The only way to protect voting rights is by this thing called the Fifteenth Amendment. That Fifteenth Amendment which has been stuck in a locker for most of its life, except for the voting rights act, which John Roberts eviscerated in twenty-thirteen.
That’s it.
If you don’t have people willing to protect the Fifteenth Amendment then you don’t have voting rights. It’s as simple as that.
In private groups – where you’re not invited – we share our bewilderment of your descent into madness. We all have stories about how we’ve cut ties with you, our family and former friends, because we don’t want your hatred poisoning our social media streams. We can’t stand to listen to you vomiting the lies of your cult, day after day. You used to be different. We liked you. But now that we know what was inside your heart all along, we’ve decided you don’t deserve to know about our lives.
I love every stinking word of that article. I love and agree with every single letter, space and punctuation. Tell him I sent you, if you click the link and read the whole thing. Since this is one of my #MAGA articles, I’m betting you, dear reader, won’t do that.
Joe Biden won the election. I realize this is news to you because your cult leader and his approved media sources won’t tell you that Donald Trump lost the election for U.S. President, but that is the truth as verified by the recent votes of the electoral college. It really shouldn’t matter that the electoral college votes one way or the other, but in the United States we have some pretty weird ideas about what it means to win an election.
Seven million (give or take) seven million more people voted for Joe Biden. Seven million more people voted for Joe Biden than voted for Donald Trump. When seven million more people vote for Joe Biden, he wins the election. That is just basic math, and it is also the way that the electoral college was supposed to work:
It was supposed to work that way originally, and it could well work that way again unless we get rid of it entirely. Seven million more people voted for Joe Biden, and still the currently sitting (lame duck) President and his supporters think that they have the umph to make him president for a second term. I don’t think they understand the basic math that is at play here. I have some visual aids for this article, because the Misguided Appallingly Gullible Americans apparently can’t understand what 7 million more votes for Joe Biden actually represents.
There are more of us than there are of you. Seven million more of us. Do you get the picture now? We are rapidly approaching the New Year as I sit here typing this. The 117th Congress will be sworn in and seated on January 3rd. The votes of the electoral college will be counted on January 6th. Barring antics by Republicans that slip through the net and attempt to sabotage the the electoral vote count, Joe Biden will be sworn in as president on January 20th.
The trumpists can either learn how to live with the fact that they and their cult-leader lost the election, or they can overthrow the legitimately elected government with trickery on January 6th or with insurrection sometime before January 20th. In either case, they will have chosen to end what has been seen as normal for the United States since 1789:
Local officials in Texas say they plan to fight a new order from Gov. Greg Abbott to limit the number of places where voters can hand deliver mail-in ballots.
Abbott announced the order Thursday, the same day local election officials opened the drop-off sites.
I’ve been of the opinion for decades now that the governor’s office has overstepped its constitutional bounds. It started with Pointy Boots, err, Rick Perry, but Abbott has stretched the areas that the office was intended to govern into areas that are far beyond constitutional intents. I know that interfering in city and county business was exactly what the writers of the Texas constitution were trying to prevent, and yet Abbott has done this routinely over the last few years with the legislature’s help.
Local officials, both county and city, should call his bluff this time. Tell him that he can either get the Secretary of State to issue a guideline that makes that limitation on balloting official (but still questionable) or he can drag the legislature back into session to make the voting changes he calls for a legislative directive that is demonstrably constitutional. Otherwise, tough. The counties make those kinds of decisions and the counties have already made their decisions.
Greg Abbott is not the dictator of Texas, he’s just the governor. His job is to look pretty, sign bills and cut ribbons. That is the extent of his power. That he can only do two of those things is not our problem.
The district court was wrong to rewrite Texas law. But the distinguished judge who did so was simply following in the Governor’s footsteps,” Ho wrote. “It is surely just as offensive to the Constitution to rewrite Texas election law by executive fiat as it is to do so by judicial fiat. Yet that is what occurred here.
“There was a drive that was left out from the D’Iberville Civic Center,” Newman’s campaign manager Holly Gibbes said. “Those numbers were never counted. (Harrison County Circuit Clerk) Connie Ladner‘s office produced that thumb drive today and added it in.
“The thumb drive and all the affidavits, absentees and what could be counted is what put Dixie up by one vote.”
Gibbes said there are still three affidavit votes that have yet to be certified. Those three voters have 96 hours to bring their photo IDs to Ladner’s office in the Gulfport courthouse. Those individuals and their votes are only known by Ladner.
I’ve never understood why we do anything we do the way we do it. Everytime some moron gets caught doing stupid stuff like this people start chanting Paper ballots! Paper ballots! I get that paper ballots are more reliable and provide an alternative when an initial count goes awry. A paper trail comes in handy when you screw up counting the votes the first time, like the officials clearly have screwed the count up for this race in Mississippi, this time. They’re going to need paper ballots to recount now. Hope they have them. But how about we don’t screw up the vote the first time, when we go to vote in the future? Why don’t we start with that?
