The Rise of Donald Trump is Remarkable, but Not Surprising.

The rise of Trump is truly remarkable, but not surprising. This is what true tribalism looks like, and those who control this society have been marketing this premise for forty years. Ever since Nixon sent Agnew after the "liberal" press (and even before with his "You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore"), the implication was created that the press is just "out to get people.”

Then, since deregulation under Reagan and his, “Government is the problem” and “it’s your money, NOT the government’s,” the hypocrisy has been unrelenting. The news media truly did become “infotainment” and "the game” became all that mattered.

The greed and selfishness and the mantra of “it doesn’t matter how you win just as long as you win” became the steady media diet in commercials, game shows, sit coms, and celebrity worship. Remember “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous”? With the help of Jerry Springer turning “lowlife, wretched behavior” into popular entertainment, we moved directly to Paris Hilton, the Kardashians, Duck Dynasty, and Honey Boo Boo. Nearly every show on the Food Network, which used to actually demonstrate cooking, is now competition with only one winner, including several shows where you get to literally sabotage your competition or pay to screw them up. We conspire to “kick people off the island” or “out of the house.”

It has become the same in politics. Term limits eliminate knowledgable public servants and replace them with ideologues and corporate shills. The media provides very little actual background or context for any statement, nor does it actually refute even the most egregious and obvious lies. It merely plays the “he said/he said” game; it’s the outright proliferation of falsehood in the guise of fairness. The "US against THEM” mentality in politics has risen to a fever pitch to the point where people can honestly comfort themselves with the idea: "I don’t care what they say about my guy or what my guy says, our team picked him, so I’m for him. Also, I don’t care how specious the attacks on our opponents; even when I know they are false, I will repeat them incessantly. More importantly, the second I vote, I’m done and can get back to 'reality TV' and complaining about the government.”

This tirade is not just aimed at Republicans although it fits them most completely, but it has come to apply to most of society, who only vote at about a 40% rate or even less in non-presidential years.

Trump is, in part, the result of the philosophy of Ayn Rand pushed by Ronald Reagan, Paul Ryan, Ron Paul, Rand Paul, Justices John Roberts and Clarence Thomas, and the corporate oligarchs. Trump is an absurdly wealthy man with a populist, jingoistic, simplistic message. He is the radical right wing’s answer to FDR, except he has the added appeal of racism, sexism, ignorance, belligerence, and arrogance. He is nearly the perfect package. It's about time that we demand much better from both sides.

If Clinton is the nominee who faces Trump, those who want to make things better need to start today to defeat Trump, who is unquestionably the least qualified, least prepared, most reprehensible individual to stand for the office in any of our lifetimes.

Then, the second that Clinton wins, we need to work for greater transparency and limits on campaign spending; we need new and more effective regulation of the banks and Wall Street, including actually incarcerating wrongdoers instead of letting them merely write off fines or pass the costs to customers; we need to engage in much greater diplomacy and seek a significantly diminished role for the military in international affairs; we need a demilitarization of our local police forces; we need to bolster our social safety net, including Social Security and health care; we need to much more aggressively pursue alternative fuel sources; we need a serious effort to rebuild our infrastructure; we need to enforce and improve our environmental protections; we need to counter the 30 year push to privatize education, the military, government, public spaces, etc.; and we need to bring civil dialogue and negotiation back into our civil society. 

NONE of this will be easy, but hopefully Warren, Sanders, Franken, Clinton and many millions of dedicated citizens can begin to accomplish the changes that most of us know we need. 

A Nod to Walt Kelly & I Go Pogo—"We have met the enemy, and he is US!"

My last post on Facebook included a video about the media distortions and mob think to which we are so easily lead; when posted elsewhere, it got the response, "Well, I guess that's why the govt. sees us all as sheep."

My response— I think that you are right: many in the government do see the people as sheep. This story is the very opposite of government manipulation, but it may expose, as you suggest, why so many politicians and those who pull their strings think of us as such.

