Article 43
Thursday, August 30, 2018
Political Glimmers Of Hope
What Ocasio-Cortez wants for America after beating Joe Crowley
By Jeff Stein
Waashington Post
June 27, 2018
The challenger who defeated Rep. Joseph Crowley (D-N.Y.) on Tuesday night campaigned on a suite of socialist policy demands, from a single-payer health-care system to a guaranteed job for every American.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 28, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, ran on issues well outside the mainstream of the Democratic Party, including health care, the environment and criminal justice. Her campaign in the Bronx and Queens district lifted her above Crowley, who raised more than $3 million for his campaign.
Ocasio-Cortez also vocally backed calls to abolishӔ Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an agency created in 2003 and increasingly decried by left-leaning activists for its punitive impact on undocumented residents. Only a handful of sitting House Democrats have called for the abolition of ICE, and Crowley did not.
Ocasio-Cortez an activist who worked as a restaurant server less than a year ago ח summarized her policy platform on a one-page sheet distributed at her campaign headquarters in Queens.
Not all these policies reflect legislation that can be signed into law, and many hurdles remain before they could be implemented. Republicans retain control of Congress, and even if Democrats were to take power, it’s unclear how many members of the Democratic Party would be on board. These proposals would also involve overhauling rules governing large parts of the U.S. economy, and many details would have to be worked out including financing.
Here is a brief explanation of three of her key policy positions, and how they differed from her opponent.
Health care: Ocasio campaigned on a single-payer health plan, called דMedicare for All, in which a government insurer would guarantee health insurance for all state residents, eradicating private insurance in the state.
Ocasio-Cortez argued that a single government insurer would guarantee that every American has insurance, while giving the government greater purchasing power to reduce health-care spending costs overall. Crowley also signed onto the House bill supporting Medicare for All, but did so after his challenger and after more than 100 House Democrats had agreed to co-sponsor the legislation.
During the debate over the Affordable Care Act, Democrats initially proposed a step toward a government insurer, pitching it as a ԓpublic option. But they backed off the effort amid objections from party moderates and a strong lobbying campaign from insurance companies and health-care firms.
Universal jobs guarantee: Ocasio-Cortez also campaigned on a “jobs guarantee,” in which the federal government would promise to give a job to every American who could not find one.
The idea has only recently gained currency among congressional Democrats, with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), and Cory Booker (D-N.J.) all signing onto different versions of a jobs guarantee. Critics say it would be impractical to manage and hurt businesses by draining them of their workforce, while proponents such as Ocasio-Cortez say it would end unemployment and exert upward pressure on wages.
The jobs guarantee was one part of Ocasio-Cortez’s broader suite of left-wing policy positions, including a $15-an-hour minimum wage.
“Abolish ICE:” Ocasio-Cortez also vowed to push for the eradication of the immigration agency that was created along with the Department of Homeland Security under President George W. Bush after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
“Abolish ICE” has become an increasing demand of activists on the left amid daily stories of immigrant families separated under President Trump. But as The Washington Post recently reported, even some on the party’s left flank are skeptical about the call to abolish ICE with Sanders ducking a question on the issue.
Crowley was similarly very critical of the agency, calling it for it to be “put back on its leash.” But Crowley declined to call for its abolition.
Ocasio-Cortez, by contrast, demanded ICE be abolished immediately, arguing ICE had been founded in a way that made it beyond repair. She left New York just days before the primary to join protests at an ICE detention center in Texas.
“As overseen by the Trump administration, ICE operates with virtually no accountability, ripping apart families and holding our friends and neighbors indefinitely in inhumane detention centers scattered across the United States,” Ocasio-Cortez said on her website. “Alex believes that if we are to uphold civic justice, we must abolish ICE and see to it that our undocumented neighbors are treated with the dignity and respect owed to all people, regardless of citizenship status.”
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Dem Socialists on the Rise in Fractured Party: Bernie’s Top Pick Upsets Establishment Choice in FL Gov Race
n one of the biggest upsets since Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won the nomination over Rep. Joe Crowley (D-N.Y.), a democratic socialist backed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) beat out the establishment pick to be the Democratic candidate for governor of Florida.
Andrew Gillum, the mayor of Tallahassee, picked up the Democratic Party’s nomination last night, beating out three moderate picks for governor.
Gillum’s opponents were former Congresswoman Gwen Graham, Miami Beach Mayor, Philip Levine, and a businessman, Jeff Greene.
Graham was seen as a front-runner for the Democratic nomination. Not only did she have Congressional experience, but she came from a prominent political family that includes a former governor and senator.
Real Clear Politics polling averages had Graham up by 7.2 points. In the end, Gillum won by 2.9 percent.
Gillum was the most progressive candidate, gaining the support of Sanders, who campaigned with him throughout the primary.