Yes, the current crop of electronic voting machines are questionable in accuracy and are pretty much just black boxes filled with proprietary software authored by the lowest bidder in a government contract executed more than twenty years ago. I’ll grant that they are shabby and their ability to count accurately is questionable. But even given all of that, why on Earth would you a) put electronic voting records on a thumb drive, EVER and b) why would the entity entrusted with counting those ballots ever accept votes that were passed on that way? We make all this crap way, way harder than it has to be.
There is encryption software out there now that could keep your identity as a voter private, but at the same time tell third parties who your vote was for. There is blockchain bookkeeping to keep all of those individual ballots together and properly tabulated. But instead of using the technology we have available to us now, we are sneaker-netting the ballots on thumb drives? Why bother to count at all if that’s the level of security we’re relying on? Heads he’s elected, tails she is sounds just about as effective. A lot cheaper, too.
Yes, paper ballots are preferable to that kind of crap, but why are we doing things that way in the first place? We start the election on this or that day, we hold the ballots open with every person able to verify their ballot is still present and correct until the day when the voting is supposed to end, and then we hold the election ‘open’ until the count is done AND everyone has verified their vote was in the count.
Thumbdrives? Thumbdrives. (shakes head in disgust) I need a drink.
Mississippi passed a voter ID law 2014. That law require voters to show state approved photo identification at the polls. If you show up to vote without a “proper” ID, you can still vote, but you have to return to the district voting office within 96 hours and show your ID. If you don’t, your vote doesn’t count.
So, they’ve got a law to certify voters, but not one for … thumb drives.
You must hold this administration, every administration, accountable. Every Congressman. Every Senator. Every general. Every CEO who takes taxpayer money. Every political party. Every media outlet. Every journalist. Ask the questions and demand the answers. Never stop. Show up for every election, no matter how minor. Educate yourself on the candidates and the issues before the election.
Jim Wright at Stonekettle Station was referencing the subject of the Orange Hate-Monkey‘s (OHM) military plans when he titled his piece Caveat Emptor. The OHM is selling us a military vision in his usual huckster fashion. The most glorious military you’ve ever seen. Anyone who believes this to be true is as dumb as the people wiring their account info to 419 scammers thinking they’re going to win big. Pretty much just as Jim tells the story.
When I used the title Caveat Emptor, I was speaking to the selling of the OHM’s alter ego, Trump the businessman, Trump the deal-maker and fixer. Caveat Emptor, buyer beware. You are being sold a bill of goods. You are being taken. Guard your wallet. The OHM is none of those things. The OHM is a money launderer, serial philanderer, and a thief. Not necessarily in that order.
When I get a quotable snippet from one of Jim’s articles, I tend to post it all over the place so as to do him a favor and drive traffic to his website. Since I can’t afford to pay him for what he writes, the least I can do is promote him where he isn’t already being promoted. I posted the above quote to Google’s idea of a social platform, Google+ as well as a few other places, but I only got replies on G+, and what I got in response came out of the anarchist/voluntaryist wings of the political spectrum, a commandment to vote harder.
I recognized the flavor of this attack almost immediately. Voting is useless. Voting doesn’t fix anything. Ah, we’re dealing with a libertarian here. I have little to no patience with libertarians, having quit that cult not so long ago. I don’t participate in government (as the snippet demands) to achieve anything specific for me personally. My personal goals are not what voting achieves. This is a core problem with libertarianism specifically and individualism generally. Voting isn’t about me and it isn’t about you or anyone else specifically. This is true of most life experience, but try explaining this fact to a libertarian or anarchist. It’ll go right over their heads.
But that isn’t to say that voting and government as a structure haven’t achieved measurable good. General goods have been achieved and the list is nearly endless. Longer even than the evils that government has created through its existence. It is always that way with the tools we create. The evil comes with the good.
The elderly no longer have to die penniless and alone. The sick now have places to go to be cared for. The poor have the beginnings of structure that could end their poverty if used properly. Libertarians will say these goods were achieved by use of force because they don’t understand the nature of money, the meaning of money, etc.but they insist on force being applied to them before yielding so that they can say told you so. I know because I’ve seen this done many times over the years. That is the definition of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
You libertarians and anarchists, you crazy right-wing armaphiles, you are not any deader when the cops shoot you for armed resistance than the dead black guy who just happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. What you are buying with your money is death, exactly like funding a military is buying death. The trick, just in case you are wondering, is to outlive the other guy, which means you are failing to understand what you are buying if you end up dead in the process. Caveat Emptor. There’s some good advice offered gratis. Don’t say I never gave you anything.
Facebook wants me to use Facebook to contact my representatives in government. I’ll get to the issue of my never giving Facebook the authority to be the messenger to and from my representatives in government eventually. First I would like to explain why none of these people really want to hear from me again.
