Important Stuff - ICYMI

The so-called "Twitter Purge" is aimed at hate groups. Huzzah!

Twitter suspends accounts of far-right Britain First leaders whose anti-Muslim videos were retweeted by Donald Trump

http://www.yahoo.com/news/twitter-su...142334952.html

Bucking Pentagon and intel agencies, Trump's security strategy omits climate change from list of major threats

https://www.aol.com/article/news/201...eats/23311302/

'Fake news' ranked second.

Marist College poll: Americans vote 'Whatever' to be the most annoying word for ninth year in a row

https://www.aol.com/article/news/201...-row/23312291/

One certain individual continually badmouths the FBI but today the FBI has thwarted a terrorist attack and we can all feel grateful:

FBI: California man planned ISIS-inspired Christmas terror attack on San Francisco's Pier 39
KABC-TV, Dec 22 2017 2:18 PM

Officials say they've arrested a California man who was planning a possible Christmas terror attack in San Francisco. The FBI arrested Everitt Aaron Jameson, a tow truck driver from Modesto. They say he planned to target Pier 39. The 26-year-old reportedly stated that "Christmas was the perfect day" for a terror attack in San Francisco and he "did not need an escape plan because he was ready to die."

According to a handwritten letter obtained by the FBI, Jameson also referred to himself as Abdallah adu Everitt ibn Gordon. According to FBI documents, Jameson picked out that location because he "had been there before and knew it was a heavily crowded area." He added that it would be easy to "funnel" people into an area where he could inflict casualties. Jameson is charged with attempting to supply support to a foreign terrorist organization, specifically the Islamic State. According to FBI documents, he posted and liked pro-ISIS and pro-terrorism content on Facebook.

http://abc7.com/fbi-ca-man-planned-c...er-39/2812490/

Be not surprised that I, a Protestant, am posting a story about the Pope. In these tumultuous times, his Christmas Eve message is one that we all need to hear.

Pope Francis, at Christmas Eve mass, says faith demands respect for immigrants
Pope compares immigrants to Mary and Joseph finding no place to stay at Bethlehem, says "none should feel that there is no room for them on this earth."

http://www.businessinsider.com/r-pop...grants-2017-12

America's Imperial Decline Might Be Our Last, Best Hope to Salvage Our Democracy
Painful as it will be, it's a necessary precondition to creating a more just country.

By Jacob Bacharach / AlterNet December 29, 2017

When the United States vetoed a United Nations Security Council resolution asking nations not to build any more diplomatic missions in Jerusalem only to be drubbed 128-9 in the General Assembly, which voted on a similar non-binding resolution last week, America’s ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, loudly proclaimed that the United States would be “taking names.” Her warning fell on deaf ears, although the U.S. and Israel did manage to cajole that titan of geopolitics, Guatemala, to come around to the American view.

The whole pitiful episode merely confirmed what the Trump administration has made readily apparent: Haley, like the president, has internalized the same impossible tale conservatives have been selling to Fox News grandmas for decades now: that the U.S. is a font of beneficent foreign aid; that the State Department outspends the Pentagon; and that billions and trillions in cash flow ever outward from our vaults and into the greedy hands of ungrateful minor nations that would sink without it. They think, in other words, that we have leverage where we do not.

When the UN announced a reduction in its budget for next fiscal year—something commonplace and long in the works—the U.S. government crowed that this was its doing. No one cared. But in an odd way, combative and stupid as they are, Trump and his circle intuitively grasp something that the mandarins of America’s post-war foreign policy consensus either won't or can't: that the institutions the United States built in order to camouflage and maintain its worldwide empire are increasingly unresponsive to the imperial will. In this respect, their strident nationalism is partially, if accidentally, correct. We ain’t what we used to be.

