria, I’d rather be safe, than sorry. *
as per disclose.tv,
Austria authorizes the world’s first nationwide lockdown for unvaccinated people over the age of 12, which goes into effect at midnight tonight.
The new restrictions in Austria will be enforced on an “unprecedented scale,” the interior minister said, with fines of up to 30,000 euros.
A wag commented “I did nazi that coming.”
meanwhile, back in the outback:
NOW – Tens of thousands protest in #Melbourne against new pandemic law that would give the executive indefinite emergency powers to “protect public health”.
Unfortunately, I don’t see any links for the disclose.tv tweets.
The needed framing to understand the medical tyranny we’re witnessing is Naomi Wolf’s “End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot”. We know how this story can end. I’m afraid it might be too late for Australia and New Zealand. And, I guess, Austria.
* Or should I say “safer, rather than sorry”. Dr. Peter McCullough is calling for a total halt to vaccination, pending standard format safety reviews. The same has been called for in the UK, by some British scientists. Unfortunately, Governor DeSantis doesn’t go to certain places. I guess we could say that his intelligence is not ‘sterilizing’ against inferior public covid policies.
The NYT has two kinds of stock, Class A and B. The Sulzberger family has almost all the Class B or voting stock. So they control the paper, and have for more than a hundred years. The Class A stock has few voting rights.
Yes, Hugh, I am aware and I am also aware that the Sulzbergers have been soliciting capital support, hence Slim and Blackrock, for which they are ever so grateful in capitalist class solidarity, thank you comrade.
As I was listening to BBC radio news, I heard over and over that at the last minute the Indian delegation insisted that a phrase in the document be changed from ” phase coal out” to “phase coal down”. Only twice in all that listening did the news mention ” India AND China” wanted the change from “out” to “down”.
And the Indian delegate gave a Third World self-pity nationalist type speech as to why India deserved to keep dumping skycarbon to share in the benefits of carbon-dumping development. The already-developed world has no right to say otherwise.
So India has joined China in the game of Skycarbon Chicken. Because the visible talkers of the world operate on a basis of “rights and fairness” in order to prevent any discussion of “actual results”, the advanced countries are going to have to zero thermal coal out of existence within their own countries first. Those which can do that will earn the “moral right” to ban imports into their countries from China and India until China and India have visibly banned thermal coal from their economies as well.
( Metallurgical coal is a fraction as much as thermal coal, and we will all keep using metallurgical coal until the iron ore itself has run out down to zero.)
When you say the rich own the means of free-speeching freely so everyone else is forced to see and hear the rich viewpoint exclusively, that is what I meant by the phrase
“bought up all the speechfront property”.
Golladay, in Wisconsin, it is illegal for anyone under the age of eighteen to go armed with a deadly weapon. And in Illinois, a permit must be obtained before the purchase of a firearm and no one under the age of eighteen can purchase a firearm. It would not surprise me if the POS judge in the Rittenhouse case thanked Rittenhouse and encouraged him to kill more progressives. But as I said before, you just make sh–t up –about the law and the facts in the case. You then act as if your new fantasy is solid fact. It isn’t.
Plague Species
Line 5
Hugh
The judge in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial seems determined to turn it into a shambles. Anyone think he would indulging in all this rightwing pro-defense nuttery if Rittenhouse was a leftist? It goes to the corruption and incompetence of the judiciary. More than this, it is another example of something in our society that should be straightforward and should work, but doesn’t. It’s like things that used to be marginal and embarrassing when they happened have become the new normal and totally unremarkable except as further evidence of our society shutting down and ceasing to function.
different clue
Tony Wikrent made a description and partial prediction of politics and society in America today so interesting that I think I will just copy-paste it here.
“Anthony K Wikrent
November 12, 2021 at 8:32 pm
Thank you for linking to Bouie’s op-ed discussing the Guarantee Clause regarding a republican form of government. It is, if you recall, a subject I have discussed in comments a few times in the past year or two, including links to some very good law journal articles on the Guarantee Clause.
