Revisiting Orwell & "Newspeak"

~George Orwell's "1984"

As cultures decay, the language decays too. 
Examine how words are used to disguise rather than illuminate an action.
So you liberate a city by destroying it.
Lies are alternative facts.

Since the obvious ease and willingness of the White House to blatantly deceive the public became self evident, George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel 1984 has been in high demand. The book had climbed all the way to No. 1 on Amazon’s best-sellers list, and remains on the best seller list.

The novel, from which phrases like “Big Brother” and “doublethink” were born, is likely the U.K.’s most famous depiction of an authoritarian surveillance state. And much of the book, particularly its fictional thought-suppressing language, Newspeak, will seem pertinent.  Some phrases in particular  - “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command” ― have seemed especially relevant in the wake of deceptions over things as indisputable as crowd size, good being evil, up being down.

Here is a link to another piece that further explores "Newspeak" and the role Orwell's 1984 plays in today's post truth world. (There is a link to where you can read the novel free online as well).
Of course 1984, while echoing today's decay; is not a manifesto of how to deal with our plight.
On the contrary, humanity, independent thought, truth and justice lose at the end...and  the protagonists don’t survive.

There is however another Orwell penned piece which may be a better source of advice regarding our current state of malaise.  His essay, "Politics And The English Language" deals with his personal observations of language being used by politicos as a weapon of mass deception.

Orwellian Thought Crime

"You must be a bigot if you point out bigotry"
Words are sabotaged to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests. Someone who thinks this way cannot ever begin to conceptualize truth.

So the desire of anti-democracy ideologues is to remove the ability of those who would criticize their anti-democratic activities and to curtail the flow of democratic ideas.
There is abundant evidence that one of the ways they do this is by intentionally destroying language.
Language is the medium through which ideas flow.

Language is systematically mapped and words historically used to describe potentates and the traditional authorities in their service , these potentates have purposefully twisted those words into terms used against those who oppose such plutocracy. This tactic both attacks the opponents of democracy and more importantly deprives them of the words that can be used to attack aristocracy.

A simple example is the term "race-baiting".
In the Nexis database, uses of "race-baiting" undergo a sudden switch in the early 1990's.
Before then, "race-baiting" referred to racists.
Afterward, it referred in a twisted way to people who oppose racism.
What happened?
It's simple:  Stink Tank rhetoricians were tired of the political advantage that their opponents had from their use of that word, so they took it away from them.

A more complicated example is the word "racist".
Language revisionist rhetoricians have tried to take this word away as well by constantly coming up with new ways to stick the word onto liberals and their policies.
For example they referred to affirmative action as "racist".
Obviously this is false; it is an example of this attempt to destroy language.
Racism is the notion that one race is intrinsically better than another.
Affirmative action is arguably discriminatory, as a means of partially offsetting discrimination in other places and times, but it is not racist.
Pro-aristocracy spokesmen have even stuck the word "racist" on people for opposing racism.
The notion seems to be that these people addressed themselves to the topic of race, and the word "racist" is sort of an adjective relating somehow to race.
In any event this is an attack on language...the medium we use to communicate ideas.
And ideas form the basis of civilization.
Ultimately the attack on language is an attack on civilization itself.



The entire reason for Orwell’s destruction of language
was to literally narrow the person’s ability to think certain thoughts.
It’s beyond thought crime, and it’s happening right here, right now.
It does not matter what year is on your calendar, it’s 1984.

The Right Wing Extremists Destruction Of Democracy - A History

To most Americans living in the North, Brown vs. the board of education was a ruling to end segregated schools—nothing more, nothing less.
End of story.

To many in the South, Brown represented much more.
At a minimum, the federal courts could no longer be counted on to defer reflexively to states’ rights arguments. More concerning was the likelihood that the high court would be more willing to intervene when presented with compelling evidence that a state action was in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of “equal protection” under the law.
States’ rights, in effect, were yielding in preeminence to individual rights.

CARRY ME BACK

In Virginia at the time, it was easy to imagine how a court might now rule, if presented with evidence of the state of Virginia’s archaic labor relations, its measures to suppress voting, or its efforts to buttress the power of reactionary rural whites by under-representing the moderate voters of the cities and suburbs of Northern Virginia. Federal meddling could rise to levels once unimaginable.

To many whites, this decision meant that Northern liberals were going to tell the South how to run their society, and tax property owners more for improvements such as electricity.

To counter this, the University of Virginia created a school with a political agenda to maintain Southern rights, headed by James McGill Buchanan, who, along with his team, was the main founder of the Koch brothers and other billionaires with a similar philosophy game plan of how to go about getting rid of Social Security, Medicare, and other new Deal Programs. The Koch’s discovered Buchanan in the early 1970s.

Although this began many decades ago, it wasn’t until the early 21st century that most of us began to sense that something extraordinarily troubling had somehow entered American politics.
 Several GOP-controlled state legislatures inflicted flesh-wounding cuts in public education,
while rushing through laws to enable unregulated charter schools and provide tax subsidies for private education.
In Wisconsin, North Carolina, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Iowa, these same GOP-controlled legislatures also took aim at state universities and colleges, which had long been integral components of state economic development efforts—and bipartisan sources of pride. Chancellors who dared to resist their agenda were summarily removed.

