America is an Oligarchy

From Professor Robert Reich's Facebook page today.

And a plutocracy. And a kakistocracy. And more.

All the Things This President and his Political Party Are Bringing to the US, All at Once

You wouldn't think one nation, by itself, could be headed for autocracy, plutocracy, oligarchy, kakistocracy and Fascism, seriously, all of those, all at once.

Autocracy:  a system of government by one person with absolute power.
synonyms:  absolutism · absolute power · totalitarianism · dictatorship · despotism · tyranny · monocracy · autarchy · dystopia
--a country, state, or society governed by one person with absolute power.
--domineering rule or control.

Plutocracy:  government by the wealthy.
--a country or society governed by the wealthy.
--an elite or ruling class of people whose power derives from their wealth.

Oligarchy:  a small group of people having control of a country, organization, or institution.
--a country governed by an oligarchy.
--government by an oligarchy.

Kakistocracy:  government by the least suitable or competent citizens of a state.
--a state or society governed by its least suitable or competent citizens.

Fascism:  an authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization.

synonyms:authoritarianism · totalitarianism · dictatorship · despotism · autocracy · absolute rule · Nazism · rightism · militarism · nationalism · xenophobia · racism · anti-Semitism
--extreme authoritarian, oppressive, or intolerant views or practices.

Thanks, Mr. President.

Thanks, Republicans.

What the World Is Thinking and Saying Of This President--and America

If you somehow don't see the problem and problems Donald Trump and his political party, both are, separately and together, read this from out of Ireland and the Irish Times.

Fintan O’Toole: Donald Trump has destroyed the country he promised to make great again

The world has loved, hated and envied the US. Now, for the first time, we pity it

Over more than two centuries, the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the US until now: pity.

However bad things are for most other rich democracies, it is hard not to feel sorry for Americans. 

Most of them did not vote for Donald Trump in 2016. Yet they are locked down with a malignant narcissist who, instead of protecting his people from Covid-19, has amplified its lethality. The country Trump promised to make great again has never in its history seemed so pitiful.

Will American prestige ever recover from this shameful episode? The US went into the coronavirus crisis with immense advantages: precious weeks of warning about what was coming, the world’s best concentration of medical and scientific expertise, effectively limitless financial resources, a military complex with stunning logistical capacity, and most of the world’s leading technology corporations. Yet it managed to make itself the global epicentre of the pandemic.

As the American writer George Packer puts it in the current edition of the Atlantic, “The United States reacted ... like Pakistan or Belarus – like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering.”
It is one thing to be powerless in the face of a natural disaster, quite another to watch vast power being squandered in real-time – wilfully, malevolently, vindictively. It is one thing for governments to fail (as, in one degree or another, most governments did), quite another to watch a ruler and his supporters actively spread a deadly virus. Trump, his party, and Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News became vectors of the pestilence.

The grotesque spectacle of the president openly inciting people (some of them armed) to take to the streets to oppose the restrictions that save lives is the manifestation of a political death wish. What is supposed to be daily briefings on the crisis, demonstrative of national unity in the face of a shared challenge, have been used by Trump merely to sow confusion and division. They provide a recurring horror show in which all the neuroses that haunt the American subconscious dance naked on live TV.
If the plague is a test, its ruling political nexus ensured that the US would fail it at a terrible cost in human lives. In the process, the idea of the US as the world’s leading nation – an idea that has shaped the past century – has all but evaporated.

Other than the Trump impersonator Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, who is now looking to the US as the exemplar of anything other than what not to do? How many people in Düsseldorf or Dublin are wishing they lived in Detroit or Dallas?

It is hard to remember now but, even in 2017, when Trump took office, the conventional wisdom in the US was that the Republican Party and the broader framework of US political institutions would prevent him from doing too much damage. This was always a delusion, but the pandemic has exposed it in the most savage ways.