Some of his key positions align with those of Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez:
Medicare for All
Abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)
$15 Minimum Wage
Raising Corporate Taxes
His city of Tallahassee also happens to be under FBI investigation. According to the Tampa Bay Times, the FBI sent a few undercover agents to the city. The FBI focused in on one lobbyist, with whom Gillum has close ties. It isn’t clear what the agents were looking for or what they found, but they did subpoena many documents.
Although Gillum has yet to be included in the subpoenas, the issue did loom over his campaign.
While the results of the FBI investigation are not clear, what is clear is that the establishment choice in the Democratic Party was so weak that it lost out to a far-left mayor of a city under FBI investigation.
Many Republicans were thrilled to see the results come in from Florida. Republican Congressman, Ron DeSantis, earned the nod to oppose Gillum in the governor’s race. President Donald Trump endorsed DeSantis several times.
The establishment Democrats have had a target on their backs from the far-left. Ocasio-Cortez beat Crowley. Longtime Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) lost her party endorsement nod to a far-left Democrat, who she will now face in the general election. Support for Nancy Pelosi to continue as minority leader or Speaker of the House has been called into question as well.
Although Gillum is the latest far-left upset, he still has a long way to go before becoming the governor of Florida.
It will be up to the people of Florida to decide if they want democratic socialists policies or DeSantis, a candidate who has fully embraced Trump’s agenda.
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Workers stuck in “old person jobs: pin hopes on tight labor market
By Robert Weisman
Globe Staff
August 28, 2018
They lost their jobs at the peak of their careers. They’ve struggled to find comparable work in their fields, often resorting to lower-paid tasks. Will the tightest labor market in nearly two decades finally boost the prospects of older workers?
Unfortunately, economists caution, workers in their 50s and 60s still face formidable hurdles at companies that are chasing young talent and are wary of gray hair.
“Things will get a little better, but the benefits will be limited for over-50 job seekers,” said Gerald Friedman, an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. In particular, he said, he’s “reasonably pessimistic” on the outlook for older candidates even those with decades of relevant experience - landing jobs in the vibrant tech sector in Massachusetts and nationally.
“These startups want to project youth,” he said. “They have Ping-Pong tables, kids eating pizza, they work all night. They want new college graduates or, even better, people who dropped out of MIT or Harvard. They want a young-looking workforce to attract other young people.”
The jobless rate for all workers dropped to 3.9 percent in July, a level that hasn’t been seen since the fall of 2001.
For workers over 55, the rate was 3.1 percent, but that’s little consolation to the longtime unemployed and underemployed in that age group. Research dating back to the 1980s shows that job options narrow for those over 50.
Many of these workers get funneled into lower-paying “old person jobs” - everything from retail sales clerks to security or school-crossing guards to taxi drivers, according to a 2016 study by the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College. The study, covering the period in the aftermath of the 2008 recession, suggested that employment prospects were bleakest for men and for job seekers further down the socioeconomic ladder.
John Thurner, 63, who was laid off in 2008 as director of technology at Belmont Hill School, has worked in his field intermittently since then, mostly on projects and as a consultant. Hes driven for the ride-hailing services Lyft and Uber, and worked for a short time loading carts at the Costco in Waltham this summer until arthritis kicked in.
Thurner’s had only about half-a-dozen interviews in the education field over the past decade.One phone interviewer, he said, asked what year he graduated from high school and, when he answered 1972, hung up. Still, he said he has seen more job postings lately and is hopeful his background in educational technology will be a fit for prospective employers.
“There seems to be more positions out there,” said Thurner, a Belmont resident who relies on his wife, a building services supervisor, for health benefits. “But in technology, there seems to be an assumption that if you’re younger, you know more. I think that’s a roadblock for me in some of the technology programs I’ve applied to.”
Economists say the bias by employers against older workers is fueled by fears that they will expect higher wages, increase health insurance costs, and be less adaptable to new technologies and practices. These perceptions persist despite evidence that many workers are willing to settle for less than they earned in the past, are covered by spouses’ insurance or Medicare, and can be as quick to learn as younger colleagues.
Fairly or not, employers reluctance to pay more for older workers can be the biggest obstacle, said Donald Klepper-Smith, chief economist at DataCore Partners, an economic research firm based in New Haven and MarthaҒs Vineyard.
Many employers are looking at what they’re paying a 60-year-old and theyre saying, ґWait, I can hire two hungry 30-year-olds Ҕ for the same cost, he said. Klepper-Smith, who is 64, added, My wife is joking right now that sheӒll outsource me for two 30-year-olds.
But the labor crunch may be opening the door just a crack for over-55 workers to return to their fields - and for those who have good jobs to hang on to them longer than employees their age did a decade ago.
