Bill Clinton’s legacy is trashed. Out on the stump he’s been dogged by protesters who’ve pointed out his tough-on-crime administration led to an explosion in the prison population, ruining the lives of millions of black Americans. So he loses his temper, wags his finger and looks worse. Others point out his trade deals and bank deregulation accelerated inequality and the destruction of middle class jobs.
So the Big Dog is now a bit rabid. He jJust can’t accept others don’t share the belief he’s the American hero he thinks he is.
Campaigning yesterday, he tried to make a joke:
“One of the few things I really haven’t enjoyed about this primary: I think it’s fine that all these young students have been so enthusiastic for [Hillary’s] opponent and [he] sounds so good: ‘Just shoot every third person on Wall Street and everything will be fine.'”
Probably not something to say when Bernie Sanders just got after his wife for her three-quarters of a million buck speeches to Goldman Sachs. Again.
“The inequality problem is rooted in the shareholder-first mentality and the absence of training for the jobs of tomorrow.” This is Bill Clinton’s answer.
Yes, absence of training for the jobs of tomorrow, jobs that somehow never arrive or that pay almost nothing, or that rewire you to sell off your life in pieces through an iPhone app. Everyone has to go back to school four or five times in life and become innovative or die. Heard it before, dozens of times. This is the only answer the modern Democratic Party has for, well, just about everything outside of endless war (which it largely supports, anyway).
Anyway, I had a song for that a couple years back. It never got old which shows how much progress there’s been.
Thomas Frank, author of Listen, Liberal!, a new book that takes apart the Democratic Party for its failure to stand up for its former base in the working class, takes it to Bill Clinton in the Guardian:
When I was researching the 1994 crime bill for Listen, Liberal, my new book documenting the sins of liberalism, I remember being warned by a scholar who has studied mass incarceration for years that it was fruitless to ask Americans to care about the thousands of lives destroyed by the prison system. Today, however, the situation has reversed itself: now people do care about mass incarceration, largely thanks to the Black Lives Matter movement and the intense scrutiny it has focused on police killings.
All of a sudden, the punitive frenzies of the 1980s and 1990s seem like something from a cruel foreign country. All of a sudden, Bill Clinton looks like a monster rather than a hero, and he now finds himself dogged by protesters as he campaigns for his wife, Hillary. And so the media has stepped up to do what it always does: reassure Americans that the nightmare isn’t real, that this honorable man did the best he could as president …
For one class of Americans, Clinton brought emancipation, a prayed-for deliverance from out of Glass–Steagall’s house of bondage. For another class of Americans, Clinton brought discipline: long prison stretches for drug users; perpetual insecurity for welfare mothers; and intimidation for blue-collar workers whose bosses Clinton thoughtfully armed with the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Look Who’s Back is a rather on-the-money movie considering our fractured times. It’s based on a best-seller in which Hitler magically appears in modern Berlin with no idea about the intervening time between now and his last day in the bunker. He can’t get anyone to believe he really is himself. Instead, he’s taken as a fabulous method actor who never drops character, winding up sold as a comedian on a TV show called Whoa, Dude, hosted by another funny man made-up to look like Barack Obama.
In the movie, Hitler upstages everyone on the ridiculous show, ignores his joke lines about the “Salafists” and instead delivers Hitler-esque stem-winders drawn from his speeches and Mein Kampf. He tells the audience they’re fools for watching reality shows about cooks and that television has them looking into the abyss. Hitler will save them, Deutschland, from that abyss. It’s so successful he’s put on every show run by the network, generating an immense following.
Oliver Masucci, an Italo-German, plays the Fuhrer. And while you could comb the dialog at length for laughs, the most indelible parts are those in which Masucci is driven around Germany as Hitler. You will not be entirely surprised that, even when in the presence of the impersonator, it’s easy to get some people to let their real selves out. “We need labor camps,” says one, in open resentment over the refugees. Hitler agrees, he can do that. He asks another man, “Will you do whatever I ask of you when the time comes?” The man instructs the camera to be turned off, which it isn’t, and says he’s ready.
