Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

To the millions who still believe Trump is their savior. Trump is a poseur who presents himself as an enemy of the elite. A modern day Robin Hood. See below. It's important to remember what a prolific liar Trump is.And it's important to consider why Trump didn't elect to enter politics as a Democrat candidate.

First a lengthy excerpt from the post this post sits in reply to:

"Team Trump’s axis with Hitler’s American friends: The ex-president’s family and allies are teaming up with Nazis and antisemites
[...]
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[Insert: Fear and Loathing of the Green New Deal
"Noam Chomsky Believes Trump Is “the Worst Criminal in Human History”"
[...]-
The response to the Green New Deal provides us with a catalogue of
conservative arguments in all their schizophrenic glory.
-
In 1991, the economist A.O. Hirschman published a short book, The Rhetoric of Reaction, in which he argued that conservative arguments from the eighteenth to the twentieth century all followed the same basic logical structure and deployed the same rhetorical formulations. It’s hard not to recall Hirschman’s argument as we see conservative opinion already amassing to place the Green New Deal outside the bounds of respectable discourse. Back in the 1930s, the foes of the New Deal repeated their central arguments over and over again, no matter the specifics of the particular legislation then up for consideration. Critics warned that the New Deal would cause permanent damage to the foundations of the American economy. They feared that its measures were hasty and irrational. And once their complaints built to a crescendo, they argued that the flurry of legislation introduced by Roosevelt and the other New Deal Democrats intended to do little more than perform the necessary rescue mission to save capitalism from itself could only result in the creation of a totalitarian state. Squint your eyes a bit at the brewing pundits’ assault from the right on the Green New Deal, and you can see nearly all the same basic structural arguments in play. A.O. Hirschman is long gone, but the rhetoric of reaction sails serenely on, deployed against the nightmare of climate change with the same breezy, repetitive insistence its adherents once rolled out to argue against a coordinated response to the Great Depression.
[...]The proposal for a federal minimum wage (which passed in 1938) aroused still greater alarm among business conservatives.
[...]Such activists as Rev. Gerald Winrod of Wichita, Kansas—the founder of an organization named Defenders of the Christian Faith and Republican senatorial candidate in 1938—perceived the Roosevelt administration’s recognition of the Soviet Union as proof positive that the “hidden hand” of a Jewish cabal (the same one that had plotted the Bolshevik Revolution) was really pulling the strings. Father Charles Coughlin’s radio broadcasts with their sinister depictions of the “international bankers” who controlled Roosevelt reached millions of listeners. As historian Matthew Avery Sutton has argued, a substantial number of evangelical Christians strongly suspected that FDR was literally the Antichrist. (Online, such fantasies continue to circulate today: For one example, an organization calling itself the Christian Party has one lengthy post on the 1930s that describes the “Jew Deal” as “a tyrannical, plutocratic, Communist program for a Jewish collectivist state,” concluding: “The name that will live on in infamy: Franklin Delano Roosevelt / THE RED DEVIL !!!”)
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A substantial number of evangelical Christians strongly suspected
that FDR was literally the Antichrist.
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Dec., 2020 - https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=160331147
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Even more unimaginably perhaps, today we have a modern day version of Hitler’s American friends.

These people aren’t hiding. They aren’t fringe or subculture. Apparently, they aren’t ashamed to be associated with neo-Nazism, antisemitism, or even Hitler himself.

They have podcasts and hold rallies. They post antisemitic memes on social media. They are proud in their unabashed bigotry and defense of the world’s most terrible person.

One, Scott McKay, claims that Jews were behind 9/11 and the assassinations of Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy, that they set up a banking system “in exchange for the blood sacrifice of a child,” among other wild assertions .. https://biz.crast.net/eric-trump-tourmate-scott-mckay-claims-jewish-people-are-traitors-and-hitler-was-really-fighting-the-same-people-were-trying-to-take-down-today/ .. , and he’s praised Hitler for “actually fighting the same people that we’re trying to take down today.”

Another unsavory character, Charlie Ward .. https://www.mediamatters.org/eric-trump/eric-trump-touring-another-antisemite-who-shares-pro-hitler-propaganda , similarly praises Hitler for “warning us” about Jews, regularly posts antisemitic garbage, and has alleged that the so-called Jewish media lied about the Holocaust.

Most Americans would walk five miles over broken glass to keep their distance from these grotesque figures. Most politically-savvy surrogates would consider a rally populated with Hitler supporters to be a liability — especially if their principle is, you know, running for president.

But not Team Trump — the former president’s son and daughter-in-law are reportedly joining these two at the Trump National Doral resort in Miami this weekend."