Then came a surge of synchronized proposals to suppress voter turnout.
In 2011 and 2012, legislators in 41 states introduced more than 180 bills to restrict who could vote and how.
Most of these bills were aimed at low-income, minority, young people and the less mobile elderly.

THE CLOT THICKENS

When the Kochs and their minions could not prevent the passage of the Affordable Care act,
 they shut down the government for sixteen days in 2013 in an attempt to defund it.

Numerous independent observers described such stonewalling, vicious partisanship, and attempts to bring the normal functioning of government to a halt as “unprecedented.”
 When the Republicans would not agree to conduct hearings to consider the president’s nominee to fill the Supreme Court seat left vacant after Justice Antonin Scalia died in early 2016, even the usually reticent Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas spoke out. “At some point,” he told the Heritage Foundation, (a conservative think tank), “we are going to have to recognize that we are destroying our institutions."

All of these actions and more not listed above were part of a well-planned and well-coordinated national campaign, some of it promoted by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) which keeps its elected members a secret. It was producing hundreds of “model laws” each year for Republican legislators to enact in their states—and nearly 20% were enacted. There were laws to devastate labor unions, rewrite tax codes, undo environmental protections, privatize public resources, and require police to take action against undocumented immigrants.



In 2010, the brilliant investigative journalist Jane Mayer alerted Americans to the fact that two billionaire brothers, Charles and David Koch, had poured more than a hundred million dollars into a “war against Obama.”
She went on to research and document how the Kochs and other ultra rich right-wing donors were providing vast quantities of “dark money” (political spending that, by law, had become untraceable).
(Read "Dark Money"...a fine book)

After the Koch brothers saw what the small Virginia school was doing, they went on to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on institutions to create operatives to infiltrate government and other institutions with their anti-democratic ideas, such as the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, Citizens for a Sound Economy, Americans for Prosperity, FreedomWorks, the Club for Growth, the State Policy Network, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Tax Foundation, the Reason Foundation, the Leadership Institute, and more, to say nothing of the Charles Koch Foundation and Koch Industries itself. Others were being hired and trained here to transform legal understanding and practice on matters from health policy to gun rights to public sector employment.

Still others were taking what they learned here to advise leading Republicans and their staffs, from Virginia governors to presidential candidates. The current vice president, Mike Pence, a case in point, has worked with many of these organizations over the years and regurgitates their agenda.

Very early on, Buchanan and the Koch brothers realized that the American people would not support their plans, so to win they had to work behind the scenes and lie about what they really wanted:
 no rules,
no regulations,
stopping taxation of wealthy individuals and their corporate entities,
and a weak government whose only function was the maintenance of social order
with themselves at the top. 

They viewed taxation to advance social justice, improve the standard of living,  or the common good as a mob attempt to take by force what the takers had no moral right to: the fruits of another person’s efforts. It began with individuals, powerless on their own, who had figured out that if they joined together, they could use their strength in numbers to move government officials to hear their concerns and act upon them.

Charles Koch did not just become a convert to the ultra-predatory capitalist radical right.
He is the sole reason why this movement alters the trajectory of the United States in ways that are profoundly disturbing.

Charles Koch made his money the good ol' fashioned way.
He inherited it.
He multiplied the earnings of the corporation he inherited by a factor of at least 1,000 entirely by corrupting politicians and even judges to do things which maximize his profits. Case in Point -
Paul Ryan. The Kochs spent 20 million dollars getting and keeping him elected.
They gave him 500 thousand dollars just days after the Tax gift bill for the wealthy passed...even though he was no longer running for anything and stepping down in 2018.

Americans for Tax Fairness estimates that the Kochs and their conglomerate Koch Industries will get  $840 million and $1.4 billion in income tax breaks each year after congress pushed their bill through.
That's a return on investment of at least 4,100 percent on the $20 million they spent to pass the law.

They are laughing at you America.
You have been fleeced and you are chumps to the Kochs.
You are only useful as an organ farm for the Kochs to harvest.

After 2008, Koch libertarians began to call themselves conservatives, knowing full well that the last thing they wanted was to conserve, they want destruction...but saw strategic advantages in doing so. A similar cynicism ruled Koch’s decision to bankroll the religious right, and men like Jerry Falwell and Ralph Reed mobilized white evangelicals for political action on their behalf.
These religious hucksters were happy to sell Koch economics to their flocks—above all, opposition to public schooling and calls for reliance on family provision or charity in place of government assistance. The Koch team also learned how to leverage wider corporate backing.

The Koch team’s most important stealth move, and the one that proved most critical to success, was to wrest control over the machinery of the Republican Party, beginning in the late 1990s and with sharply escalating determination after 2008. From there it was just a short step to lay claim to being the true representatives of the party, declaring all others Republicans in name only. But while these radicals of the right operate within the Republican Party and use that party as a delivery vehicle, make no mistake about it: the cadre’s loyalty is not to the Grand Old Party or its traditions or standard-bearers. Their loyalty is to their revolutionary cause.