My read at this point is that we are in a pre-civil war situation, with conservative and libertarians just itching to get on with killing the liberals (just like sothorons were itching, by spring of 1860, for a war to begin killing Yankees). This is the true context in which to view the Rittenhouse trial in Kenosha. The drift into a second civil war should properly be understood as the end result of the past 90 years organizing by rich reactionaries against the New Deal, and their attempt to restore the preponderance of power to capital versus labor. For all the short termism of a financialized economy, the rich reactionaries have had a stunning lomg game in mind, and the most impactful part is probably going to be the creation and propagation of “law and economics” and the (anti)Federalist Society seizure of control of the judiciary.
The drift into a second civil war is also the context in which to view the “left’s” demands for censorship, which Taibbi, Greenwald, and a few others have assailed repeatedly and, imho, unwisely. We must build the cultural capacity to limit the free speech of the rich, in much the same way the there are cultural limits on speech by military officers. It bears repeating that the ascendancy of the reactionaries, who are now poised to deploy the authoritarians they have cultivated within the population, has been a 90 year project. At various points, severe penalties and a cultural disapprobation of free speech would have avoided the present drive to war. For example, G. Gordon Liddy and Oliver North should never have been allowed to become stars of right-wing TV and talk radio.
And, a subject of the British crown, Rupert Murdoch, should never have been allowed to have control of major American media. The case of Murdoch points to the real vulnerability we face: there is no understanding of what a republic is, and how a republic must be defended. Hence, Madison writing about “aristocratic or monarchial innovations” sounds very strange to us today. But Ganesh Sitaraman, in his excellent book, The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution: Why Economic Inequality Threatens our Republic (2017), points out that Americans were culturally hostile and suspicious of aristocracy and monarchy up until World War Two and the Cold War, when the new foe to be guarded against became fascism, then communism.
This lack of republican culture allows Gitlin, Isaac, and Kristol, in their “An Open Letter in Defense of Democracy,” to purvey a series of frauds on public opinion. They write, ““Liberal democracy depends on free and fair elections, respect for the rights of others, the rule of law, a commitment to truth and tolerance in our public discourse.” This is certainly not untrue, but what they omit is crucial. First, this is supposed to be a republic, not a democracy. While a republic should have a democratic form of government, a republic is different because a regard for the General Welfare must be balanced against individual freedoms. There used to be a consideration of public virtue, in which citizens were expected to abandon their self-interests when they conflicted with the public good. For example, citizens should be expected to wear masks and embrace vaccine requirements in a pandemic, and any refusal or disobedience should be properly seen as an assault on the republic.
Second, in a republic, there is a positive requirement to do good. The exemplar of this is Benjamin Franklin, and the various organizations he helped create: a fire company, a library, a hospital, the American Philosophical Association, and so on. All of these resulted in the network that fought the Revolutionary War, then attempted to codify republicanism in the Constitution. But the compromise with slavery was a fatal flaw.
President John Quincy Adams, in his first annual message to Congress, summarized this positive requirement to do good:
The great object of the institution of civil government is the improvement of the condition of those who are parties to the social compact, and no government, in what ever form constituted, can accomplish the lawful ends of its institution but in proportion as it improves the condition of those over whom it is established. Roads and canals, by multiplying and facilitating the communications and intercourse between distant regions and multitudes of men, are among the most important means of improvement. But moral, political, intellectual improvement are duties assigned by the Author of Our Existence to social no less than to individual man
.