This post was prompted by this post of 2012: The Return of the Sheriff of Nottingham - Hal Crowther

[...]

The benevolent outlaw is an archetype, a folk hero born of the frustrations of an underclass that sees the law as the will and whim of the privileged classes above them. In nearly every culture, individuals who pursue popularity -- politicians, comedians, poets and playwrights, pamphleteers and cartoonists and journalists -- at least pay lip service to this resentment and to its populist ideal. This was the essence of the persona crafted by Will Rogers, perhaps the most beloved of all American entertainers. I was caught off guard when someone reminded me of a fact I'd acquired and mislaid -- the fact that cowboy Will loved to play polo, the sport of kings.

There was a time when no one could be elected president of the United States without representing himself as the nemesis of Wall Street and Park Avenue, the champion of the dispossessed and downtrodden. A century ago, this was no perfunctory nod to the bleacher seats. On Labor Day, 1906, House Speaker Joe Cannon rallied his Republican troops with a speech praising President Theodore Roosevelt: "He is honest and fearless, and able, and stands for the people every time." At his highest populist pitch, one that rings positively Marxist to our 21st-century ears, Roosevelt sounds like a Robin Hood himself.

"There is not in the world a more ignoble character," TR sermonized, "than the mere money-getting American, insensible to every duty, regardless of every principle, bent only on amassing a fortune, and putting his fortune only to the basest uses -- whether these uses be to speculate in stocks and wreck railroads himself, or to allow his son to lead a life of foolish and expensive idleness and gross debauchery, or to purchase some scoundrel of high social position, foreign or native, for his daughter."

Roosevelt, the patrician Republican, called the enemies of the people "malefactors of great wealth"; his cousin Franklin Delano, of the same old money and gentle birth, was the class traitor who reviled them as "money changers" and "economic royalists." The Roosevelts were the center, in their day. On their left, the plutocracy was harangued by Marxists, socialists and agrarian populists, with relatively huge constituencies, who have since vanished mysteriously from America's political ecosphere. One hundred years ago this month, during TR's second term, a prominent Massachusetts socialist named James F. Carey came to Bangor, Maine, in support of the socialist candidate for governor. In spite of police harassment, a crowd described by the local newspaper as "multitudes" gathered in Center Park to hear the capitalists flayed.

"The wealth of the country was produced by labor," Carey declaimed. "Capital itself produces nothing. Why should those who produce everything have nothing, while those who produce nothing have everything?" In our own age of timorous, emasculated media, it's worth noting the local reporter's response, that late summer evening in 1906. He described an audience "held by the spell of the speaker's magnetic personality" and wrote that Carey made his points "with the directness and force of so many bullets."

In pre-World War I America, drastic economic inequality was a legacy of the Gilded Age. Corporate excess and colossal fortunes had taken much of the small-town shine off the Founders' notions of democracy. Yet the bloated, top-hatted, mustache-waxed villains who represented Big Capital in the cartoons of Thomas Nast were figures of fun and of general contempt. They were the dragons that Teddy Roosevelt and every high-minded, self-styled American hero hungered to slay. Their victims, the working class and the defenseless poor, were sentimentalized in the same cartoons as virtuous citizens whose plight was a national disgrace. Whatever his secret agenda, no public figure would openly embrace money grubbing, union busting or carrying water for the warlocks of Wall Street.

America's future was uncertain, at the turn of that century -- capitalism, since the Civil War, had become a kind of nuclear reaction nothing could stop -- but at least you knew where its heart was. When Joe Cannon spoke of "the people," it meant something -- it was more than a demagogue's rhetorical flourish. Looking back across that century, we see that one thing has never changed: the gross economic imbalance James Carey and his socialists vowed to rectify. Corporate profits are now at their highest level in four decades, thanks in part to a sharp rise in worker productivity. But current reports from the Census Bureau and the Labor Department show that median real wages have fallen behind inflation and the highest 1% of salaries account for 11% of all wages, nearly twice their share 30 years ago. The buying power of the minimum wage is at its lowest point in 50 years; the average CEO salary, 24 times the average worker's compensation in 1965, is now 262 times greater (511 in the obscenely flush oil industry) -- an abhorrent trend that began in the 1990s and continues to accelerate.

Paul Krugman, the New York Times' economic watchdog, crunched the numbers and concluded that manufacturing wages, in real money, had fallen 1% since 1980, while the real income of America's economic elite (the 1% with annual incomes over $277,000) had risen by 135%. Coincidentally, there are 15 million United States citizens living in "deep poverty" -- income below $7,800 annually for a family of three -- more than at any time since the government began keeping track of them. The number of Americans without health insurance, 46.6 million in 2005, was another record figure.