The new men in the wings respect only compliance; if they fail to get it, they respond with swift vengeance. The cadre targets for removal any old-time Republicans deemed a problem, throwing big money into their next primary race to unseat them.

U.S. senator Arlen Specter, of Pennsylvania, one of the first longtime Republicans to lose his seat for his failure to obey, referred to those who undermined him as “cannibals” who seek “the end of governing as we know it.” Others learned from experience how to survive. The Reagan Republican and six-term U.S. senator Orrin Hatch of Utah exploded after being targeted by a challenger from his own party in 2012: “These people are not conservatives. They’re not Republicans. They’re radical libertarians. . . . I despise these people.” He was right that they were not what they said they were, but the scare taught him to stop bucking and comply to keep his job. And, of course, there is John Boehner, the former House Speaker, who in 2015 finally gave up and walked out, calling one of the leaders of this cause inside the Capitol, Ted Cruz, “Lucifer in the flesh”.

Our trouble in grasping what has happened comes, in part, from our inherited way of seeing the political divide. Americans have been told for so long, from so many quarters, that political debate can be broken down into conservative versus liberal, pro-market versus pro-government, Republican versus Democrat, that it is hard to recognize that something more insidious is afoot, a shrewd long game blocked from our sight by these stale classifications. So not having words to fit what Republicans have become, we assume that what we are seeing is just very ugly partisanship, perhaps made worse by social media. But it is more than that. The Republican Party is now in the control of a hypnotized cult  for whom compromise is a dirty word.

Their cause, they say, is liberty. But by that they mean the insulation of private property rights from the reach of government—and the takeover of what was long public (schools, prisons, western lands, and much more) by corporations, a system that would radically reduce the freedom and quality of life of the many.

The Koch libertarian network had so much money and power at its disposal as the primary season began that every single Republican presidential front-runner was bowing to its agenda. Not a one would admit that climate change was a real problem or that guns weren’t as good as God.
Every one of them attacked public education and teachers’ unions and advocated more charter schools and public subsidies for religious schools. All called for radical changes in taxation and government spending. Each one claimed that Social Security and Medicare were in mortal crisis and that individual retirement and health savings accounts, presumably to be invested with Wall Street firms, were the best solution. They didn't back Trump...the authoritarian pussy grabbing was not Koch style. But they owned outright every other candidate in the GOP race.
Koch showed up at Trump tower election night though.

For Trump, the presidency is not only about power and rampant narcissism. It’s also part of his brand, sold to foreign diplomats and domestic suck-ups alike at the Trump International Hotel, to would-be investors in properties belonging to his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to Chinese consumers of his daughter’s fashion brands,onymous Ivanka Tru the epmp lines. And don’t forget members of and visitors to his golf clubs. There’s hush money and hacked emails and oligarch pals and all manner of stuff emitting noxious odors. The preceding list barely scratches the surface. But without the Koch brothers, who virtually own the Republican legislature, Trump could not remain in power.
Despite their love of the libertarian faith, the Kochs have thrown in with a tainted authoritarian because it’s working for them.

It’s won them a tax bill that starves government and issues a windfall to the wealthy.
It’s won them the administration’s policy of removing two regulations for every new one that’s implemented. (The brothers’ conglomerate, Koch Industries, is a famous polluter.) It’s won them a promise to open up more, even sacred, public lands for mineral and fossil fuel extraction.

We’ll probably never know the scope of the sprawl of the Koch network of interlocking nonprofit organizations, thanks to the unleashing of dark money in the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision—you know, the “money is speech” case that allows nonprofit groups to conceal the names of their donors. That dark money is pretty much paying for the perpetuation of Donald Trump’s corruption of the presidency and the U.S. Constitution. Because if the Kochs wanted Trump gone, they could put a bug in a few congressional ears about articles of impeachment. Yet they don’t. They may even feed their youthful ward, Paul Ryan, to the Trumpian beast that Congress has become.

In the end, it seems, there is no real division between the authoritarian and the neo-libertarian Kochs. Stronger than those differences is their mutual commitment to one unifying principle: greed.
Summary

It is unlikely that the United States can find its way back from the corruption epitomized by the Trump administration without addressing the corrosive effect of the dark money unleashed by the Supreme Court.

Democrats would be wise to shine a light on the corruption represented by Trump and his congressional supporters. It’s time to revive legislation that would turn off the dark-money spigot.

The very life of the constitution as well as democracy depends on it.

Are the right-wing billionaire neo libertarians a “fifth column”?

Is what we are dealing with merely a social movement of the right whose radical ideas must eventually face public scrutiny and rise or fall on their merits? No.
 This is the story of something quite different, something never before seen in American history.
 I use these words quite hesitantly and carefully—
it is a fifth-column assault on American democratic governance.
The term “fifth column” has been applied to stealth supporters of an enemy who assist by engaging in propaganda and sabotage to prepare the way for its conquest.
 A movement that knows it can never win majority support is not a classic social movement.

