Tag Archives: Bernie Sanders

Climate Change Is Inevitable With Trump Or Hillary

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US population distribution by states (2013)

US population distribution by states (2013)

Election 2016 by counties

Election 2016 by counties (D. Trump = red; H. Clinton = blue)

As of April 1, 2010, the date of the 2010 United States Census, the nine most populous U.S. states contain slightly more than half of the total population. The 25 least populous states contain less than one-sixth of the total population. California, the most populous state, contains more people than the 21 least populous states combined. (from Wikipedia)
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Most U.S. People Live “Near” the Big Water

The 9 most populous states (each with > 10M people): CA, TX, FL, NY, IL, PA, OH, GA, NC, have seashore (Atlantic, Pacific, Gulf) or lakeshore on the Great Lakes.

The next 4 most populous states (MI, NJ, VA, WA, ranked 10-13) have seashore or lakeshore on the Great Lakes, and populations between 7M and 10M (each).

Ranked 14th is AZ, the first landlocked state (population between 6M and 7M).

Of the 16 states ranked 15-30, 7 have seashore (Atlantic, Pacific, Gulf) and 3 have lakeshore (Great Lakes), the remaining 6 are landlocked. All have populations between 3M and 7M.

The last 20 states have populations between 0.5M and 3M. There are 7 states with seashore (Atlantic, Pacific, Gulf), none with lakeshore (Great Lakes), and so 13 are landlocked.

Of the 37 states below rank 13:
all 20 landlocked states are included,
14 have seashore (Atlantic, Pacific, Gulf)
3 have lakeshore (Great Lakes).
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Whether Trump or Hillary is US president, Climate Change will continue unabated

In the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton won the population centers and the wealth zones; Donald Trump won the countryside (see maps). The peasants and proletarians revolted against the self-satisfied and arrogant cosmopolitans, and backed an avenging berserker they hoped (hope again!) would save them economically, and thus preserve their insular and primitive cultures. This revolt is a reaction to the supreme failure of the Democratic Party to care about the impoverished and ill-educated lives in the despairing countryside. Bernie Sanders would have swept this election. The American people lost the general election to the billionaires and the corporations on 25 July 2016, at the DP convention in Philadelphia. The Trump presidency is the direct result of Hillary Clinton’s ambition and the Democratic Party’s complicity with it.

Under a Trump presidency, billionaires and corporate bosses will openly and in full public view run the country to their personal advantage, paid for by the continuing impoverishment of the citizens and degradation of the natural environment. Many hope that by political legerdemain Hillary Clinton can be installed as the president instead, on January 20, 2017. Then, they would be relieved to know that the billionaires and corporate bosses running the country to their personal advantage, paid for by the continuing impoverishment of the citizens and degradation of the natural environment, would do so discretely out of public view.

In my view, we will never stop (let alone reverse) climate change, because the addiction to fossil fuels is universal and incurable. Basically, all the personal excuses worldwide boil down to something within the range of: “I’ve got to have it to survive,” and “I’ve got to have it to profit.” Climate change is the exhaust product of capitalism (whether of “free market” or “command economy” style), and no one is willing “to miss out” on getting more power NOW to “survive” and “profit.”

Socialistic frugality to economize and thus forestall climate change could only happen under a “dictatorship,” with a top-down enforced regimen of shared economics, as under Fidel Castro in Cuba. This is impossible globally, as well as in almost every country.

I have no doubt that essentially the same policies and trends would have occurred under a Hillary Clinton presidency as under a Trump presidency. There would be big differences of style between the two, but little differences of timing. The desperate peasants who voted for Trump simply hoped to get some economic lift by getting skilled-labor jobs in Trump’s promised America-first unleashed smokestack economy (factories and mines on the prairies and in the hills, but also Wall Street pulling the strings). There was no such hope for the peasantry in Hillary’s likely economy of outsourced smokestack industries, H-1B domestic tech industries (IT and Bio-tech) and an unleashed financial industry (high-tech along the coasts, and investment banking everywhere). It’s kind of like picking between “Ford” and “Chevrolet” economies with billionaires in the drivers’ seats either way. The gas, oil and coal will be hammered, pumped and dug up, and burned to inflate fortunes.

The one advantage of a Trump presidency and economy is that it will hit most of us with an instantaneous jab of pain and burning sensation, like the sting of a bee puncturing public consciousness, and cause an immediate mass reaction seeking to swat the offender.

In contrast, a Hillary Clinton presidency and economy would hit us like the stealthy sting of a tick, which regurgitates a highly infectious anticoagulant during its bite so it can linger draining your blood until you eventually become aware of a persistent pain and a possible enduring disease.

It was never in the public interest to support Hillary Clinton to “avoid” Donald Trump, whether before or after the November 8 election. Post-election efforts going into fantasies promoting Hillary (importuning Electoral College electors to switch their votes in favor of Hillary, while sopping up conspiracy theories aiming hatred at the Russians, and blame away from the real culprits) would be better spent on planning resistance to Trump’s policy initiatives. I suspect that within two years (mid-term elections) that disillusionment with Trump will have already become visible among the ranks of Trump’s populist supporters. Then the members of the Sanders Revolution will have the opportunity to begin combining forces with disillusioned Trump supporters, and ideally also reformed and reeducated Hillary supporters (though these are likely to be the most obdurate, i.e., brainwashed), and a second populist wave might beneficially inundate the electoral spectacle by 2020.