Law journal articles on the Guarantee Clause:
Bonfield, Arthur E., “The Guarantee Clause of Article IV, Section 4: A Study in Constitutional Desuetude”, [On the Constitutional guarantee of the federal government that each state shall have a republican form of government]
46 Minnesota Law Review 513 (May, 1961)
https://scholarship.law.umn.edu/mlr/863/
https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/217205534.pdf
Erwin Chemerinsky, Why Cases Under the Guarantee Clause Should Be Justiciable,
65 University of Colorado Law Review 849-880 (1994)
https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/faculty_scholarship/787/
The Yale Law Journal
Vol. 97, No. 8, Jul., 1988
Symposium: The Republican Civic Tradition
[12 articles on republicanism]
https://www.jstor.org/stable/i232687 ”
If anyone thinks this doesn’t really describe the situation in America today, they can perhaps explain why.
bruce wilder
The drift into a second civil war is also the context in which to view the “left’s” demands for censorship, which Taibbi, Greenwald, and a few others have assailed repeatedly and, imho, unwisely.
Wow! wtf?
“unwisely” !??
I am not sure how to make sense of this.
Free speech / free press absolutism of the kind preached by Greenwald does leave unaddressed the problem of sorting out critical truth. When people can say and publish any damn thing they want, without any mechanism to identify and penalize fraud and misinformation then we are lost. Greenwald does not give enough attention to considering the difficulties introduced by the growing floodtide of fictions and conflicting claims, propaganda designed to activate deep prejudice and limbic responses. While he’s appearing on Fox, he might take some notice of polls showing how systematically misinformed Fox News viewers are. But, I credit Greenwald with articulating principles and sticking to them in a way that tribally partisan commentators are incapable of.
Matt Taibbi has addressed himself to a different problem: the abandonment by journalists of the professional obligation to ascertain the objective facts and communicate the facts of a reported case clearly, accurately and with skepticism of and due diligence with regard to repeating the claims of authority. He has decried the willingness of newsrooms dominated by young, inexperienced journalists to demand compliance with doctrines and etiquette of racial and social justice. In contrast to Greenwald’s doctrinaire libertarianism, Taibbi is directly addressing the need for social mechanisms, such as professional standards of journalism, to filter the flood as well as model good judgment.
That Carlos Slim effectively owns the New York Times, Jeff Bezos the Washington Post, Mrs Steve Jobs the Atlantic and so on thru the ranks of mainstream and prestige news organizations ought to be concerning, given the rapidly deteriorating quality of their journalism. The stealth right-wing agendas of Google and Facebook contribute to an effective censorship of the real left, under the guise of policing “disinformation” and a centre-left devoted to Russiagate and BLM and so on has cheered on this creeping fascism. Our partisan tribalism, which gives rise I am presuming to the talk of “civil war”, is driven in part by reckless narratives and careless opinion pressed from all sides and from underneath by social media. Large numbers of Americans are accustomed to believing all kinds of things that are not so, and to relying on loaded narratives built from slanders, omission and false implication.
I have not seen any sort of censorship call from the so-called “left” that I would regard as anything more than foolishness and stupidity aimed at empty targets. Maybe Tony is reading things I am not aware of.
I would tax commercial advertising of all kinds heavily enough to tip the balance of economics sharply against “free” advertising-supported apps and publications (and reduce the sheer volume of such “throwaways”; I would ban again advertising of prescription drugs; I would fund police investigation and prosecution of internet and phone solicitation frauds and ransom-ware; I would institute privacy regulations sufficient to destroy the Facebook model of selling click-bait hate and lies.
That said, the compulsive “othering” by tribal partisans, which afflicts many who lean Democratic by habit or history as well as Trumpist Republicans and talk-radio addicts, troubles me greatly. Many times I have read a critic of misinformation or disinformation who inexplicably finds examples only from “over there”. I honestly do not know how anyone could stomach either Sean Hannity or Rachel Maddow — and, yes, that is true equivalence. People who think “the problem” is confined to Murdoch’s Fox News need to join us in the 21st century already.
If I had the time to follow the Kyle Rittenhouse trial, I do not know where I would look for a trustworthy account. And, without that, it just looks like way too much work to me to do on my own. And, that is a serious problem for the country’s politics. I think it might get solved by building institutions with some integrity, as unlikely as the prospect seems. But joining the growing faction of the Democratic Party in bed with the intelligence/police/security services in a censorship project seems like a fast path to fascism.