Abject surrender

What used to be called mainstream conservatism has not absorbed Trump – he has absorbed it. Almost the entire right-wing half of American politics has surrendered abjectly to him. It has sacrificed on the altar of wanton stupidity the most basic ideas of responsibility, care, and even safety.
Thus, even at the very end of March, 15 Republican governors had failed to order people to stay at home or to close non-essential businesses. In Alabama, for example, it was not until April 3rd that governor Kay Ivey finally issued a stay-at-home order.

In Florida, the state with the highest concentration of elderly people with underlying conditions, governor Ron DeSantis, a Trump mini-me, kept the beach resorts open to students traveling from all over the US for spring break parties. Even on April 1st, when he issued restrictions, DeSantis exempted religious services and “recreational activities”.

Georgia governor Brian Kemp, when he finally issued a stay-at-home order on April 1st, explained: “We didn’t know that [the virus can be spread by people without symptoms] until the last 24 hours.”
This is not mere ignorance – it is deliberate and homicidal stupidity. There is, as the demonstrations this week in US cities have shown, plenty of political mileage in denying the reality of the pandemic. It is fuelled by Fox News and far-right internet sites, and it reaps for these politicians millions of dollars in donations, mostly (in an ugly irony) from older people who are most vulnerable to the coronavirus.

It draws on a concoction of conspiracy theories, hatred of science, paranoia about the “deep state” and religious provincialism (God will protect the good folks) that is now very deeply infused in the mindset of the American right.

Trump embodies and enacts this mindset, but he did not invent it. The US response to the coronavirus crisis has been paralyzed by a contradiction that the Republicans have inserted into the heart of US democracy. On the one hand, they want to control all the levers of governmental power. On the other, they have created a popular base by playing on the notion that the government is innately evil and must not be trusted.

The contradiction was made manifest in two of Trump’s statements on the pandemic: on the one hand that he has “total authority”, and on the other that “I don’t take responsibility at all”. Caught between authoritarian and anarchic impulses, he is incapable of coherence.

Fertile ground

But this is not just Donald Trump. The crisis has shown definitively that Trump’s presidency is not an aberration. It has grown on soil long prepared to receive it. The monstrous blossoming of misrule has structure and purpose and strategy behind it.

There are very powerful interests that demand “freedom” in order to do as they like with the environment, society, and the economy. They have infused a very large part of American culture with the belief that “freedom” is literally more important than life. My freedom to own assault weapons trumps your right not to get shot at school. Now, my freedom to go to the barber (“I Need a Haircut” read one banner this week in St Paul, Minnesota) trumps your need to avoid infection.

Usually, when this kind of outlandish idiocy is displaying itself, there is the comforting thought that, if things were really serious, it would all stop. People would sober up. Instead, a large part of the US has hit the bottle even harder.

And the president, his party, and their media allies keep supplying the drinks. There has been no moment of truth, no shock of realization that the antics have to end. No one of any substance on the US right has stepped in to say: get a grip, people are dying here.

That is the mark of how deep the trouble is for the US – it is not just that Trump has treated the crisis merely as a way to feed tribal hatreds but that this behaviour has become normalized. When the freak show is live on TV every evening, and the star is boasting about his ratings, it is not really a freak show anymore. For a very large and solid bloc of Americans, it is reality.

And this will get worse before it gets better. Trump has at least eight more months in power. In his inaugural address in 2017, he evoked “American carnage” and promised to make it stop. But now that the real carnage has arrived, he is reveling in it. He is in his element.

As things get worse, he will pump more hatred and falsehood, more death-wish defiance of reason and decency, into the groundwater. If a new administration succeeds him in 2021, it will have to clean up the toxic dump he leaves behind. If he is re-elected, toxicity will have become the lifeblood of American politics.

Either way, it will be a long time before the rest of the world can imagine America being great again.

Thanks, Republicans.

The US, This Pandemic and the Fall of an Empire, Part II: The Conversation

I posted about this yesterday but it was just the opening to the conversation the author had with Mr. Hedges.

Pulitzer winner Chris Hedges: These "are the good times — compared to what's coming next"

Author of "America: The Farewell Tour": We're heading for a steep decline; Biden and the Democrats have no answers

Herewith, that conversation. Again, it's an eye-opener.

