"Angry Inch," Hedwig & the Angry Inch: In theatrical form as pure a piece of punk rock as you're likely to find in the 21st century. The sound is rooted in early '70s glam rock, T-Rex, Bowie, so it's transgender glam rock punk rock. Intense, funny, and brutally poignant. This is the DIY punk aesthetic in the 21st century, tightly scripted and catchy as hell. Cinematic punk rock.
US War Department of 1943 Endorses Harris/Walz
"Beginning in 1943, the War Department published a series of pamphlets for U.S. Army personnel in the European theater of World War II. Titled Army Talks, the series was designed “to help [the personnel] become better-informed men and women and therefore better soldiers.”
On March 24, 1945, the topic for the week was “FASCISM!”
The War Department thought it was important for Americans to understand the tactics fascists would use to take power in the United States. They would try to gain power “under the guise of ‘super-patriotism’ and ‘super-Americanism.’” And they would use three techniques:
First, they would pit religious, racial, and economic groups against one another to break down national unity. Part of that effort to divide and conquer would be a “well-planned ‘hate campaign’ against minority races, religions, and other groups.”
Second, they would deny any need for international cooperation, because that would fly in the face of their insistence that their supporters were better than everyone else. “In place of international cooperation, the fascists seek to substitute a perverted sort of ultra-nationalism which tells their people that they are the only people in the world who count. With this goes hatred and suspicion toward the people of all other nations.”
Third, fascists would insist that “the world has but two choices—either fascism or communism, and they label as ‘communists’ everyone who refuses to support them.”
It is “vitally important” to learn to spot native fascists, the government said, “even though they adopt names and slogans with popular appeal, drape themselves with the American flag, and attempt to carry out their program in the name of the democracy they are trying to destroy.”
The only way to stop the rise of fascism in the United States, the document said, “is by making our democracy work and by actively cooperating to preserve world peace and security.” In the midst of the insecurity of the modern world, the hatred at the root of fascism “fulfills a triple mission.” By dividing people, it weakens democracy. “By getting men to hate rather than to think,” it prevents them “from seeking the real cause and a democratic solution to the problem.” By falsely promising prosperity, it lures people to embrace its security."
Letters from an American Historian
Anything sound familiar here? You know what to do: vote Harris/Walz and blue-no-matter-who down ballot to defeat the fascist movement in America. And please note how what is to be done is not radical or "communist" or "crazy liberal" but in keeping with the wise counsel of the friggin' War Department during WW2!
dub space rock electric church music
Fun music trivia: Dennis Bovell, British reggae super producer, Lover's rock, Linton Kwesi Johnson's superlative early albums, The Pop Group, etc. Bovell contends Hendrix's "Third Stone from the Sun" was the very first dub track ever produced in 1967. Six years before the more popularly recognized dub landmark, Lee "Scratch" Perry's Upsetter's 14 Dub Blackboard Jungle. Or is this "electric church music," as I've heard Hendrix refer to some of his music? And in addition to this being possibly the very first dub track and electric church music this is also an early example of the space rock sub-genre. So very complex multi-faceted classic rock.
VOTE BLUE NO MATTER WHO TO SAVE AMERICA!!!
Grump Is To Blame
"As we careen toward Election Day in a week, the day’s news is replete with reminders that Donald Trump continues to be a singular threat to a free and fair elections. The complexity of the threat matrix – political violence, foreign interference, conspiracy theories, the Big Lie – can obscure that Trump plays a critical role in all of them as instigator, inciter, conspiracist, accelerant, and useful idiot.
For nearly a decade now, Trump has radicalized American politics and personally served as a catalyst for the worst impulses, extremism, and violence that have afflicted the public square. He has created, sustained, and nourished a crazed political atmosphere which pushes lone wolf actors over the edge. He has summoned and rallied a crowd of insurrectionists and turned them loose against the legislative branch in order to remain in power. He has dipped into Nazi rhetoric, dehumanized entire peoples and nationalities, trafficked in the most racist tropes, and treated women like trash. He has taken a sledgehammer to democratic institutions and the principles upon which they are based."
The Cowardice of the Elites
"The Amazon king is not alone in this consequential abdication of responsibility. Numerous folks in the ruling class have cowardly ducked and covered in this election that could determine whether our imperfect democracy slides toward fascism. JP Morgan chief executive Jamie Dimon, who previously referred to Trump’s post-2020 election conduct as “treason,” privately supports Harris. But according to the New York Times, he won’t say so publicly “because he’s fearful that if Mr. Trump is victorious, he could retaliate against the people and companies who publicly opposed his run.” Billionaire Bill Gates has privately donated $50 million to a nonprofit that supports Harris, but he has not (as of this writing) publicly endorsed her. He won’t put his mouth where his money is. Billionaire investor Warren Buffett, who organized fundraisers for Barack Obama in 2012 and campaigned for Hillary Clinton in 2016 (denouncing Trump), announced he won’t take a position on the 2024 race.