“Employers scrambling to boost output may be forced to capitalize on the availability of older workers,” said Klepper-Smith. States, he said, would be wise to invest in programs to retrain all workers to handle new tech-enabled jobs.
The number of unfilled US jobs hit a 17-year high this spring 6.7 million, according to Labor Department data reported Aug. 7 - but most of the openings are in sectors like retail, services, and transportation, which already employ large numbers of older workers.
Yet many workers in those sectors, who are officially listed in the jobs rolls, consider themselves underemployed and continue to seek work in their fields.
Judy Krassowski, 61, of Hooksett, N.H., was laid off seven years ago from her position as an art and Spanish teacher at a Chester, N.H., public school. Since then, shes had to piece together a string of full-time and part-time jobs to make up the income. She has taught at a Catholic school and worked at an Apple Store. She has also driven for Uber and has applied for a job at Walmart.
“I’ve been looking for something better for four years,” Krassowski said. But if IӒm at an interview, and someone whos 23 or 24 is there, they’re going to get the job. I can work temp jobs. I can work as a greeter at Walmart. Its what do you do to make ends meet?”
More than 22 percent of older job seekers hired from 1996 to 2012 found work in so-called old person occupations, according to the BC study.
“In today’s tight labor market,” said Matthew Rutledge, research economist at the Center for Retirement Research, it’s likely more older workers are moving up into better paying jobs in their field while others are coming back into the workforce in service jobs. Still, older employees continue to be pigeonholed into lower-wage positions, Rutledge said, with often dire financial consequences for their retirement savings and income.
“A lot of people think their earnings are going to grow as they get older,” he said. When that doesnӒt happen, it means theyve probably overestimated how much they can save and what their Social Security benefits will be. And theyҒll end up living on less.
Ipswich resident Joseph Couture, 66, a veteran sales support worker who once owned a Rowley store that sold model trains and ships, was laid off in 2012 from Fowler High Precision, a Newton supplier of measuring instruments. Since then, he has worked on and off in contracting jobs for other manufacturers. Earlier this month, he was laid off from his most recent job at the Peabody medical device maker Analogic after it was acquired by an out-of-state buyer.
Couture said he’s already updated his resume and has applied for work at another manufacturing company in New Hampshire. Hes trying to stay in his field and steer clear of retail work.
“I could go to Market Basket and get a job bagging groceries,” he said, “or take a job at Walmart stocking shelves at night. I may have a little too much pride, but I don’t want to do that.”
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Wednesday, August 29, 2018
Culture Of Cruelty
I had a panic attack of fear of the future a few years ago after an UNEMPLOYMENT OFFICE VISIT, but instead of throwing myself in front of a bus, went to a church and talked to a priest. The man seemed friendly enough until he asked if I believed Jesus died for my sins. I said “No.” He threw me out. No different than those JEHOVAH WITNESSES.
A lady walked into the dentist with a child screaming in agony holding his hand next to his cheek. The staff rushed him into the back as mom says she has no insurance. Out in the waiting room we all heard the discussion that turned from helping the kid, to how is mom gonna pay. A few minutes later they walked out with the kid still screaming.
On my first day AT THE CALL CENTER a few years ago, a manager yelled at me for missing an inbound call. This is three hours into day one. “I’m sorry I pressed the wrong button.” The verbal abuse didn’t stop. It led me to a psychologist from the company’s employee assistance program. The doctor said ”MAN UP and take it.”
AT LUCENT we weren’t allowed to discuss of grieve for our just-layed-off friends and workmates.
AT&T does the same these days. They JUST LET YOU GO without even letting you SAY GOOD-BYE to anyone.
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The Terrible and Catastrophic Price of American Cruelty
What History Teaches Us About What Crueltys (Really) Worth
By Umair
Eudaimonia
Augist 29, 2018
You’re at Stanford. You’re depressed. You become suicidal. You go for counseling. And instead of support - you’re asked to leave class, your dorm room, your degree, and sent home, until you “accept blame.”
Shocked? I was. And yet, at the same time, its still somehow unsurprising. The above is a tiny but telling example of what America’s legendary for now - the world over -not freedom, justice, or truth, but a kind of weird, gruesome, and relentless cruelty.
The problem is that America’s fatally misjudged what cruelty’s worth. American thinking supposes that cruelty perfects human beings. No pain, no gain. But the truth is that cruelty isn’t an asset for a society, or a person. It is a liability. It leads a society to become something like a Ponzi scheme of the human spirit, each person preying on the next, and thus corrodes it from within - leaving it ever in the hands of Caesars and Caligulas, or Trumps and Bannons.