Their hostile takeover maneuvers very much like a fifth column, operating in a highly calculated fashion, more akin to an occupying force than to an open group engaged in the usual give-and-take of politics. The size of this force is enormous. The social scientists who have led scholars in researching the Koch network write that it “operates on the scale of a national U.S. political party” and employs more than three times as many people as the Republican committees had on their payrolls in 2015.

This points to another characteristic associated with a fifth column: the tactic of overwhelming the normal political process with schemes to disrupt its functioning. Indeed, this massive and well-funded force is turning the party it has occupied toward ends that most Americans and even Republican voters do not want, such as the privatization of Social Security, Medicare, and education.

What this cause really seeks is a return to oligarchy, to a world in which both economic and effective political power are to be concentrated in the hands of a few. It would like to reinstate the kind of political economy that prevailed in America at the opening of the 20th century, when the mass disfranchisement of voters and the legal treatment of labor unions as illegitimate enabled large corporations and wealthy individuals to dominate Congress and most state governments alike, and to feel secure that the nation’s courts would not interfere with their reign.

The American people have used their power to do many significant things that required tax revenues: provide public education, develop manufacturing, build roads and bridges, create land-grant universities, protect the safety of food and drugs, enable workers to speak as one through unions, prevent old-age poverty, fight discrimination, assure the right to vote, and clean up our air and water, to name a few. These are achievements in which most citizens have taken pride.That may all be a bit of nostalgia now.

Make no mistake, while lots of American Robber Barons have skeletons in the family closet.
Charles and David Koch, are in a league of their own.
The father of these famous rightwing billionaires was Fred Koch, who started his fortune with $500,000 received from Stalin for his assistance constructing 15 oil refineries in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. A couple of years later, his company, Winkler-Koch, helped the Nazis complete their third-largest oil refinery. The facility produced hundreds of thousands of gallons of high-octane fuel for the Luftwaffe, until it was destroyed by Allied bombs in 1944.

In 1938, the patriarch wrote that “the only sound countries in the world are Germany, Italy and Japan”. To make sure his children got the right ideas, he hired a German nanny. The nanny was such a fervent Nazi that when France fell in 1940, she resigned and returned to Germany. After that, Fred became the main disciplinarian, whipping his children with belts and tree branches.

Twenty years after collaborating with the Nazis, Fred Koch had lost none of his love for extremism. In 1958, he was one of the 11 original members of the John Birch Society, an organization which accused scores of prominent Americans, including President Dwight Eisenhower, of communist sympathies.

In 1960, Koch revealed his racism writing: “The colored man looms large in the Communist plan to take over America.”
He strongly supported the movement to impeach chief justice Earl Warren, after the supreme court voted to desegregate public schools in Brown v Board of Education.
His sons became Birchers too

Yes, the Kochs have a vision for America.
Enslaving it and raping it. What the Kochs and other post truth American "Robber Barons" are doing here is also being done in most of our allies democracies. Oligarchs are destroying the fabric of democracy through disinformation, promoting hate, fear, and nativism. They are all using similar corrupting methods. 

It's time to wake up from this nightmare folks. If we can't stop the dark money and corrupt manipulation, we deserve to be Koch's chumps. We deserve to be robbed blind by Trump.
Say goodnight Dick.

Welcome To The Post - Post -Truth Era... or Who Will Stop The Reign?

What if a regime employed a dismal us-versus-them divide in national politics to destroy faith in institutions capable of containing its power? Things like elections, an independent judiciary, journalism, the public forum – thereby eliminating checks on its own self-enriching schemes. Publicizing false charges of corruption while engaging in unfathomably corrupt practices is typical of fascist politics, and sham anti-corruption campaigns are frequently at the heart of fascist political movements.

What if the regime used these same divisive politics to build popular support for a tax system that preserves and increases wealth for few most privileged while creating no new opportunities for everyone else?
We are observing ironic hypocritical tactics of waving the banners of nationalism in front of middle-and working-class white people in order to funnel the state’s spoils into the hands of oligarchs has become routine.We need to breakdown and understand the fascist ideology as it was employed in Germany, Italy, Hungary, Rwanda Myanmar, Serbia and, yes, the United States.

In all fascist regimes, a mythic past is promoted, some extreme version of the patriarchal "family" reigns supreme, sometimes only a few generations ago...the autocratic leader promotes himself as the patriarch. In the rhetoric of all extreme nationalists, a glorious past has been lost by the humiliation brought on by globalism, liberal ideas, cosmopolitanism, and respect for ‘universal values’ such as equality. These values are supposed to have made the nation weak in the face of trumped up threatening challenges to the nation’s existence.

The rhetoric we are bombarded with every day now is based on the fascist idea of us and them. Trump leads fascist chants at rallies, encourages his supporters to use violence, he praises a politician who attacked a journalist, he mused that Hillary Clinton should be assassinated, denigrates the intelligence of African Americans, associates migrants with criminality, runs anti-Semitic advertisements, spreads the Nazi trope of Jews as ‘globalists,’ and endorses the anti-Semitic idea that the Jewish financier George Soros is responsible for his political opposition and even finances bands of disease ridden criminally insane boogiemen to "invade" the US — but he and his followers will puff chests and swell sinuses if anyone points this out.
Attacks on journalism an autocrat doesn’t like being called “fake news” follows the Nazi tactic of berating the Lügenpresse, or “lying press”. A phrase that has sadly returned to the political conversation in free world with the resurgence of the populist far right.