Although some jury awards have seemed overboard, and although frivolous or nuisance lawsuits can be used unfairly, the "Tort Reform" movement is cynically motivated by the same treacherous greed and perpetrated by the same corporate criminal interests that oppose all regulation of business. In a society ruled by true laissez faire (let business do whatever it wants with no government interference) and caveat emptor (let the buyer beware), the scoundrels and the sociopaths always have the upper hand.

Tort reform; deregulation; term limits; the "religious" right to refuse insurance protections to employees; union busting; the corporate right to intrude on employee's personal lives; gag orders in legal settlements; the absurd but shrewd idea that corporations are people and money is speech; the gutting of the Voting Rights Act; the unscrupulous purging of voter roles; the enactment of new registration and voting requirements that intentionally suppress voting; "No new taxes...ever!"; the cutting or eliminating programs for those in need while heaping incredible subsidies or bailouts on those who illegally foreclose on peoples' property or pollute and destroy the environment; unjustified and illegal wars pursued on false pretenses: All of these are part of the same movement, aided by the corporate controlled media, designed to decimate the middle class. A peasantry set at one another's throats for the few remaining crumbs really is a sensible goal for a ruthless, anti-social, plutocratic oligarchy.

The fact that so many of those elected to positions of power actually subscribe to a conflation of Ayn Rand's hypocritical social Darwinism and a misinterpretation of MIlton Friedman's "business has no moral responsibility except to make money" is due, for the most part, to the carefully cultivated cynicism, apathy, and cowardice of the American people who have come to care more about the new "American Idol," the latest "Survivor," or the latest irrelevant sexual scandal or lewd celebrity pictures on the net than they care about the running of our government or the welfare of our society and our world.

As a result of willful ignorance, intellectual ennui, and a nagging but indefinable sense of aggrievement, the populous is easily manipulated and roused to incomprehensible and often uncontrollable anger over calculated and intentionally distorted or spurious claims by demagogues (Ted Cruz being the latest puppet of the Right, though the left have theirs as well). After a few hours or occasionally even days of engagement, of course, the angry mob subsides to its disinterested apathy once again.

 WE ARE the GOVERNMENT, but in so many ways we have allowed our selfishness, cowardice, ignorance, and apathy to turn over our responsibilities and our interests to those who care little for the actual needs of the country but for whom ruthless self-interest and self-righteous hypocrisy are most useful tools.

"The Greatest Threat to Democracy is Hypocrisy! Seek Truth! Speak Truth!" Tim McMullen

Healthcare and the "It's My Money" Argument

A friend on Facebook posted an article about a chain store, Hobby Lobby, suing the government over the Affordable Care Act because of their religious opposition to contraception. Though the thread got a little off topic, the following reasonable question was raised about another commentator’s suggestion that we should have universal healthcare like 90% of the developed nations.

“Why should I be forced to pay for the irresponsibility of another person? Rights are restrictions on what other people can force upon you. You have the right to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness. You have the right to believe what you want, the right to go about doing whatever you want without being forced into doing anything with anybody else that you do not wish to participate in so long as you are not effecting there rights. How is it your birthright to take my money and pay for your healthcare if you choose to live a lifestyle that will cause medical problems?"

Granted, it missed the whole religious aspect of the contraception issue, but it asks a question many ask about taxes. What follows is my answer:

Fred, I was going to let this thread about a petty and spurious legal squabble slide since your response to my answer about the religious nature of the lawsuit was not a rebuttal but a complete reframing of the issue that was, again, completely irrelevant to the article. But after your answer to Amy’s question about universal healthcare, I feel compelled to weigh in.

I do not wish to attribute to you any assumptions or views that you do not hold, yet in order to respond to the underlying premises, I find it necessary to make some generalizations. I am not accusing you of or praising you for being a libertarian; however, your line of reasoning is along “libertarian” lines.

People like Ron Paul and Penn Gillette make compelling arguments about the intrusive and/or oppressive nature of government while elevating the rights of the individual over the demands of society. I am guessing that these arguments, if unexamined, have resonance with a majority Americans.

