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Whereas The Paper Of Record Gauges The Big (Or Small?) Global Question
A 'newspaper of record'..
.. is a major newspaper that has a large circulation and whose editorial and news-gathering functions are considered professional and typically authoritative.
As such the trusted New York Times reliably ponders the most important topics of U.S. and global polices. Here is an outstanding example:
 bigger – Link
After spending some 350 well chosen words examining the issue at hand, the distinguished author concludes:
So, yes, the size of Trump’s penis matters …
We should all be proud to merit such epiphany.
I admire the ease with which Trump suborns the media to provide him their megaphone. When Marco Rubio attacked Trump's manhood there was little media reaction. Trump's response to Rubio is followed up by a series of headlines.
As one observer noted:
@MaxAbrahms
The Media:
"Trump is debasing American politics with his disgusting antics. Now let's replay his penis comment one more time!"
When the august NYT decides that the size of Trump's penis it is now a big (or small?) question that matters, Trump wins.
No wonder he is the last man standing while the others exit the stage.
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The Trumpster Sends The GOP/Neocon Establishment To The Dumpster
At the end of the day, the reason that the neocons are apoplectic is that Trump would restore the 1991 status quo ante. The nation’s self-proclaimed greatest deal-maker might even take a leaf out of Warren G. Harding’s playbook and negotiate sweeping disarmament agreements in a world where governments everywhere are on the verge of fiscal bankruptcy.
He might also come down with wrathful indignation on the Fed if its dares push toward the criminal zone of negative interest rates. As far as I know, The Donald was never mis-educated by the Keynesian swells at Brookings, either. No plain old businessman would ever fall for the sophistry and crank monetary theories that are now ascendant in the Eccles Building.
When it comes to the nation’s current economic wreckers-in-chief, Janet Yellen and Stanley Fischer, he might even dust off on day one the skills he honed during his ten year stint on the Apprentice.
Indeed, the sound of “your fired!” in that context would echo with high approbation down the pages of history.
Worse things could surely happen.
Number 1 worse thing … Hillary could be elected instead of The Donald?
There is a lengthy recount of the Neocon reign of terror, starting in 1991 before this last pearl from David Stockman … one of the first Republicrat victims of the neocons.
Meanwhile, college-educated, elite Chris Hedges quotes his main stays …
The Revenge of the Lower Classes and the Rise of American Fascism
College-educated elites, on behalf of corporations, carried out the savage neoliberal assault on the working poor. … There are tens of millions of Americans, especially lower-class whites, rightfully enraged at what has been done to them, their families and their communities. They have risen up to reject the neoliberal policies and political correctness imposed on them by college-educated elites from both political parties: Lower-class whites are embracing an American fascism. …
As Arendt noted, the fascist and communist movements in Europe in the 1930s
“… recruited their members from this mass of apparently indifferent people whom all other parties had given up as too apathetic or too stupid for their attention. The result was that the majority of their membership consisted of people who had never before appeared on the political scene. This permitted the introduction of entirely new methods into political propaganda, and indifference to the arguments of political opponents; these movements not only placed themselves outside and against the party system as a whole, they found a membership that had never been reached, never been ‘spoiled’ by the party system. Therefore they did not need to refute opposing arguments and consistently preferred methods which ended in death rather than persuasion, which spelled terror rather than conviction. They presented disagreements as invariably originating in deep natural, social, or psychological sources beyond the control of the individual and therefore beyond the control of reason. This would have been a shortcoming only if they had sincerely entered into competition with either parties; it was not if they were sure of dealing with people who had reason to be equally hostile to all parties.”
I wince when I read ‘lower classes’ … Hedges sounds like one of his own ‘college-educated elites …’ who thrust ‘… a knife into the back of the underclass for their corporate masters’ when he writes of the ‘lower class’.
Hedges writes …
“If Clinton prevails in the general election Trump may disappear, but the fascist sentiments will expand. Another Trump, perhaps more vile, will be vomited up from the bowels of the decayed political system.”
Other than their stage manner, I don’t see a dime’s worth of difference between The Hil and The Donald. And it will be The H – a more-nearly house-broken version of The Donald – who is vomited up from the bowels of the decayed political system in lieu of The D.
It certainly does seem true that fantasizing with Stockman over what The Donald ‘might do’ is dangerous. Hedges, quoting again …
Richard Rorty in his last book, Achieving Our Country, written in 1998, presciently saw where our postindustrial nation was headed.
“… once a strongman takes office, nobody can predict what will happen. In 1932, most of the predictions made about what would happen if Hindenburg named Hitler chancellor were wildly overoptimistic. …”
I agree with Rorty on the likelihood of overoptimism on The D. in the face of the H. And also with Hedges … “The longer the elites … remain in charge, the worse it is going to get.” Realistically … The Donald, The Hil … they are going to remain in charge.