What has the sudden shock of the coronavirus pandemic revealed about America? If you were to take a snapshot of this moment, what does it reveal about the country?

These days are the good times, as compared to what is coming next.

How does a society change so fast?

A society can change so quickly because the underlying structures are rotten. There is the patina or the veneer of a functioning system, but the foundations of it are so decayed that they can't take the stress. That was true in the Weimar Republic in Germany, before the Nazis took full control. That was true in Yugoslavia before the civil war and ethnic violence. It is true here in the United States too. This country cannot withstand the stress of the coronavirus pandemic. Beyond the obviousness of what the Republicans are doing, the Democratic Party's response to this crisis exemplifies the problems America is facing as a whole.

Twelve hundred dollars to individuals suffering during this crisis is not sufficient. The Democrats were only really trying to block the equivalent of a $500 billion slush fund that is going into Mnuchin's hands, a man who acts like a criminal. That $1,200 is going to get vacuumed right up by the credit card companies and the banks who hold the mortgages.

This is like a repeat of 2008, where Congress is dumping staggering sums of money into the hands of Wall Street thieves. What happened in 2008? The plutocrats and the corporations gave themselves massive stock bonuses and other income and returns. I do not see how the United States is going to avoid another Great Depression, which in turn will lead to a further consolidation of power by an authoritarian, oligarchic elite. Those elites are not really worried about the coronavirus pandemic because they will have their own ventilators and private medical staff and all the other things that they need to survive. The average person will be left to take care of themselves.

The president, his party, the corporate overlords and Trump's Christian nationalist cult are now telling the American people to go out and risk death from the novel coronavirus as an act of "patriotism" and "love" for the economy.

I would also add that huge numbers of people are going to die unnecessarily. Profit is always the most important thing for the oligarchs, and because of Fox News and other right-wing outlets a significant portion of the American public will downplay the severity and dangers of the coronavirus. Quite predictably, there is an accompanying spike in racist attacks against Chinese-Americans or any people of Asian descent.

I think the pandemic and the response to it could lead us into virtually uncharted territory within the United States because as things deteriorate, the violence against nonwhites and other groups who are demonized by Trump and the right wing will increase. The desire for an authoritarian solution will grow more pronounced. I remember speaking to Fritz Stern, the great scholar of fascism, who himself fled Nazi Germany as a teenager. He said that in Germany there was a yearning for fascism before the word "fascism" was invented. We already see that yearning in America. The coronavirus crisis will make that yearning even more pronounced.

What of public memory, especially in the short and the medium term? There are many voices who believe the coronavirus will spur positive social change in the United States. I worry that there will be a type of organized forgetting, where several months from now the coronavirus pandemic and what it exposed about the country's underlying rot will be forgotten — all of it thrown down the memory hole.

I don't think we're going to be able to go back to a time before the coronavirus pandemic. I believe that the coronavirus is going to trigger a decline unlike anything the country has seen since the Great Depression. That is why the business class and other ruling elites are panicking. It is why Trump, the corporate leaders, Republicans and others aligned with them are telling people to go back to work — but to wear masks — which may really not keep them 100% safe.

The pandemic was predictable. And yet, of course, especially under the Trump administration, we dismantled the mechanisms through which the United States could prepare. The needed infrastructure, such as hospital beds and ventilators and other needed equipment, was not there because, like with all decaying empires, the resources go to the defense industry and the military.

The other part of this decay and vulnerability was the assault against public education and the corruption of the media. The fact that Fox News is even considered a news organization is staggering — although I don't think CNN is much better. In total, that contributes to a yearning for a system or a figure that can promise to tame the demons that have been unleashed.

I am unsure if we have any mechanisms left in the United States by which we can effectively push back against the elites, the oligarchs and other anti-democratic forces. We don't have any ability to pit power against power. We can beg Pelosi or Mitch McConnell or some other politician all we want for help. We are not going to get it.