While our commuter trains leap from their aging tracks, tactical victories in the so-called war on terror produce not a glimpse of distant victory but only the enervating glimmer of a long-strategic defeat. The already barely tolerable oligarchy of late 20th-century capitalism has given way to a high-tech feudalism of the darkest speculative fiction, ruled by a tiny global class of billionaires—soon, probably, to include trillionaires—as its once-comfortable middle class stagnates and rising sea levels threaten its coastal cities, not to mention those of the rest of the world.

The American Empire shepherded the world to this point, sometimes clumsily and sometimes accidentally, but most often deliberately. The project of global dominion, of commercial leverage, of seeding client states with “S.O.B.s, but our S.O.B.s” was a project of very bad but very capable men. They knew what they were doing. Maybe American imperialism was once spoken of in hushed tones, but then some dummy in the Dubya era went and said it out loud: “We’re an empire now; we make our own reality.”

But empires don’t really make reality; they revolve around it like a planet around a star, and even their relatively minor gravity makes the star wobble. Now no one is very shy when talking about America as a center of imperial power and ambition, a global economic and military hegemon with almost 800 military outposts scattered across the world and concentric rings of omnipresent planes, drones, and satellites overhead—a vast network of industrial and financial influence, the world center of a pop culture that produces not only global taste but maintains English as the global lingua franca. Ironically, this new openness about empire coincides with the deepening sense that the empire itself is now in a state of inexorable decline.

The loss of global respect and prestige seems to stick particularly in the throats of centrist liberals and the Beltway's tiny clutch of moderate Republicans, hashtag-resistance sorts who consider Trump an appalling Caligula, a grotesque called into being by the fevered prejudices of the less educated corners of their nation, or else willed into existence by the Odoacer of our little Roman drama, Vladimir Putin. They pine for Obama, a man who always seemed to imagine himself a kind of Eisenhower; he uttered all the correct soothing phrases, and he didn’t fart and gallivant like a toddler when called upon to perform on the world stage. They want the quiet order of Bretton Woods and the G20, balmy joint declarations and hot wars all around the Eurasian periphery that never cause us to break a sweat. They want national prestige. This is why the whole Jerusalem-at-the-UN debacle so upset them: not because they especially care about the status of Jerusalem, which the U.S. has been fecklessly proclaiming the “eternal and undivided” capital of Israel for decades now, nor because they give one iota about Palestinians, but because they believe, in a strange reflection of the maddest madmen of the GWB era, that appearance is reality.

Trump throws these absurdities into stark relief. An aging creature of pure id, he doesn’t know or care enough to hew to genteel fictions. The decline of America’s ability to bend its traditional clients to its will and whims was already evident under Bush Junior when he failed to cobble together a truly international coalition in Iraq. Obama plainly knew it and hoped to slow the entropy; his internationalism, his “pivot to Asia,” his long-term military priorities were all attempts to staunch the bleeding, but his inability to really extricate the country from its Middle Eastern and South Asian quagmires—not to mention domestic opposition from a GOP whose leaders failed to recognize him as a potential ally, and who sealed their own irrelevance by turning to a ravenous and deeply racist base—doomed his presidency to painting around the edges.

Trump practically wandered into the Oval Office, his reality-show campaign aided and abetted by his predecessor's forceful favoring of finance over his indebted citizenry, and the most incompetent Democratic presidential campaign imaginable. Obama alumni and Clinton dead-enders view Trump as an extraordinary outlier. “This,” they keep saying, “is not normal.” But Trump is just the natural end result of decades of policy—not an aberration, but an apotheosis. He represents a heretofore invincible society recognizing that something is distinctly not right.

The opposition to Trump has divided into two camps: one that pines for a reversion to the mean, a painless transition back to incrementalism at home and see-no-evilism abroad; and another that recognizes the very rot that let a man who is both Fool and Lear in one howling figure stumble into the presidency. This latter faction, which ranges from the modest social democracy of Bernie Sanders to a far more radical and openly anti-imperial left, sees in the present crises an opportunity to wrench back some kind of national democracy from imperialism. It sees the fact that the United States has, for nearly two decades now, spent $250 million a day on war as both a crime and an opportunity to redirect those resources. (To put that figure in perspective, it would be enough to operate a modest regional hospital for a year.)