Posted by: jfl | Mar 4 2016 7:22 utc | 5
All this pious faith in the Greens is really most touching. They’re a thoroughly bourgeois party, drawn from the more aggressively sincere members of the creative and technical elite. When push comes to shove, they’ll suck it up and keep the system running, but with a “kinder, gentler machine gun hand.” Or if you prefer something more classical: “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”
Take a look at the EuroGreens. The German party formed part of the coalition government in the late 90’s that got involved in Kosovo. Though back in opposition now, they routinely back Merkel and the Troika’s diktats of austerity under the guise of “Europeanism.”
More telling, from my point of view, is the strong support they’ve given to the Banderist junta in Kiev, draped in similar pieties.
From they first, they gave official support and cover to the Maidan thugs. While I don’t much care for LaRouche and his organization, they did provide an interesting report of debate in the Reichstag in Feb. 2014. They note the growing public unease at the activities of the fascists.
Typical was a debate in the German Bundestag Feb. 1, during which a big clash occurred between Wolfgang Gehrcke of the Linke and Marieluise Beck of the Greens: Gehrcke said that he and his party do not want to see Europeans having any relations with “these right-wing-extremist scumbags” [sic] of the Svoboda, etc., whereas Beck said this was all black propaganda from the Russian FSB intelligence service to discredit the “peaceful protests of the people.” This Green siding with the Kiev rioters fits well with the fact that the Green-linked Heinrich Boell Foundation has established an “alternative Ukrainian embassy” not far from the official embassy in Berlin, as an information center and coordination venue for opposition Ukrainian groups. The Heinrich Boell Foundation is run by Ralph Fuecks, Beck’s husband.
Beck routinely fronts for Kiev, which regularly lauds her for her work, including her active participation on the Maidan. Here’s a little further info. on their activities from my side of the aisle, the Fourth Internationalists of WSWS. “Not only Fücks, but other Green politicians have produced hysterical war propaganda against Russia and called on the Merkel government to take tougher measures in Ukraine.”
The two addressed a conference last March in Berlin, sponsored by the Boell Foundation, on the Ukraine, Russia, and the EU – Europe one year after the annexation of Crimea.
Ralf Fücks and Marieluise Beck both expressed their disappointment with the rather distant or even frigid response the changes in Ukraine received in the West. Fücks added that on the left the attitude towards Euromaidan has become a marker, distinguishing “libertarian” from “authoritarian” tendencies.
Perhaps, but not in the way he envisions, I think.
I would add that the French Greens, after a number of years in opposition, have recently returned to Hollande’s cabinet. Sure, it’s austerity. But it’s environmentally sustainable austerity.
How do you create real change? On the streets and picket lines, from the bottom up. Provided you have leadership that springs from and remains part of the proletariat. What Gramsci termed “organic intellectuals,” for all you discoursin’ fellow-travellers.
That, it seems to me, is the bottom line on a very interesting piece at The Jacobin. Historian Robert Brenner discusses The Dynamics of Retreat, looking at the role of working-class organizations in rise and fall of the welfare state. Too long and too interesting to summarize, but here’s a sample.
The rise of the militant mass workers movement of 1933–35 generated the kind of political conditions and radical consciousness that were, and will continue to be, the prerequisite for the formation of an American labor party.
Without this kind of struggle, the winner-take-all, first-past-the-post character of the American electoral system makes any third party, including a labor party, all but impossible.
He notes that assorted class-conscious organizations of socialists, Communists, and Trotskyists provided critical element of continuity, historical analysis, and useful strategies and tactics to UAW and CIO militants. These organizations had kept working from the end of the Great War through the buoyant glitter of the Roaring Twenties, and possessed solid cadres. This meant that the social infrastructure needed to sustain strike wave (culminating in Flint in 1937) and obtain New Deal concessions was already in place.
It takes conscious, long-term, committed work. Not “Let’s get Trump to blow shit up and see what the freaking pieces look like.” Like Malheur, that great exposition of precinct democracy? Or maybe like the Berlin Wall? I guess all the guard platforms would be Trump Towers. Or how ’bout Gitmo on steroids? It’ll be YUGE!!!!!!
Folks had better hope we can turn America around. Implosion will be very ugly for all concerned, i.e. pretty much the planet and everything on it, and diffusing it will take finesse.
PB @ 79 —
The music was a bit hokey, but I loved the animation. Simple, bold, powerful.
I might sum up my position musically thusly — we’ll all go together, when we go.
Posted by: rufus magister | Mar 5 2016 5:31 utc | 83
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