At the end we have Hitler riding through modern day Germany in full regalia. He’s in an open top limousine with his agent, a blonde woman who looks a little like Eva, juxtaposed with video from news clips on the rise of fascist parties in Europe and ongoing protests and violence against refugees and immigrants. It’s not exactly the kind of product placement Mercedes had been hoping for.
Of course, if you want slapstick, there’s that too. A segment in which Hitler is pepper-sprayed auf dem Platz in front of the Brandenberg Gate is hysterical.
Look Who’s Back is only a movie, bitingly amusing, but it would be lost on most Americans. First of all, we’d have to read the subtitles and get the jokes, which we can’t because of large gaps in the knowledge of that history. But, mostly,we’re just incapable of seeing bits of ourselves and what we can easily become reflected in parts of it.
I howled with laughter through most of it. However, if the YouTube videos of Hitler ranting in the bunker about being locked out of video games are your cup of tea, maybe not so much. Not accidentally, I’m sure, Constantin owns Downfall and Look Who’s Back, giving it something of a lock on the global Hitler market.
Excerpt’s from George Orwell’s review of “Mein Kampf”:
“What he envisions … a continuous state of 250 million Germans with plenty of ‘living room’ (stretching to Afghanistan or thereabouts), a horrible brainless empire in which, essentially, nothing ever happens except the training of young men for war and the endless breeding of fresh cannon-fodder.”
“He had crushed the labor movement and for that the property-owning classes were willing to forgive him almost anything.”
“[His] is the fixed vision of a monomaniac and not likely to be much affected by the temporary maneuvres of power politics.”
“[The slogan] ‘Better an end with horror than a horror without end’ is a winner. Now that we are fighting against the man who coined it, we ought not to underrate its emotional appeal.”
What the mainstream media and Gawker didn’t get over the weekend in having a good Twitter laugh about tricking Donald Trump into quoting Mussolini: The people who are going to vote for him don’t care. In fact, they’ll find it affirming, (1) because they don’t really know anything about Il Duce if they knew about him at all, and (2), they’ll agree with Trump, it’s a quote that’s great for re-tweeting.
So no prize to Gawker or anyone else smirking when there’s a 50-50 chance the election will throw them to the Devil and merciless statistics in November.
But as much as the Republican Party created Trump, it shares parentage with the transpartisan national security complex. Politicians, generals, CIA directors, think tank warriors and terrorism “experts” have been dinning a message of fear into our heads for a decade and a half, a fear that works on many voters like catnip on a feline.
The author continues:
The fear, of course, can only be exorcised by a policy of nonstop militarism. Congratulations, patricians of the Beltway: However disdainful you are of the vulgarian Trump, you helped put him where he is today …
I’d estimate the odds at about fifty-fifty that this country ends up with something resembling a fascist political system, if not in 2017, then at some point in the next decade. We may never hear it called that: The prestige media have up to now mostly maintained an embargo on words like “fascist” or “authoritarian”; it will be fascinating to see at which point in the coming year – if at all – the embargo is lifted. No, we won’t have black uniforms and goose-stepping. In the US cultural vernacular, it would be more like Lee Greenwood played on an endless loop, with patriotic ceremonies even more lugubrious and hypocritical than the ones now at professional sporting events.
So when you read those stories about how Michael Hayden went on Maher to claim the military wouldn’t follow some of Donald Trump’s orders were he President, to these you should say: Bullshit it won’t.
The Wehrmacht’s general staff, those that survived, was said to have many principled men who detested the Fuhrer. And that made such a difference.
The point to be made is not that the United States is like the Third Reich.
When it fails big time, it will do so in a way unique to itself, of its history. But people haven’t changed. Americans, US military men, don’t have some special DNA or secret patent trumping the regular human condition. They make the same historical mistakes, again and again, always thinking we’ll be different this time because …
Yes, Trump is about racism, Islamophobia and making America great “again.” But you’re missing the point if you don’t see that supporting him is also about saying fuck you to the political class, if not the political system. Of course, there are more constructive ways to do this. — Barbara Ehrenreich, on Facebook
The revenge vote is going to be strong. Four decades of slump is a long time to have been keeping a lid on the growing rage. Hillary Clinton will never understand it.