But linking Trump to fascism is not to assume that he’s the second coming of Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Perón, Salazar, or Szálasi... it is to point to worrying currents swirling through American democracy and the treacherous path down which this president is leading the nation. Anyone familiar with the history of autocrats in the last century or Plato's Republic can see the writing on the wall.

Trump's narcissism & general ignorance will eventually be his own undoing, he will fail at the hands of his own incompetence. However this does not mean the nation or civilization will survive unscathed. This brand of "nationalism" has been sold to a large enough segment of the populations of numerous democratic countries...people who have no memory of what "nationalism" wrought in the world wars, or who for perverse reasons beyond the comprehension of any reasonable human beings, would prefer the Nazis had won.

Fascist bastards in the USA. 

Fascists reject liberal democracy, which is basically a representative kind of government where elections are free and competitive, powers between different government branches are separated, and people have more or less equal rights, freedoms and protections under the law.

Fascists, on the other hand, prefer totalitarian one-party rule, led by a strong leader (your favorite dictator). This allows the fascist country to have unparalleled national unity of purpose, a very ordered society, generally ready for armed conflict. Such a society is also poised to respond quickly to economic measures, especially in time of difficulties. A fascist country will likely isolate itself, blaming the international economic order for its troubles.

"Nationalists....with a mythical past"

Just as a side note, who has been bankrolling overt fascist political campaigns all over Europe? (As well as throwing monkey wrenches in the cogs of US elections) from Marine Le Pen to the Golden Dawn?
Putin & his inner circle of oligarchs. Why?
Because it doesn't seem to take much to get liberal democracies to destroy themselves. Which would leave Putin & his cronies in position to prosper greatly in the void left from their fall.
Read more:

The far right extremists are making inroads everywhere, not just the US.

Neo-nazis & white supremacists are jumping for joy over Trump's "I'm a nationalist" statement.

Democracy - For Sale To Highest Bidder?

Back in 2003, researchers at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, Sarah Brosnan and Frans de Waal, who led the research team, found that capuchin monkeys respond negatively to inequality and injustice.

In the experiment, capuchins were motivated to perform a task when rewarded with a slice of cucumber, until they became aware that other monkeys were being rewarded with grapes.
When the primates became aware that partners were receiving better rewards for the same task, they became agitated, threw their cucumbers at the researchers, and refused to participate in the experiment.

Humans, who we might argue are at least as intelligent (well we MIGHT),  have similar reactions to injustice. Studies in employee behavior support the equity theory of motivation, showing that effort is tied to the perception that employees are  being treated fair and rewards are distributed equitably and justly, based on performance. When employees perceive that they are not rewarded for their efforts compared to others, they strive to achieve justice by either doing less work, obtaining salary increases, reducing the rewards of others, or leaving these jobs entirely.

In both human and primate examples, social comparisons drive dissatisfaction. People are generally willing to put up with minimal  rewards if those rewards are distributed equitably.
We would rather be collectively poor than treated unfairly.
In a recent OECD Study, the point is made that there is now widespread recognition that GDP measures or GDP per capita are misleading when it comes to understanding economic well-being.
What the study found was that household income, with a particular emphasis on income inequality was by far the truthful measure of a country's well being. It analyzed the distribution of household wealth across 28 countries, finding that wealth inequality is twice the level of income inequality on average.

The study also found that the wealthiest 10 percent of households hold 52 percent of total household wealth on average. By comparison, the 60 percent least wealthy households own little over 12 percent. The situation of inequality is worst in the United States.
In the US, the share of wealth held by the richest 10 percent of households stands at 79 percent.

 The bottom 60 percent of U.S. households only hold 2.4 percent of household wealth.

This inequality gap is also wide in Europe -10 percent of households control 68 percent of wealth in the Netherlands and 64 percent in Denmark. However in both countries, there are strong government investments in social programs. For instance even the poorest citizens have access to healthcare and education.

The United States leads the world in wealth inequality.

Inequality justified by performance isn't a problem. But the idea that one can get ahead and achieve  based solely on merit has become difficult to defend. Research from the Brookings Institution shows there is some minor opportunity for economic mobility at the middle of the economic ladder. (Middle-income kids have some opportunities to shape their own destinies, moving up or down in socioeconomic status)  Yet the middle class is shrinking. It grows smaller every day.

 Those born to wealthy parents stay wealthy, and those born to poor parents stay poor.

Wealthy families provide ample safety nets that allow their children to succeed, quite often despite very poor choices , little effort, and even behavior that; had they been born to a less wealthy parent, would have landed them in jail.

Conversely, poor families become a liability to even the most ambitious offspring.