But let’s start at the beginning. American life is now one long exercise in cruelty - first learning to survive it, then learning to appreciate and admire it (as perverse as that sounds), then learning, in the end, to perform and enact it - thus, the cycle keeps going. Do I exaggerate? You go ahead and be the judge.
You’re born, you go to school. Active shooter drills. From an early age, you learn that life is divided, therefore, into predator and prey. You go to middle school, high school - it’s a uniquely awful, dispiriting experience, about being mean and nasty, bullying and submission, popularity and vanity and selfishness - and while you might think, “it’s like that everywhere!” my friends, it isn’t. Other nations don’t base their entire adolescent cultures on the trauma of just waking up and going to school. But Americans do, because that’s life. Hence, among disastrous effects, skyrocketing SUICIDE rates.
Those that do survive a culture of extreme cruelty from the day they’re born? Off you go go to college - and you’re hazed mercilessly to join a fraternity. What are you being trained for, really? Education, creativity, insight - or dominance, submission, and tribalism? Never mind. You graduate and go to work. And the workplace is one where bullying itself is called management, and every kind of abuse is normalized. No one else in the civilized world, really, puts up with bosses shouting at them and berating them and demeaning them, like feudal overlords. It just isn’t tolerated - its usually quite literally against the law. But America created a culture where overwork is work, where 80 hour weeks for shrinking pay are just fine, and you have to perform with a rictus smile of submission on your face. YouҒre not really “working” more than that, you’re performing a kind of flamboyant display of emotional and intellectual servitude, which proves what you really are, a social nobody. Better not make that capitalist mad - or is he your lord? Yet for Americans, all these are perfectly normal and acceptable.
You’re getting older now. Heaven forbid you get sick - better not tell your boss. He might fire you. Heaven forbid someone in your family needs to use the insurance. They might axe you for that, too. Don’t take a vacation, don’t use up those sick days, don’t be the first to leave the office, always be the first to arrive. Cruelty’s been internalized at this point - you’ve learned to “take responsibility for abusing yourself,” sadly, and call it “adulthood,” yet it’s anything but that: its the repression of the true adult in you, which is crying out for meaning, purpose, belonging, truth.
So you search for a partner, a spouse. Who do you want? The one that everyone else wants. Culture doesn’t tell you to be interested in a person for who they are, what they’ve been through, the secret suffering hidden in their heart - which is the one thing which might save you, too. It just tells you to date the hottest person with the highest attractiveness quotient, basically - swipe right. So you go on endless dates - but nothing seems to click, work out. You say there’s no spark, ruefully, to your friends - but what you can’t admit to yourself is you’re afraid they wouldn’t think, and you don’t think, the person you actually like or love or admire or need meets the strange and stupid standards - he’s got perfect abs, shes a perfect size zero, never mind the ego, self-absorption, vanity, greed, duplicity, and indifference, aww, they’re the American Dream - everyoneʒs learned from a culture of cruelty to admire and celebrate as universally attractive in the first place.
You have kids. What are their lives like? Not much different from yours - you learned to survive cruelty, then admire it, then enact it, finally. I could go on. But perhaps you see my point. American life is one long headpsinning exercise in cruelty - and Americans seem to revel in it, or at least to shrug, grin, and bear it, while not understanding that life elsewhere isn’t like this, because, well, people shudder at the thought.
What does it to do us, though? I think the Stanford example is much more illuminating than it might appear on first glance. So let’s think about it.
There’s the poor Stanford kid. About halfway through the lifecycle of cruelty I’ve described above. Except maybe he just cant take it anymore - the constant atmosphere of pervasive abuse, emotional violence, pressure, stress, trauma. He grows depressed, and then suicidal. Instead of support, what happens?
The first thing that happens is that support is withdrawn. That’s a very American pattern - and it happens because Americans see weakness as a dangerous, threatening liability. Something like parasitism - which will drain away their very lifeblood if they give an inch. What do we do with drug addicts? Instead of supporting them, we follow the crackpot “intervention” model, and withdraw our support. Tough Love, Tucker! Sorry, son - go sleep on the street! But that model hasn’t worked, not in America - have you seen the suicide rate skyrocketing - because it can’t. You can’t withdraw support at a time when people need it most - and hope for anything to result but further, often catastrophic, injury and hurt. Yet that is what American institutions are built to do. Need healthcare? Sorry, insurance wont cover that. Need a job? Sorry - you’re over, under, mis, unemployed. Need an education? Sorry - the only way you get one is to pay 10% interest forever. And so on.
The second thing that happens is that the suffering party is shunned and ostracized.Because Americans see weakness as contagious, they must step back - What if I get infected?!, appears to be the logic. But I want you to note how ignorant and foolish this is: weakness isn’t contagious - thatӒs something like medieval logic, isnt it? Yet this is a step beyond withdrawing support - the Stanford students don’t just get no counseling, they get kicked out. But that too follows the general pattern of American cruelty. Get sick - lose your job. Shes pregnant - fire her, just don’t tell anyone. They’re going through a rough patch - we don’t talk to them anymore. It’s so commonplace in America now to shun and ostracize the weak that we barely notice it at all. But what happens to us when we fall, then?