However the politics of the next four to eight years unfolds, two conclusions seem clear:

You cannot have capitalism without gross inequity and climate change.

You cannot have socialism with ignorant, greedy and self-centered people.

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Trump Absolutely Won, Hillary Absolutely Lost

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11 November 2016 (98th Armistice Day)

“I’d rather vote for what I want, and not get it, than vote for what I don’t want and get it.”
(Eugene V. Debs)

I wanted Bernie Sanders, and if not then Jill Stein, and if not then… abstain.

I would never vote FOR Hillary Clinton, nor FOR Donald Trump.

Electorally, How Did Trump Win?

– RURAL and RUST BELT counties are the overwhelming majority of counties in the USA.

– A majority of people in RURAL and RUST BELT counties favored Trump.

– This is how Trump won states to get the significant majority of Electoral votes.

Electorally, How Did Hillary Lose?

– Hillary only won the URBAN CENTERS in the major US wealth areas:
– LEFT COAST: LA Basin, SF Coastal Strip, Portland, Seattle
– SOUTHWEST: Colorado & New Mexico cites, and Latino vote
– MIDWEST: Minneapolis/St. Paul (MN), Chicago (IL)
– EAST COAST ESTABLISHMENT: Wash.D.C., VA, MD, DE
– BIG MONEY CENTRAL: NY, NJ, CT, RI, MA
– NEW ENGLAND: VT (Bernie’s state), NH, coastal Maine

– Hillary lost the great majority of inland, outlying and rural counties in “her” states.

Florida Vote (a swing state):

Trump = 4,605,515
Clinton = 4,485, 745
Stein = 64,019

Clinton + Stein = 4,549,764

Trump got +55,751 MORE Florida votes than Clinton + Stein

Don’t blame Jill Stein. Trump absolutely won, and Hillary absolutely lost.

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2008 Red-Blue Map by County:
2008-redblue

2012 Red-Blue Map by County:
2012-redblue

Hillary did WORSE in 2016 than the results shown in the 2012 map.

See: http://www.google.com/ “2016 US election results”
(for the numbers in every state, and individual state-county maps)

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Voter Turnout 2016

Part of Hillary Clinton’s defeat (and Donald Trump’s victory) in 2016 can be attributed to the LOWEST percentage voter turnout in US history (since 1828, when data records began). TEN MILLION fewer eligible voters went to the polls in 2016 than in 2012. Fewer than half of eligible voters actually voted in 2016.

Percentage turnout has been above 50% since 1828, except during 1920, 1924, 1996 and 2016. The % turnout for 2016 was 48.6% (the lowest in US history).

Between 2012 and 2016 the US voting age population (VAP) increased by 10 million.
(VAP in 2016 is 245.3 million)

The voter turnout in 2016 was 10 million LESS than in 2012.
(Turnout in 2016 was 119.3 million)

The percentage voter turnout in 2012 was 54.9%
The percentage voter turnout in 2016 was 48.6% (record low)

The election years with LESS than 50% turnout:
1920, 49.2%
1924, 48.9%
1996, 49.0% (W. Clinton wins)
2016, 48.6% (H. Clinton loses)

In 2016:
H. Clinton gains 47.7% of turnout (56.90M votes)
D. Trump gains 47.5% of turnout (56.67M votes)
HC + DT gain 95.2% of turnout (113.57M votes)

Net Others gain 4.8% of turnout (5.73M votes)

HC gains 230,053 more votes than DT (+0.19% of turnout)
(loses on basis of Electoral College votes)

IF WE ASSUME that:
– the eligible voters favoring Trump were on average highly motivated, so a high percentage of them went to the polls,
while
– the eligible voters favoring HRC were on average modestly motivated, so a middling percentage of them went to the polls
then
IT IS POSSIBLE that:
– in the non-voting portion of the VAP (say at least the 10M missing since 2012) there was a higher portion of HRC-leaning people to DT-leaning people,
– AND IF turnout had been higher
then
– relatively more HRC votes than T votes would have been added (to the observed totals)
AND
– that might possibly have tilted the election in HRC’s favor.

Bernie Sanders has often said that “with high turnouts Democrats win, with low turnouts Republicans win.” (Which is why Republicans favor voter suppression.)

In brief, HRC needed tidal waves of “missing voters” who favored her, in Red States.

Of course, it is entirely possible that the non-voting remainder of the 2016 VAP (126M possible voters) did not split any differently than the voting portion (the 119.3M turnout) on the favoring of HRC or DT. So speculating on how an HRC win might have been gained by engaging large numbers of presumably “missing” HRC voters may be grasping at nonexistent straws.

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Commentary On Election 2016 (follows)

Please note, I express myself freely in what follows. I am NOT concerned to spare anyone’s feelings. Nothing personal, but…

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Essential reading if you want to know “why it happened” and “what do we (really) have to do to fix the problem.” In brief: stop crying, emoting, “fleeing” your privileged white ass to Canada hoping they make good lattés up there, and messing up the streets (protesting a democratic election!!). Instead, fire the ENTIRE Democratic Party, and start that over with an entirely new crew (e.g., Bernie, Nina Turner, Keith Ellison, Tulsi Gabbard, that kind of people). You are only victims of believing what you want to believe, instead of opening your eyes and ears to reality, and then dealing with it as it actually exists. Your ignorance is their power. Maintaining ignorance (blaming others) is the essence of the delusion of “privilege.” I do not feel your pain. Wake up!