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In the broader sense, this corner of the opposition, the folks who are organizing at the street level, writing about the failures of post-recession economic policies and talking about truly universal healthcare, recognizes that while even a carefully managed decline will mean real pain and dislocation, it represents a necessary precondition to the construction of a fairer, better, more just country than the one we have. It understands that the militarization of police and the financialization of the whole economy are inextricably linked with a militant and aggressive foreign policy and an endless succession of debt-financed wars. It suspects, in fact, that the desperately tragic gun violence in America is at least as much a product of the desensitizing march of military violence, the endless production of movies and television glorifying a national policy of vigilantism, war, and death, as it is of the problematic availability of guns; that even the reemergence of an impolite racism is in some ways tied to the necessary production of terrifying foreign others to justify endless foreign conflicts.

Every bit of power retained by the old consensus, which despite its seeming slide into abeyance retains a tremendous amount of institutional influence, will ultimately marshal itself to combat any turning away from our status as the One Indispensable Nation. They’re gonna tell you that a hegemonic China will...well, do something very bad, that Putin is hiding in your closet, that the US has some actual interest in resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict; and that only the U.S. can resolve it. They’re gonna tell you that unless Tim Kaine wins in 2020, Donald Trump will disband the, uh, CIA. They’re gonna use a subtler but no less dangerous language of cultural dissipation to warn that any relative decline in America’s global position will mean the end of it all. They’re wrong. Comrades, why can’t it be a beginning?

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-po...-our-democracy

_________________________________________

What is happening now gives us an opportunity. Will it be effectively utilized or instead be wasted due to indifference or obstruction? The choices made will affect everything.

"Bradley Manning, you joined the Army, you gave 750,000 classified documents and videos to WikiLeaks, you were court-martialed, you were sentenced to 35 years at Leavenworth, you decided you were a woman and wanted to be called Chelsea, and your sentence was commuted by President Obama. What are you going to do now?"

"I'm going to run for the Senate."

Chelsea Manning files to run for US Senate in Maryland

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local...54d_story.html

Last year was the third-warmest year on record in the US. It was the 21st consecutive year that the average annual temperature was higher than the 1901-2000 average. Each of the five warmest years has occurred since 2006. The cost of 16 major weather- and climate-related disasters -- storms, floods, hurricanes, droughts, wildfires, a freeze -- was a record-setting $306 billion.

2017 was 3rd warmest year on record for US

http://www.noaa.gov/news/2017-was-3r...-record-for-us

Mexico rejects Trump claim it is world's most dangerous country
Reuters, Jan 18 2018 2:31 PM

Mexico today dismissed a claim by U.S. President Donald Trump that it was the most dangerous country in the world and reiterated it would not fund the construction of a wall along the U.S. southern border. In a series of Twitter posts touching on NAFTA trade negotiations and security, Trump described Mexico as "the number one most dangerous country in the world," an assertion that was quickly rebuffed by Mexico's foreign ministry. "Even though Mexico has a significant problem with violence, it is plainly false that Mexico is the most dangerous country in the world," the ministry said in a statement.

In the year through November, a total of 23,101 murder investigations were opened in Mexico. That was a murder rate of 18.7 per 100,000 inhabitants, well below levels in Latin American countries such as Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, Honduras and El Salvador, according to U.N. figures used in the World Bank's online database for 2015, the last year for which results are available.

Looking ahead to talks later this month to rework the North American Free Trade Agreement, the ministry said the country would put its national interest first while seeking an outcome to benefit all countries in the pact. Trump has suggested that Mexico could finance construction of the wall indirectly through changes to NAFTA. "If there is no Wall, there is no Deal!" Trump wrote today, without specifying which deal he was referring to.