Thomas B Golladay
@Hugh
The Kyle Rittenhouse Case is clear cut self-defense. Kyle did not initiate the fight, fled first, and only opened fired after being physically trapped and attacked. He fired only the minimal rounds necessary to eliminate the direct threat to his life from the mob, and then turned himself in.
Kyle’s father, grandmother, aunt, and uncle lived in Kenosha, and he worked there as a lifeguard, so it was his second hometown. Another fact everyone ignores.
Per documented video footage we see the white BLM crowd burning the city and trying to set an Asian owned gas station on fire. Over Mr. Blake’s shooting. Which by the way was justified as he was in the process of kidnapping 2 children in a stolen vehicle, had just assaulted and battered their mother, and resisted arrest.
An acquittal is just and warranted and the BLM terrorists and Antifa, who are burning down largely minority neighborhoods and killing largely minorities and getting away with it, need to be crushed and carted off to prison.
It also never ceases to amaze me how so few here realize the real fascist authoritarians are not the Republicans, but the Democrats.
But hey, ideology trumps actual facts on the ground.
Hugh
Golladay, don’t you have a Nazi SS memorial you could be at? Rittenhouse was an underage murderous punk who went 4 hours from his home to carry his illegal assault rifle at night into a protest so he could feel “threatened” and kill people.
If he was such a law abiding citizen, how come he had an assault rifle that he couldn’t legally own with him? Why under-aged as he was, was he there at all? Where were his guardians? Why weren’t they there? You fascists make stories up to justify and excuse your criminality. Then you automatically believe them and act like they were carved in stone. And that makes them OK.
As for Greenwald, he had 4 years of Trump to exercise his criticism and scorn of Trump’s non-stop lies. What we got from Glenn was silence on Trump, criticism of Democrats, and appearances on Tucker Carlson. Wake up and smell the coffee. Whatever Greenwald was in the past, he is a rightwing nutjob now.
Hugh
Well my comment went into mod a while ago.
Glenn Greenwald is a hack and carny. How many principles does anyone have who could stay silent through four years of Trump? Or whose best bud is Tucker? The Bush years are long gone. It is remarkable how few of the icons from those times didn’t pack it in or try to sell out if they could. Ian is one of the few who didn’t give up the fight. Greenwald is just a self-important joke.
Golladay is a creature out of his time and place. His time was the 1930s and his place was Germany.
NR
Just as a reminder in case anyone has forgotten, Thomas was openly calling for civil war in the aftermath of last year’s election. So keep that in mind when reading his “well ackhsully, Democrats are the REAL fascists” shtick.
On another topic, I think a lot of Ian’s readers are older and so it’s understandable that many of them miss the biggest danger around free speech these days. Back in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, the biggest danger involving free speech was government and/or corporate censorship of views. However, that’s not the case today. The biggest speech-related danger today is the fact that anyone can lie about anything and there is simply no mechanism in place to stop them from doing so. Furthermore, social media directly incentivizes people to lie, rewarding them with $$$ for pulling people in to their particular brand of fiction is.
I mean, take our very own Thomas as an example. Thomas doesn’t have a single thought in his head that some right-wing social media influencer didn’t put there. These people have a massive audience and they have thoroughly poisoned any chance of real, productive public discourse. It’s genuinely a crisis, and old views of looking at free speech simply aren’t equal to it.
And just in case anyone wants to give the classic “the best way to beat a lie is with the truth” answer, that’s simply not the case anymore. It’s not the most honest voices that win out today, it’s the loudest, and the loudest are the liars.
Mark Pontin
Bruce W: ‘That Carlos Slim effectively owns the New York Times, Jeff Bezos the Washington Post, Mrs Steve Jobs the Atlantic and so on thru the ranks of mainstream and prestige news organizations ought to be concerning’….