Watching Trump stand before the country and speak about the coronavirus pandemic while he is flanked by corporate CEOs — never mind how Trump has filled the government with people from some of the world's largest corporations — really speaks to how the country is a naked plutocracy. The elites do not even try to hide it anymore.

The oligarchs don't care about democracy. They don't care about truth. They are not interested in the consent of the governed. They could care less about social and income inequality. They are not going to rein in the surveillance state. In fact, as things deteriorate, the surveillance state going to expand. The oligarchs do not care about job losses because, as Marx said, unemployment creates greater pools of desperate surplus labor. The oligarchs do not care about the climate. It's all about the primacy of profit and corporate power — and those values and systems are extinguishing our democracy.

And of course, they are all thrilled that nobody can go out in the streets because of the coronavirus pandemic and social distancing. Mass mobilization and civil disobedience is what is needed to defeat the oligarchs and take those first steps necessary to win back an American democracy.

America's current political system is a corporate political duopoly. A person can either vote for nativists and racists and climate deniers and creationists on one end, or a person can vote for people who speak in the language of tolerance and are willing to put gay people or women or people of color into positions of power as long as they serve the system. Of course, that is the role that Barack Obama fulfilled at the expense of the American people.

American society is in crisis, and in decline. As you point out, the coronavirus, in combination with Trump's authoritarian, neofascist movement are just symptoms of a deep societal rot. Where do we go from here?

Let's take Biden. What does it mean to vote for Joe Biden? He has this kind of goofy persona which some people find charming. What is Biden's record? What is a person voting for if they back Biden on Election Day 2020?

The humiliation of courageous women like Anita Hill who confronted her abuser. You vote for the architects of endless war. You vote for the apartheid state in Israel. Biden supports those things. With Biden you are voting for wholesale surveillance by the government, including the abolition of due process and habeas corpus. You vote for austerity programs. You vote for the destruction of welfare. That was Biden. You vote for cuts to Social Security, which he has repeatedly called for cutting, along with Medicaid. You vote for NAFTA, you vote for "free trade" deals. If you vote for Biden, you are voting for a real decline in wages and the loss of hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs.

With Biden you are also voting for the assault on public education and the transfer of federal funds to Christian "charter schools." With Biden you are voting for more than a doubling of the prison population. With Biden you are voting for the militarized police and against the Green New Deal.

You are also voting to limit a woman's right to abortion and reproductive rights. You are voting for a segregated public school system. With Biden you are voting for punitive levels of student debt and the inability of people to free themselves of that debt through bankruptcy. A vote for Biden is a vote for deregulating banking and finance. Biden also supports for-profit insurance and pharmaceutical corporations.

A vote for Biden is also a vote against the possibility of universal health care. You vote for Biden and you are supporting huge, wasteful and bloated defense budgets. Biden also supports unlimited oligarchic and corporate money to buy the elections.

That's what you're voting for.

A vote for Joe Biden is a vote for more of the same. The ruling elites would prefer Joe Biden, just like they preferred Hillary Clinton. Donald Trump is vulgar and an embarrassment. But the ruling elites also made it abundantly clear about their interests: Many of these people were quoted by name saying that if Bernie Sanders was the nominee — or even Elizabeth Warren — they would vote for Donald Trump.

One of the dominant narratives in the mainstream news media is that Trump is done. The coronavirus pandemic and his incompetence are dooming his re-election chances; the tide has finally turned.

My response has been that this is too hopeful and borders on the delusional. One, there is no guarantee that there will even be a presidential election in 2020. Trump and the Republican Party are experts at vote-rigging and other ways of cheating to steal elections and subvert democracy. After the coronavirus crisis recedes, I believe that Trump may very well be even more powerful because he leads a cult and will proclaim that he led the country to "victory" over the virus.

Liberal elites offer hope that is not grounded in an understanding of political reality. I do not believe that Joe Biden will necessarily be able to win against Trump. Biden is an extremely weak candidate because he represents the neoliberal gangster capitalist policies that the Democratic Party has embraced and that so many Americans are revolting against.