Earlier today Trump tweeted: "The Wall will be paid for, directly or indirectly, or through longer term reimbursement, by Mexico, which has a ridiculous $71 billion trade surplus with the U.S. The $20 billion Wall is 'peanuts' compared to what Mexico makes from the U.S. NAFTA is a bad joke!" Mexico's foreign ministry batted away the Twitter salvos. "Mexico will not negotiate NAFTA, nor any other aspect of the bilateral relationship, through social networks or the media," it said in its statement.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-u...-idUSKBN1F728D

NOAA said 2017 was the third-warmest year on record. According to NASA data, 2017 was the second-warmest year on record. The five hottest years have occurred since 2010. Does anyone other than Donald Trump still think there is no such thing as global warming?

2017 was the second-warmest year ever recorded -- behind only 2016
The five warmest years on record have all occurred since 2010. The rise is directly attributable to human-caused greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide.

http://www.businessinsider.com/nasa-...-record-2018-1

The Official State of the Union Drinking Game Rules!

How much to drink and why – whether you watch Trump's first address or you don't


Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone

https://disq.us/url?url=https%3A%2F%...1qw&cuid=73190

In light of the following story -- and all the firings and resignations and investigations and scandals and lawsuits -- I take special amusement in what Donald Trump said in February 19, 2016, at a rally in North Carolina: "We're going to win so much, you're going to get tired of winning. You’re going to say, 'Please, Mr. President, I have a headache. Please don't win so much. This is getting terrible.' And I'm going to say, 'No, we have to make America great again.' You're gonna say, 'Please.' I'll say, 'Nope, nope. We're gonna keep winning.’

Judge finalizes $25 million settlement for 'victims of Donald Trump's fraudulent university'

http://abcnews.go.com/US/judge-final...ry?id=54347237

Russia wanted Trump to win the Presidential election. Russian trolls created thousands of fake social media accounts and spread pro-Trump propaganda. Russians gave money to the NRA. The NRA gave money to Trump. Trump does the NRA's bidding. It's like Joni Mitchell sang: "We go round and round and round in the circle game."

NRA admits accepting donations from 23 Russia-linked donors since 2015

http://www.newsweek.com/nra-admits-a...-donors-882310

GOP Tax Cut Fraud: 'It'll Pay for Itself'

Paul Ryan got exactly what he wanted and expected—a devastating report that he can wield as a weapon to smash programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

By Leo Gerard / AlterNet April 12, 2018

Remember the Republicans’ claim that their tax scam slashing rates for the rich and corporations would magically pay for itself?

Here is how that works: a rich guy walks into a Mercedes-Benz dealership, gets behind the wheel of a $112,400 GP Coupe, and drives away yelling to the salesman, “Don’t worry. It’ll pay for itself.”

It’s nothing but a fraud.

Well, that’s what the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) said this week, anyway. Without blatantly labeling the GOP tax cut as a con, the CBO did say that it would in no way, not ever pay for itself. It would, the CBO warned, dramatically raise the national budget deficit, year after year, for at least a decade.

Republicans, the party of public hand-wringing over deficits, deliberately created this gob-smackingly huge one. Privately, Republicans are the party of glee over deficits. That’s because they use them as an excuse to slash and burn programs cherished by the vast majority of Americans such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Yes, Grandma, that tax cut Republicans gave to fat cats means you’ll be eating cat food.

The CBO said Monday that the budget deficit this year will be $804 billion, which is $139 billion more than the agency had projected the shortfall would be before the Republican-controlled Congress passed the tax cut for the rich and a massively out-of-balance budget.

The GOP tax bill, the CBO said, would continue not paying for itself by larger and larger amounts, increasing the deficit to nearly $1 trillion next year and more than $1 trillion in 2020.

The CBO also projected that the reduced tax income and increased deficit spending would raise interest rates. Higher rates hurt everyone trying to buy a home or pay down credit card debt. They’re also bad for the federal government.