Last week, Fortune looked at the 10 richest people in the United States and discovered that none of them had publicly expressed a preference between Trump and Harris, except for Elon Musk, the No. 1 on the list, who has become Trump’s top (and manic) cheerleader, pouring tens of millions of dollars—perhaps hundreds of millions—into efforts to elect Trump. (See my recent article on how Musk is essentially providing Trump $100 million worth of free advertising on X, the social media platform he owns.) This roster of chickens includes Buffet, Gates, Bezos, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison (a longtime GOP donor), former Google CEO Larry Page, former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.
These plutocrats amassed fortunes in America, yet they now will not publicly oppose a convicted felon and fraudster who was found liable for sexual assault, who attempted to subvert the constitutional order when he was last in office, who has expressed support and admiration for overseas dictators, and who has voiced fascistic sentiments, including proposing military tribunals and criminal prosecutions for his political foes, the suspension of the Constitution for his own benefit, and loyalty oaths (to him) for government workers."
David Corn @ Our Land/Mother Jones (I get an email newsletter but can't link it for some reason.)
What strikes me here is another connection to the major media. CNN reports on the regular, I heard it again reported this way just today, and I imagine the nightly network news broadcasts more or less repeat the same, and that is "voters trust Harris more on women's issues and democracy and Trump more on immigration and economics." I've shared before that serious polling does not support the contention that the general public or electorate trusts Trump more on the economy. Significant majorities know Trump and the republicans favor rich corporations and stiff labor whenever they can. But as indicated above the rich people who own the major media do quite obviously trust Trump over Harris on the economy. Why? Because they don't want to pay more taxes or deal with more environmental regulations, same as it ever was. But, especially, they don't want to face four more years of Lina Khan's antitrust, which is to be clear good economics for small businesses and consumers but bad economics for monopolists and Billionaires.
The Resistance Demands Respect, Too
"These liberals [including 200,000 that have canceled WaPo subscriptions] are signaling that they’ve reached their breaking point with institutions that coddle extremists; that fear holding enemies of democracy to any consistent standard; that would rather head off bad-faith attacks than do what’s right. They believe, quite rightly, that these impulses are the reason Trump is not currently in prison. They know Republicans won’t check him or hold him accountable, but they aren’t willing to underwrite a system where journalists and Democrats and prosecutors and judges and union and corporate leaders won’t either.
In other words, they want the Trump era to be well and truly over. For the moment that mostly means beating him next week. But in a longer-run sense it means changing incentives so that leaders stop tolerating or caving to the extortionate tactics that define Trump’s [and corporate rule's] authoritarianism."
VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE!
And beyond Trump, he couldn't do this all alone after all, who is most responsible for the US being on the precipice of a violent fascist catastrophe? Dishonor roll:
Republican Party
MAGA
SCOTUS and legal system
Billionaires (aka Oligarchy)
Wall Street
Violent militias and police unions and gun nuts
Major media (Fox is a national security threat at this point but NY Times and WaPo and NPR have been "bothsidesing" mealy-mouthed terrible as well)
Social media (turns out it doesn't expand free speech so much as blow-up fake news and disinformation)
Sinclair Broadcast Group
Putin and Trump's other foreign dictator besties
Legacy of paranoid style and violent bigotry in American history (Lost Cause, etc)
Crooked business hustlers
Special hell reserved for academic and activist lefties and Third Party morons rooting for Trump to hasten the revolution
People without college educations, which I hesitate to pick-on because this is my own family origins, and I generally root for populist movements in history, but Trump is a treasonous, hateful, and embarrassingly dumb low in the history of American populism, or in my life time at the very least.
Again, VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! to save America!
Jeff Bezos and WaPo Teach About Billionaires
"What makes this moment important isn’t that it swung any votes, but that normal Democrats must finally reckon with the political danger of concentrations of wealth and power.
"Amazon,” wrote pundit Matt Yglesias [corporate rule apologist], “as far as I can tell, is a charitable organization being run by elements of the investment community for the benefit of consumers.” Bezos liked that line so much he quoted it in an investor letter.
From Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, to Hollywood’s refusal to distribute a pro-union documentary, to Google’s censorship of negative information about Republicans, Democrats are going through the same process Republicans did over the 2010s when they realized that the cultural power centers of America are hostile to their political vision. Democrats are realizing that market power is political power."
Matt Stoller @ (Too Damn ) BIG!
I'm just a poor retired school teacher, on the sidelines, fringy margins, out of it, but seems like the Dems have known this or should have known this since the 1980s, at least, when the political establishment, of both parties, more or less capitulated to corporate rule.
What's changed now is the Dems have assumed their own inclusive, civil rights expanding, globalizing values aligned it with corporate growth and expansion goals in a way the GOP's exclusionary culture war bigotry never could. Corporations, Dems could reason, want bigger markets, want to reach more consumers, not smaller markets or fewer consumers, excluding those consumers the GOP doesn't like.
But what the Dems did not anticipate, apparently, is that when it came to facing serious democratic pressures for more taxes and regulations on the rich and on the wealthy, an increasingly likely outcome of democratic majorities in government since 2020, corporations and their Billionaire donor class leadership would align with Grump/MAGA's violent bigotry and Handmaid's Tale morality over whatever "woke" Green New Deal and worker prosperity plans the Dems come up with.
What's most surprising or even galling to me is the Lucy and the football routine familiarity of all this and how something like it has been incrementalizing towards the current crisis for decades. Every time environmental reforms or worker protections or health care affordability reforms have been squelched because of their so-called "anti-growth" implications over the past thirty or forty years has been a political surrender to market power and the austerity economics TSEBC is calling for now again, should Trump be elected and he take an official role in the government.
We know the economic model Grump stands for, TSEBC continues to promote, and Yglesias defends, generates Billionaires, what we haven't fully come to grips with yet is the corrosive and obstructive effects unfettered market power has on public infrastructure, sustainable technological innovations, and the environmental crisis pushing the earth's life support systems to the brink.
Or, perhaps most galling of all, we haven't even come to grips with the fact this "free market" fundamentalist model isn't even the most pro economic growth; for that, see the New Deal order, 1930-1980, much higher taxes on rich corporations, better growth rates, and more widely shared prosperity. Corporate rule doesn't promote widespread economic prosperity but instead monopolizing, wealth hoarding, Billionaires.
"The Medium Was Tedium" b/w "Don't Back the Front" The Desperate Bicycles (1978)
Simon Reynolds, in his book Rip It Up, argues the Desperate Bicycles were more important to the developing DIY ethos than the arty moves made by '77 punk rock bellwether record labels like Fast Product or Factory. The DB's were from London, and didactic as the Gang of Four but not as collegiate or sarcastic or ironic. The drummer on this single was 14. Their direct DIY message: "It was easy, it was cheap-- go and do it!" In other words, start a band and make a record. If we can do it, they said, you can too. This is the 'A'-side of the DB's second single, "The Medium Was Tedium" followed by the 'B'-side, from 1978.
"Don't Back the Front"
Punk Rock Tuesday
"We now know that Russian operatives helped Trump’s campaign in 2016 in part because of what Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort knew as the Mariupol Plan, which called for Trump to look the other way as Putin installed puppets in the oblasts of eastern Ukraine, permitting him to take through political manipulations the land that he ended up in February 2022 trying to take by force."-- Heather Cox Richardson
Robert Paxton, Anatomy of Fascism (2004), defines the fascist form of politics:
“A form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”
Post-election America: check, check, check, check, and check. About the only thing that doesn't check is the "external expansion," unless you count increased trade with other kleptocratic states, Russia and Hungary, or if talk resumes about trying to buy Greenland.
The worst of this, of course, is all the violence and suffering this fascist fever will impose on the Republican's scapegoats, poor migrants, Trans people, liberals, anybody that opposes them, basically. Project 2025 checks a lot of those same fascist boxes and reportedly doesn't have much to say about external expansion either. It is, actually, not just a fascist moral abomination but geo-politically a belly-flop losing strategy in the global energy transition that will define civilization in the 21st century.
Climate change denialism in US government policy, hostile to industrial policy, obstructing government action for decades, is why Chinese innovation and production in solar and electric cars has blown away the US in the last 15-20 years. Doubling down on this loser's strategy-- Grump promises to reverse all the green new deal industrial policy in Biden's Inflation Reduction Act-- will increasingly isolate the US as a belligerent obstacle to sustainable global economic development.