‘Twas ever thus, to a great extent. “You furnish the pictures. I’ll furnish the war,” as William Randolph Hearst said.
Bruce W: ‘I would tax commercial advertising of all kinds heavily enough to tip the balance of economics sharply against “free” advertising-supported apps and publications’
You damned Commie!
More to the point, however, advertising was_precisely_ what paid for the previous model of journalism. I’d have to struggle to think of any mass publication in the last half-century that ever made more than 50 percent of its revenues from subscriptions and newsstand sales. Google and Facebook eating up 80 percent of those advertising revenues is what’s largely finished that model off.
Also, a large part of the problem with ‘journalism’ today is two-fold and not going away now there’s an Internet.
That is:
(A) There’s a twenty-four hour cycle and everyone is competing on that rushed, short-term basis;
(B) It’s only clicks that get eyeballs on internet ads that pay for anything, so that’s all that counts.
It’s unfortunate. But in the age of the internet, expecting classified ads sections in printed newspapers to return so we can have real journalism again — because that is largely what largely supported that previous model of journalism — would be be as fatuous as expecting the return of the horse and buggy.
One can look at the vanished mediascape of the mid-20th century and those films that valorized it like THE SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS and ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN with appreciation and nostalgia. As H.L. Mencken said, “I had more fun doing news reporting than in any other enterprise. It really is the life of kings.”
Nevertheless, it’s gone, gone, gone.
Mark Pontin
Something else will be along, though.
different clue
Thanks everyone for the detailed replies. The problem Tony Wikrent identifies of the Rich people owning all the “speechfront property” should ideally first be addressed by repealing Clinton’s various pro-media-monopoly and media-consolidation laws and then re-breaking up all the monopolies Clinton sought this law to create. If Murchoch’s American citizenship can be legally revoked so that his media-ownership can be busted back down to what would be allowed to an alien, that would be good. Forced restoration of the Fairness Doctrine on radio. Other things like that and see if they work.
And see what can be done about digital social media monopolies which arose after all the laws for pre-digital communications were invented.
I also see a danger in accepting Mr. Wikrent’s view that the rich have too much freedom of speech at a philosophy-of-governance level because such acceptance in theory will certainly be used to ban Ian Welsh, Tony Wikrent, Naked Capitalism, etc. from any digital presence. The rich can always afford the best and most clever lawyers to do that with.
I think people have missed what seems to be Wikrent’s main point ( if I am correct myself) which is that the upper classes and the Overclass have spent the last 90 years working to repeal the FairDeal/New Deal/Square Deal and create the moral equivalent of Economic-Business Monarchy. They have been using their media properties to indoctrinate their armies of Humanoid Orcs for systematic Interahamwe-style mass politicide against all the kinds of people who would be considered not sufficiently pro-Republicanazi Fascistrumpanon to meet the upper class’s and the Overclass’s needs and desires. That’s the “civil war” that Wikrent notes that the Overclass and its “right wing” have been preparing for.
Just what the ha ha “left” ha ha is supposed to do to get ready for the Intrumpahamwe Militias has not been discussed or even faced up to as a possible near-term future issue.
Hugh
Media consolidation meant that the assets of a paper being bought up would be sold off, newsrooms would be downsized, especially getting rid of more experienced, more expensive, staff, the size and coverage of the paper would be decreased, and of course the cost of subscriptions would be raised. Rinse, repeat, often. It became a self-reinforcing cycle. As papers got smaller and more expensive, readers left, followed by advertisers. The company would respond by cutting more staff, cutting the size of the paper even more and raising prices ever higher. A lot of papers aren’t much more than a glorified obits section with a couple pages of news articles attached.
This summer going through some old stuff, I came across some papers from about fifteen to twenty years ago. They were huge compared to the pamphlets they put out now. Technology didn’t do papers in. It was the greed and stupidity of big media companies that did.