Because of the higher rates, the CBO says that by 2023, interest costs on the national debt will exceed what the government spends on the military. By 2028, those payments will cost more than triple the amount paid last year.

Also, in the case of an economic downturn, high rates and high debt would make it difficult for the government to borrow to pay for an economic stimulus to turn the economy around.

Normally, during times when the economy is healthy and unemployment is low—times like now—the government reduces deficits, in effect, saving for a rainy day.

That’s not what this Republican Congress did. Remember, GOP congressmen, who are employed by the government, hate the government. They want to drown it in a bathtub, as their cult leader Grover Norquist advocates.

David Stockman, who was President Ronald Reagan’s budget director, named the maneuver Republicans use to accomplish this “starve the beast,” with “the beast” being the government. Emaciating the government is simple. Cut taxes paid by the rich, which, of course, reduces government revenues. Then claim the government just doesn’t have enough money to pay for crucial benefits that tens of millions of vulnerable Americans need to survive.

Republicans see it as a win-win. It’s a gift to their wealthy campaign donors and kick in the gut to government services.

It’s exactly what Republicans were doing when they first cut taxes by $1.5 trillion in December then in February passed a $1.3 trillion spending plan that eliminated previous budget caps so that Congress could spend even more money that it doesn’t have over the next two years—in this case, an extra $300 billion.

The scheme is no secret either. GOP House Speaker Paul Ryan announced exactly what he was doing right around the time Republicans gave the rich and corporations all those tax cuts last year. On a radio talk show he said, “We’re going to have to get back next year at entitlement reform, which is how you tackle the debt and the deficit.”

Grandmas, heroin addicts seeking treatment and Tea Partiers with signs warning “Keep Your Goddamn Government Hands Off My Medicare” should be wary. Congressional Republicans are now going to wrap their government hands around Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security and try to squeeze the life out of them.

Paul Ryan got exactly what he wanted and expected from the CBO this week—horrible news, a devastating report that he can wield as a weapon to smash these programs.

Republicans knew tax cuts for the rich (including 15 wealthy Republicans on tax-writing committees who will each get a tax windfall averaging $314,000) would not “pay for themselves.” They always intended to make the elderly, the poor and the ill pay for them.

Paul Ryan announced on Wednesday that he is retiring from the House at the end of 2018. He said the tax cuts for the rich were his key legacy. “I like to think I’ve done my part,” he said.

He did his part to further enrich the already rich, bankrupt the American government, and push the nation’s elderly and vulnerable closer to the brink.

Before he bows out, he’s going to try to make matters worse. He wants the House to vote on an amendment to the Constitution requiring a balanced budget. If such an amendment were in place now, it would require Congress to find an extra $804 billion this year to eliminate the deficit Republicans deliberately created. The first place the GOP would go looking for that money is the Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security funds.

Unlike legislation, though, a proposed amendment to the Constitution must be passed by two-thirds of the House and Senate before it can move on to consideration by state legislatures. So Paul Ryan’s new attempt to force Congress to kill social welfare programs will fail.

And it should.

When they run for office, Republicans should flat out tell their constituents, who have paid into the Social Security and Medicare funds all of their lives, that the GOP will do whatever it takes to incinerate the nation’s social safety net.

Republicans know, however, that would mean voters would put an end to GOP lawmakers’ government-paid gravy train. And while they are willing to take the food out of the mouths of the nation’s elderly, they’re not willing to relinquish their own free lunches.

https://www.alternet.org/economy/gop...tll-pay-itself

______________________________________

I am aware of how dangerous generalizations, hyperbole and uncontrolled emotion can undermine objective argument. There is no danger of any of that when I say that conservatives have been doing what this essay outlines for decades, and, that it, and every other conservative policy, are a significant danger to the fabric of the country. This MUST end.