And, crucially, global realpolitiks that the republicans seem to have lost entirely, this plutocratic opposition to climate change reforms can slow and obstruct a green transition but they cannot stop the economic challenges climate change presents to the 7 billion people living on earth. Ceding global leadership to China and other great power centers facing these challenges will only further endanger the planet, increasingly marginalize the US and other states that assume this burn-baby-burn posture, and hasten the decline of US influence and power in building for a better future.
British Post-Punk Goth Rock Ground Zero
You might have heard of this thing where film critics of a certain age have this thing for the movies of 1999. A generation older, I think I have maybe something similar for the music of 1979. I turned twenty. The possibilities felt exciting and endless and endlessly exciting. I'm still ready to dismiss it all as coincidence but I keep finding all these extraordinary music performances from 1979.
"Inner Sanction," Insex: Obsessive dark tribal pounding tom-tom drums and monster guitar riffing produces compelling prototype obscure British post-punk Goth Rock. Think Bowie's Berlin period with even bigger stacks of speaker feedback. Gives Joy Division a run for the money, even if Insex lost. They had to. Killing Joke. Etc.
Punk Rock Tuesday.
"when bad polls drive good polls they’re not so good anymore"
“And we know now that government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob,” Franklin Roosevelt, Madison Square Garden, 1936
In 2024 Trump/Vance and Musk/Thiel are trying to unite these dangers.
When polling was started in the Great Depression era the response rate to polls was over 90%. Today, or as recently as 2015 via the linked story in the NY-er, the response rate to polling was in single digits.
Trying to correct for “non-response bias” by giving greater weight to the answers of people from demographic groups that are less likely to respond-- means putting pollsters thumbs on the scales, invisible hands on democratic representation
Elmo Roper, another early pollster, called the public-opinion survey “the greatest contribution to democracy since the introduction of the secret ballot.” But as the historian Sarah Igo has pointed out, “Instead of functioning as a tool for democracy, opinion polls were deliberately modeled upon, and compounded, democracy’s flaws.”
The statistician Nate Silver began explaining polls to readers in 2008; the Times ran his blog, FiveThirtyEight, for four years. Silver makes his own predictions by aggregating polls, giving greater weight to those which are more reliable. This is helpful, but it’s a patch, not a fix. The distinction between one kind of poll and another is important, but it is also often exaggerated. Polls drive polls. Good polls drive polls and bad polls drive polls, and when bad polls drive good polls they’re not so good anymore.
Like might be happening right now. That is MAGA flooding the zone, Silver's aggregate polling model, with partisan junk polls, inflating republican prospects, hoping to boost turnout, tip the scales into an inside-straight steal of the electoral college.
Not everyone uses the Internet, and, at the moment, the people who do, and who complete online surveys, are younger and leftier than people who don’t, while people who have landlines, and who answer the phone, are older and more conservative than people who don’t.
Donald Trump is a creature of the polls. He is his numbers. But he is only a sign of the times. Turning the press into pollsters has made American political culture Trumpian: frantic, volatile, shortsighted, sales-driven, and anti-democratic.
Politics and the New Machine @ NY-er
Also, another more recent story about the perils of polls: Rick Perlstein @ The American Prospect
As Bad As All That
Or "How Alarmed Should We Be If Trump Wins Again?"
Eloquent rambling in the NY-er's inimitable style, a freelance writer's paradise for long form journalism. But, truth be told, it can try my patience, I can't keep up, and I often don't finish the long meandering essays. Adam Gopnik's wanderings, richly erudite, literary (high and low), and, crucially for me, historical, however, keep me reading further than most. And if pressed for time the short answer to the above question is: Very!
"The space is that strange, and the stakes that high," concludes Gopnik.
The subject is the stakes of the current moment, the election, historical comparisons, cultural models, Trump's character, political power. Not a comforting take unless you find bigger historical perspectives comforting, as I do. And likely behind a paywall but if you can get to it it adds curious context to our strange world-historical moment. Some choice excerpts:
Marrying the American paranoid style to the more recent cult of the image, Trump can draw on the manner of the tabloid star and show that his is a game, a show, not to be taken quite seriously while still being serious in actually inciting violent insurrections and planning to expel millions of helpless immigrants.
Trump’s ability to be both joking and severe at the same time is what gives him his power and his immunity. This power extends even to something as unprecedented as the assault on the U.S. Capitol. Trump demanded violence (“If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore”) but stuck in three words, “peacefully and patriotically,” that, however hollow, were meant to immunize him, Gotti-style. They were, so to speak, meant for the cops on the wiretap. Trump’s resilience is not, as we would like to tell our children about resilience, a function of his character. It’s a function of his not having one.