There is one preliminary quibble I need to get out of the way. Facebook claims my local government representatives are on Facebook. this is false. Austin’s mayor is on Facebook as part of this new Townhall function they’ve come up with, so there is a representative of my local government. But not nearly all of them, or even more than that one. No one below that, local townsfolk who have actual knowledge of what I need and might want to say to them are on Facebook as part of this function that Facebook has given itself. None of them; City Manager, City Councilmember, County Commissioners, Justice of the Peace, County Clerk, Municipal Court, Police Department, Fire Department, EMS, Austin Utilities, Texas Gas, Or the various information service providers, all of whom are between me and my access to Facebook who has deemed itself my conduit to speaking to my government representatives, are listed as being part of this townhall dublafluwichy they’ve invented for Facebook.
Now, these guys? These guys aren’t local, but one of them was. So I’ll follow him. He’s also the only one of these people who would willingly take a call from me personally and not actually ignore anything I say, so he’s the only one worth talking to. Now, you could say, What about Dawnna Dukes? She’s local. Yeah, she’s local, but there’s no point in talking to her. She wasn’t present to do her job this session in congress, and I voted for her for the first time in 2016 only because she promised she’d retire and let a special session pick her replacement. This time around I will vote for anybody who runs against her in the primary. Anybody. I’ll vote for anybody running against her in the general. Anybody. That’s how much I want her out of the seat she’s sitting in.
The other two state Schmos? The ones who represent the entire state of Texas? I’ve never voted for either of them at any point in history, and I doubt that I ever will. One of them is a crazed religious zealot who wants to kick all Hispanics out of the state of Texas and thinks that the transgendered, homosexuals and atheists are threats to the christian way of life, and the other one is Dan Patrick. The less said about him the better.
These guys are definitely not local. District twenty-five is a gerrymandered piece of shit that the Texas GOP came up with to get rid of what was then the only sitting Texas Democrat in the House of Representatives. They failed. He’s still there sitting in the seat he inherited from J.J. Jake Pickle.
Roger Williams is from Killeen, a place way up North of Austin. He’s not local. If Texas was broken up like the Atlantic states are, He’d be from Maine while I was from Connecticut. Not even vaguely similar. Killeen is as much like Austin as a Catholic is like a Baptist. Jesus is their shared savior but they aren’t exactly sure how that is.
Likewise John Cornyn is from Texas but his notion of what Texas is and mine will never be the same. Ted Cruz is Ted Cruz. I’ve talked to both of them before. I’d rather have a conversation with my dog. I’m pretty sure my dog understands me better and I’m quite comfortable calling my dog a friend I can relate to. If I could relate to those two I don’t think I’d be able to sleep at night.
All three of those guys, Williams, Cornyn and Cruz are on the same list as Dawnna Dukes, which is a low point for Democrats for me. The one Democrat who represents me is the one Democrat I want to be rid of; the one Democrat that I would vote for anybody on the ticket other than her. The other three are just typical Texas Republicans. People I generally have no use for but are stuck in the same state with anyway. Their twisted values are as familiar to me as the taint of oil refinery polluted air around Houston and Borger. The shell-shocked town of West. The destitute colonias along the Texas-Mexico border. No, I know these people quite well. They are the problem, not the solution.
All of the negative observations above goes double for both Mike Pence and Donald Trump. Mike Pence may end up being the person in charge of the federal government but that will only be because the Orange Hate-Monkey (OHM) is completely incapable of holding government office successfully. His probable presidency will not be because Mike Pence has the slightest clue in which direction reality lies or an idea of what good governance is or might be. He’s only the Vice President because the OHM picked someone everyone would be less inclined to trust than him. We can’t impeach Trump, then we’d have to face President Pence. Except we have to impeach Trump because he’s probably a lunatic, making him more dangerous to the world than a President Pence would be to us.
Having now taken the tour of Facebook’s townhall offering, I’d like to make a counter-offer. Be careful, Facebook. You are starting to look like the Post Office. The Post Office was Benjamin Franklin’s invention that allowed an informed public to be created and through it for representative governance to be possible. If you are the Post Office, then you are subject to direct federal oversight. You are a part of government; and as such, can be dictated to by the exact same representatives you list for me to contact. You can be altered, ordered or dismantled by the government without an appeal to the population at large. Without a claim to private business or privacy protections. Branches of government can come and go at the government’s whim.
With a user base of over a billion people, I have to wonder if there is anything with enough power to bring you to heel? I’m beginning to doubt that there is an entity with enough authority to govern the internet in general and Facebook in particular. But it may be about time that we starting talking about that kind of authority, if not well past that time.
It was voter suppression 100 years ago and more, and it is still voter suppression today. The solution to the problem that they don’t’ have and won’t undertake is to make voting mandatory and thereby make any and all documents affirming your citizenship legitimate proof of voter eligibility. These kinds of people would much rather put barriers up that only allow conservatives to vote, this is the personal track record for each and every member of the commision that is visible to anyone who cares to look.