If only we had an organized, efficient and effective opposition party that worked to prevent everything that is slowly destroying the best of what makes this country worth living in.

We don't.

How has Alex Jones managed to become such an ignorant unbalanced delusional idiot in only 44 years?

Sandy Hook parents sue InfoWars host Alex Jones for defamation
The Guardian, Apr 17 2018 12:21 PM

Two of the families who lost children in the Sandy Hook mass shooting are suing radio host Alex Jones and his website InfoWars for defamation after becoming the target of internet conspiracy theorists. Jones has been at the front of a small but loud group of conspiracy theorists who believe the shooting was a staged event, intended to push public opinion toward increased gun control. "Undoubtedly, there’s a cover-up, there’s actors, they’re manipulating, they’ve been caught lying," Jones said in a March 2014 broadcast.

Mark Bankston, lead attorney in the case, said, "Our clients have been tormented for five years by Jones’ ghoulish accusations that they are actors who faked their children’s deaths as part of a fraud on the American people. Enough is enough." Neil Heslin, along with Leonard Pozner and his ex-wife Veronique De La Rosa, both families who lost six-year-old children, filed the suits early on Tuesday in Travis county, Texas, where Jones' outlet is based. Each suit is seeking more than $1 million in damages.

Jones has discussed Sandy Hook numerous times since the 2012 shooting that killed 20 five- and six-year-old children in a Connecticut elementary school. In various segments, Jones and other hosts on InfoWars have accused the families of slain children of being paid actors and of lying and the media of staging coverage with green-screen video technology. Bankston contends that these claims have brought the families abuse and threats from Jones' followers and listeners, who number in the tens of millions.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...nts-defamation

We all knew the GOP tax plan would mostly benefit banks, big corporations and the wealthiest Americans. Now we have proof:

Big banks saved $3.6 billion in taxes last quarter under new law

http://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/20/big-b...r-new-law.html

https://youtu.be/qG_2m74spy0

Rendevous with Oblivion

Reports from a Sinking Society
by Thomas Frank

The following post is excerpted from Rendezvous with Oblivion: Reports from a Sinking Society by Thomas Frank. A former columnist for The Wall Street Journal and Harper’s, Frank is the founding editor of The Baffler and writes regularly for The Guardian. He is also the author of Listen, Liberal, Pity the Billionaire, The Wrecking Crew, and What’s the Matter with Kansas?

The First Shall Be First

The essays collected here scan over many diverse aspects of American life, but they all aim to tell one essential story: This is what a society looks like when the glue that holds it together starts to dissolve. This is the way ordinary citizens react when they learn the structure beneath them is crumbling. This is the thrill that pulses through the veins of the well-to-do when they discover there is no longer any limit on their power to accumulate.

In headline terms, these essays cover the years of the Barack Obama presidency and the populist explosion that marked its end. It was a time when liberal hopes were sinking and the newly invigorated right was proceeding from triumph to triumph. When I wrote the earliest installment in the collection, Democrats still technically controlled both houses of Congress in addition to the presidency; when I finished these essays, Donald Trump sat in the Oval Office and Republicans had assumed a position of almost unprecedented power over the nation’s political system.

For a few, these were times of great personal satisfaction. The effects of what was called the Great Recession were receding, and affluence had returned to smile once again on the tasteful and the fortunate. The lucky ones resumed their fascinating inquiries into the art of the cocktail and the science of the grandiose suburban home. For them, things transpired reassuringly as before.

But for the many, this was a period when reassurance was in short supply. Ordinary Americans began to understand that, recovery or not, things would probably never be the same in their town or neighborhood. For them, this was a time of cascading collapse, with one trusted institution after another visibly deteriorating.

It was a golden age of corruption. By this I do not mean that our top political leaders were on the take—they weren’t—but rather that America’s guardian class had been subverted or put to sleep. Human intellect no longer served the interests of the public; it served money—or else it ceased to serve at all. That was the theme of the era, whether the locale was Washington, D.C., or the college your kids attended, or the city desk of your rapidly shrinking local newspaper. No one was watching out for the interests of the people, and increasingly the people could see that this was the case.