This effect of parental income on a child’s income, which economists call “intergenerational earnings elasticity,” or IGE, is growing in the U.S. In a comparative analysis across countries, income inequality is correlated with high IGE, and the United States has fallen behind all other Western democracies in both. The “American dream” is now more realistically the “Canadian dream.”

The truth is, despite the misguided belief; "merit" has little to do with income.
Most wealth is simply inherited.
Oh sure, you can find some people who became wealthy because of their intellectual property, or hard work, or intelligent use of their own talents...but on the Forbes list of the world's 100 wealthiest people, only a half dozen or so did not inherit their wealth.

Education is often a mechanism for the transfer of wealth, as the wealthy can send their kids to the best private schools and most expensive colleges, and use their influence to secure high paying positions afterwards.  Yet, even among students at the same college, it is clear that the system favors  wealthier families. Take internships, for example. In the US, the norm has been for companies and organizations to offer unpaid internships, capitalizing on the free labor of a generation desperate for the experience that has become necessary to enter the workforce. But how can a middle class or poor person afford to live while working for free? They can not.

Wealthy families can pay for their summer housing, transportation expenses and even cover tuition so the internship can count for college credit. Yet, other students must work paid retail jobs over the summer to earn money for books and other college expenses. Their resumes can not look as impressive. And what about students who want to go to law school? Students whose families can afford to pay the $1,500 fee for LSAT preparatory courses have a clear advantage over those who cannot. These are but a few examples.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the Janus case surprised no one who pays attention to America’s highest judicial panel. Every analyst following the case expected the Supremes to rule against America’s public sector unions. And by a 5-4 margin, they did.

The impact from this decision? The Supreme Court’s decision in Janus will make the United States still more unequal.

The five justices who decided Janus never, of course, mentioned anything about inequality in their ruling that public sector unions cannot collect representational fees from the nonmembers they are legally required to represent. The Janus majority justices talked instead about protecting First Amendment rights. But that lofty philosophizing merely served as a convenient cover for the continuing assault on the basic human right to justice on the job.

This assault was an effort bankrolled over the years by a relentless gang of fiercely anti-union deep pockets and it has been remarkably effective.

Back in the 1950s, over a third of America’s workers belonged to unions.
And that statistic underplayed the actual extent of the nation’s trade union presence.
In the private sector, outside the South, unions represented over half the workforce in the decades  after World War II.

The workers unions didn’t represent in those years directly benefited as well from heavy trade union “density.” Nonunion employers simply couldn’t hire and keep workers unless they improved what they had to offer in pay and benefits.

The business pushback against union influence started picking up considerable momentum in the 1970s, then achieved critical mass in the 1980s with Ronald Reagan in the White House.

In 1981, Reagan fired and permanently replaced striking air traffic controllers.
Two major private sector employers, Phelps Dodge and International Paper, would soon follow Reagan’s example with their own striking unions. Other employers took notes.

This willingness to replace striking workers, historian Joseph McCartin has written, would reshape “the world of the modern workplace.” Strikes would now almost totally disappear from American labor relations. Strikes had given workers leverage. Without them, unions simply couldn’t effectively pressure employers to increase wages as productivity & profits grew.

Other assaults on worker rights aggravated labor’s growing marginality in America’s workplaces.
The nation’s labor laws — statutes meant to protect workers’ right to bargain collectively with their employer — were killed. 
Employers who violated these statutes no longer faced any significant liability.
The assaults took a toll. By 1983, union membership had dropped to 20.1 percent of America’s nonsupervisory workforce. In 2017, the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics reported only 10.7 percent of the nation’s employees carried union cards.

And these stats overplay the actual extent — in the private sector — of the trade union presence in 21st-century American life. In the mid-20th century, most all union members worked in the private sector. Today union members make up 34.4 percent of the public sector workforce and only 6.5 percent of workers in the private sector.
Nine states now have overall union member rates under 5 percent. In other words, over vast swatches of the American economic landscape, unions  barely exist at all.

What does exist in the United States today?
A level of income and wealth inequality not seen since the 1920s, another era of minimal union influence. The history of America’s past century paints a vividly clear picture: Inequality in America has increased in the years when unions have been at their weakest and decreased in the years when unions have been at their strongest.

For years, the conventional economic wisdom has blamed our contemporary extreme inequality on irreversible trends like advancing technologies and globalization. But this myth is no longer defended by mainstream economists. Recent mainstream research has emphasized how crucial a role union density plays in income and wealth distribution.

Researchers from the International Monetary Fund (of all places!) have examined the economic experiences of 20 developed nations between 1980 and 2010. Most all of these nations showed a declining union presence over the course of these years, with that decline severe in some nations — like the United States — and much less severe in others. What they found was declining union density was “strongly associated” with the growing share of national income going, within each nation, to the richest 10 percent of the population. “The decline in union density,” this IMF research indicates, “explains about 40 percent of the average increase in the top 10 percent of income share in our sample countries.”

Part of that growing income share of the already affluent reflects the lower wages of workers in nonunion workplaces. The de-unionization that “weakens earnings of middle- and low-income workers,” the IMF researchers explain, “necessarily increases” the income share of corporate executives and shareholders.