After Kobach’s opinion piece was published by Breitbart, Democratic Sens. Hassan and Jeanne Shaheen issued a joint statement accusing Kobach of trying to “mislead the public” in order to “lay the groundwork for broad-scale, politically motivated voter suppression.”
“The law clearly states that college students and other New Hampshire residents can vote without a New Hampshire ID, and these false partisan claims are deliberately twisting the facts,” Hassan and Shaheen wrote.
The cashiering of the entire panel shortly after I wrote the above paragraph rendered the entirety of what I was going to say on the subject largely moot.
What you’re reading now is a multiple-concept piece amalgamated from several other pieces, reworked and re-edited so many times I’ve lost count. The fact that several of my Facebook friends are now openly endorsing an unapologetic authoritarian, that I have severed my long-time association with the Liberty Dollar over their new commemorative coin, pushes me to complete this piece even though I remain dissatisfied with the way that it firms up.
I am troubled by undercurrents in politics that are presenting themselves these days. I have been troubled since I wrote the article Obama Best President Since Eisenhower and my tepid acceptance of who the next president should be, titled Hillary for President? What troubles me is elusive. It is hard to give it a label. It is even harder to find people discussing the perturbations that aren’t actually trying to cover them up in some way. This tendency to hide true motivations has made the process of expressing my concerns even harder to elucidate, to solidify into words, than they normally are.
I’ve written and rewritten this article more than a few times now with various titles and themes. It started out as Feudalism vs. Socialism, but I couldn’t get a handle on what precisely feudalism was based on the judgement of historians. None of them agree on what it was, when it started and when it ended. The death blow was that The Wife hated the original piece. She essentially forbade me to publish it because it was beneath me. I almost did publish it, but I knew I could do better.
To imagine that our times are defined primarily by the struggle between “liberalism” and “conservatism” or between the Democratic and Republican parties is to be dangerously distracted and misled. There is a struggle that defines our times, all right, but it’s a struggle over what the United States of America is all about—what “America” means. And we have to be aware of this struggle and recognize it for what it is.
Here’s our task: We have to begin framing the debate not as liberal or conservative, Democratic or Republican, but as equality or neo-Confederacy. We have to do this every time we speak, every time we write.
We have to do this because we have to push the Democratic Party to stand for equality, not for equality-except-in-politics-and-economics.
We have to know what a progressive, pro-equality position is and what a neo-Confederate position is on every issue—which position promotes freedom for all, and which promotes only the “liberties” of a lucky, privileged class. We have to present those positions to every Democratic candidate and ask her to choose one, and if she chooses the patrician position, we have to ask her why she’s favoring inequality over equality. We have to make her see equality as sensible and popular and inequality as radical and unthinkable.
Because unless we have a Democratic Party that unequivocally stands for equality and rejects inequality—social, political and economic—we can’t have an America that stands for equality.
The Republicans have gone all in for neo-Confederate authoritarianism. We have to go all in, too, for liberty, equality, justice and dignity for all—or the long arc of the moral universe will bend away from us, away from justice, and back into the darkness of rule by force and fear.
Equality is the founding principle of socialism, of humanism, no matter how poorly attempts to bring the notions of socialism into the world have failed, equality remains its basis. I tossed the idea out to see if it floated at a BBS I’ve been known to frequent with the title Egalitarianism vs. Kyriarchy, and got some interesting (and not so interesting) feedback. I just couldn’t get it to gel the way I wanted, so I disgustedly shelved the piece again.
Continuing my exploration of concepts, I ran across this Vox article The Rise of American Authoritarianism. That was when it hit me, the label for at least one of the forces at play in the world:
The political phenomenon we identify as right-wing populism seems to line up, with almost astonishing precision, with the research on how authoritarianism is both caused and expressed
After an early period of junk science in the mid-20th century, a more serious group of scholars has addressed this question, specifically studying how it plays out in American politics: researchers like Hetherington and Weiler, Stanley Feldman, Karen Stenner, and Elizabeth Suhay, to name just a few.
The field, after a breakthrough in the early 1990s, has come to develop the contours of a grand theory of authoritarianism, culminating quite recently, in 2005, with Stenner’s seminal The Authoritarian Dynamic — just in time for that theory to seemingly come true, more rapidly and in greater force than any of them had imagined, in the personage of one Donald Trump and his norm-shattering rise.
Authoritarianism is old, as old as humanity. Everyone in some corner of their mind can find some kinship with the notions of the great man, someone we can turn to in order to fix the problems that trouble us. If we can hand it all to him, he will make it alright. That is authoritarianism, in a nutshell. It manifests in the current election in the two counter-culture Presidential candidates Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, but the dream of the great man predates all of us.