The financial crisis of 2008 engraved this pattern in the public mind. Every trusted professional group touching the mortgage industry had turned out to be corrupt: real estate appraisers had puffed the housing bubble, credit rating agencies had puffed Wall Street’s trashy securities, and of course investment bankers themselves had created the financial instruments that were designed to destroy their clients. And then, as the larger economy spiraled earthward … as millions around the world lost jobs and homes … the trusted professionals of the federal government stepped in to ensure that their brother professionals on Wall Street would suffer no ill effects. For the present generation, the bailout of the crooks would stand as the ultimate demonstration of the worthlessness of institutions, the nightmare knowledge that lurked behind every scam that was to come.

What I describe in this volume is a vast panorama of such scams—a republic of rip-offs. Bernie Sanders, the archetypal reform figure of our time, likes to say that “the business model of Wall Street is fraud,” but in truth we could say that about many of the designated protectors of our health and well-being. Pharmaceutical companies, we learned, jack up prices for no reason other than because they can, because it is their federally guaranteed right to do so. The brain power of Silicon Valley, meanwhile, concentrates on the search for ingenious ways to harvest private information and build monopolies so that it, too, can gouge the world with impunity.

The university is the ultimate source of credentialed expertise—of the idea that there are values beyond those of the market—and here, too, the rot and the corruption were unmistakable. That the traditional professoriate was doomed became obvious in these years, and also that the contemplative way of life was circling the drain as well. But even as the intellectuals went down, the universities themselves prospered in a remarkable and even unprecedented way, growing and building and driving tuition prices skyward. As these developments unfolded, legitimate higher ed was dogged by countless educational scams and even fake-educational scams, operations that would sell anyone a realistic-looking college degree for a modest sum.

In politics, of course, the scam and the fib are as old as the earth itself. Even so, the past decade has been a time of extraordinary innovation in the field. The rise of the super PAC and the Citizens United decision drew the most attention in this regard, but what seems most striking in retrospect was the way the casual dishonesty of politics started to spill over into everyday life.

The consolations of ideology became available to the millions, thanks to Facebook and Twitter and the political entertainers on cable news. Millions of Americans came to believe that everything was political and that therefore everything was faked; that everyone was a false accuser so why not accuse people falsely; that any complaint or objection could ultimately be confounded by some clever meme; that they or their TV heroes had discovered the made-up argument by which they could drown out that still small voice of reality. At right-wing rallies, one began to notice a gleeful denial of things that were obviously true.

Legitimate public defenders like newspapers were simply shutting down. And as your local paper went silent, the reign of factuality seemed to crumble as well. Among newspapers that survived, meanwhile, the resident professionals often seemed to be in denial about what was happening. This was a “golden age of journalism,” they chanted, and as their little world shrank and the public grew to hate them more and more, the survivors came together in an ever tighter circle of professional unanimity, missing the obvious but agreeing with one another on the correct interpretation of an amazing variety of events.

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Cont'd

Fake news flourished, of course. For every newspaper that withered away, an opportunity opened up for somebody willing to imitate what had gone before. Social media entrepreneurs prospered, as did home-grown propagandists and online scam artists. It sometimes seemed as if everyone was search-engine-optimizing something or making bogus documentaries or Photoshopping some outrageous text onto some stock photo. The Internet teemed with collators of tweets, makers of memes, content farms, traffickers in panic and stereotype, liars for hire.

The representative figure of this new era was Andrew Breitbart, the master of a homemade right-wing Web empire, who rose from obscurity to become the bellowing scourge of the mainstream media: accusing promiscuously, denying vociferously, always shouting, always rationalizing. For him, representation was everything, reality was nothing, and politics became more and more an analogue of pro wrestling. The pseudo-event was the only game in town.