Hugh
I would say that it is not about the free speech rights of the rich but rather that although they are the fewest, the rich own all the speech. It would be a very different world if the rich had, and could control, no more speech than anyone else. That would really zuck for them.
Charlie Dewitt
I’m not one to comment here there or anywhere, but I gotta compliment Hugh for that last sentence even if it is kinda sorta, you know . . . something or another.
Z
Bruce,
Carlos Slim does not effectively own the NYZ Times.
https://thehill.com/homenews/media/365763-mexican-billionaire-carlos-slim-sells-off-half-of-ny-times-shares
Z
Hugh
It is hard to overstate what a failure COP26 was. With time run out and an existential threat coming, the international community just couldn’t be bothered to take it seriously or do anything about it.
bruce wilder
Re: economics of publishing news
advertising was_precisely_ what paid for the previous model of journalism. I’d have to struggle to think of any mass publication in the last half-century that ever made more than 50 percent of its revenues from subscriptions and newsstand sales.
“previous” being an operative term. the cost of physical production and distribution was proportionately huge in the previous model. and, let’s not overlook the fact that the ads themselves remained a scarce and valuable good in a multifarious bundle thru much of the newspaper era — some people bought the paper for the ads! or crossword puzzle. or the comix. or window washing and fish wrap. the news or sports was the bonus.
breaking the bundle into fragments and reducing the cost of publication and distribution by an order of magnitude (or 2) has pushed advertising and propaganda generally into a state of vast overproduction. news and propaganda production and distribution costs, already cheap, are subsidized into vast overproduction. like it or not, people are served both more than they can or want to pay attention to and also a quality of content skewed to the preferences of the advertisers paying for it rather than the needs of readers consuming that content upon force-feeding.
those are some of the reasons why I think taxing commercial advertising at a penalty rate designed to reduce its production generally makes sense. what remains scarce now is the attention of the viewer or reader — an individual with the same 24-hour day as the citizen of, say, 1850 who was lucky for a 8-page tabloid, twice a week.
bruce wilder
@ Z Thanks for the update! Blackrock, indeed.
The NYTimes has, as they say, a valuable brand if nothing else. Much of the actual paper editorial is simply dreadful by any standard.
Z
Bruce,
It’s a publicly traded company. Even BlackRock at 8% doesn’t have enough of a stake to heavily influence the paper on their own.
What matters about the NY Times IMO is who runs it and that’s the Sulzberger’s.
Z
Thomas B Golladay
@Hugh
Kyle as a 17 year old can carry a longarm legally in Wisconsin which the Judge granted in Jury Instructions and to disprove this, the state had to measure the barrel which they failed to do in court. So the Judge will likely throw that charge out on Monday.
Also, Kyle lives a half hour from Kenosha which is where he worked and where his father, grandmother, aunt, and uncle lived. It is in effect his second hometown.
We have ample video evidence of what was going on. At no point did Kyle spray the crowd with bullets. For the bulk of the night, his rifle was on its sling with the barrel to the ground while he put out fires, treated injuries, and formed a human wall to block a crowd of white BLM protestors from torching an Asian owned gas station.
Had that gas station gone up, it would have quickly spread into a section of minority owned homes.
This was all testified to in court by even prosecution witnesses.
It was only when Rosenbaum, a convicted child molester who had been just released from a mental hospital, attacked Kyle did things go south. Kyle first tried to flee, its on video, he was not there to start a fight and always deflected and defused any potential conflict.
Then some idiot in the crowd had to pull a handgun and open fire.
This is all on video. It was played in court from multiple angles and from multiple witnesses.
Self-defense clear as day.
@NR, you have selective reading and memory and are a literal fake news pusher. I don’t want a civil war, but people like you make it inevitable.
I myself have no intention to be caught up in a civil war to see what establishment elite takes a broken throne of a dead nation. I exited the system for the parallel society. The elites and their suckers can kill each other for all I care. If you want to join their struggle, good luck to yah. You will get nothing out of it but pain and misery.
