Ethical Culture, or Ethical Humanism says, "Act in a way that will promote
positive behavior in others, or something like that. It's the secular version
of "do onto others but it's a bit different. It's like, "Do whatever you can
to encourage the good, wherever you see it". Given our situation, I suppose it
feels sort of passive, but it's the best I can come up with. The question then
arises, What do we do when we see people doing something really hurtful to
others?" We try to stop them. But in the process, we'll get hurt. If we attempt
to defend ourselves, we'll be hurt worse. I think my father might advise, "Just
do the best you can".
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Monday, January 07, 2019 1:24 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: The Election Circus Begins
Miriam,
Our choices are "Grim and Grimmer".
I agree with those who believe that a violent uprising will only end with
another violent master. But, while I've said it myself, standing upon our
principles, we'll still end up with a new violent master. We need to believe
that we can take actions that will bring about a positive change. So, what
would a positive change look like?
Then, how do we move toward that goal without violence?
The current "liberal leaders" are still under the control of the Corporate
American Empire, and are not going to do anything worth while. So what is it
that we can present which will attract people?
And how do we spread the word, if we did have a word, when the normal channels
are all bought and paid for? It's a real conundrum.
Carl Jarvis
On 1/7/19, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Yes, they should impeach him or remove him with the 25th amendment or
whatever it is. The problem is that the Democrats are so timid.
They're afraid that someone might get mad at them. Chris Hedges wants
us to resist, somehow, without telling us how, because it is the right
thing to do, because it is moral, and as far as he's concerned, being
moral is good enough, even if we don't achieve anything, even if we die in
the process.
Norman Solomon wants us to reform the Democratic Party, a bit at a time.
Bernie Sanders wants us to reform the system in terms of domestic
policy, but not to mess too much with our military budget. Elizabeth
Warren wants us to reform domestic economic policy while continuing to be an
empire.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Monday, January 07, 2019 11:27 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: The Election Circus Begins
So, Chris Hedges, what do we do about it all? I agree with your basic
premise, that we are now embarking on a long new campaign season, a
wild carnival about to unfold, with more clowns and freaks than ever
were seen at "The Greatest Show On Earth". But even with all your
insight, even with public exposure far broader than any that I might
hope for, you offer no real hope for a positive solution.
While the establishment begins shuffling along toward another long,
unbelievably dull season of lies, deceit, misdirection and Trumped up
national crisis's, the "Donald" himself is leaning toward declaring a
national emergency, and very likely shutting down even more of what
still calls itself, "The Government".
I have changed my position...once again, and now believe that you and
all of us demand that Donald Trump be impeached. As much a threat to
democracy as Mike Pence might be, he is not the loos cannon that is
now threatening to destroy the economy in order to prove that he is a
real Macho Guy. I believe that my two US Senators, Murray and
Cantwell would go the distance on any effort to remove this out-of-control
Carney from office.
Beyond that, I would urge you, Chris Hedges, and all Americans to
bring pressure on their senators and representatives to declare the
2016 presidential election to be illegal, and all those people
appointed officially by Donald Trump, to be illegal appointments. All
of the judges receiving appointments since 2016 also need to be
withdrawn and replaced by whoever becomes the actual president.
So...where did I put my "magic mushrooms?"
Carl Jarvis
On 1/7/19, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The Election Circus Begins
Mr. Fish / Truthdig
It is January 2019. This signals the start of the 2020 election circus.
Sen.
Elizabeth Warren is the first big-name Democrat on stage. But we will
soon be deluged with candidates, bizarre antics and endless
commentary by fatuous TV and radio pundits. The hyperventilating, the
constant polling, the updates on who has the largest campaign war
chest, the hypothetical matches between this hopeful and that
hopeful, the mocking tweets by Donald Trump, will, as we saw in the
2016 election campaign, have as much relevance to our lives and
political future as the speculation on cable sports channels about
next year's football season. This farce takes the place of genuine political
life.
It costs a lot of money to mount this spectacle. Our corporate
masters, like the oligarchic rulers of ancient Rome who poured money
into the arena as they stripped the empire and its citizens of their
assets, are happy to oblige. The campaign sustains the fiction of a
democracy and gives legitimacy to the corporate state. Maybe Hillary
Clinton, who raised $1 billion in her 2016 run for president, will
return for another season, although the Bill and Hillary tour is now
a debacle with empty seats and slashed ticket prices. Maybe Joe Biden
and Bernie Sanders will make comebacks. And what about the new faces
in the scramble for the presidency-Beto O'Rourke, former New Orleans
Mayor Mitch Landrieu, former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, former
Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., former Housing Secretary Julian
Castro, Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand, Cory Booker and Kamala Harris, Los
Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti and the billionaires Tom Steyer and
Michael Bloomberg?