What is the other force though? The other codifying idea that people coalesce around. It really isn’t socialism per se. Those with authority want you to believe that capitalism vs. socialism is the fight that continues. The holders of old money, the inheritors of new money, the powerful who want to retain power. They raise the specter of socialism like a bogeyman to scare those of us who remember when socialism was the masque worn by dictators across Europe and Asia.
The mind reels at trying to communicate the fear that the word socialism engenders in the minds of people who remember the Berlin wall as a real barrier people were shot crossing. How to communicate the history? Twenty-eight years before 9/11/2001, back in the time when 2001 was a symbol of a bright future in a film yet to be made, I was born. Born in the same year that JFK’s Camelot came to an end. My mother escaped from Europe on the heels of what she figured was the beginning of WWIII, the general suspicion of the time being that the USSR had a hand in the death of our president. The end of an age, the beginning of another one.
What were those years like, what was the feeling during that time? It’s hard even for me to say. From 1963 to 1969 there was assassination after assassination in the political sphere. JFK. MLK. RFK. The riots. The marches. Vietnam. Then the 70’s. Nixon and Watergate. The fall of Saigon. Carter and the oil embargo. The Iran hostage crisis. The return of Ronald Reagan.
I graduated high school out in flyover country and Red Dawn was seen as prophetic when it premiered in 1984. I mean really prophetic, not some kind of hokey, campy the Russkies are coming to get us kind of joke you hear so often these days. We knew the commies were coming to get us, it was just a matter of time. The feds in DC were the real joke because they had no idea what was going on in the world.
How could there be a bright future in 2001 while Red Dawn was a real prophecy of the failure of capitalism, both at the same time? That was/is the kind of discord present in every mind that thinks there is a grand conspiracy out there somewhere running things. There is the world that is, and the world as it really is, and you have to decode the one to find the secret other world. Besides, 2001 was nearly 20 years away. Who can see 20 years into the future?
It was all a lie. All of it. While the USSR and the KGB did plant spies in the US in an attempt to sway US politics, they were never effective. The red scare was and is a chimera, a boogeyman that was and is still used to keep the American people in line. The USSR which had survived on graft for generations finally collapsed under its own weight not long after Red Dawn premiered. I got a job and started working for a living, and the authorities of the world redrew all the maps I memorized in school, and life went on as if we hadn’t spent the last 40 years afraid of our own shadows, afraid of the communists among us.
The war machine though, it went on without stopping. With no enemies to fight, the machine still wanted us to act like we were at war. Reagan was mentally AWOL virtually from the day he took office. His VP barely squeaked out a win on Reagan’s coattails and had to raise taxes to pay for the killing machines conservatives wanted him to build. Bush the first lost to Bill Clinton because of the fiscal reality of who pays for the war machines, the wars, but Slick Willy still had to appease the conservatives who held power and the majority, scared in their own beds at night of the commies waiting to get them. Bill fought every battle he found an excuse for just to keep them quiet and still couldn’t justify the military budget, which he had to cut.
Then came the surprise that created the world we know now; created it out of silicon and electricity. PC’s became widely available. Suddenly everyone had the ability to wax verbose across the entire US, the ability to read the craziest rantings of the most marginalized among us as if they were some kind of representative sample of American thought. Not too long after the US was wired, the whole world was wired. We went from having to do research that took months and years to complete in dusty libraries across differing regions to being able to access virtually all of human knowledge with the click of a mouse.
Not all of that knowledge is real though. Very little of it is, when you start sifting the contents of the internet. Bloggers proliferated in the early years, including yours truly, spreading rumor as if it was fact, furthering the reach of questionable thinking, of non-rational thought.
It became possible to find news on your own, invent news on your own. No longer force-fed nightly at 6 and 10, you could binge on news 24/7. News that you wanted to read/watch/listen to, not the things that the media determined were things an educated public should know. The doors started to come off the media machine, the carefully crafted machine that fed the US and the world the news it wanted us to hear. Out of that chaos was born the conservative echo-chamber as we know it today.
The conservative echo-chamber elected Bush the second. Conservatives fed off other conservatives, on channels they created to coordinate what it was they wanted done, how they wanted their arguments to proceed. What they wanted the grass roots to believe. Small government. Low taxes on the wealthy so they would spend more. Low taxes on everybody so that they had more to spend. A war machine to rival all others. Jobs for everybody. All of it born out of the half-baked plans that came to power with Reagan, that influenced Reagan. Neoconservatism. Libertarian economics. A perversion of Goldwater conservatism that even Barry Goldwater would be hard pressed to back.
With Jesus and the prosperity gospel, they brought their selected candidate to office. It’s just too bad he didn’t know what it was he was doing.
I never did credit W with a wealth of brains. Familiarity breeds contempt, and as a Texan I knew what kind of lackluster thinker the Junior Bush was. He did know at least one thing, because it wasn’t that hard to figure out. Any human group works better together with an enemy to fight, and he started off his term in office with every intention of dealing with Iraq and Saddam Hussein, even before that fateful day in September of 2001.