Another part of that growing top 10 percent income hoarding reflects the loss of influence over basic public policy decisions that average wage earners wielded when unions were stronger.
That shrinking influence leaves the wealthiest 10% in control of the the economic and political system, and they rig it in their favor.

Other global economic bodies — like the OECD, the official economic research agency of the developed world — have concluded that our current high levels of inequality do no society any good.

“By not addressing inequality,” OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurría has pronounced, “governments are cutting into the social fabric of their countries and hurting their long-term economic growth.”

Last year, trade union leaders from around the world descended on an OECD Ministerial Council Meeting in Paris to make the case that significant progress against inequality will only come when workers have the bargaining power to “benefit from structural and technological change.” along with the

The U.S. Supreme Court has totally ignored economic reality with its Janus decision.
Come to think of it, the U.S. government in it's efforts to appease the billionaire class since the 1980s, has ignored economic reality entirely.
As for the rest of us?
Unlike the SCOTUS...or the other branches of government...
We can’t afford to.

Postscript: 
The Rich do not always win...remember that.
The memory of the  triumph over plutocracy that created the American middle class must not be permitted to be extinguished. The future may appear to be bleak, and if we do not change the course we are on, it will be. However that is a matter of choice. We need not choose a bleak future.
We must not let others convince us there is no choice.
Recommended reading on the subject:
an analysis of how America went from a plutocracy to a more egalitarian society and back again.

Follow me on Spotify!!!!

The Kremlin KKKandidate - From Putin, With Love?...

It's well documented that Putin & his oligarch network runs stealth efforts on behalf of politicians who rail against the European Union and want to push away from NATO.
And why wouldn't they?

Putin has been a patron of the fascists like Golden Dawn in Greece, Ataka in Bulgaria, and Jobbik in Hungary. Russian banks financed the campaign of fascist Jean-Marie Le Pen in France.
In a speech at the Brookings Institution Joe Biden noted: “President Putin sees such political forces as useful tools to be manipulated, to create cracks in the European body politic which he and his oligarch circle can then exploit.”

Ruptures that will likely multiply after Brexit—a campaign Russia’s many propaganda organs bombastically promoted.

While the destruction of Europe is quite a grandiose objective; so is the weakening of the United States. Until recently, Putin's oligarch network has only focused glancing attention on US elections.

Then along came the barking Tangerine Twitler.
If the Oligarchs could design their perfect patsy, it would look exactly like Trump.
 He celebrated the United Kingdom’s exit from the EU.
 He denounces NATO.
He spits on long time allies.
He praises dictators.
He preaches division.
He wants to build walls, not tear them down.
And he is also a great admirer of Vladimir Putin.
Trump’s devotion to the Russian president has been portrayed in the news as a buffoonish enthusiasm for a fellow macho strongman.  But Trump’s statements of praise are something closer to slavish devotion. In 2007, he praised Putin for “rebuilding Russia.” A year later he added, “He does his work well. Much better than our Bush.” When Putin ripped America in a New York Times op-ed in 2013, Trump called it “a masterpiece.” Despite ample evidence, Trump denies that Putin has assassinated his opponents, “In the event that such killings have transpired, they can be forgiven: At least he’s a leader.” And not just any old head of state: “I will tell you that, in terms of leadership, he’s getting an A.”

Many of Trump's ties to Russian Banks owned by Putin's network of oligarchs are known.
When the American banks stopped loaning him money because of his habit of intentionally declaring bankruptcies to get out of paying labor & creditors, he was bailed out by the Russian banks, owned by Putin's inner circle.  And why wouldn’t the Russians offer him the same furtive assistance they’ve lavished on Le Pen, Berlusconi, and the rest? Russian propaganda went full throttle for Trump, using its Russia Today apparatus to hail the courage of Trump’s foreign policy. (Sample headline: “Trump Sparks NATO Debate: ‘NATO Obsolete’) Russian intelligence services hacked the Democratic National Committee’s servers, purloining its opposition research files on Trump and just about everything else it could find. They also wormed their way into the computers of the Clinton Foundation, a breach reported by Bloomberg. And though it may be a mere coincidence, Trump’s inner circle is populated with advisers and operatives who have long careers advancing the interests of the Kremlin.
There is certainty that a foreign power that wishes ill upon the United States attached itself to a major presidential campaign.