“Ten or 30 rounds, what difference does it make???? one fellow tells the newspaper. “I can change a clip in 1.5 seconds.???
Another keeps a thirty-round magazine-equipped AR-15 in his house for protection. In case a couple of squads attack, one presumes.
Keep your hands off, gun grabber, or a “sizable population” will start a revolution, another tells the Times.
Perish forbid, I would never think of grabbing their junk.
I don’t have to write much about WhiteManistan anymore. Why bother? The newsmedia has to wrestle with the ways of the good Americans, daily.
In the meantime, do enjoy a fond look back at PARIAH, the magazine that caught the spirit of it way before the big dailies had their noses rubbed in it. It was ahead of its time.
Art, ruin, revenge and white supremacy — all wrapped up in a magazine that coulda shown up Garden & Gun.
Three years on, almost to the day, and gun massacres are the US of Fail’s locked groove. Of all angry white male America’s obsessions, hoarding ridiculous amounts of assault rifles (sanitizingly referred to as “long guns”) and ammunition is about the strongest. So powerful, it scares the civilized world.
Growing up in southeastern Pennsylvania, my neighborhood had many gun owners. No one in my family owned one but I didn’t have a problem with anyone who did.
Four decades on, that’s all changed. News stories that reported gun background checks through the roof on Black Friday show the expanse of the raging white gun nut revolt at everyone else’s expense. Now everyone expects gun sales to explode after a massacre. The people in this story on the front page of the New York Times aren’t your friends.
They’re the enemy, a collective hive mind that’s insane.
“It is all part of a weapons boom that has been building for weeks,” reads the newspaper.
And the people behind it look in the mirror each morning and never see the nuts person staring back at them. Nothing reaches them except twisted alarms and stories inspiring them to buy more.
So, by all means, go, go, go to more gun shows. Buy more. Say you’re afraid, real afraid, to reporters. Make a “political buy,” just to show your solidarity in defiance of the president, the “gun grabber” who’s never actually grabbed any.
I’m glad I don’t know any of you. You have an incurable mental illness. And if, by chance, I bump into any of you in the future I’ll cut you a break and silently go the other way.
You could hear a swarm of helicopters off to the west (agh!) east from before lunch until just a little while ago. About an hour in, it hit the news.
Despite what the President will say, no matter what comes from politicians and the famous, this is our normal, our exceptionalism, the thing for which we are best known. We’re trapped with it.
The economy of the corporate dictatorship has come home to roost for a portion of white America, and it’s class based, a factor the New York Times linked piece doesn’t really get around to until near the end of the piece. Affluent middle class whites haven’t show up in the awful statistics so much. (Yet.)
Nevertheless, the life expectancy for this slice of America’s white tribe is still above that for African Americans, who’ve never faced anything but the grinding wheel of the national economy. However, life expectancy for the same classes in other Western developed nations is on the rise, It is only here where we are so exceptional.
None of this can really be much of a surprise although one of the doctors interviewed by the Times concludes, “It seems so sad.”
I’ve written about the bleak trends in WhiteManistan for a couple years. The Forty Year Slump entry sums up much of what I thought, having experienced it, first hand:
When I was entering college, Alcoa aluminum closed the biggest extrusion plant in the world in Cressona, PA, where my father worked. He escaped lay-off and was transferred to a small soda bottle-cap manufacturing plant outside Lancaster, a three hour drive every day.
The metal-working plants closed. A recession was in full swing when I graduated from college in Reading, PA. There were no jobs so I enrolled in a Ph.D. program at Lehigh.
During the Reagan years, the nation’s economic policies destroyed Bethlehem Steel. The center of Allentown and the south side of Bethlehem turned into slums. I saw it happen. The people voted for the man who was killing their future. So did the rest of the country…
When you rip the economic heart out of a community it takes a lot down with it.
I’ve never known a time when the road wasn’t downhill. I suspect most people have the same impression unless they’re of the top slice. The better educated, and with more good fortune, were better at clinging to the diminishing number of seats in the country’s economic version of musical chairs.