Democrats, Trump, and the Ongoing, Dangerous Refusal to Learn the Lesson of Brexit
(Glenn Greenwald)
9 November 2016
https://theintercept.com/2016/11/09/democrats-trump-and-the-ongoing-dangerous-refusal-to-learn-the-lesson-of-brexit/

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Yvette Carnell (on Facebook, just after midnight, on the morning of 9 November 2016):

“Understand what this Trump victory means. He defeated capital, the media, the military industrial complex and both the Republican and Democratic Party. Republicans said he was unelectable and ran away from him after the groping allegations. Now Trump is president. This is historic.”

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My Old Predictions on Election 2016
9 November 2016
https://manuelgarciajr.com/2016/11/09/my-old-predictions-on-election-2016/
(above shown in full below)

During last June (the CA primary, 7 June 2016) I wrote that “a vote for Hillary Clinton before July is a vote for Donald Trump in November.” By all kinds of cheating, bribery, rigging, collusion with corporate media and procedural underhandedness, the Clinton mafia, the DNC and professional Democrats managed to shut out the popular will (and its spokesman, Bernie Sanders) from the electoral process. Okay, so the corporations won. But it seems increasing clear now that Hillary Clinton’s political legacy for America will be the Trump Administration. <> (29 September 2016)

Donald Trump is the popular response of the white working class to its nearly 40 year degradation by neoliberal economics. Donald Trump is not Hitler, neoliberalism is Dracula. The neoliberal plague was unleashed in 1979 by Margaret Thatcher (in the UK) and Ronald Reagan in 1981, and has continued to be propagated in the US by a succession of corporate-owned factotums: George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and — if the Democratic Party can rig everything to come out just right — Hillary Clinton. <> (8 September 2016)

It is abundantly clear that should Hillary Clinton lose the November election (as seems more likely with each passing day) it will be a richly deserved loss. <> (8 September 2016)

The American electorate may arrive at a consensus of voting for a train-wreck they can be assured of seeing unfold in every detail, instead of voting for a stealthy railroading of them all, under the guise of social progress. <> (8 September 2016)

If Donald Trump does actually win the November election it will be because of all the Democratic Party regulars and Clinton faithful, who “voted for him” by late July, by voting for Hillary instead of Bernie: that is to say by rigging the voting processes, and collusion with corporate media to sabotage the Sanders campaign, in addition to simply casting their votes for Hillary during the primary elections and at the Democratic Party convention. <> (24 August 2016)

Had the Democratic Party really been concerned about beating Donald Trump in the November election they would have nominated Bernie Sanders, who is heavily favored over Donald in just about every electoral district, and in every single poll taken on that question (still). But, the Democratic Party regulars and the Clinton faithful are far more concerned about preserving their own situations of personal gain, and they did not want to “lose control” of the Democratic Party to the “popular will” (Jean-Jacques Rousseau), for the good of the country. <> (24 August 2016)

So today, the 25th of July 2016, is undoubtedly the first day of the Trump presidency, the beginning of its preamble which will reach a crescendo on November 8, and then be legitimized on the 20th of January 2017. The best hopes for the next four years in America, and perhaps for a generation, were strangled in their Democratic Party crib today. I will always hate all Hillary Clinton voters, and I will always pity all Donald Trump voters. <> (25 July 2016)

Trump voters are too stupid to do any better, and many of them are justifiably angry over how they have been exploited economically. It is perfectly understandable that they would rebel against their political impotence by throwing the monkey wrench of a vote for Trump into the gears of the system. So, I pity them. Hillary voters, on the other hand, are smart enough to realize just how stupid their identity politics vanity is. Is the advancement and enrichment of one very corrupt woman really worth the many sacrifices the nation and its people must endure to sustain it? Is the thrill of being able to say “I voted for the first American woman president” really more important than the futures of our children, and the welfare of so many hard-pressed people? For Hillary Clinton voters it is, and so I hate them. <> (25 July 2016)

The Democratic Party has done a superb job of ensuring that many millions of young Americans will never look on it with respect and trust ever again. It has also done an outstanding job at demonstrating — for all Americans and all the World — one of the clearest and most vivid counterexamples to the concept of integrity that has ever been devised. Seed corn has been wasted by the gluttony of the privileged, and of the stupid. Fortunately for these Democratic party “loyalists,” delusion and self-absorption will save them from ever noticing the consequences. Until karma surprises. <> (14 June 2016)

The 2016 election is between the people and the corporations. Independents will determine who wins in November (they outnumber registered Democrats and registered Republicans). Bernie is the overwhelming favorite nationally (and in swing states), and would easily defeat Trump. If the DP fields Hillary Clinton against Trump, Trump will win. <> (5 June 2016)

Among the people: Bernie’s supporters are the most alert, Trump’s supporters are the most bitter, and Hillary’s supporters are the most deluded. <> (5 June 2016)

If the Democratic Party apparatchiks (the paid minions of the 1% oligarchs) can beat back the hostile-takeover Sanders insurgency of popular and populist democracy, and put Hillary Clinton forward as the party’s champion in the general electoral joust, then President Trump will be inaugurated in January 2017. The Democratic Party apparatchiks are first and foremost fighting to preserve their patronage positions (to hell with the country). A President Trump is no threat to their ambitions, but a nominee Sanders — whether subsequently president or not — would mean that a revolution had occurred in the Democratic Party, and the Obama-Clinton apparatchik gravy-train derailed. <> (27 February 2016)

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President Trump
8 November 2016 (revised 11 November 2016)

President Trump is popular America’s (as opposed to institutional America’s) equivalent of a Brexit from neoliberalism and globalization.