Think hard about the probable consequences of a second Trump Administration—about the things he has promised to do and can do, the things that the hard-core group of rancidly discontented figures (as usual with authoritarians, more committed than he is to an ideology) who surround him wants him to do and can do.
Having lost the popular vote, as he surely will, he will not speak up to reconcile “all Americans.” He will insist that he won the popular vote, and by a landslide. He will pardon and then celebrate the January 6th insurrectionists, and thereby guarantee the existence of a paramilitary organization that’s capable of committing violence on his behalf without fear of consequences. He will, with an obedient Attorney General, begin prosecuting his political opponents; he was largely unsuccessful in his previous attempt only because the heads of two U.S. Attorneys’ offices, who are no longer there, refused to coöperate. When he begins to pressure CNN and ABC, and they, with all the vulnerabilities of large corporations, bend to his will, telling themselves that his is now the will of the people, what will we do to fend off the slow degradation of open debate? Trump will certainly abandon Ukraine to Vladimir Putin and realign this country with dictatorships and against NATO and the democratic alliance of Europe.
Above all, the spirit of vengeful reprisal is the totality of his beliefs—very much like the fascists of the twentieth century in being a man and a movement without any positive doctrine except revenge against his imagined enemies. And against this: What? Who? The spirit of resistance may prove too frail, and too exhausted, to rise again to the contest. Who can have confidence that a democracy could endure such a figure in absolute control and survive?
Skateboard Raps, Confessional Rap Gospel, Krautrock Disco, and House Music
Slowing down, relaxing enough, having enough room in your life for music is such a luxury. One I've learned to take for granted, savor, even protect, so when I lose that musical feeling, feel like I can't listen to music, whether crowded out by work or distracting emotional stresses, I grow manic, brittle, and burnout quickly. (Something like this happens with reading too.) I'm like a battery running down fast without regular recharging. Haven't felt like I could listen to music, beyond a few patches of very distracted background streaming, in two weeks or so, so splurging on underdog superhero Lil B and then some groove-oriented Krautrock and a double-shot of Frankie Knuckles' style House music.
"Vans," The Pack (2006): East Bay hybrid hiphop artists do skateboard raps. Lil B startup.
"Unchain Me," Lil B (2011): Lil B, The BasedGod, Im Gay (Im Happy) at a spiritual peak. On a short list of great ambient hiphop albums, as far as I know anyway which is admittedly very limited.
"Synthesist," Harald Grosskopf (1979): Percussionist with Ash Ra Tempel, Cosmic Jokers, and Klaus Schulz's solo work. Late Krautrock as ambient electronic groove music.
E+MC2 (Jelly & Fish remix), Giorgio Moroder (1979/2020): Peaked at number 4 on the charts. Moody, relentless, a cheap shabby beautiful grandeur. Elemental traits of robotic space disco like Kraftwerk and gothic disco like New Order.
"Move That Body," Marshall Jefferson (1986): "The House Music Anthem." Trax Records. Deceptively simple and catchy and fiercely vamping workout of piano, kinetic polyrhythms, clapping dub effects, and chanting "rock your body" dancers: "The music is going to set you free." You gotta believe it.
"Que Tal America," Two Man Sound (1979): This is the 12" version but also appears on an album called Disco Samba. In the squiggly sonic details, a thicket of melodic polyrhythms (uptempo funk, basically), churning, unfurling mesmerizingly elongated grooves and intoxicating repetition transcends monotony. Get it on and let Two Man Sound take you for a ride. Dance music ASMR.
Thank god it's disco Friday!
Post-New Deal Democrats Better for Economy
And for expanding prosperity and opportunity to all workers, all Americans, while Repugs only good for increasing extreme inequality and economic austerity (and "draining the pool" politics) for the 99%:
"In April the nonpartisan Economic Policy Institute found that since 1949 the nation’s annual real growth has been 1.2 percentage points higher under Democratic administrations than under Republican administrations (3.79% versus 2.60%), total job growth averages 2.5% annually under Democrats compared to barely over 1% under Republicans, business investment is more than double the pace under Democrats than under Republicans, average rates of inflation are slightly lower under Democrats, and families in the bottom 20% of the economy experience income growth 188% faster under Democrats than under Republicans.
A recent analysis by former Goldman Sachs managing director H. John Gilbertson expands on those numbers, showing that Democratic administrations reduce the U.S. budget deficit and that stock market returns are 60% higher under Democrats than under Republicans.