Ayn Rand’s vision of the exceptional, self-made man, the individualistic hero—Emerson and Thoreau’s “self-reliant” individual turned into a morally superior and anti-social megalomaniac—as well as Nietzsche’s “Übermensch” or “Superman,” has also found increasing popularity in an ethical, social, political, and economic milieu where the wages and rights of the worker have been significantly eroded while a new class of corporate mega-millionaires has been created.

Anyone born during or since Reagan’s reign has lived in a society in which “government IS the PROBLEM” has been the “common wisdom”; this is a “consensus” that was carefully designed and executed long before Reagan’s ascendancy, and one that continues to be bought and paid for by billions of corporate dollars spent to perpetuate that destructive falsehood. Government is NOT the problem. However, BAD government is ONE of the problems. Mythical distortions of history and anti-intellectualism are also problematic for a society as is an unsustainable economy predicated on personal greed and perpetual growth.

E.E. Cummings coined the phrase “shrill, collective myth” to describe a “popular” view of history. Our collective myth perpetuates some very powerful and laudable assumptions. You said, for example, “Rights are restrictions on what other people can force upon you.” This point, of course, stems from an assumption of “Natural Rights,” i.e., those rights that are “inalienable” and which apply equally to all humans, as opposed to “Legal Rights,” which are those rights conferred by the laws of a society. Jefferson included the phrase, “they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” If, by Creator (with a capital “C”) he meant God, then this very line of reasoning is not self-evident, but pure conjecture. The existence of God (as anthropomorphic being rather than as Tillich’s “Ultimate Concern”) is certainly not self-evident any more than basic rights are self-evident. This, on the other hand, does not mean that these enumerated rights are not good goals.

You also quote the brilliant “Declaration of Independence” directly: “You have the right to ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’” Of course, it is important to remember that the men who penned these phrases held and justified the holding of slaves, in essence, instantly contradicting all three provisions as far as slaves were concerned.

John Locke, the philosopher from whom much of the rationale for the “Declaration” was acquired, suggested in “A Letter Concerning Toleration”: “The commonwealth seems to me to be a society of men constituted only for the procuring, preserving, and advancing their own civil interests.  ¶Civil interests I call life, liberty, health, and indolency of body; and the possession of outward things, such as money, lands, houses, furniture, and the like.” Notice that he actually included health as one of these “civil interests.” These sentences were preceded by his analysis and dismissal of the “pretense” of claims by both church and magistrate as an excuse to dominate others. His rational analysis of and call for religious tolerance (which echoes Roger William’s essay “On the Bloudy Tenent of Persecution, 1644) is extremely pertinent and, I think you would agree, comes down solidly on the side of the Affordable Care Act and against Hobby Lobby.

Finally, you suggest the following: “You have the right to believe what you want, the right to go about doing whatever you want without being forced into doing anything with anybody else that you do not wish to participate in so long as you are not effecting there (sic) rights.” This is certainly true in a social vacuum, and as long as one lives completely outside of any human contact (and some would extend this to inter-species contact), such rights can remain sacrosanct. However, as soon as another individual enters the picture, such rights are either lost entirely, in the case of subjugation or domination, or compromised in ways that accommodate both individuals. This is the nature of society. I completely agree with your characterization of lofty goals, and I would tend to agree with Locke and Jefferson (and with you, perhaps?) that governments came into existence to “secure these rights.”

Unfortunately, lofty goals aside, the argument nearly always degenerates into an argument about “MY MONEY!” and returns us to the fiction of the “self-made man” and the “self-made money.” I would be happy to address this “we made this” fallacy elsewhere, but here it simply comes down to the simple fact that taxes are not the government stealing from the individual, it is the individual consenting to be taxed as a part of being the governed.

As Locke said in “Sec. 140.” Of the Second Treatise of Civil Government, after spending paragraphs explaining why no person can be legally deprived of property, he avers: “It is true, governments cannot be supported without great charge, and it is fit every one who enjoys his share of the protection, should pay out of his estate his proportion for the maintenance of it. But still it must be with his own consent, i.e. the consent of the majority, giving it either by themselves, or their representatives chosen by them: for if any one shall claim a power to lay and levy taxes on the people, by his own authority, and without such consent of the people, he thereby invades the fundamental law of property, and subverts the end of government: for what property have I in that, which another may by right take, when he pleases, to himself?”