James Baldwin explained why black people don't have midlife crises. Why? Because they do not buy into the myths of America. Black people know that the system in America is rigged. Black people know this when they are children. By comparison, white people buy into these illusions of meritocracy and individualism and American exceptionalism and similar beliefs. That is why the highest rates of suicide right now are among middle-aged white men, because they are finally starting to realize that the system does not care about them.

The US, This Pandemic and the Coincidental Fall of An Empire

Holy cow, folks.  You ought to read this article. It's by Chauncey DeVega at Salon. He interviews Chris Hedges. Important, if also scary to the point of frightening. It is truly an eye-opener.

Pulitzer winner Chris Hedges: These "are the good times — compared to what's coming next"

Author of "America: The Farewell Tour": We're heading for a steep decline; Biden and the Democrats have no answers

Just a bit from the article:

Empires fall a little bit at a time and then all at once. Over the last two decades, America has proven itself to be well along on that journey. The coronavirus pandemic has simply pushed our nation further along that downward spiral.

Ultimately, the pandemic has further exposed and exacerbated — for those still somehow in denial about the decades-long reality of America as a decaying empire — deep political, social, economic, cultural and other societal problems.

The country's infrastructure is rotting. Trump presides over a plutocratic, corrupt, cruel, authoritarian, pathological kakistocracy. The commons is being reduced to rubble while the ultra-rich extract ever more wealth and other resources from the American people. Excessive military spending has left the United States incapable of attending to the basic needs of its people. A culture of distraction and spectacle has rendered many Americans incapable of being responsible engaged citizens. Our public educational system does not teach critical thinking skills. Radical right-wing Christians, white terrorist organizations and other neofascist paramilitaries and extremists are engaging in a campaign of thuggery, intimidation and violence against multiracial American democracy.

Writing at the Atlantic, George Packer described this woeful state of affairs:

The crisis demanded a response that was swift, rational, and collective. The United States reacted instead like Pakistan or Belarus — like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering. The administration squandered two irretrievable months to prepare. From the president came willful blindness, scapegoating, boasts, and lies. From his mouthpieces, conspiracy theories and miracle cures. A few senators and corporate executives acted quickly — not to prevent the coming disaster, but to profit from it. When a government doctor tried to warn the public of the danger, the White House took the mic and politicized the message.

Every morning in the endless month of March, Americans woke up to find themselves citizens of a failed state.

In the New York Times, Pulitzer-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen diagnosed the health of America's body politic in the age of Trump and the pandemic he has empowered and accelerated:

If anything good emerges out of this period, it might be an awakening to the pre-existing conditions of our body politic. We were not as healthy as we thought we were. The biological virus afflicting individuals is also a social virus. Its symptoms — inequality, callousness, selfishness and a profit motive that undervalues human life and overvalues commodities — were for too long masked by the hearty good cheer of American exceptionalism, the ruddiness of someone a few steps away from a heart attack.

Chris Hedges, the Pulitzer-winning journalist, author, and philosopher, is not surprised by America's decline. In places such as the former Yugoslavia, he has personally witnessed what happens when societies fall apart. In his most recent book, "America: The Farewell Tour," Hedges both details the country's many cultural and political crises and what could potentially happen next. The coronavirus crisis has shown his analysis to be eerily prescient.

In this conversation, Hedges warns that the tumult and pain of Trump's coronavirus crisis is but a preview of far worse things in America's future, as social inequality and political failure combine to create a full collapse of the country's already declining standard of living, as well as its ailing democracy.

Hedges also explains how the Democratic Party and its presumptive presidential nominee, Joe Biden, will likely not be able to respond to the Age of Trump and the economic and social destruction created by gangster capitalism, in combination with the coronavirus pandemic. Why? Because the Democrats are also part of the plutocratic establishment that has failed the American people.

It goes on from there to a podcast (and also written conversation) with Mr. Hedges on our current national situation, not to be missed.

I've said here, several times, many times, how bad this President is, citing facts and showing resources, not opinion. Him and his political party both. 