A relative of his Saudi business partners, Osama Bin Laden, had similar if opposing goals. Having been betrayed by the US at the end of the Cold War when we abandoned the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, outraged by the stationing of infidel troops in the holy land, OBL hatched a plan to start a war with the US by destroying the icons of US capitalism and dominance in the world, the trade center in NYC. The towers fell and the wars started, and the jobs never came and the debts mounted.
That is what it has been like, from then to now. Conservatives afraid of commies, of socialism, suspicious of even their countrymen, especially their liberal countrymen who didn’t see the threat they saw, backing whatever horse showed up claiming to be able to hold the commies at bay, because they prayed to their god to send them a savior. Faith in the supernatural, reliance on the unknowable, fear and betrayal and more betrayal. That is why conservatives back the demagogue, Donald Trump. They are tired of being betrayed by complex people with complex arguments, and they want a war to destroy their enemy (whoever that is) before they are themselves destroyed. Before they are dissolved into history.
Socialism?
Returning to the narrative, that is why socialism is a non-starter in fly-over country, the vast angry red areas of the United States. They still think socialism is a thing to be afraid of. They have no idea that socialism is their insurance coverage. Their police force. Their fire fighters. Their hospitals. Any effort that benefits us all and doesn’t have a clear profit motivation to push it forward, that is socialism at work.
Socialism means no more and no less than control of social systems being held by the many rather than the wealthy few. The corporations. The elites. That the costs of maintaining and running the system are spread across the social groups the system serves rather than paid directly by the person who receives the benefit.
When you get a check from your insurance company, you have benefited from a socializing system. The cost to reimburse you for your loss is borne by the group who pays premiums to that insurance company. When you are injured and rushed to a hospital, the existence of those systems being there to keep you from dying is due to socialism’s influence. When you log on to your computer to check Facebook or whatever social site is popular right now, the existence of that system is due to the socializing influence of government investment in technology.
The internet was not conceived of by a single corporation, was not the brainchild of a single mind. It was conceived of by many people working separately with funds infused by government for the purpose of stimulating research. It was the product of many people working towards the goal of making knowledge available to a larger and larger group of people, for the betterment of humanity as a whole. The internet is the most social of social structures ever invented by man. More social than the grandest ideals of socialism, more liberating than millions of dollars handed to each and every poor person.
Socialism spread without the USSR. Socialism spread without communist China, too. Socialism is greater than Karl Marx. Socialism is less duplicitous than Lenin. Socialism is the antithetical to feudalism, to fascism, but not to capitalism, because socialism isn’t limited to economics. Right or wrong, absolute equality is the basis for socialist theory, and socialist theory is here to stay, just like all the other ideas that have been conceived by the human mind since we first formed words to describe the world around us.
Humanism
The opposing force for Authoritarianism is deeper than socialism, which is why acceptance of socialism as the good is irrelevant in the long run. Authoritarianism is the godhead. The worship of absolute authority over all things living. What opposes it is just as strong, but largely unvoiced. It is an expression of the value of each human life. It is at its core humanism, the valuing of the human over the spiritual or supernatural. Humanism is a movement that was spawned with the enlightenment and has been forgotten by most people today.
Those of us who do remember a time before 9/11 remember Hillary Clinton’s first entrance on the world stage as First Lady to William Jefferson Clinton’s Presidency. Sadly it is against the backdrop of his presidency that her suitability for office is judged, rightly or wrongly. Her first book It Takes a Village was routinely derided by conservatives who knew the harsh cruel world for what it was, never actually asking if that was the world they wanted to live in or not. Whether it might be in our power to change the nature of the world. Change the nature of existence, at least among us humans.
But the humanist notions of It Takes a Village have proven to be true over time. We do need to create a better world for our children and grandchildren. Capitalism needs updating now, so as to bring the floor of our social structure up to a tolerable level, to bring all of the people into the fold reserved for the privileged few in previous human generations. However, it is the basis of capitalism that authoritarians want us to talk about the least. They don’t want to talk about it because the system set up by the privileged is the one that keeps them fat and happy today.
Capitalism is nothing more or less than an outgrowth of the creation of money for trading goods and services. An outgrowth of the common notion that one should profit from transactions with others. Capitalism and money are themselves tools, part of the bigger picture of human interactions. Money cannot exist without others who accept that it is a fair trade for real or imagined value, making capitalism versus socialism a false dichotomy easily destroyed by authoritarians bent on altering the system to suit their goals.
Historical feudalism was an expression of authoritarianism, and facets of feudalism persist into the modern age long past the time when historians have credited it as dead. The notion that one can be granted title to people as well as property by a King or other warlord who controls a region seems outmoded or medieval; however the actual governing of areas, the ownership of lands and systems in the modern age seems hardly different in practice. Holding title to lands was first introduced as a feudal practice. Inheriting that title and associated wealth was also introduced then.