Part of the political rejection elevating Donald Trump to the presidency (beyond excruciating economic pain) is a popular emotional rejection of social attitudes and would-be social norms (as advocated by “advanced” worldly people) that are taken as threats to local distinctiveness, local traditions and old “religious” and ethnic customs, where those old customs are largely forms of bigotry passed down through families as basic elements of social and personal identity.

As is true with ISIS, the Taliban, Syria’s Assad, Turkey’s Erdogan, Iran’s ayatollahs, Egypt’s generals, the Chinese ‘geriatrocrats,’ and every “conservative” authoritarian regime around the world, all socially “liberal” ideas like women’s rights (reproductive, marital, sexual) and equality with men (political and economic), secular parliamentary government, the illegality of institutional racism, the illegality of the persecution of homosexuality and gender relativity, are all seen as part of “world governing” capitalist globalization taking over and diluting (to zero) local power structures (which are basically certain types of regional-national male classes defining the nature of their societies, and compelling all others to fit into their assigned places in these inequitable hierarchies).

This rejectionist and xenophobic nationalism is keenly and emotionally felt as “patriotism,” the defending and maintaining of “our (local) way of life” against the invasions by heartless, impersonal, unpatriotic trans-national and exploitative world economic forces, with no loyalty locally or nationally (e.g., job offshoring, foreign tax-haven sheltering “world capital”), and whose human faces are self-aggrandizing elitists who have personally removed from themselves any localisms and “backwardness” that would connect them to the communities they would rule over from afar, in order to be most efficient in advancing their own personal ambitions. Hillary Clinton is a perfect example of such an elitist, happy to homogenize (and “feminize”) the USA in order to make its exploitation by “world capital” more efficient.

Hillary Clinton is certainly more capable than Donald Trump would ever be at managing the economic system that currently owns the USA. But the popular preference for a President Trump is an angry rejection of that Wall Street neoliberal globalized system. They don’t want Trump to run it better than Hillary, they want Trump to destroy it and give them something new, which makes them feel good within their local distinctiveness, as they imagine they would have “in the good old days.”

Personally, I wish the Democrats had run Bernie instead of Hillary. Oh well, you reap what you sow.

I voted for Jill Stein of the Green Party.

Trump has triumphed, and all the institutions, who were uniformly against him (including a significant portion of the Republican Party Establishment), have been shamed. The American people have unleashed their political berserker.

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However you feel about it, Trump’s victory is:
– the result of an honest democratic election,
– a victory for populism, and
– a defeat (electoral) of the neoliberal establishment.

I have no doubt we could have had the same electoral result with Bernie Sanders, as President-Elect.

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PDF of this article:
trump-absolutely-won-hillary-absolutely-lost

My Old Predictions on Election 2016

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During last June (the CA primary, 7 June 2016) I wrote that “a vote for Hillary Clinton before July is a vote for Donald Trump in November.” By all kinds of cheating, bribery, rigging, collusion with corporate media and procedural underhandedness, the Clinton mafia, the DNC and professional Democrats managed to shut out the popular will (and its spokesman, Bernie Sanders) from the electoral process. Okay, so the corporations won. But it seems increasing clear now that Hillary Clinton’s political legacy for America will be the Trump Administration. <> (29 September 2016)

Donald Trump is the popular response of the white working class to its nearly 40 year degradation by neoliberal economics. Donald Trump is not Hitler, neoliberalism is Dracula. The neoliberal plague was unleashed in 1979 by Margaret Thatcher (in the UK) and Ronald Reagan in 1981, and has continued to be propagated in the US by a succession of corporate-owned factotums: George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and — if the Democratic Party can rig everything to come out just right — Hillary Clinton. <> (8 September 2016)

It is abundantly clear that should Hillary Clinton lose the November election (as seems more likely with each passing day) it will be a richly deserved loss. <> (8 September 2016)

The American electorate may arrive at a consensus of voting for a train-wreck they can be assured of seeing unfold in every detail, instead of voting for a stealthy railroading of them all, under the guise of social progress. <> (8 September 2016)

If Donald Trump does actually win the November election it will be because of all the Democratic Party regulars and Clinton faithful, who “voted for him” by late July, by voting for Hillary instead of Bernie: that is to say by rigging the voting processes, and collusion with corporate media to sabotage the Sanders campaign, in addition to simply casting their votes for Hillary during the primary elections and at the Democratic Party convention. <> (24 August 2016)

Had the Democratic Party really been concerned about beating Donald Trump in the November election they would have nominated Bernie Sanders, who is heavily favored over Donald in just about every electoral district, and in every single poll taken on that question (still). But, the Democratic Party regulars and the Clinton faithful are far more concerned about preserving their own situations of personal gain, and they did not want to “lose control” of the Democratic Party to the “popular will” (Jean-Jacques Rousseau) for the good of the country. <> (24 August 2016)