It is a political version of the reality television show "Survivor."
Who will be the first knocked out? Who will make it into the
semifinals and the finals? Who is the most devious and cunning? Who
will come out on top? We get to vote for the contestants that appeal
to us most, or at least vote against those we hate the most. The
cable news shows, in a prelude to the nonstop idiocy to come, have
spent the last few days speculating about whom Mitt Romney will
endorse in the
2020 race. Now, there's a burning question of national importance.
To take power in 2021 in lieu of any real policy changes, the
Democratic Party is banking on the deep animus toward President Trump.
It has no intention of instituting genuine populist programs,
rebuilding unions, funding universal health care, providing free
college tuition or curbing the criminal activities of the
corporations and the big banks. The war machine will continue to wage
endless war and consume half of all discretionary spending. The
vaunted new populist members of Congress will be no more than window
dressing, trotted out, like Sanders, to trick voters into thinking
the Democratic Party is capable of reform. Most voters, for this
reason, are "voting out of loathing, against enemies and against the
system in general, not really for anybody," as journalist Matt Taibbi
points out.
Working men and women especially despise the slick-talking
politicians-including the Clintons and Barack Obama-and the "experts"
and well-groomed pundits on their screens who sold them the con that
deindustrialization, deregulation, austerity, bailing out the banks,
nearly two decades of constant war, the exporting of jobs overseas,
tax cuts for the rich and the impoverishment of the working class
were forms of progress.
Trump hangs on to the support of white working Americans because he
expresses through his adolescent insults and dynamiting of political
norms the legitimate hatred they feel toward the well-heeled,
college-educated ruling elites who sold them out. The Democrats, at
the same time, understand that it takes someone as revolting as Trump
to fire up their lethargic base, a group in which millions do not
vote. They cling to a tactic of "anybody but Trump" even though it
did not work in 2016.
The corporate media ignores issues and policies, since there is
little genuine disagreement among the candidates, and presents the
race as a beauty contest. The fundamental question the press asks is
not what do the candidates stand for but whom do the voters like. As
for now, Warren-the only nationally known Democrat except Julian
Castro to form an exploratory committee for a presidential bid-is not
winning this popularity contest. A CNN/Des Moines Register Iowa
poll-yes, polling in Iowa already has begun-puts her fourth, with
only 8 percent of support among the Democrats surveyed, behind Joe
Biden, Bernie Sanders and Beto O'Rourke.
Our corporate rulers do not need to denounce democracy. Democratic
laws, such as who can fund campaigns, have been subverted from
within, their original purposes redefined by the courts and
legislative bodies to serve corporate power. This managed democracy
has transformed elections from the simple, straightforward process of
voting for a party platform or party positions to vast, choreographed
theatrical productions. Politicians run on "moral" issues and use
public relations experts to create manufactured personalities. Trump,
his image constructed by a reality television show, proved more adept
than his rivals at playing this game the last time around.
Politicians must stick to the script. They have well-defined roles.
They express a suffocating, reality-defying positivism about the
future of America. They are steadfast in their obsequious praise of
the nation's "heroes" in the military and law enforcement. They are
silent about the crimes of empire. They ignore the plight of the
poor; indeed the word "poor"
is banished from their vocabulary. They pretend we do not live in a
corporate oligarchy, although they acknowledge amorphous attacks on
the middle class and promise to stem the assault. They exude a
cloying feel-your-pain compassion that revolves around personal
stories of the hardships they overcame in their own lives to become
"successes"-the most ludicrous being Trump's claim that he turned a
"very small" loan from his father into a multibillion-dollar real
estate empire. They telegraph to us that they are one of us. We can
be like them. They trot out their wives, husbands and children, even
when a spouse like Melania Trump looks as if she has been taken
hostage, to portray themselves as family men and women. They claim
they are outsiders, ignoring their long political careers and their
status as members of the wealthy ruling elite. They are no different
from the array of self-help gurus who ignore systemic injustice and
social decay to peddle schemes for personal success. The formula is
universal. It is the triumph of artifice, what Benjamin DeMott called "junk
politics."
Those who do not play this game, like Ralph Nader, or who like
Sanders play it begrudgingly-Sanders refused corporate money, has
called for reforming "the bloated and wasteful $716 billion annual
Pentagon budget" and addresses issues of class-are ridiculed and
marginalized by a monochromatic corporate media that banishes
qualification, ambiguity, nuance and genuine dialogue.
Trump's success as a candidate came, in large part, because of the
constant media attention he received. Those like Sanders who attempt
to defy the rules of the game are punished. The goal is entertainment.
Politicians who are good entertainers do well. The poor entertainers
do badly. The networks seek to attract viewers and increase profits,
not disseminate information about political issues. Voters have
little or no say in who decides to run, who gets funded, how
campaigns are managed, what television ads say, which candidates get
covered by the press or who gets invited to presidential debates.