Obviously a family will and should be allowed to continue to use what was held by the head of the household before death. That seems like common sense. But the idea that it belonged to his/her heirs, the notion of heirs itself is feudalism. Is it justice for inheritors to possess gains which were ill-gotten? Gains handed to the original owner on the basis of skin color or where they called home previously? Where is the justice in that, where is the room to be merely human in a world of rigid structure like that?
One can argue that people are no longer property, held with the lands. That is probably the one big difference between the modern world and the ancient world. People are no longer legally property in most places around the world. But if you are poor and cannot afford to leave the lands you were born into (Greece in perspective) the functional difference between the two states blurs. The poor and unfortunate are the pawns of today’s systems just as they were in feudal systems. They are entirely at the mercy of those who control them and the lands they can’t afford to leave. There is little improvement through the ages for the poor among us aside from modern plumbing and the spreading of the knowledge of science.
Capitalism is not a social structure. It is an economic philosophy of a value for value trade, a good solid basis for dealing fairly with those around you. A basis for labor having a value of its own which can be traded for goods and other labor at a later time. Capitalism has nothing at all to say about the content of society, what the minimum standards of living should be, what humane treatment of the sick and injured should be, how the elderly are cared for. In fact it has little of merit to say about most things human.
During the course of the First World War the old establishments of feudalism/authoritarianism started to give way to the new ideas of democracy and self-rule. If you aren’t a student of history, you might not know that WWI saw the end of one of the longest running governments in human history, the Ottoman Empire. It was itself the inheritor of much of the wealth and knowledge of the Byzantine Empire which marked time all the way back through the Roman Empire almost to the beginning of recorded history. So the belief that feudalism was a practice limited to the middle ages is not much more than a quaint notion for scholars to debate. The practices of feudalism were encoded into law, and some of them continue to this day.
The United States, an early precursor of the modern age of democracy (one man one vote) wisely adopted many of the mechanisms established by the successful feudal societies that founded the colonies it sprang from. Mechanisms like corporations to shield business owners from direct personal liability for business losses. Mechanisms like a sound money system which established a commodity as the base measure of value. But the US has always been a mixed economy. Mixed as in respecting the feudal/capitalist nature of the systems that were inherited from the English and the Dutch.
Corporations are feudal creations, originally charters granted by emperors and kings, and their structures are feudal in execution. Yes, a group requires a leader, that is a given of all human systems. But the value of that leadership in today’s world is highly over-rated. The pay for corporate executives far out-weighs the contributions they make to the process of creating the goods and services a corporation produces (Saving Capitalism) the average person on the street cannot name the current head of a single corporation.
Donald Trump vs. Hillary Clinton
This is the intersection which we are currently attempting to navigate. Donald Trump represents exactly what economic conservatives have wanted for a generation. He is a businessman willing to take on the job of running the country, running the country like a business. Unfortunately for them he exhibits even less control than the previous businessmen conservatives have flirted with nominating. He launched his candidacy by laying this turd in full view of the watching world:
When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.
Donald Trump. Or as I like to refer to him, the Orange Hate-Monkey. Fake tanned, he has embraced the conservative tropes of yesteryear, flinging the hatred of other like a monkey flings shit at gawkers at the zoo. His supporters hear only that they will be saved, if they follow him. That is all they want to hear.
I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?
Donald Trump is the poster boy for feudal privilege. Far from being a hero of the common man, an example of bootstrapping, Trump inherited his wealth and businesses from his father. He has bankrupted those businesses not once, but four times. His claim to authority is based entirely on his birth to a position of wealth and influence, the modern equivalent to nobility. The Dukes & Earls of previous societies are now referred to as CEO or CFO. Positions on the boards of large corporations mark your power within modern feudal society. Governments bow to your whims, write laws to benefit your finances, cater to your desires to the detriment of the poor forced to work for a living within the societies you rule.
Many, many people look at Hillary Clinton, look at her with the backdrop of 40 years of increasingly more conservative dominated politics, as well as the Presidency of her husband, and can’t see how she is an improvement on the President we currently have. There are independents who look at the two major party candidates and inexplicably cannot see a difference between the two of them because they can’t separate the woman from the men she has been required to serve with, the real estate developer who has lied to himself for so long he doesn’t even know what the truth is anymore.
Maybe I’m just weird.
I’m struck today with the same sense of surrealism that I’ve had since the day I first heard the term Birther, long before there was such a thing as Birther-in-Chief, another apt Trump label. When I heard the accusation that Barack Obama wasn’t an American, I recognized it immediately as racism and dismissed it. When the conspiracy fantasy wouldn’t go away, when the Birther-in-Chief picked up this obvious dog whistle and wouldn’t stop blowing it, I realized that the conservative echo-chamber was a thing, not just a possibility.