So today, the 25th of July 2016, is undoubtedly the first day of the Trump presidency, the beginning of its preamble which will reach a crescendo on November 8, and then be legitimized on the 20th of January 2017. The best hopes for the next four years in America, and perhaps for a generation, were strangled in their Democratic Party crib today. I will always hate all Hillary Clinton voters, and I will always pity all Donald Trump voters. <> (25 July 2016)

Trump voters are too stupid to do any better, and many of them are justifiably angry over how they have been exploited economically. It is perfectly understandable that they would rebel against their political impotence by throwing the monkey wrench of a vote for Trump into the gears of the system. So, I pity them. Hillary voters, on the other hand, are smart enough to realize just how stupid their identity politics vanity is. Is the advancement and enrichment of one very corrupt woman really worth the many sacrifices the nation and its people must endure to sustain it? Is the thrill of being able to say “I voted for the first American woman president” really more important than the futures of our children, and the welfare of so many hard-pressed people? For Hillary Clinton voters it is, and so I hate them. <> (25 July 2016)

The Democratic Party has done a superb job of ensuring that many millions of young Americans will never look on it with respect and trust ever again. It has also done an outstanding job at demonstrating — for all Americans and all the World — one of the clearest and most vivid counterexamples to the concept of integrity that has ever been devised. Seed corn has been wasted by the gluttony of the privileged, and of the stupid. Fortunately for these Democratic party “loyalists,” delusion and self-absorption will save them from ever noticing the consequences. Until karma surprises. <> (14 June 2016)

The 2016 election is between the people and the corporations. Independents will determine who wins in November (they outnumber registered Democrats and registered Republicans). Bernie is the overwhelming favorite nationally (and in swing states), and would easily defeat Trump. If the DP fields Hillary Clinton against Trump, Trump will win. <> (5 June 2016)

Among the people: Bernie’s supporters are the most alert, Trump’s supporters are the most bitter, and Hillary’s supporters are the most deluded. <> (5 June 2016)

If the Democratic Party apparatchiks (the paid minions of the 1% oligarchs) can beat back the hostile-takeover Sanders insurgency of popular and populist democracy, and put Hillary Clinton forward as the party’s champion in the general electoral joust, then President Trump will be inaugurated in January 2017. The Democratic Party apparatchiks are first and foremost fighting to preserve their patronage positions (to hell with the country). A President Trump is no threat to their ambitions, but a nominee Sanders — whether subsequently president or not — would mean that a revolution had occurred in the Democratic Party, and the Obama-Clinton apparatchik gravy-train derailed. <> (27 February 2016)

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President Trump

Posted on by

President Trump is popular America’s (as opposed to institutional America’s) equivalent of a Brexit from neoliberalism and globalization.

Part of the political rejection elevating Donald Trump to the presidency is a popular emotional rejection of social attitudes and would-be social norms (as advocated by “advanced” worldly people) that are taken as threats to local distinctiveness, local traditions and old “religious” and ethnic customs, where those old customs are largely forms of bigotry passed down through families as basic elements of social and personal identity.

As is true with ISIS, the Taliban, Syria’s Assad, Turkey’s Erdogan, Iran’s ayatollahs, Egypt’s generals, the Chinese geriatrocrats, and every “conservative” authoritarian regime around the world, all socially “liberal” ideas like women’s rights (reproductive, marital, sexual) and equality with men (political and economic), secular parliamentary government, the illegality of institutional racism, the illegality of the persecution of homosexuality and gender relativity, are all seen as part of “world governing” capitalist globalization taking over and diluting (to zero) local power structures (which are basically certain types of regional-national male classes defining the nature of their societies, and compelling all others to fit into their assigned places in these inequitable hierarchies).

This rejectionist and xenophobic nationalism is keenly and emotionally felt as “patriotism,” the defending and maintaining of “our (local) way of life” against the invasions by heartless, impersonal, unpatriotic trans-national and exploitative world economic forces, with no loyalty locally or nationally (e.g., job offshoring, foreign tax-haven sheltering “world capital”), and whose human faces are self-aggrandizing elitists who have personally removed from themselves any localisms and “backwardness” that would connect them to the communities they would rule over from afar, in order to be most efficient in advancing their own personal ambitions. Hillary Clinton is a perfect example of such an elitist, happy to homogenize (and “feminize”) the USA in order to make its exploitation by “world capital” more efficient.

Hillary Clinton is certainly more capable than Donald Trump would ever be at managing the economic system that currently owns the USA. But the popular preference for a President Trump is an angry rejection of that Wall Street neoliberal globalized system. They don’t want Trump to run it better than Hillary, they want Trump to destroy it and give them something new, which makes them feel good within their local distinctiveness, as they imagine they would have “in the good old days.”

It looks like my prediction yesterday wasn’t too good (today, 8 November 2016, at 10 PM Pacific Time, Trump seems likely to win). Personally, I wish the Democrats had run Bernie instead of Hillary. Oh well, you reap what you sow.

I voted for Jill Stein of the Green Party.

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P.S. 11:44 PM, 8 November 2016, Pacific Time:

Donald Trump wins 276 Electoral College votes, 6 more than needed to gain the presidency (270). The New York Times estimates that when all votes are finally counted, Trump will have gained 310 Electoral votes (and Hillary Clinton will have gained 228). Both the US House of Representatives and the Senate will have Republican Party majorities in 2017.