They are spectators, pawns used to legitimize political farce.
"At issue is more than crude bribery," the political philosopher
Sheldon Wolin writes in "Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy
and the Spector of Inverted Totalitarianism." "Campaign contributions
are a vital tool of political management. They create a pecking order
that calibrates, in strictly quantitative and objective terms, whose
interests have priority.
The amount of corruption that regularly takes place before elections
means that corruption is not an anomaly but an essential element in
the functioning of managed democracy. The entrenched system of
bribery and corruption involves no physical violence, no
brown-shirted storm troopers, no coercion of the political
opposition. While the tactics are not those of the Nazis, the end result is
the inverted equivalent.
Opposition has not been liquidated but rendered feckless."
This process, Wolin writes, has turned the electorate into "a hybrid
creation, part cinematic and part consumer. Like a movie or TV
audience, it would be credulous, nurtured on the unreality of images
on the screen, the impossible feats and situations depicted, or the
promise of personal transformation by a new product. In this the
elites were abetted by the long-standing American tradition of
dramatic evangelism and its fostering of collective fervor and
popular fantasies of the miraculous. It was no leap of faith from the
camp meetings of the nineteenth century and the Billy Sundays of the
twentieth century to the politically savvy televangelist of the
twenty-first century."
The corporations that own the media and the two major political
parties have a vested interest in making sure there is never serious
public discussion about issues ranging from our disastrous for-profit
health care system and endless wars to the virtual tax boycott that
large corporations have legalized. The corporate system is presented
as sacrosanct and the ruling ideology of neoliberalism as natural law.
The corporations are funding the show. They get what they pay for.
Sanders, it appears, will run again as a Democrat, despite the theft
of the
2016 nomination by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party hierarchy.
His next campaign, to quote Samuel Johnson, will be the triumph of
hope over experience. The Democratic establishment and the media
sharks will, if Sanders uses the old playbook, devour him. They have
already severely diminished his stature by turning him into Clinton
and Chuck Schumer's barking seal.
The differences between the right-wing media and the liberal media
are minuscule. As Taibbi writes in "Insane Clown President:
Dispatches From the
2016 Circus," they are "really just two different strategies of the
same kind of nihilistic lizard-brain sensationalism. The ideal CNN
story is a baby down a well, while the ideal Fox story is probably a
baby thrown down a well by a Muslim terrorist or an ACORN activist.
Both companies offer the same service, it's just that the Fox version
is a little kinkier."
"Elections are about a lot of things, but at the highest level,
they're about money," Taibbi writes. "The people who sponsor election
campaigns, who pay hundreds of millions of dollars to fund the
candidates' charter jets and TV ads and 25-piece marching banks,
those people have concrete needs. They want tax breaks, federal
contracts, regulatory relief, cheap financing, free security for
shipping lanes, anti-trust waivers and dozens of other things."
"They mostly don't care about abortion or gay marriage or school
vouchers or any of the social issues the rest of us spend our time
arguing about. It's about the money for them, and as far as that
goes, the CEO class has had a brilliantly winning electoral strategy
for a generation. They donate heavily to both parties, essentially
hiring two different sets of politicians to market their needs to the
population. The Republicans give them everything that they want,
while the Democrats only give them mostly everything. They get
everything from the Republicans because you don't have to make a
single concession to a Republican voter. All you have to do to secure
a Republican vote is show lots of pictures of gay people kissing or
black kids with their pants down or Mexican babies at an emergency
room."
The Republican strategy of playing to the lowest common denominator
ensured that eventually the useful idiots would take over and elect
one of their own, in Donald Trump. Trump is the epitome of the human
mutation produced by an illiterate, dumbed-down age of electronic
images. He, like tens of millions of other Americans, believes
anything he sees on television. He does not read. He is consumed by
vanity and the cult of the self. He is a conspiracy theorist. He
blames America's complex social and economic ills on scapegoats such
as Mexican immigrants and Muslims, and of course the Democratic Party.
The Democratic Party, in turn, blames Trump's election on Russia and
former FBI Director James Comey. It is the theater of the absurd.
The childish gibberish Trump speaks is the new language of political
discourse. His taunting tweets against his enemies are countered by
his enemies with taunting tweets against him. These
grade-school-level insults dominate the daily news cycle. The
political process, captured by commercial interests, devolved to
Trump's imbecilic level. The presidential election of
2020 has begun. The circus, with its freaks, con artists and clowns,
is open for business.
Chris Hedges
Columnist
Chris Hedges is a Truthdig columnist, a Pulitzer Prize-winning
journalist, a New York Times best-selling author, a professor in the
college degree program offered to New Jersey state prisoners by
Rutgers.
Chris Hedges