But give the statistics a little more time. As more scientists begin looking into the matter, we’ll see more. And in the next few years, perhaps even a little sooner, the same thing is going to come for the college-educated white class. The plutocrats are going to winnow them out and part with even less to those left over, for the privileged work of keeping the lights on and the toilets clean.
And then, like those described in this week’s news, they, too, will self-medicate until death with drink, drugs, suicide and other causes of mortality when masses are permanently ejected from ways to make a living. Dispair and distress will tighten their grip as the country descends into a paradise of all against all. Politically, there’s no reason to expect any change, no radical steps taken to reverse the serious systemic problems that have led us to this point, and certainly not in the next eight years, even if the not-insane party takes the White House.
The average age of the homeless people who have died this year has been 48. Most have been male and white. There were 12 deaths in January, more than in any other month.
Forty-four of the deaths have been by accident or natural causes, seven by suicide and four by homicide. There were 20 deaths classified as involving drugs, alcohol or both.
Murray and Constantine attributed homelessness here to several factors, including what the mayor described as a heroin epidemic “across this nation and in this city.???
The mayor also mentioned, “jobs lost during the Great Recession that have never returned??? and inadequate state funding to help people with mental illnesses.
In his last book, Wollin described the United States as an example of inverted totalitarianism.
Reads the Times, in its final paragraph on the man:
With time, he took the view that corporate power and political power were becoming so closely intertwined in the United States, and the public so apathetic, that genuine participatory democracy was at best a remote possibility, expressed in rare “fugitive??? expressions of the popular will.
“Democracy in the late modern world cannot be a complete political system,??? he wrote in a 1994 essay, “and given the awesome potentialities of modern forms of power, and what they exact of the social and natural world, it ought not to be hoped or striven for.???
His last book reflected this dark interpretation of politics in the United States. It bore a sobering title: “Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism.???
Perhaps Wollin would say, too, that the decline in life expectancy of America’s white tribe is not at all unexpected, given his analysis of where we are.
A short video explains what universities and community colleges have been polishing since when I left with a doctorate thirty years ago. In fact, my first job straight out of school was in this developing mechanism.
Now it’s a nationwide parasitic machine, one that reduces a majority of the teaching staff to penury, migrant workers hired and let go at will, serving at school after school, never getting anywhere. And it’s all for the sake of those at the top and the handfuls of full tenured research stars. Make no mistake, though, it didn’t happen in a vacuum. The greed and hubris in the privileged faculty had much to do with it, too.
This has never been a secret and its one of the cold, hard facts that shows the common bleats about America facing a shortage of scientists and engineers, or that Americans are not educated enough and must be prepared for a life of constant retraining are self-serving falsehoods.
1. At the Bottom: Of the Half-Billion Poorest Adults in the World, One out of Ten is an American …
3. In the Middle: The US is the Only Region Where the Middle-Class Does Not Own Its Equivalent Share of Wealth
Table 4-2: North America has 38.8 percent of its people in the middle class, but they own just 21 percent of the wealth.
Tables 4-4, 4-5: The wealth-deprived North American middle class is largely a U.S. phenomenon, as Mexico’s relatively small (percentage) middle class has over double its share of wealth, and Canada’s middle class, from a population a little over a tenth of the size of the U.S., has about 20 percent less than its share, compared to the U.S. with 50 percent less.
Table 6-1: U.S. median wealth is just 1/7 of average wealth, which implies a skewing of wealth toward the top. Among other major nations, only Russia is worse.
Global Wealth Report, p. 34: “A shortfall of the wealth share of the middle class below its population share is also evident in many individual countries outside North America, including every one of the G7 nations. Figure 4 shows that the shortfall is most acute in Switzerland, Singapore and the United States; but in Australia, Hong Kong SAR and Sweden the mean wealth of the middle class is also more than one-third lower than the average for the whole population…In contrast, for middle and low-income countries – such as Brazil, China, India, Indonesia and Mexico – the share of the middle-class wealth exceeds its population share (see Figure 4). This difference signals that in such countries members of the middle class are not ‘in the middle.’ Rather, they are towards the top of the distribution and there are relatively few people above them. The same is true for the world as a whole.”