Therefore, roads and schools and military and police and business regulations and health care that the society, through their representative government, deem worthy of securing, is a fundamental part of a societal construct. That our own society has abdicated Locke’s “civil interest” in health is a moral disgrace, and the fact that we have relegated basic health protections to the private profiteers is something that we actually should be up in arms about.

This brings us to your view of “health” and “health care.” You argue, “How is it your birthright to take my money and pay for your healthcare if you choose to live a lifestyle that will cause medical problems?" Are you arguing that all health issues can be avoided through lifestyle choices? Mitigated, certainly, but avoided? Of course not. What of the child born with a disease or who contracts one early in life? Was that a result of the child’s lifestyle? If not, would you admit that this child has a birthright to health care? Or is this individual’s life merely determined by the vagaries of wealth and whether or not the family can afford it? We have a right, as a society, to agree otherwise.

If I knowingly eat spoiled food, I am an idiot. But do we, as a part of our consent to be governed have a right to demand that the government regulate those who make and provide food so that it is not spoiled when we eat it? Do we have a right to demand that corporations not pollute our environment or that when they do, we, as a society, have a right to extract both compensation and punishment for that harm (a basic Lockean premise from the same paragraph of his letter quoted above).

I have no children. You appear to argue that the government taking my money and paying for the education of someone else’s children is inherently wrong. Howard Jarvis, the demagogue who led the “taxpayers’ revolt” with Prop 13 in California is still hailed as a guiding light by many. He stated unequivocally that he did not believe in public education. I believe that Howard Jarvis and Paul Gann were idiots about tax policy (or more likely, knowing con men), sycophants for the corporatocracy parading as “grass roots” organizers, an early example of “astro-turfing,” and direct contributors to our current economic woes.

I, however, would not begrudge their children a public education nor would I deny their fundamental social right to health care. Ironically, Paul Gann contracted AIDS, apparently from a transfusion, and at the end of his life, he was an advocate for AIDS treatment and patient’s rights. The "Paul Gann Blood Safety Act" (California Health and Safety Code Section 1645(b)) mandates that physicians discuss the risks of blood transfusions. Public money well spent on government intervention to protect the health of individuals. Just like public money well spent on public education, fire and safety enforcement, infrastructure, business regulations, and health care—including contraception.

We, as citizens, have every right to demand that our tax dollars are “well spent,” and we have a right to argue about how to spend them, but we don’t have a right to individually withhold it on religious or personal grounds. I, of course, also think that Churches who participate in political activity either in the pulpit or through campaign contributions as well as any “non-profit” (501(c)(3)’s, like Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS, that engage in political activity should also be taxed, but that, again, is a different argument for a different time.

Personally, I sort of like the idea of voters getting to “check off” where their tax dollars will go. I am enraged and outraged that my taxes support the murdering of innocent civilians by “video game” (drone); the protection and subsidizing of irresponsible, criminal, and in some cases, murderous corporations and their management; and myriad other examples of what I see as misuses of government, i.e., tax-payer, funds. But until we, the governed, create such a system, then it is unfair and unreasonable to argue that the government is usurping or commandeering or “stealing” your money simply because you object to how it is used. Lobby to change it, or revolt to change it, but to argue coercion on a particular specific is, at the very least, disingenuous.

Encouraging De Tocqueville's Slippery Slope

In a recent post on my brother’s Facebook page, one of his friends commented on a graphic deriding those who could not differentiate between Joseph Stalin and Barack Obama. He quoted Alexis De Tocqueville, from Democracy in America, as follows:

"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years.”

He then added, “Sounds like Obamacare and many more of the entitlement programs to me.”