This clearly shows, to me, the larger, bigger picture, the entire picture or where we--the US--is just now.

And where we may be--are likely?--headed.

Damn.

It's far from pretty.

"Fasten your seatbelts. It's going to be a bumpy night."

Not done there, as if that's all not depressing enough, there's also this from The New Yorker just now:

Is America’s “One Nation Indivisible” Being Killed Off by the Coronavirus?

Republican Party Song of the Day, Week, Month, Decade. Century?

That these Republicans today are outraged, OUTRAGED! at the treatment of this, their party's nominee for the highest court in the land, the Supreme Court, this Brett Kavanaugh, in these hearings when they didn't even allow---remember that--didn't even ALLOW hearings for the previous President's pick for the court is the epitome of chutzpah, irony and hypocrisy, all.

I thought Trump gaining the White House would be the worst that could and would happen.

I was wrong.

So deeply wrong.

Arguably the Most Important Thing An Adult American Could Read Today

I ran across this article over the weekend. As said above, I think it is, arguably, one of the most, if not the most important thing an adult American could read today about America, about us, about who we are, what we're doing and what may well happen.

The Coming Collapse

Here is but one snippet, dealing with only one of the issues the writer, Chris Hedges, and his article, touch on.

The Trump administration did not rise, prima facie, like Venus on a half shell from the sea. Donald Trump is the result of a long process of political, cultural and social decay. He is a product of our failed democracy. The longer we perpetuate the fiction that we live in a functioning democracy, that Trump and the political mutations around him are somehow an aberrant deviation that can be vanquished in the next election, the more we will hurtle toward tyranny. The problem is not Trump. It is a political system, dominated by corporate power and the mandarins of the two major political parties, in which we don’t count. We will wrest back political control by dismantling the corporate state, and this means massive and sustained civil disobedience, like that demonstrated by teachers around the country this year. If we do not stand up we will enter a new dark age.

Go. Read.

What Donald Trump and the Republican Party Represent and Offer the US and Its Citizens Presently

Oligarchy is rule by the few.

Plutocracy is rule by the wealthy.

Corporatocracy is rule by corporations, by business.

Kakistocracy is by the least qualified or most unprincipled.

We've got all that, presently in Washington, DC, at least, if not also in too many state houses.

Literally.

Another definition of kakistocracy is rule by the worst element of society, government by the worst people.

Links, definitions:

Oligarchy 

Plutocracy

corporatocracy

Kakistocracy

American Kakistocracy

This Headline Hurts

So I was on Facebook, just scrolling through posts and suddenly I saw one with a headline from an article published out of the UK. This one:

Decline and fall: 

how American society unravelled

And damn.

That hurt.

That hurts.

With Trump President, I've been hoping this is just a swerve, a bump in our road to and of progress, you know? Just a brief mistake, if, yes, more than just slight.

But then, you look at the already-wealthy and corporations of the nation, firmly in control, creating more and yet more ways to shovel money their way since they own the Republican Party, at minimum. And you look at the way the NRA owns them and so, runs America, getting and keeping far too many weapons out there in the nation, on our streets. People being shot and lots killed, needlessly.

Then there's the opioid crisis, killing thousands of Americans and all because Big Pharma also has their sway with our government and so, us.

And now, this President Trump putting more and yet more science deniers in charge all over our government, in the EPA and at NASA, etc. Then putting people from the big banks in offices to support the banks and not the people, not protecting the people, you and I.

Then China has stepped up on the international politics and leadership field since there's a yawning gap of leadership with The Orange One in the White House.

I think, maybe they're right.

I still hope they're wrong but maybe we have, in fact, already begun to slike, as a nation and society and "great power."

Damn.

Our best days behind us?

No longer the world's leading power and "beacof light", "beacon of hope"?

Damn.

Links:

Trump stacks administration with climate change skeptics

Study: US is an oligarchy, not a democracy

American Kakistocracy

Donald Trump ushers in a new era of kakistocracy