4. In the Upper-Middle: For a Full 70% of Americans, Percentage Ownership of National Wealth is One of the Lowest in the World
Table 1-5: The bottom 70% of Americans own just 6.9 percent of the wealth, a percentage far below all other major nations.
The entirety is here, along with a link to the Swiss Bank analysis from which the figures are extracted.
Pity the people who are not insane in Texas. They’re trapped in place with the encapsulated delusions of the ruling right and they can’t get out.
The only answer is to run the GOP from political power, as in California. But that’s not an option in Texas.
So this week, many people who wished to not see have been roughly shown that what once was the raving of damaged right wing paranoids is now the way of things.
“You may have issues with the administration … So be it,” said the Special Operations Command public communications officer charged with fruitlessly trying to tell people that Jade Helm 15 was not the start of a big takeover.
The people, wearing T-shirts that said “Come and take it” and “I love Jesus,” were having none of it.
The Baltimore riot, it was said, was just a pretext, a staged diversion to distract what was really going to happen in July: The military imposition of dictatorship and the seizure of all guns in Texas and across the southwest.
My question to the special operations public communications officer would have been:
“Sir, what do you make of what’s happened in your country while you’ve been out fighting endless wars in the Middle East?”
The newspapers in Texas have recoiled. Old run-out-of-power Texas GOPers have railed. Even Mr. Paul Krugman has commented on it, although “derp” doesn’t really describe the problem of intractable mass delusion. (And, boy, aren’t those cute videos of nice young man and nice young girl chamber music bands really beginning to suck?)
Now, in an interesting case study, we’ve seen what happens when you juxtapose Texas’ reverence for troops against the GOP’s instinct to pander to the furthest reaches of its right wing rump.
Yes, the crazies win.
Mere weeks after a state House committee hearing in which speakers railed against the Union in the Civil War, and called anti-slavery Texans traitors, Gov. Greg Abbott indulged in some naked pandering to those that hold modern US Special Forces in the same contempt. As has been widely reported, he has announced that he is sending the Texas State Guard to monitor the exercise. As a learning opportunity? No, because the right-wing fringe, ginned up by Agenda 21 conspiracy theories, black helicopter phobias, and radio demagogue Alex Jones, has decided that this is the beginning of martial law.
The writer closes with a paragraph that likens the crazy Republican Party with the Terminator. It can’t be reasoned with and it won’t stop, ever.
I have another movie character in mind. Rorschach, from The Watchmen.
“None of you seem to understand. I’m not locked in here with you; you’re locked in here with me!”
“The federal government took over Baltimore, but they won’t take over Bastrop,??? Kyle Arrington, a 26-year-old pizza cook said Sunday over a glass of iced tea at Bastrop’s Old Town Bar.
“It would be too big a fight. Texas has more guns than any other state, we can take care of ourselves.???
Arrington said only a small minority of the town’s more than 7,000 residents believe Jade Helm 15 is an attempt by the Obama administration to take over Texas and seize firearms.
“But it wouldn’t be the first time the federal government tried to take over the South,??? he added.
The only thing we haven’t seen yet is someone quoting from The Turner Diaries.
You know, leave out the rabid bigot parts about not-white people and race defilement while focusing on the fighting of government forces.
Maybe Texas news men and the not-crazies could ask Ted Nugent for help? No, cross that one off. Nugent has been a regular on Alex Jones.
Wires…
And Walmart is in on it, with some recently closed stores possibly being used to “house the headquarters of invading troops from China, here to disarm Americans one by one.” And also there are underground tunnels connecting the various Walmarts.
Rant: And screw Jon Stewart and The Daily Show. He’s made a fortune turning lazy video segments on the country’s decline into madness into comedy entertainment. He can’t point to one thing where providing shits and giggles for his upper middle class white bread audience has reversed the trend.
In terms of “art” it’s not much different than YouTube users who post videos of the homeless, crazy, drug-addicted or wounded in backyard mishaps to the net for cheap laughs.
When you get right down to it you don’t even need to employ writers. Daily life, captured on video, unpacks itself and barks at you, no reading of the instructions, assembly or installation of batteries required.