I am offering this lengthy treatise because I think that we fall too easily into the use of catch phrases, code words, and intellectual short cuts to demonize rather than think about real issues. “Obamacare,” “entitlements,” “nanny state,” “socialism,” “big government,” “liberal,” “conservative,” “tax and spend,” “job killers,” etc., are pejoratives used to obfuscate and denigrate rather than to understand problems and find real solutions.

Benjamin Franklin, in his “Speech to the Convention, 1789,” after a very clever use of irony and self deprecation in his intro, said, “In these sentiments, Sir, I agree to this Constitution with all its faults, if they are such; because I think a general Government necessary for us, and there is no form of Government but what may be a blessing to the people if well administered, and believe farther that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in Despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic Government, being incapable of any other.”

Forty-five to fifty years later, De Tocqueville made a great number of astute observations and suggestions about democracy in America in Democracy in America. In the above quote, De Tocqueville echoed much of Franklin’s sentiment.

I would suggest that, in this case, his prediction and admonition in Chapter XX, comes much closer to what has actually happened in the last forty years. He said, “I am of the opinion, on the whole, that the manufacturing aristocracy which is growing up under our eyes is one of the harshest that ever existed in the world; but at the same time it is one of the most confined and least dangerous [What do you think he would say now?]. Nevertheless, the friends of democracy should keep their eyes anxiously fixed in this direction; for if ever a permanent inequality of conditions and aristocracy again penetrates into the world, it may be predicted that this is the gate by which they will enter.”

Speaking of “slippery slopes,“(another of the commentators suggested this premise), we actually have two occurring, both of which are conflicting impulses found in De Tocqueville. One slippery slope that he championed was equality and social justice. He saw the rise of these trends over hundreds of years of history, and the demise of the aristocracy was one of the most important in the evolution of equality and social justice. He deeply admired America for having created the world’s best effort at accomplishing these principles both consciously, through the creation of its institutions, and unconsciously, through the character and aspirations of the people.

The other slippery slope is the rise of another aristocracy that could exploit what he called the principles of “manufactures” to the point where the workers are essentially disenfranchised, and the “owners” control the government; thus, another route to despotism other than “majority” wanting to feed off the largesse of government.

Only thirty years after De Tocqueville published his tome, we had the rise of the “Robber Barons” and the exploitation of wage slavery until the rise of labor began to curb some of the most egregious excesses. With Theodore Roosevelt, we get the first inklings of “progressive” government as an actual protector of the “people’s” interests and rights and a hedge against the exploitation and domination of bosses and corporations. Jim Crow, of course, was still alive and well, and women were still disenfranchised, but workers began to have a glimmer of hope in achieving the equality and social justice that the author of Democracy in America envisioned.

Until the latter part of the 1960’s, we saw a steady rise in equality and justice which some might argue created a strong middle class and others might suggest resulted from that strong middle class. Either way, pensions, health care, overtime, five day work weeks, concern for the environment, concern for the health and safety of workers and consumers, all became attainable.  These improvements were, of course, fought viciously every step of the way by those who profited from a workforce at the mercy of their masters (as De Tocqueville called them). After the massive defeat of Barry Goldwater’s brand of fiscal conservatism, the corporatocracy put millions of dollars into think tanks and media manipulation. Eventually, they found their front man in the form of affable but feisty Ronald Reagan who gleefully attacked government as “the problem” and espoused deregulation and the free reign of business to exploit and manipulate at will.

A slavish acceptance of Milton Friedman’s fantasy “free market” philosophy, a whole-hearted adoption of Arthur Laffer’s laughable (but devastating) “supply-side” economics, combined with a similar cherry-picking of Ayn Rand’s antithetical distortion of Emerson’s “Self Reliance,” and you get forty years of lax regulation, deregulation, and manipulation of the marketplace that have lead to the destruction of journalism and objective reporting, the savings and loan debacle, the energy fraud (Enron), the dot com bubble collapsing, the housing crisis, the banking crisis, “too big to fail,” ad infinitum.