Democratic President Joe Biden returned the country to the proven system that worked before 1981, and the economy has boomed. While Trump has vowed to return to the tax cuts and deregulation of supply-side economics, Vice President Harris has promised to retain and fine-tune Biden’s policies.
But Harris has to overcome more than a century of American mythmaking."
American Oligarchy's Dark Money Backs Bid for Dictatorship
"In 2010, the year of the Citizens United decision, all of America’s billionaires together spent a mere $31 million on elections: There were still substantial limits on dark money in American politics.
That number jumped to $231 million in the 2012 and 2014 elections, and over $600 million for both 2016 and 2018.
The dark money blowout came in 2020, when Trump was running for re-election and there was a very real chance the billionaires could seize complete control of our federal government.
They spent a total of $2,362,000,000 in that election, with $1.2 billion of it going to elect conventional politicians who would then be beholden to their patrons.
While Thomas Jefferson was still the US envoy to France and living in Paris, just after the Constitution had been written but a year before it would be ratified, John Adams wrote him on December 6, 1778 arguing that Jefferson’s fear of a strongman president wasn’t as big a concern as Adams’ fear of rich people corrupting American politics:
“You are afraid of the one — I, of the few. We agree perfectly that the many should have a full fair and perfect Representation. — You are Apprehensive of Monarchy; I, of Aristocracy.”
And oldie but not goodie. Cleaning up a pile of forgotten drafts. Let's bookmark these numbers.
Manifesto of the 343
One million women in France have abortions every year. Condemned to secrecy, they do so in dangerous conditions, while under medical supervision, this is one of the simplest procedures. Society is silencing these millions of women. I declare that I am one of them. I declare that I have had an abortion. Just as we demand free access to contraception, we demand the freedom to have an abortion. -Simone de Beauvoir, 1971
Three hundred and forty-three signatures were appended to the “manifesto”: 343 French women and citizens who risked their careers and reputations by publicly confessing to having had an illegal abortion. The act of civil disobedience—now known as the “Manifesto of the 343”—was a non-violent refusal to obey a country’s law. It would prove to be one of the bravest acts toward achieving French women’s reproductive rights.
Trump/Vance's Bigot Troll Ad Campaign and Harris/Walz For The People
In these times in contrast with Trump's hateful intolerance even Liz Cheney is for the people, for crying out loud.
They're rolling out a Trump ad in Seattle and, reportedly, around the swing states:
Harris as "Border Czar" is letting in drug dealers, rapists, and murderous foreign born scary looking gangbangers, enabling "illegals" (to GOP all POC are "illegals," see Springfield, OH) immigrants to escape justice. And then adding insult to injury, when these violent criminals are finally captured by our men in blue and put in jail Harris is helping them get sex change operations. Crazy liberals! Harris-- says the violent fascists targeting and smearing immigrants and Trans people in the scary alarmist video-- is for "They/Them" and "Grump is for you."
True Trumpers, "you," screams the ad like Howard Beale in Network (1976), would rather watch Trump round up all of the immigrants, POC, Trans, LGBTQ+, and crazy liberals and force them into concentration camps and deport them, if not shoot them for target practice. Even if he probably can't totally get away with any or all of this, this is his basic campaign plea. And it's a message, apparently, popular with a sizable segment of the macho bigot population.
(And in "a lie travels around the world before the truth can put her boots on" sweepstakes the NY Times now reports Under Trump, US Prisons Offered Gender-Affirming Care, most notably couching the hateful slander as the GOP's own humane gesture.)
Trump, of course, didn't invent fake news, what the Russians call "political technology," but he is the first in US to take over a political party with it, weaponized against women, immigrants, sexual minorities, whatever is agitating and galvanizing the hateful bigots most on social media.
The punching down cruelty in MAGA isn't entirely new in American history, either. Historian Richard Hofstadter chronicles the paranoid style, racist anti-communist wacko conservatism in American politics, all the way back to the Civil War. But it'd be curious what he'd make of MAGA? In the early 1960s, in his essay The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Hofstadter argued a solid middle of the American democratic electorate, established, security conscious, resistant willy-nilly change, a centrist majority, always rejects the violent bigot extremes in American politics, like Goldwater in 1964 (who thought Eisenhower was a communist and wanted to Nuke the Chinese in Korea). And like MAGA's violent fascism, presumably.