These people don’t know reality from fantasy. Their fantasies about what goes on in the world mean more to them than the facts that govern it. They dismiss those facts when convenient, when the facts get in the way of their fantasies. And since the echo-chamber reflects back to them what they want to hear, they never get the corrective feedback that reality attempts to deliver.
In much the same way, it is painfully clear to me that misogyny governs most of the reporting that goes on in relation to Hillary Clinton. The media desperately attempt to echo the narrative that the long-dominant political forces in the US seem to want to hear. But there are voices out there sending the feedback that we need to be listening for, if only we are paying attention.
However, even if the worst of the worst of the beliefs about Hillary Clinton are true (and they aren’t) There is no way, NO WAY POSSIBLE that she could be as bad, much less worse than Trump. The beast that he has shackled himself to requires human sacrifice to be satiated. That is what happens when you found your campaign on creating an enemy in our midst. When your every other pronouncement decries the barbarian at the door.
Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on
The old adage runs like this: “American fascism will arrive carrying a cross and wrapped in a flag” and it has. However, there is no one person to fear that enters dragging fascism in their wake. The threat is not the figurehead, the Trump or the Hitler. The people to fear are those willing to vote for wrong, to back wrong with force, in the mistaken belief they are right. And that is scarier than the mere presence of Donald Trump on the political scene.
These people desire the destruction of the system itself, in their mad desire to be free of their fears, to the potential destruction of us all. How is that, you ask?
The delivery of modern technology and modern medicine are such complex ventures that their continuation virtually requires the existence of government, government which is now threatened by corporate greed and corporate malfeasance. It is corporations who benefit from the loss of governmental power, not the individual. Corporations who stand ready to reap larger and larger profits at the cost of the lives of the poor and the sacrifice of the rest of the middle class in the US and across the face of the world. Corporations which must be brought to heel by government if we are ever to see the dawn of a new age. The age of the individual as expressed through humanism, the leveling of the playing field with the more equal distribution of information through technology.
Humanism is the vehicle which will bring the corporations to heel. Its time has finally arrived, let us not waste this opportunity to grasp the future for ourselves, our children and our children’s children. Trust in our ability to make the systems work to our benefit, using modern technology as our tool. It matters little what Hillary Clinton wants to do so long as she keeps the systems running long enough for us to realize the potential present in the technology we now have at our disposal. Let us not fear the future, but embrace it.
I have gone through and re-edited the text of this article to genericize it away from the events that inspired its publication. While they are still present in the text, I have added some detail to anchor them in time. I have also engaged in some generic wordsmithing to clean up the text and make it more understandable from a narrative perspective. Even I lost track of what it was I was trying to say about halfway through the history of the American love affair with authoritarians.
I’ve added headings at the rough points where I switch topics later in the piece, so that it is clear what it is I’m talking about. This was one of my first longer writing pieces, and the narrative I have constructed for it shows that this is an early work. I will do my best to leave the majority of it alone. Here is the Archive.org link to the original article when it was front page on the blog.
They tell me every time I go in the ballot box to turn off your cellphone. Have done so for a decade and more. I never did turn it off, until the last election. I don’t turn it off because I use the phone to reference the online voter guide, sparing myself the cost of the paper to print it. The last election I stupidly argued with the woman behind the desk. She refused to let me go to the ballot box until I had shown her I turned it off. Of course, I turned it right back on again as soon as I was out of sight.
Since it is ‘illegal’ to have your cellphone on in the booth, it is illegal to take a photo with your ballot, no matter what stupid excuse they give you as to why. The photo itself is proof of the violation though, so you’ll have a tough time proving you didn’t violate the law.
My Only Selfie
Yes, I know, it curtails free speech.
Personally, I don’t have the cash or the interest to carry the fight as far as it will have to go. On the other hand, I was never interested in taking a selfie with my ballot in the first place. Never have understood selfies or other people’s need to take them. Enjoy your battles. I pick mine a little more carefully these days. I’ll toast your victories in a few years when you achieve them.
There is no real protest vote. That is the problem. There might be a realistic vote of protest, as in voting for “none of the above” essentially voting “no confidence” in the system as it is currently offered, but there isn’t that possibility in the US system.
Again, as I’ve said many times in the past in other place, you cannot show up once every 4 years and expect to have people pay attention to what you want. You have to show up week after week, month after month, to precinct meetings, county meetings and State meetings so that when these major elections come rolling around your party knows what you want already and then you just go out and vote for the candidates who are doing what you want.
That is how the party system works. Even for third parties. If you don’t want to participate at that level, then you are going to have to first alter the way the parties work so that you can spend less time engaged in party politics. Either that or you have to accept that the parties who hold power will at best operate only tangentially to what you actually want.
Take it or leave it, but don’t pretend to yourself that a protest vote means anything to anyone aside from you. Because it doesn’t. What it will mean, in swing states, is that someone else picks the president you have to live under, we all have to live under. Don’t be Florida in 2000. That is my sound advice on this subject.