Thoreau said, in his essay, “On the Duty of Resistance to Civil Government (1848)” (aka “Civil Disobedience”), “The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right. It is truly enough said that a corporation has no conscience; but a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience.” On the other hand, Milton Friedman declared that profit was the only moral duty of a corporation or a business man, and he lambasted the idea that business had any kind of social responsibility as “socialism,” which was, to him, of course, the most extreme negative attack in his arsenal of derision.

I see the current assaults on women’s rights, workers’ rights, immigrants’ rights, gay rights, health and safety regulations, environmental regulations, et al, as a last gasp of a newly emerged and rapidly expanded oligarchy to turn back the inevitable march of equality and social justice and promote the specious fable of a “meritocracy” that in reality rewards fraud, malfeasance, and injustice. Unfortunately, last gasps can last a long time, and if we, as a society, buy into the grotesque misuse of “Self Reliance” as a justification for “Social Darwinism,” a premise which the corporate oligarchs have been trying to sell us for over thirty years, rather than understanding the actual moral import of both Emerson’s essay or Darwin’s book, it will be a long slog indeed.

"The Greatest Threat to Democracy is Hypocrisy! Seek Truth! Speak Truth!"

Tim McMullen

Should We Fear David Brooks' "Population Implosion"?

Danny O'Keefe shared an article by David Brooks titled "The Fertility Implosion" which expresses Brooks' growing trepidation about birthrates falling worldwide. Danny offered the following intro: "A major point in this article is that when people expand their income ability (usually with the benefit of greater education) they rely less on large families. The Earth could use less people. If the capacity to create and retain wealth grows, then the only real problem with maintaining an equity standard would seem to be fair distribution. If that sounds like socialism then let your granny starve."

I responded:
Danny, I agree with your analysis of the issue, but I don't think Brooks does. Perhaps I am just so jaded by all the recent assaults on women's rights, but this reads to me like a subtle admonishment to the advocates of birth control that we are controlling ourselves out of "prosperity."

The irony of this way of thinking is that it is predicated on the interpolation or conflation of the perceived need for large families due to the low life expectancy juxtaposed with the capitalistic fantasy of endless growth for prosperity. The irony stems from the fact, as you have pointed out, that increased population does not mean increased economic growth when the wealth is siphoned off by a tiny percentage and the trajectory of the "trickle" ceases to be "down."

It is likely that, with the technology that David Brooks acknowledges, we could, indeed, feed the world and not only successfully sustain life but improve living conditions for all. This cannot occur, however, when the system designed to provide that sustenance is predicated on promoting predators and sacrificing workers to a slave-like subsistence.

Brooks laments the fertility implosion because the system he supports demands a perpetual supply of an ever cheaper and harder working labor force (i.e., the hilarious misnomer: increased productivity) who do not share in the profits that their labor creates. Adam Smith would not recognize this grotesque perversion of his theory of capitalism as distorted by the amoral and immoral elevation of greed and selfishness by the likes of Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand, two unlikely but sympathetic bedfellows, whose acolytes recite snippets of their philosophies like mantras without an inkling of understanding.

In OUR TOWN, Wilder has an angry man ask Editor Webb (the play's most centered and level headed character, played, incidentally, by Ronny Cox in the excellent 1977 TV production), "“Is there no one in town aware of social injustice and industrial inequality?” To which Editor Webb replies:

"I guess we’re all huntin’ like everybody else for a way the diligent and sensible can rise to the top and the lazy and quarrelsome sink to the bottom. But it ain’t easy to find. Meantime, we do all we can to take care of those who can’t help themselves."

In the last thirty years, we have completely reversed these goals, rewarding and promoting corruption and fraud as the methodology of the quarrelsome and lazy gamers of the system while the diligent and sensible see their prospects squeezed out of them as that desire to help others is seen as a foolish weakness and unaffordable indulgence: Socialism, if you will.

My guess is that the only way to turn this delusional, self-destructive juggernaut around is by simultaneously and wholeheartedly supporting workers rights, women's rights, immigrants' rights, LGBT rights everywhere in the world, coupled with a profound respect for and aggressive protection of the environment. If we can do those "simple" things, we just might overcome this offensive glitch in the slow but inevitable evolution of freedom on this little speck of dust.