It doesn't take a degree in economics, or rocket science, to follow Krugman's logic to its conclusion. More people are in the work force, working more hours and producing more effectively -- and carrying home a smaller and smaller share of the wealth they create. Even President Bush's Treasury secretary, Henry Paulson, felt obliged to note -- though not deplore -- that unchecked economic polarization might become a source of anxiety. Paulson added, of course, that "it is neither fair nor useful to blame any political party."

America's economic food chain in 2006 bears a close resemblance to the 1906 model,

[...]

The Bush GOP, deaf to empathy or irony, is corporate America's Final Solution to the problem of people who insist on their fair share -- of the wealth they produce, of leverage in the marketplace, of political clout that in democratic theory accrues to superior numbers instead of concentrated wealth. How did it come to this, in a nation that boasts so hypocritically of exporting and fighting for "democracy" and "freedom"? And we have no one in sight who promises to fight, legally or illegally, for economic justice -- no Robin Hood, no Roosevelts, no James F. Carey or Eugene V. Debs or William Jennings Bryan, no Fighting Bob LaFollette, no Norman Thomas or Henry Wallace, no Kennedy brothers even. Our proletariat is homeless in Sherwood Forest with the Sheriff of Nottingham firmly in control, the nefarious Prince John lurking just over his shoulder.

[... the crunch is here ...]

When you vote, vote of course to give the Democrats the congressional majorities they've done virtually nothing to deserve -- not because they'll end the war in Iraq or any of these economic abominations, but just because they didn't create them and they're not pledged and determined to make them worse. And because it's the only door open to impeachment. Vote first on the war in Iraq, because it's not merely a fiasco as Thomas Ricks labels it, not merely a catastrophe but a goddamn freaking dress rehearsal for Armageddon -- without question the most tragic blunder an American president has ever committed. Everything Bush says about it is a lie, except when he says it will be a bloody hell if we leave -- and the same if we don't leave, or long after we leave, or this afternoon. We're left with no solution that's safe or moral either. The practical, realpolitik compromise would be to hand the whole snakepit back to Saddam Hussein, with our best wishes and enough American weapons to restore a loathsome but stable dictatorship. Iraq is sheer madness -- it was Pandora's box just waiting for the perfect fool to pry it open.

But when you approach the polling place, don't forget about Walter or the minimum-wage mothers, or the weeping debtor women of Boston. Failed experiments in state-sponsored altruism have taken the luster off socialism's theories, but its simplest truths persist. Since democracy only thrives on the sort of level playing field that Big Capital is bound to destroy, it may be that democracy and capitalism are intrinsically incompatible. Where do these "conservatives" draw the line between passively accepting socioeconomic Darwinism -- survival of the fittest -- and implementing it by deliberately culling the most vulnerable individuals? This is no class warfare; it's class genocide, embraced by an especially moronic and inflexible plutocracy that will soon learn there's no profit in being chief when the last healthy, willing Indian has disappeared. The dead end of "the American Dream" is a society that deifies The Dollar and excommunicates the citizen who has too few. That's where the nation's soul departs from its body.

I'm no longer a young man; this is not what America was in my time, or my father's time, or his father's. If that's what it will be in the future, I am so, so ashamed. If that's class warfare, bring it on.

https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=78633121

Just some more reading is all. Also consider this little note to one of this boards must trenchant recent critics

B402, It's worse in other countries. To bad you can't blame the Dems for that you dick. Again i put to
you your beef is with capitalism yet you have never once that i've seen posted any criticism of that.
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=172009309

Eleven years ago. Oh, toss in a 'particularly Chris Christie' connection of back then:

As Escapees Stream Out, a Penal Business Thrives

A company with deep ties to Gov. Chris Christie dominates New Jersey’s system of large halfway houses. There has been little state oversight, despite widespread problems, The New York Times found.

[...]

Yet with little oversight, the state’s halfway houses have mutated into a shadow corrections network, where drugs, gang activity and violence, including sexual assaults, often go unchecked, according to a 10-month investigation by The New York Times.

[...]

A Growth Industry

When the system was created, the large halfway houses were intended to help low-level offenders toward the end of their sentences. Inmates would be housed in dormitory-style rooms and receive drug treatment, job counseling and other services.

Many experts praise the halfway-house model, saying that if facilities are well managed, inmates are less likely to return to crime. State officials and Community Education credit the system with helping to reduce the state’s recidivism rate, as well as its prison population, which fell to 25,000 in 2010 from 30,000 in 2000, federal data show.
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=76691032