The third thing that happens is that people must never blame anyone else but themselves for weakness - and then they are institutionally legitimized again. They must never complain. In this case, Stanford students had to “accept blame,” and whatnot. But that’s the general rule. (Of course, here, by “weakness” and “legitimacy,” I emphatically don’t mean Louis CK doing stand-up comedy again - we’re not talking about people who hurt other, but people who are hurt). You can see this rule operating everywhere. “Hey, I was sick, but I beat it!” “Oh, stop whining and bitching! You’re always complaining! “Be positive!” The idea is simply the flipside of self-reliance - one must never broach the idea that one has been failed, only that one has failed.
Now, you might say, so what? The problem with all the above is very simple. You can have a society based on norms of extreme cruelty - or you can have a democratic, free, and prosperous one. But you cant have both. Cruelty like all the above makes people timid, afraid, and docile - of being the ones preyed on. It leaves them unimaginative, dull, empty, and ignorant - because they are too busy obeying order to question them. It makes conformists and braggarts and bullies of them - who hope to become flunkies, cronies, and enforcers, one day. But that is about the limit of their existential aspirations, and the edge of their moral horizons.
In this way, a society based upon cruelty is something like a house of cards - just waiting to collapse into authoritarianism, of one kind or another. The people in it are already meek and timid, servile and docile, when their superiors are watching, but vicious and abusive, violent and savage, to their underlings - yet all that is precisely the opposite of what a democracy needs, isn’t it?
Yet history tells us this story again and again. Rome degenerated not because it grew poor, feeble, or infirm - but because cruelty produced tyranny and obscenity, in the end. The French Revolutions noble, ambitious ideals were betrayed the moment it acceded to the cruelty of a Bonaparte. Germany’s romantic, bombastic nationalism didn’t lead to a noble empire - it led to the Nazis. The Soviets looked forward to a glorious future - and soon enough, an admiration for cruelty had produced a Stalin. And so on.
History is littered with the ruins of the cruel. Because todayגs cruelest are really just tomorrows dullest җ quicker to draw a gun or a sword than read or writea book. But a gun, unlike a book, has never once lit a spark in a mind, a fire in a heart, or held up a mirror to a soul, yet it is those things which prosperity is genuinely made of. That is why the cruel always fall from within usually, without an enemy even needing to fire a shot. Societies built on cruelty above all else usually are too busy shooting themselves to need their enemies to do anything but gawp. For societies, just as for people, it is best to see cruelty as a kind of fatal ignorance ח about what the purpose of this life is, and how it is best lived. Not with cruelty. But with grace, authenticity, gentleness, and humility.
The price of cruelty, my friends, in the end, is us. What else could it be? That lesson, which is what history has taken so many long millennia to teach us, has always been lost on America and still, it seems to me, is.
DEMOCRACY HOLLOWED OUT PART 27
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Monday, August 27, 2018
What Google Knows About You - Part II
Android data slurping measured and monitored
Study lays bare personal data flows from mobes to the Chocolate Factory
By Andrew Orlowski
The Register
August 24, 2018
GOOGLE’S passive collection of personal data from Android and iOS has been monitored and measured in a significant academic study.
The report confirms that Google is no respecter of the Chrome browser’s “incognito mode” aka “porn mode”, collecting Chrome data to add to your personal profile, as we pointed out EARLIER THIS YEAR.
It also reveals how phone users are being tracked without realising it. How so? It’s here that the B2B parts of Google’s vast data collection network its publisher and advertiser products - kick into life as soon the user engages with a phone. These parts of Google receive personal data from an Android even when the phone is static and not being used.
The activity has come to light thanks to RESEARCH (PDF) by computer science professor Douglas Schmidt of Vanderbilt University, conducted for the nonprofit trade association Digital Content Next. It’s already been described by one privacy activist as “the most comprehensive report on Google’s data collection practices so far”.
Even if you don’t use a consumer-facing Google service such as YouTube, many of the sites you visit on the web will be plugged into Google via the publisher and advertiser services: DoubleClick and Google Analytics.AMP mobile pages, hosted on Google, has also helped retrieve more valuable personal data.
Google Analytics is used by more than three quarters of the top 100,000 most visited websites (including the one you’re reading), while DoubleClick’s third-party cookies are widely used to track users across the web. When Google acquired DoubleClick in 2007 it assured regulators it would never combine DoubleClick’s cookies with its own. It abandoned that promise in 2016, attracting the (ongoing) attention of the European Commission.
