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. 

The Game Needs to Change—We Need to Put the Civil Back into Civil Society

I am deeply tired of the "who can be uglier" race that we currently have going on in both parties. On the Republican side, it is the candidates themselves that have tried to prove that they are MORE racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, and greedy than the next guy. On the Democratic side, we have the spectacle of the candidates being relatively cordial and actually talking about (to be honest, rather minor) differences of opinion while their partisans on social media bend over backwards to be the most offensive, outrageous, hate mongers and conspiracy theorists, outdoing the Republican machine in their trashing of the other's candidate. It's like the idiotic anger and elation at a mindless and meaningless sporting event except, in this game, the opponent is, obviously, the Devil incarnate.

This election is serious, perhaps the most serious in my experience with politics, and I remember the Eisenhower/Stevenson contest in 1956. The first time that I was eligible to vote for Governor was 1970, and I voted against Ronald Reagan. I have voted in every election since then. I have also watched the intentional dumbing down and incivility of the electoral process since the Republicans lost so badly with Goldwater in 1964. The rhetoric of Nixon but especially Agnew took the discussion to a new level of vitriol. Reagan continued the all out assault on "liberals," but it was the election of Bill Clinton that ushered in the new era of Conservative talk radio and, with the deregulation and consolidation of media, the advent of NEWSCorp, FOX News, Clear Channel, and and the no-holds barred, partisan, mischaracterization, distortion, and outright lying that has simply come to be accepted as spin. The media, including social media, has been not merely complicit but instrumental in this negative transformation. Just like Scalia's court decision about innocence, the actual truth is completely irrelevant. The news no longer presents actual perspective or context. They don't even try to find and present the truth. They merely offer a "he said/he said" paraphrased report or 3-seconds of edited footage with whichever slant their corporate masters have demanded.

Unfortunately, most people have not demanded better; instead, we have bought into their game. We do not find ourselves talking about what really matters and our vison of what this country should be or how we might get there. We simply post ridiculous graphics with false quotes and sarcastic gibes to make the other side look foolish or corrupt and then gleefully attack the other side for their obvious ignorance, stupidity or evil.

I posit the following. I don't care if you are for Sanders, Clinton, Warren or Obama, Trump, Cruz, Kasich or Paul. The only way that we will ever crawl out of the miasmic mire in which we have sunk ourselves is to begin to actually think deeply, discuss civilly, and listen carefully—repeating the process indefinitely—until the fog of corrupt corporate control has lifted, and we can return to the business of creating a civil civil society (This is not a mistaken repetition—"civil" needs to be at the heart of a progressive civilization).

Demand that the President "Seek Truth" & Corporations "Speak Truth!"

To the President of the United States:

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

Please use this ban on stealth dollars as the beginning salvo to rein in the distorting and destructive abuse of corporate dollars on our political process.

Thirty years of corrupt "free market" fraud has brought us to the brink of disaster. You serve the American people, and they deserve your concerted effort on their behalf as opposed to the continued collusion between government and the private sector that has created the greatest disparity of wealth in this country's history and that has driven us to become the fourth worst country in the world regarding wealth distribution and income disparity.

Thirty years of the morally (and legally) corrupt and corrosive falsehoods of Milton Friedman and Arthur Laffer's "Reaganomics," the band wagon boondoggles of the "New Democratic Clintonomics," and the outright destruction of America's working class during ten years of unfettered, deregulated rape of the world economy and the unmitigated destruction of the social safety net by the "Bush Doctrine" (Anyone who we perceive to be a threat—with or without evidence—we have a right to take out!)

That doctrine, as absurd and patently hypocritical as it is (i.e., it is the precise rationale for committing acts of terror), was barely used in military terms, but it was used consistently and repeatedly to attempt to wipe out 100 years of progressive reforms and protections for the American worker and citizen against the unconscionable abuses of a corrupt and criminal corporate capitalism.

You were elected to stop the hemorrhaging of the economic and social structures of this country caused by unchecked corporate fraud and greed. You have not yet succeeded. This would be an important step in restoring sanity and justice to the country.

Please bring the abuses of government contractors to an end now, by demanding transparency in their spending of taxpayer dollars to subvert the taxpayers' interests.

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

Tim McMullen

Check out this video and this call to action from MoveOn.org

http://pol.moveon.org/militarycontractors?id=27605-15276185-tWdV60x&t=5