But over sixty years later violent bigot extremes have taken over the Republican party and have already attempted one failed coup attempt to overthrow democracy and the rule of law. And propose in Project 2025 a second admin committed to purging immigrants and civil servants and anyone that opposes them. But Trumpers are sure, they do their research (Fox or worse), that it's poor TDS maligned Trump who gets the raw deal. Stop the Steal! When the most salient feature of the Trump era is nearly all the 'stealing' and fake news emanates from Trump and his MAGA movement. Presented as a dramatic TV series prior to 2016 this stuff would be dismissed by critics as hysterical and over the top. Unbelievable.
But, in fact, MAGA regularly threatens violence against immigrants and the police and judges and public health officials and election workers or liberals or anybody who opposes them. They attacked congress, violently, on the day the legislative body of of the government was formally recognizing the peaceful transfer of power as a fundamental traditional hallmark of democracy and the rule of law. Trump skipped the inauguration, denies Biden won the election, and MAGA republicans in power, SCOTUS, radical anti-democratic federal and state legislators insist on giving the felon reprobate another chance to steal an election and American democracy. Violent threats are the crypto currency of MAGA.
As I've argued before Trump is a real-life Frankenstein caricature of the 1980s neoliberal economic model, as if scripted for an over-the-top apocalyptic remake of Robo Cop. His ridiculously self-dealing monopoly capitalism, his cultish branding and celebrity popularity economics, and his big-government-is-the-problem austerity economics are like a cartoon caricature drawn by Grover Norquist. And, ultimately, it's a loser project, kicked to the curb statistically over and over by mainstream economic measures, pushing the environment to brink, but thrives as zombie economics boosted by "greed is good" free marketeers right and left. Their prescription is tired and doomy: More tax cuts for the rich (which they turn into stock buy backs and stiff workers), burn baby burn, and trash Big Government, public infrastructure, public goods as wasteful deficit spending, and then proving disastrously the ineffectiveness of government whenever in office.
(Mainstream economists scoff at Stephanie Kelton, the economics professor who wrote The Deficit Myth, but there is a simple observation in her work that is undeniable: why do both parties compete to outspend each other on the military, never calling such spending deficit spending, even though it is quite obviously every bit as much deficit spending as any social spending on health care, public education, environmental protections, etc? So that even Dems fret about how we can pay for essential public infrastructure and Repugs relentlessly condemn it as reckless, wasteful deficit spending? This is the austerity economics of neolib corporate rule. The rich and corporations will not pay taxes sufficient to support basic public infrastructure (housing, health care, public education, public safety, food safety, environmental protections, roads and bridges, etc) that makes possible their wealth accumulation, so public infrastructure crumbles and they blame government waste. Sure, the caring economy, the public goods that support community welfare, and sustainable energy production are a lot but probably some very manageable progressive tax margins would cover it but the rich have resisted these kinds of democratic reform, relentlessly, and frequently manipulatively and violently since the Roman Republic. It's fundamental orientation of political economy in my readings of world history, the rich insisting on profit margins that enrich them and squeeze and impoverish labor.)
Trump's candidacy, as the first felon, the most litigated in American history, is a disgraceful travesty and miscarriage of justice that has played out in plain sight on TV and in the mainstream media. And his craven effort to buy the election in the name of his violent bigot fascism and crypto market capitalism is a terrifying prospect but Elon Musk and his Billionaire friends, with their stranglehold on the biggest media platforms, are on the case. It's so preposterously bad it's impossible to describe without sounding hysterical. But they do a slightly more benign version of something like this in Seattle all the time; i.e., local corporate interests buying elections. So, I dunno. It could happen here! It did happen here in 2016. They're trying to do it again and of course it'll only be worse.
Trump should have been disqualified from ever holding any kind of elective office, along with all his co-conspirators, for Jan 6 alone and many times over for a variety of other high crimes and misdemeanors; treason, election interference, financial fraud, promoting violence, sexually harassing women, etc. The MAGA movement is an ongoing crime spree. And yet the polling experts tell us the election is tossup and NY Times/WaPo scratch their chins over whether Harris or Trump would be better for the economy.
We know Trump is a terrible business man, just a puffed up celebrity hustler and financial fraudster. We know his incompetent self-dealing leadership endangered public health during a global pandemic. We know his packed court ended women's basic individual rights, basic reproductive rights, and we know his election would only expand those restrictions on women's rights. We know SCOTUS aided and abetted his failed coup attempt on Jan 6 and we know his election would exonerate the violent insurrectionists who stormed the capitol that day to try to overthrow the election. We know he stole top secret national security documents, that scores of national security professionals tell us endangers America and Americans. And we know he promotes violence against anybody or anything that gets in his way.