So did Facebook, for similar reasons a strategy that Facebook called “closing the loop”.
The nature of some data may also surprise. App developers receive your age and gender whenever an app is launched, the study found.
Overall, the study discovered that Apple retrieves much less data than Google.
“The total number of calls to Apple servers from an iOS device was much lower, just 19 per cent the number of calls to Google servers from an Android device.
Moreover, there are no ad-related calls to Apple servers, which may stem from the fact that Apple’s business model is not as dependent on advertising as Google’s. Although Apple does obtain some user location data from iOS devices, the volume of data collected is much (16x) lower than what Google collects from Android,” the study noted.
As we repeatedly point out, Apple makes its money from selling overpriced hardware, and has no need to track and personalise a virtual version of you, that advertisers can then access. Porn habits included.
We invited Google to comment on, and debunk the study if it so wished, but have not yet heard back at press time.
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Tyranny of the Stupid
America, the Tyranny of the Stupid
By Gordon Duff
New Eastern Outlook
August 26, 2018
People around the world are convinced that the United States is a nation RUN BY criminal psychopaths and morons. A greater fear is that world leaders mistakenly assume that their American counterparts who do and say insane things continually are, in actuality, normal people operating inside some master plan.
Then, when time and time again, no such plan materializes, and it is demonstrated that America has blundered into a diplomatic, economic or military morass, for some unknown reason, a reset occurs, and the wrong assumptions are again made.
At every level, humanity errs in assuming that those in command are there because of talent and worth or that, because America is so wealthy and powerful, that its people are such because of moral and intellectual superiority.
Blind acceptance of exceptionalism is, in itself, a dangerous disease.
If you ask an average American what their IQ is, they are quick to answer. Invariably they will say, 140 or more. Yet, when you look at American society, at America’s culture, the idea of a nation of Mensa types is unrealistic. Americans aren’t much more stupid than other people, just much more dangerous.
Truth is, the average American has an IQ of around 96. It used to be 100, the number established as a mean. About 40% of Americans run between 60 and 85, enough to function at basic levels but with intelligence low enough to impair higher functions such as judgment and critical reasoning.
This is where the real problem is, of that 40%, a significant number graduate from universities and of those who come from higher socio-economic backgrounds, like those with inherited money, they get not just Ivy League degrees, but often make it through “diploma mill” fake graduate programs at the Wharton School of Business, Yale and Harvard.
In Britain, of course, idiots, and the quotes are out of kindness because idiot is a real term with a real definition and applies quite nicely, go to Eaton, then Oxford or Cambridge.
Where it comes to play in America is the manner those of limited capability are channeled into military command, into government, into teaching positions even in universities and into the White House itself.
Thus, real talent, brilliance as it were, is replaced by cleverness and even various forms of moral deficiency on the spectrum of social psychopathy.
When the world watches America, on the bus to “Crazy-Town,” it is always assumed that the worst, even if that worst is true, must be denied, rationalized away. Even in America itself, those of talent, out of a need to simply turn away from an unpleasant truth, too often look for any sign that psychopathic morons in government and the military or, worse still, controlling social media giants and tech companies, are normal.
This form of denial, normalizing, the abnormal, exalting the idiot, mistaking clownishness for hidden genius, very hidden genius, is in itself a disease, a weakness, a failing and a threat to the survival of the human species.
It is no secret that the world itself and certainly the United States is ruled by economic elites whose positions are entirely inherited, elites with a stranglehold on political and economic life. Their origins, the banking families of Europes Middle Ages or the ROBBER BARONS of the 19th century, perhaps the shipping families that carried opium and slaves, those and more, have left America with an elite ruling class that has long demonstrated moral depravity.
Through social manipulation this group, that controlled the eugenics movement during the 20s and 30s, has learned that they don’t need to use selective breeding to create slaves, but that it can be done through the education system which they control through foundations and think tanks.
To an extent, it is demonstrable that the Nazi reign of terror was financed and engineered by Americas elites, the Bush, Harriman, Rockefeller, Farish and Walker families partnered with Hitler and IG Farben. Auschwitz was one of their efforts and what began as eugenics became mass murder under Hitler only to reappear as Google and Facebook decades later. In between, foundations rewrote history, recreated a “dumbed down” education system and society.
In American government, congress walled itself in with rules that stifled change and debate, gave all control of the few, committee heads from remote and backward districts who ruled America on behalf of ruling elites for generations.
Key to keeping it all working has been the reengineering of every institution to favor the “morally flexible” of limited intelligence, a nation of semi-literate legislators, doctors, judges, law enforcement officials, college professors, admirals and generals and even captains of industry.