Trump has triumphed, and all the institutions, who were uniformly against him (including a significant portion of the Republican Party Establishment), have been shamed. The American people have unleashed their political berserker.

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Coin-flip Election of 2016

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Coin-flip Election of 2016

Hillary Clinton ran against herself and lost.
Donald Trump ran against Hillary Clinton and won.
The American people – and the world – had lost the election in July.
From then until November it was a coin-flip
—– between corporate head and corporate tail.
The parasite elite was heartbroken with the result
but relieved the lumbering beast they fed off
—– remained under control.
The beast had settled on profound ignorance and honest bigotry
over profound corruption and dishonest ambition,
—– and for denial of its own complicity.

Hillary Clinton ran against herself and won.
Donald Trump ran against Hillary Clinton and lost.
The American people – and the world – had lost the election in July.
From then until November it was a coin-flip
—– between corporate head and corporate tail.
The parasite elite were ecstatic with the result
and relieved the lumbering beast they fed off
—– remained under control.
The beast had settled on profound corruption and dishonest ambition
over profound ignorance and honest bigotry,
—– and for denial of its own complicity.

1 November 2016

Donald Trump’s Medal of Honor Citation

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Classified Citation for the Secret Medal of Honor, for Donald Trump

In the Classified History of the United States, Donald Trump will go down as one of the greatest heroes of the early twenty-first century, for almost single-handedly saving the republic from the anti-capitalist insurrection of Bernard Sanders, thus allowing our neoliberal economic order, guided by its Wall Street conservators, to continue without any foreseeable domestic threats for the remainder of the century.

Donald Trump accomplished this feat by his uncanny insights into public relations, his personal investments and losses, and his unsurpassed personal sacrifices in accepting near universal condemnation for his public policies, and opprobrium for his personal behavior. By willingly exposing himself to the public as the villainous foil to our designated successor for the presidency, Hillary Clinton, and carrying through with this boundlessly difficult and distasteful role to the bitter end, Donald succeeded in repelling a majority of the American public into the embrace of Hillary Clinton, and thus satisfactorily under our continuing control.

Donald single-handedly ruptured the Republican Party, creating the opportunity for it to repudiate its obstreperous and discredited populist “Tea Party” elements, and to realign itself once again under the full control of its long-standing and stable professionals of our bipartisan national leadership class. By creating what has been called “the most powerful negative pole of political policy and activity ever exhibited in an American presidential election,” Donald caused the fragile and insecure positivity of Hillary Clinton’s “political pole” to be exponentially enhanced in public perception. As a consequence of this felicitous enhancement, the luster of Bernard Sanders has been significantly dimmed, and the rabid enthusiasm of his anti-capitalist followers has been satisfactorily quenched into a mass disappointment that has excellent prospects of enduring as long term apathy.

Barack Obama has been the most successful tool for public guidance we have ever been fortunate to acquire, so it was natural we would once again turn to the Clinton-controlled Democratic Party for his successor. Hillary Clinton is the outstanding choice for that role, because of her lifetime of loyalty to our interests, and the singular confluence of politically useful characteristics she possesses: her female sex, which immediately guarantees her capturing half the votes in America, her absolute freedom from moral impediments, her salubrious cupidity (the bedrock of her loyalty), and her mastery of dissimulation and political manipulation. Where this “dream candidate” has weakness is in the area of easily rallying the public, and we had great apprehension earlier in her campaign with the surge of Bernard Sanders in opposition to her. It required the coordinated efforts of our operatives in the Democratic Party, the media, the corporate donor class, and the Obama Administration (including the president himself) to bring the Sanders insurgency to heel. But, essential to making the anti-Sanders counteroffensive successful were the enormous contributions of Donald Trump in the public sphere, as described earlier.

Truly it can be said that no man has knowingly shown greater loyalty to our class interests, and at greater sacrifice, than Donald Trump. For his unbounded and effective energy, sacrifices and success in our interests, we bestow on Donald Trump the Secret Medal of Honor.

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Fear & Loathing in American Voting, 2016

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In the diagrams above:
“tax Wall Street” = “deal with climate change” = “socialism” = “no wars.”

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The following rather moralizing (and no doubt futile) essay is a bonus with today’s posting.

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When The You We See Is The You You Are

My response to Charles Eisenstein’s essay (cited just below) follows:

The Lid Is Off
by Charles Eisenstein
http://charleseisenstein.net/the-lid-is-off/

Charles Eisenstein presents the dilemma posed by modern electronics communications and recording technology eroding the ease of concealment of unsavory personal behavior and attitudes, which ease of concealment was up until recently an intrinsic aspect of human society. He describes three examples:

1. Exposure of lewd “locker room” talk about women by Donald Trump, audio recorded a decade or more ago,

2. Exposure of Hillary Clinton’s speeches to Wall Street bankers (her actual political beliefs, opinions, and promises to the financial industry); by hacked e-mail.

3. Exposure of many instances of police brutality (e.g., beatings, fatally shooting unarmed civilians, even non-fleeing unresisting ones); by cell phone video.