Make no mistake, ratification of or a slam-dunk rejection of all this violent fake news fascism is on the ballot. Whatever shortcomings of the Dems, that we will continue to peacefully protest after the election, a vote for the Dems is a vote for democracy, civil rights, workers, and a sustainable and democratic future, and a vote for Trump, or any repug on the ballot, is a vote for dictatorship, corruption, violence, environmental destruction, and stupid bigotry.
And, shamefully, Big Tech Bros and their Billionaire friends, are sponsoring his candidacy and fake news about pet-eating immigrants and other anti-immigrant/LGBTQ rage porn on social media and the internet and now in commercials on local TV broadcasts around Seattle. Remember this.
And this. “Trump has a habit of assuming other politicians act in the same way as he would,” Glenn Kessler wrote in WaPo. So he looked into why Trump would have accused Biden “of raiding the FEMA disaster fund to handle undocumented migrants. It turns out that’s because he did this.”
In the middle of hurricane season in 2019, Kessler explains, Trump took $155 million from the FEMA disaster fund and redirected it to pay for detention space and temporary hearing locations for immigrants seeking asylum. “No, Biden didn’t take FEMA relief money to use on migrants,” the article title reads, “but Trump did.”
Remember, they withheld PPE funding in the pandemic because they thought it would mostly be going to blue cities. I mean, really, you can't make up how bad this sick fuck was. His admin was pure kleptocracy and some people go for it because they like the Trump scenery-chewing spectacle of violence and abuse against their perceived enemies.
Letters from an American Historian
"Rather than standing against slavery alone, those organizing in 1854 stood against an entire political system, opposing the small group of elite enslavers who had taken over the U.S. government in order to establish an oligarchy and were quite clear they rejected the self-evident truth in the Declaration of Independence that all men were created equal. Instead, they intended to rule over the nation’s majority, whose labor produced the capital that southern leaders believed only elites should control."
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." Not equal in height or strength or wealth and intelligence but equal in "certain unalienable rights," individual rights, the essence of our personal freedoms, including "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."
"Republican Abraham Lincoln articulated this worldview for his fledgling party in 1859 as it took a stand against oligarchs. Believing these principles accurately represented the aspirations of the nation’s founders, Lincoln called them “conservative.” People from all parties rallied to the party that promised to defend those principles."
Kamala Harris in Wisconsin: “The president of the United States must not look at our country through the narrow lens of ideology or petty partisanship or self-interest,” Harris said today. “The president of the United States must not look at our country as an instrument for their own ambitions. Our nation is not some spoil to be won. The United States of America is the greatest idea humanity ever devised: the nation that inspired the world to believe in the possibility of a representative government. And so in the face of those who would endanger our magnificent experiment, people of every party must stand together.”
"In this election, putting patriotism ahead of partisanship is not an aspiration. It is our duty,” Cheney said. “I ask all of you here and everyone listening across this great country to join us. I ask you to meet this moment. I ask you to stand in truth, to reject the depraved cruelty of Donald Trump."
Letters from an American Historian
Yeah, but, as the saying goes, what if the "depraved cruelty" is the point? Along with owning the libs, ritual acts of violence, mass deportations, and state violence against targeted groups are more or less precisely what people who got off on Trump's first term and his immigrant family separation policy really want most, right? The Purge. Like some guy at a town meeting asking when he gets to start shooting liberals.
And we, the people, the others, workers, labor, families, liberals, the 99%, we're hoping, wishing, preying, by contrast, an overwhelming majority of Americans, Us, will say No to more Trump lies and treason, No to more MAGA bigot hate and misogyny and gun violence, and Hell No to Billionaire crony capitalist rich-get-richer-poor-get-poorer economics.
We're not communists. We're for free enterprise and opposed to wealth hoarding corporate rule and violent bigotry. It's not that difficult to figure out, and it's not pie in the sky.
"Today the International Longshoremen’s Association suspended the strike after USMX agreed to wage increases of 62% over six years. The two sides agreed to extend the current contract until January 15 to address the issues of benefits and automation. Administration officials White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients, top White House economic advisor Lael Brainard, Acting Secretary of Labor Julie Su, and Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg helped broker the temporary agreement."
Trump won't grow the economy. And he won't help make life more affordable for workers and regular families. And, most preposterously, he won't make America stronger in the world or safer at home. Trump will grow violence and corruption and insecurity at home and around the world. We know this. Unless you only watch Fox News, we all saw it on TV 2017 to 2020. And we don't want to watch the rerun. It'll only be worse.
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