The result has been 50 years of declining wages, lowered life expectancy despite scientific advances, a society at war with itself, radicalized, superstitious and easily controlled.
Fostering all of it is the general human weakness of denialism, the need to ignore seemingly unsurmountable challenges when simply going along with the program allows for survival and where being part of the problem can offer great rewards.
Behind it all is the fake narrative, an endless droning of jingoism and phony patriotism, of exceptionalism and behind that is always fear.
To an extent, technology itself is the enemy. A century ago, when America was a burgeoning industrial giant, teeming millions worked in factories. The hierarchy there wasn’t so much factory owners or thuggish supervisors, Ford Motor Company actually hired violent felons to oversee workers.
It took real talent, even brilliance, to design tools, create innovations, improve processes, all of which was done by real elites among the working classes. Whoever may have thought they were in charge, without tool and die makers nothing happened.
With all of that gone, CAD systems, robotics, a world of devices and apps, an America with fake universities giving out fake degrees, a military that passes out fake medals to fake heroes by the score who fight equally fake wars, whatever remained of a natural elite, an offset as it were, has disappeared.
By the mid-1970s, under the guise of creating opportunities for minorities, the bar was lowered, allowing the least talented to rise and the potentially threatening few of capability to be contained and stifled. This wasnt by accident and had absolutely nothing to do with opportunity or equality.
It had everything to do with compliance and with building a society where moral questions would go unanswered, unasked and would eventually disappear.
The reality, a congress where an IQ of 70 is not unheard of, military academies where psychopathic behavior is promoted and those who exhibit the most deviant tendencies are fast tracked to command.
Journalism and its partner industry, entertainment is so much worse.
None of it was done by accident.
Gordon Duff is a Marine combat veteran of the Vietnam War that has worked on veterans and POW issues for decades and consulted with governments challenged by security issues. He’s a senior editor and chairman of the board of Veterans Today, especially for the online magazine New Eastern Outlook.
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Wednesday, August 22, 2018
Good Guys Bad Guys
President Donald Trump confronted one of the most perilous moments of his presidency Tuesday after two onetime members of his inner circle simultaneously were labeled “guilty” of criminal charges.
Daily Herald 8/21/2018
Did the Good Guys Just Rescue America From the Bad Guys?
What Fixing, Saving, or Rescuing America Really Means (to Me)
By Umair
Eudamonia
August 21, 2018
I dont often writeabout daily political events - noise, not signal - but I’ll reluctantly make an exception, given toda’s spectacular ones. Could they be a turning point for a beleaguered America?
The good news is that Americas proven (finally) that it has one working institution of governance: the judiciary. The bad news is that America is that it has two profoundly, badly, perhaps fatally broken ones: the executive and the legislature. Now, that might seem obvious. But itҒs more significant than you might think.
This is a not uncommon position for failing states to find themselves in. The judiciary becomes the last bulwark of governance, something like the last piston in the engine of democracy. And so a nation can limp along, for decades, often, with just a functioning judiciary, while executives and legislatures are deeply corrupt - just as many Latin American and Asian countries have. It doesn’t go much of anywhere - it sputters, rolls forward in inch, moves backward, and so on. In many ways, that’s what a kleptocracy is - a place where there are so many, so flagrant, crooks in government, the judiciary, which is the last functioning institution, overloaded, can barely keep up.
So the first way to answer the question is: the judiciary might have SET A KIND OF FLOOR to American collapse, putting a safety net in place just above the bottom of the abyss. Thats a welcome development. But will America hit it?
What about the executive and the legislature? Well, history suggests that authoritarians and FASCISTS hardly give in and exit shamefully when theyҒre challenged - precisely because they dont have a sense of shame. In fact, they double down - bellowing even more preposterous excuses, rationales, and justifications for misbehaviour. Why is that? Because the only way that a narcissist really knows how to relate, much like a mafia, is through the raw exercise of egoistic power. If you canҒt rub it in peoples faces, and get away with it, make a public spectacle of it - then you haven’t really intimidated anyone at all, and therefore, you are nothing, worthless, laughable, the proverbial “loser” and that is the worst thing of all to be, something that strikes clawing fear into the heart of a narcissist. So while you might hope for apple-cheeked resignations, and walks of shame, its probably unlikely to be the case. One can always dream, though - and IҒd be delighted to be proven wrong.
Now, they might seem absurd to you and to double down on absurd excuses, at this point of moral outrage. But that is missing the point. Remember, the minds of the people who’ve become proto-fascists have stopped working at this point in the cycle - they are seething, instead, with imaginary grievances, illusory persecution complexes, in which they’ve become the victims of fictional, nightmarish enemies, with the power to destroy them whole. Of course, little Mexican kids cant destroy anyone, really - but that’s not how the fascist mind sees it. And so the excuses - the more absurd they are - will be lapped up by the faithful, which is precisely what the authoritarian mind seems to intuitively grasp.