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When I began work in the classified arena (1978) I instantly learned to consider every communication, and even research inquiry, whether face-to-face and verbal, or written, and especially through any electronic means (via computer networks), to be the equivalent of a postcard: it would be readable by anyone and everyone who could come across it, or eavesdrop (or “wiretap,” or “hack”). This was a procedural form of “say what you mean, and mean what you say.” In other words, understand and accept the consequences of what you are saying (or writing, or making research inquiries about). So, it never occurred to me to try running any money-making schemes, or seek out porno through my employer’s computer/internet systems (not so hard to do since I had no interest in these things, but people who did were invariably caught and fired).

At a more basic level, the “solution” to the dilemma posed by Charles Eisenstein is simply to not be a hypocrite. “Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.” Speak and act as if every moment is a “postcard” entirely visible to any and all, and easily recorded by them. Naturally, no actual human could ever maintain a perfect record in this regard, but making the effort to do so will improve your character and thus self-esteem, and it is very likely to keep you out of a lot of trouble.

The way to do this is to become self-aware, either by the luck of good parenting and education (when you are young), or by the luck of learning this truth as a result of the blowback from your own folly that you (also) luckily escaped from and got to live down (and then reform yourself). Once self-aware, you identify any disparities between your persona (the public you) and your shadow (the hidden negative aspects of your personality), and you breach the wall of hypocrisy and denial you had maintained between these two, letting in disinfecting light (and public view) that clears up your hidden rot: mean what you say and say what you mean.

So, for the Trump part of you: enjoy your sex dreams within the vast expanse of your own mind, but leave them there. There is no need to share them as part of boasting and ridicule expressed to boost comradeship, which is in fact a form of intimacy (between boys and boys, and girls and girls) that you veil with bravado to hid from yourself your embarrassment about it. Don’t act to demand attention and dominate, but command respect and gain trust by how you consistently act.

For the Hillary part of you: enjoy your daydreams of Machiavellian manipulations of people that result in your glorification, because like Walter Mitty, Billy Liar and all brides, it is so enjoyable to be the star of your own movie. But, keep these dreams (of inadequacy desiring power) within the vast expanse of your own mind, and make sure you do not deceitfully actualize them, thus splitting yourself into a persona that is a lie, and a shadow of hidden corruption as your motivating core. Instead of “me against the world” (like Rastignac at the end of Balzac’s “Le Père Goriot”), seek to be in and with the world in a way that maintains an honest self-respect.

For the chest-thumping alpha-male gorilla in you: play by the rules when exercising your power, be unbiased in how you treat others, and never forget your humanity when dealing with another person, whether you like them or not. Every moment of your life is a postcard. Make sure that any unbiased (and ethical) observer who happens to read any of your postcards of the moment can conclude he/she would have acted as you did if he/she had been in your place; or he/she can accept the choices you made in those circumstances. When acting as an agent of society to maintain order (peace and safety), do so in a manner that upholds the ideals of that society. You will be proud to have served honorably and ethically, and with a consistency of such action you will earn appreciation and gratitude.

Developing and maintaining good character during the course of your life will prevent the occurrence of many possible regrets when it comes time for you to die.

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National Character & Old Gals for Empire

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The Character of a Nation

The lower the moral and intellectual development of the masses, the less effective are democratic processes for solving national problems, improving the lives of people, and making wise use of national resources.

Elites can only control and exploit a people who have allowed themselves to become culturally primitive, socially degraded and disunited.

The fate of a nation is set by the character of its people.

 

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Old Gals Just Want To Have Fun (with Hillary’s Bill)

The easiest way to destroy a man’s career today is to accuse him of being nasty to the ladies. However, this is only true for abusers of women who are unpopular with women, like Donald Trump. Abusers of women who are popular with women, as John Kennedy was and Bill Clinton remains, are immune from such censure. A majority of American women retain favorable opinions of Bill Clinton, and many thousands would be delighted to flop on their backs and spread their legs for his enjoyment, despite him being a narcissistic sexist clod.

This masochistic devotional fervor is all to the benefit of Hillary Clinton’s political ambitions. She is America’s Livia Drusilla who aspires to be America’s Margaret Thatcher, and now seems likely to gain the White House to become America’s most successful influence peddler, much to the delight of the Wall Street banksters by whom she is bought and paid for. Hillary Clinton is cashing in on the yearnings of a majority of America’s older female voters, for compulsory celebratory recognition.

This is the popular force that is overwhelming any concern over climate change, nuclear war with Russia, securing fair and just futures for America’s youth, and stopping the “genocide by indifference” [1] that accompanies American foreign policy and imperialism. Such is the force of American middle-aged female vanity longing for adoration.

So, screw the kids and their desires for worthy futures in Bernie’s revolutionary social democracy; screw the brown people in foreign lands getting bombed to support American weapons sales; screw the dumped American labor force whose jobs are offshored and whose housing unaffordable in order to fatten the Wall Street take; screw the future desperate patients of Veterans Administration hospitals, who will have absorbed the incoming from America’s wars-of-tomorrow; and screw everybody who is going to get burned out or washed away by climate change, necessary to fill the corporate treasure chests.

For too much of the older double-X portion of the electorate, the self-image paragon to be deified is Hillary Clinton, along with her co-enabling super-predator Bill Clinton, barking and humping at the end of a long leash. Everybody else, worldwide, will just have to suck it up and bow down to the old girls’ triumph in becoming vicariously powerful; it’s their turn to come out on top. Nothing else matters.

[1] Robert Pearsall.

Voting For Against

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Voting For Against

There’s a sucker born every minute, and they all vote for the lesser evil.