Z
Cause through all those years that the Sulzbergers have ran it, the NYZ Times has consistently been pro-war, pro-Wall Street, and an active agent of division that constantly tries to dice up the populace along any lines except economic class.
Z
metamars
I crossed into Florida yesterday. While NJ isn’t Austria, I’d rather be safe, than sorry. *
as per disclose.tv,
Austria authorizes the world’s first nationwide lockdown for unvaccinated people over the age of 12, which goes into effect at midnight tonight.
The new restrictions in Austria will be enforced on an “unprecedented scale,” the interior minister said, with fines of up to 30,000 euros.
A wag commented “I did nazi that coming.”
meanwhile, back in the outback:
NOW – Tens of thousands protest in #Melbourne against new pandemic law that would give the executive indefinite emergency powers to “protect public health”.
Unfortunately, I don’t see any links for the disclose.tv tweets.
The needed framing to understand the medical tyranny we’re witnessing is Naomi Wolf’s “End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot”. We know how this story can end. I’m afraid it might be too late for Australia and New Zealand. And, I guess, Austria.
* Or should I say “safer, rather than sorry”. Dr. Peter McCullough is calling for a total halt to vaccination, pending standard format safety reviews. The same has been called for in the UK, by some British scientists. Unfortunately, Governor DeSantis doesn’t go to certain places. I guess we could say that his intelligence is not ‘sterilizing’ against inferior public covid policies.
bruce wilder
Z: . . . along any lines except economic class.
huh? the one thing i feel i can always count on the NYTimes for is taking the point of view of the feckless upper-class fop
Hugh
The NYT has two kinds of stock, Class A and B. The Sulzberger family has almost all the Class B or voting stock. So they control the paper, and have for more than a hundred years. The Class A stock has few voting rights.
bruce wilder
Yes, Hugh, I am aware and I am also aware that the Sulzbergers have been soliciting capital support, hence Slim and Blackrock, for which they are ever so grateful in capitalist class solidarity, thank you comrade.
bruce wilder
Austria has locked down the unvaccinated. I did nazi that coming.
(Totally NOT original, but Hugh cannot be allowed to win the thread on the strength of dumb zuck alone.)
different clue
@Hugh,
As I was listening to BBC radio news, I heard over and over that at the last minute the Indian delegation insisted that a phrase in the document be changed from ” phase coal out” to “phase coal down”. Only twice in all that listening did the news mention ” India AND China” wanted the change from “out” to “down”.
And the Indian delegate gave a Third World self-pity nationalist type speech as to why India deserved to keep dumping skycarbon to share in the benefits of carbon-dumping development. The already-developed world has no right to say otherwise.
So India has joined China in the game of Skycarbon Chicken. Because the visible talkers of the world operate on a basis of “rights and fairness” in order to prevent any discussion of “actual results”, the advanced countries are going to have to zero thermal coal out of existence within their own countries first. Those which can do that will earn the “moral right” to ban imports into their countries from China and India until China and India have visibly banned thermal coal from their economies as well.
( Metallurgical coal is a fraction as much as thermal coal, and we will all keep using metallurgical coal until the iron ore itself has run out down to zero.)
different clue
@Hugh,
When you say the rich own the means of free-speeching freely so everyone else is forced to see and hear the rich viewpoint exclusively, that is what I meant by the phrase
“bought up all the speechfront property”.
Hugh
different clue, I agree.
Golladay, in Wisconsin, it is illegal for anyone under the age of eighteen to go armed with a deadly weapon. And in Illinois, a permit must be obtained before the purchase of a firearm and no one under the age of eighteen can purchase a firearm. It would not surprise me if the POS judge in the Rittenhouse case thanked Rittenhouse and encouraged him to kill more progressives. But as I said before, you just make sh–t up –about the law and the facts in the case. You then act as if your new fantasy is solid fact. It isn’t.
Jim Harmon
Many serious points on this thread, and yet it’s quite punny.