I think this point is often misunderstood, so I want to make it clear. The more that an authoritarian or fascist is attacked, the more support hardens into a kind of unbreakable bond. The authoritarian is the surrogate parent, and taking them away from the regressed child, who fears imaginary monsters, is to remove all safety. Just as a kid attacks the person attacking their parent does - no matter how abusive the parent might be. They believe in the goodness of their protector all the more. So American politics, which are already polarized, are likely only to polarize more (as incredible as that might seem.)
And that brings me to the third branch of government - the legislature. We might well imagine that the modern-day GOP will come its senses, and do the needful. But we are decent people, and they are opportunists and scoundrels to a degree that calling them kleptocrats would be a compliment. They are hardly likely to act out of concern for either the republic, or even their own good names. Instead, its more likely that as they see support for the authoritarian hardening, they follow the political tide -and offer their own preposterous excuses and justifications for not doing what is right, in order to please extremists. Again, Id be delighted to be proven wrong. But as I ask myself: what would they gain from doing the right thing? The answer seems to me to be: nothing at all. And they are more self-interested creatures than any piranha has ever been.
So where does that leave us? Did the good guys just rescue American from the bad guys? Not yet, my friends, not yet. But I feel you probably already know this - as much as you might not want to admit just yet. I think its wiser to say: the good guys have set off a kind of chain reaction now, whose effects will be as inescapable as they will be explosive. Only it’s hard to know whether that fire will consume the republic, or whether it will cauterize its wounds.
(If you understand all the above, then the chain reaction thats been set off tonight, by hardening fascist support, by pushing authoritarians into a corner, by making the legislature fall into line all the more easily, might just cleave America apart even more than it is already is. ThatҒs not to say the good guys shouldnt have acted. Of course they should have. ItҒs only to say that political choices often have perverse consequences. And yet if all that energizes Americans to vote in the mid-terms, then, by a circuitous route, democracy will have worked to shield itself.)
Now, if you want to really talk about saving America, then the challenges only really barely begin with a shift in political tides. The really hard work comes after the bad guys leave office. What happens then? Americans have to catch up with the modern world - they are at least half a century behind, when it comes to a working social contract. They must develop a working economy - not just a predatory machine. A polity which represents people - not land. And so on - all the institutional changes which I and many others have discussed over the years.
But most crucially of all - and I think this is the part that too few really get, and even fewer discuss - Americans must build a society in which this can never, ever happen again. Ever. Do you know how hard that is? What it took in Germany, South Africa, or Argentina?
That means a period of self-examination and self-reflection. How did we get here? Why have we diverged so far from our ideals? How did we become the kind of nation that is universally mocked and feared and scorned? Why do we always seem to take the low road, as a people - cruelty, greed, rage, violence? What will it take to be able to take the high road, of gentleness, wisdom, truth, and liberation? What is it in us that is so ashamed, afraid, and wounded, that it leads downwards, where it can unrestrain itself to do its worst, again and again - and more and more often now - not upwards, where we can all struggle mightily to be our best? What is that part of us? What happened to hurt it so?
Because a society is a living thing, too, my friends. And living things do not lash out in rage and shock unless they are hurt, wounded, bitterly, desperately afraid for their very being, in some way. That is where America is, and has been, for far too long. And yet no one at all seems to ask why, in a gentle way, in a giving way, in a compassionate way - in the way a loving parent might, to a little frightened child. What is it that has wounded America so badly that - even though it is the most powerful one of - fearing for its very being, it acts out a deep, deep sense of rage, shame, fear, and humiliation, over and over again?
Americans don’t like questions like that. I don’t say that to condemn them. I say it, if anything, with empathy. I hardly blame them. They are difficult, painful, piercing questions to ask of ones self. And yet it is the hallmark of a mature, confident society - just as it is a person - to be able to ask them, and laugh, not just through the pain, but or at the pain, or even despite the pain. But with a kind of happiness. Because the pain of self-revelation is precisely what contains all the characteristics of maturity - curiosity, courage, compassion, self-awareness. These questions of shortcoming and limitation and frailty are how a person, just as a society, develops, flourishes, really becomes itself.
America has spent too long acting out its childhood traumas, if you ask me. Like an abandoned, neglected thing, it became a society which endlessly took its rage, sparked by an all-consuming, soul-crushing fear of annihilation, out on the most vulnerable and weakest among it - and when that wasn’t enough, around it. But now it’s time for America to grow up. Because a society cannot stay a childlike thing forever - it ends up where America has gone for the last two years, forever.
The good guys, bless them, cannot make anyone do all that. That part is up to a society, one day, and one step, at a time.
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