Bernie Madoff is in jail for life for running a Ponzi scheme that defrauded the rich. His colleagues running similar scams are free, rich and celebrated because they defraud the working and workless poor. From their legally protected offshore treasure chests they fund the lesser evilism of a rigged electoral system that keeps governments under control by corruption that shakes down the public to slop the troughs of the high rollers.

Election night is always a heartbreak for the old-timers who’ve seen the lesser evil scam cycle over and over again, and wish they could see it killed off before they die.

Election night is a big yawn to the nonchalant youth busy playing in their chill sandboxes without a thought to their unbroken futures as sucker carrion and cannon fodder.

Election night is an exciting drama to the vain shallow-minded selfish useful idiots who think what’s good for them is good for the country, and that either of those is offered by lesser evilism.

Today’s politicking is a furious clash between hot air and vapid prattle, devoid of truth while demurely united in criminality, to entrance the hollow-headed with a circus that spoofs attentiveness, so as to allow the hidden hand to continue stealing the public bread.

To be alert, compassionate and ethical is to resign yourself to being marooned in a moral wasteland on a lost planet.

America’s Enslaving Freedoms

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America’s Enslaving Freedoms

The White people who came to the American continents and eventually established the many nations of the Western Hemisphere, including the United States of America, were united in their belief in three motivating principles:

1. They wanted the freedom to practice their religion, and to persecute those who did not,

2. They wanted the freedom to practice genocide of the native populations in order to gain real estate,

3. They wanted the freedom to practice slavery, both chattel slavery and wage slavery, to gain wealth.

In today’s United States, these three freedoms are somewhat tempered for political expediency, but their motivational cores remain as the essence of this nation’s attraction to immigrants from around the world.

The freedom of religion is an umbrella under which we gather our many forms of enjoying ignorance and being comforted by bigotry. Racism, anti-science irrationality, paternalism, sexism, child abuse, homophobia and traditional religious intolerance of all kinds are all enthusiastically maintained here.

The freedom to practice genocide is now a systematized slow-motion process of wealth-driven legality degrading and displacing depreciated populations to extract material advantages from those being impoverished. The combine of the banking, real estate and fossil fuel industries, and their many land-grab schemes for: gentrification, urban commercial development, large-scale industrialized agriculture, privatization of scenic areas, pipelines and natural resource extraction, all find their motivational root in this freedom of the wealthy to exclude.

The freedom to enslave remains as popular today as it has always been. Gaining the rewards from the unpaid and even forced labor of others is an enduring desirable among our species. Again, in today’s America the raw slavery of the past is difficult to practice on a grand scale, though many individuals do manage to be masters over their own hidden slavery operations (of economic as well as sexual slavery). The major slavery plantations serving USA owners today are the tragically vast private prison and slavery complex, and the internationally outsourced de facto slavery operations of pittance wage labor producing “low cost” (high profit) products for import to the USA.

One can easily see strong resonances of these three principles as the foundations of many US foreign policies, entanglements and alliances; with Israel and Saudi Arabia for example.

Most Americans adhere to these principles, even if they don’t realize it, because they are easily distracted shallow thinkers whom corporate media indoctrinates without difficulty. Our public political discourse is confined to the narrowest of ranges centered squarely in neoliberal capitalist orthodoxy. The grotesque fluff that passes for political debate, currently between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, is entirely about the inconsequential atmospherics that each presidential contender would prefer to exhibit were they to be appointed the manager of the existing, unchangeable and continuing neoliberal economic regime.

The purpose of the US corporate-owned government is to maintain the conditions that allow today’s corporate wealth-generating schemes to continue their extraction from the national and world common good. There is no room for the voice of wage-slave America in the political process imposed for the benefit of the wealthy. That was the bluntly obvious message, sent by the ownership class to wage-slave America, in the blocking of the Bernie Sanders campaign. Jill Stein and the Green Party valiantly carry on with the most popular yet least supported agenda for wage-slave Americans, but again, too many are imprisoned by their fear-based indoctrination.

Remaining faithful to learned delusions for enslavement is more comforting to most of the electorate than breaking out into a rebellious independence of logical thought, based on facts, that leads to politically disobedient actions. However, in 2016, the sheer odiousness of the leading presidential contenders, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, has shredded so much of the camouflage hiding the naked reality of American capitalism, that it is impossible for any sane person to remain unaware of it. Some very optimistic observers are hopeful that this ‘pantsing’ of American neoliberalism will be the beginning of a collapse of wage-slave America’s support for both the Democratic and Republican parties. We have all seen:

1. The loutish honesty of Donald Trump in accurately expressing the attitudes of the American wealth elite; and

2. The smarmy manipulativeness and blatant dishonesty of Hillary Clinton, which has exposed the corruption of the government professionals serving the American wealth elite.

Donald Trump’s popular support has come at the expense of the viability of the Republican Party as a vehicle supporting the careerism of its professional politicians, because that support is a populist insurgency that overwhelmed the pros. By contrast, Hillary Clinton’s support is centered among the careerist professional politicians of the Democratic Party, and has come as a result of excluding the voice of the people, who in turn have lost enthusiasm for that party and its “first female president” candidate.

So now, the Trump-led Republican Party flounders with chaotically amateurish ebullience, while the Clinton-led Democratic Party is a tightly scripted flat tire. Will more of the electorate wake up, and move on? We can only hope.