Donald Trump’s interest in Russia dates back to Soviet times. In fact, there’s extraordinary footage of him shaking hands with Mikhail Gorbachev. It comes from 1988, the peak of perestroika and Gorbachev’s efforts to charm the American public. On his legendary trip to Washington and New York, the Soviet in chief left the confines of his limousine and security cordon to glad-hand with the American people. Donald Trump suggested to reporters that the Soviet leader would be making his way to Trump Tower, a crucial station on his journey to capitalism. This was, in fact, a self-aggrandizing fabrication that Trump himself planted in the tabloids, but it was a convincing lie. A year earlier, Trump had traveled to Russia to attempt to develop luxury hotels in Moscow and Leningrad to feed the regime’s new appetite for Western business.  Newsweek reported this story.
Trump reveled in the newspaper stories that reported Gorbachev’s forthcoming visit to his HQ as fact. But he never expected his fake story to become reality. He must have been gobsmacked when he received word that Gorbachev wanted to pay a spontaneous visit to Trump Tower.
The skyscraper’s namesake rushed down from his penthouse office to pay obeisance.
From the video, we can see the blotched head of Gorbachev emerge from his car.
Trump and his retinue push through the crowd.
 “Great, great honor,” the mogul says as he pumps the hand of the Soviet supremo.
But one of Trump’s many vulnerabilities is that he doesn’t vet his people, whether it’s business partners, or the dubious characters he retweets, or the foreign leaders who show up at his door.
 As it turns out, this Gorbachev wasn’t really the Soviet leader but an impersonator called Ronald Knapp. Trump was lavishing praise on the winner of a look-alike contest.
The con man was easily conned by a prankster.
Now he's dealing with far more accomplished "pranksters", and the future of the US, as well as our allies and partners hangs in the balance.

And that my friends, abridged as it may be; tells you all you really need to know about this mango Mussolini. That was merely the first instance of Trump carelessly sucking up to Russian power in the hopes of personal gain.

Fuckface Von Clownstick

You can rest assured, there will be plenty of unscrupulous details uncovered via the Mueller investigation. Money laundering, corruption on the grandest scale, and fraud are already obvious.
But none of this is the point of this writing today.
No, this isn't about Russians meddling.
The real issue, the one we ought to be up in arms about has nothing to do with one nation or another.
It has nothing to do with borders on a political map.
The real truth is that this is a class war.
The billionaire oligarchs against everyone else.
America has over time become less democratic and more oligarchic.
The gutting of protections against monopolies, the destruction of labor organization protections, the use of capital to override and overturn laws in favor of the obscenely wealthy...there's a privileged class and there's "the "inferior" who are not billionaires
 The "unnecessary eaters" as they were called in Weimar Germany by Trump's "many good people".
(sarcasm off)

This isn't about Russians, it's about oligarchs -- Birds Of A Feather.
If you think the Fanta Fascist is on YOUR side, unless you own a few Senators and travel in a personal Lear Jet, you likely attended Trump University and are a moron.
What do the Oligarchs want?
From The Kochs and Mercers, to the Kozitsyns, Potanins, and Melnichenkos...they all want one thing. The end of liberal democracies.
They have grown bored and tired with the inconvenience of going through the motions of pretending all you "unnecessary eaters" out there have political voices...the expenses of buying legislatures off.
Beyond your value as an organ donor when their livers are shot, you are less than nothing.

Putin is estimated to be the richest man in the world.
Like Trump, he hides the details.
(Trump's a halfwit who is hiding his debts and money laundering...make no comparison...he wasn't in the oligarch club...he wants in ).
This isn't about the country of Russia, it's about the wealthy going after the last crumbs on earth...yours. 

A Simple Plea- Abraham Lincoln's 1858 Warning

“Now, my countrymen, if you have been taught doctrines in conflict with the great landmarks of the Declaration of Independence, if you have listened to suggestions which would take away from its grandeur and mutilate the fair symmetry of its proportions; if you have been inclined to believe that all men are not created equal in those inalienable rights enumerated in our charter of liberty, let me entreat you to come back. Return to the fountain whose waters spring close by the blood of the revolution".  ~Abraham Lincoln

These are the words Lincoln used in 1858.
They are well chosen and should be heeded.
But there is more wisdom, he went on to say; speaking of the founders of the nation:

“Wise statesmen as they were, they knew the tendency of prosperity to breed tyrants, and so they established these great self-evident truths,that when in the distant future some man, some faction, some interest, should set up the doctrine that none but rich men, or none but white men, were entitled to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, their posterity might look up again to the Declaration of Independence and take courage to renew the battle which their fathers began — so that truth, and justice, and mercy, and all the humane and Christian virtues might not be extinguished from the land; so that no man would hereafter dare to limit and circumscribe the great principles on which the temple of liberty was being built.”

Well that moment is here.
  Lincoln challenges all of us to uphold the principles which guided the founding of this nation.
These principles are now under full assault, not only by a malevolent autocrat, but by a thoroughly corrupt and slavish political party that sustains him.

On this 4th of July, in which we find our democracy under constant, unrelenting assault by an Administration that shows no interest in our country’s most cherished beliefs, it is an ideal time for the majority of Americans who do care about the country’s future to listen to this warning  from a President whom historians often cite along with Washington, and F.D.R., as the most important;
 a president who through his words and deeds truly earned the respect of all.

Even if you voted for Trump, for whatever reason, it couldn't be more obvious now from the corruption and rot currently stinking up the Oval Office, the inhuman removal of children from their families,  the embracing of murderers & dictators, the disdain for our closest allies, (those not only economically or militarily allied with us but also our ideological kin),  must have one salutary effect... to force many Americans to actually think about their civic responsibility towards the nation and indeed the world.

Like Lincoln, I implore my fellow countrymen to do just that.