* * *

The United States has always been friendly to quacks and mountebanks and false accusers; that is an essential teaching of this country’s literature from the days of Mark Twain to those of Lewis Lapham. Like pumpkin pie and the bald eagle, the con game is so utterly American that it probably deserves its own series of postage stamps. But something is different today. The quacks and the mountebanks own the place, and everyone knows it. The con game is our national pastime. Everyone either is in on it or has a plan for getting in on it soon.

What has made corruption’s reign possible is no mystery. For most Americans, the props of middle-class life—four years at college, for example—are growing expensive and moving out of reach. At the same time, the rewards showered upon society’s handful of winners have grown astronomically greater. The result is exactly what our cynical ancestors would have expected: people will do anything to be among the winners.

And as we serve money, we find that money always wants the same thing from us: that it pushes everyone it beguiles in the same direction. Money never seems to be interested in strengthening regulatory agencies, for example, but always in subverting them, in making them miss the danger signs in coal mines and in derivatives trading and in deep-sea oil wells. You can have a shot at joining the one percent, money tells us, only if you are first committed to making the one percent stronger, to defending their piles in some new and imaginative way, to rationalizing and burnishing their glory, to exempting them from regulation or taxation and bowing down as they pass.

What I am describing is not “sustainable,” as people in Washington like to say. It has given us a rendezvous with oblivion, not with destiny. You can’t build a civilization on rip-offs … on no-doc loans taken out in order to make scam phone calls to senior citizens … on rolled-back odometers and fancy college degrees that are worth less than they used to be and might well prove to be worthless altogether … on the presidential aspirations of a con man who mimics your way of talking but has no idea how to govern.

And so we come to Donald Trump, the very personification of this low, dishonest age. Nearly every one of the trends described in this book culminates with him. He is an Ivy League graduate who also went into business selling degrees of his own. A dealer in tasteless palatial real estate. A one-man right-wing propaganda bureau who didn’t seem to be able to distinguish between what was true and what was false amid his constant tweetings and accusings. A character from pro wrestling and reality TV. A true-believing adherent of Breitbart’s doctrine that only media matters—indeed, a candidate whose 2016 campaign was run by the viceroy of Breitbart’s empire.

Trump was the most virulent fake populist of them all: a “blue-collar billionaire,” as his admirers described him, a Republican who was carried to victory by his lovable habit of inventing cruel nicknames for his opponents. The legitimate media came together against him as a matter of course, tallying up his falsehoods and insults and assuring their audience that he represented the end of conservatism at long last. The country’s surviving newspapers endorsed his Democratic opponent by an unprecedented margin.

For all that, there was still something real about Trump—or rather about the suffering of the white working-class people who attended his rallies and who made him their president during the crazy election of 2016. These were people on the receiving end of the trends I’ve described; they were living in the world dominated by the self-serving professionals who screwed things up and survived to screw things up again. Despite what the Beltway types assured them, they knew that the wars were inexcusable and the elites were corrupt and the trade deals were bad. And what others saw as Trump’s falsehoods they saw as a form of honesty, a plain-speaking directness that was refreshing in all its vulgarity. They looked not to be saved by experts but rescued from them, and Trump’s achievement was to make himself the vehicle of their hopes.

The results were disastrous, of course, and much of what I describe in the book that follows are matters of grave import. You will notice, however, that I describe them with a certain amount of levity. I do that because that’s the only way to confront the issues of our time without sinking into debilitating gloom. “We live in a land of abounding quackeries,” wrote H. L. Mencken once upon a time, “and if we do not learn how to laugh we succumb to the melancholy disease which afflicts the race of viewers-with-alarm.”

http://americanempireproject.com/blo...-thomas-frank/

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Thomas Frank is one of the best observers of the actual condition of the country - not sparing anyone or anything from his perceptive and objective analyses. He is required reading for those who care about truth.