The mess we are living in is a deliberate one.
If it was created by people, it can be dismantled by people,
and it can be rebuilt in a way that serves all, rather than a selfish, hoarding few.
– Reni Eddo-Lodge
I rip out magazine articles I want to read when time allows.
Found this amusingly shocking, shockingly amusing piece in a manila folder from 2015. You know I am slow.
That was two contested Presidential elections ago.
2016, the more popular alleged thief lost to the actual crook on a technicality with foreign help.
2020, that mob boss LOST in a re-election bid in the most secure election in USA history.
And then, and then, that flaming fat fuck tried to overthrow his own government.
Our government.
Just the facts, Jack.
The current events of seven years ago become today’s history we will be doomed to repeat if we don’t get our act together ASAP. Because a whole helluva lot of cultural social political shit is SNAFUed beyond all recognition. FUBARed completely.
Either way, it don’t look good.
And it is gonna be worse the next time.
Which could be the last time.
For those of you still trying to understand why, why why why, why white people are so upset about the government and black people and transgender library books and want to go back to the days when Ricki and Lucy had to sleep in separate beds and only polite fans in short hair and suits and ties attended Dodger games.
They. Are. Afraid.
I’m guessing many feel like the playing field is leveled all of a sudden after five hundred years, their boy children will want to wear thongs and speak a foreign language, probably French.
Something they saw on the internet.
Be wary of men with beards who just want to impregnate brown women and then leave town.
And in Florida, Governor DeSantis has made it legal for teachers to discuss consensual heterosexual cunnilingus at the Kindergarten – Second Grade levels.
Teachers’ union typically outraged. Wait until Middle School, they say.
Donald Trump’s Sales Pitch
By James Surowiecki for The New Yorker. August 3, 2015.
[ATTENTION: 2015 this was: WHAT HAS CHANGED?]
Donald Trump’s campaign slogan is “Make America Great Again!” A better one might be “Only in America.” You could not ask for a better illustration of the complexity of ordinary Americans’ attitudes toward class, wealth, and social identity than the fact that a billionaire’s popularity among working-class voters has given him the lead in the race for the Republican Presidential nomination.
In a recent Washington Post/ABC poll, Trump was the candidate of choice of a full third of white Republicans with no college education. Working-class voters face stagnant wages and diminished job prospects, and a 2014 poll found that seventy-four per cent of them think “the U.S. economic system generally favors the wealthy.”
Why on earth would they support a billionaire?
Part of the answer is Trump’s nativist and populist rhetoric. But his wealth is giving him a boost, too. The Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg, who’s published reams of work on white working-class attitudes, told me, “There is no bigger problem for these voters than the corruption of the political system. They think big companies are buying influence, while average people are blocked out.”
Trump’s riches allow him to portray himself as someone who can’t be bought, and his competitors as slaves to their donors. (Ross Perot pioneered this tactic during the 1992 campaign.) “I don’t give a shit about lobbyists,” Trump proclaimed at an event in May. And his willingness to talk about issues that other candidates are shying away from, like immigration and trade, reinforces the message that money makes him free.
Trump has also succeeded in presenting himself as a self-made man, who has flourished thanks to deal-making savvy. In fact, Trump was born into money, and his first great real-estate success—the transformation of New York’s Commodore Hotel into the Grand Hyatt—was enabled by a tax abatement worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Yet many voters see Trump as someone who embodies the American dream of making your own fortune.
And that dream remains surprisingly potent: in a 2011 Pew survey, hard work and personal drive (not luck or family connections) were the factors respondents cited most frequently to explain why people got ahead. Even Trump’s unabashed reveling in his wealth works to his benefit, since it makes him seem like an ordinary guy who can’t get over how cool it is to be rich. [He has been cheating on his taxes since the age of TWO. 2. Not a misprint. We have receipts.]
For someone who talks a lot about winning, Trump has a résumé dotted with more than a few losses. On four occasions, companies he’s been involved with have gone bankrupt. Yet these failures haven’t dented his reputation at all, contributing instead to a sense that he’s had to deal with adversity. In other countries, such failures would make it very hard for him to campaign as a visionary businessman.
But the U.S. has always been exceptionally tolerant, in terms of both attitude and the law, toward business failure and bankruptcy. Indeed, Trump brags about how he used the bankruptcy code to get better deals for his companies; as he put it not long ago, “I’ve used the laws of the country to my advantage.”
Trump is hardly the first Western plutocrat to venture into politics. Think of William Randolph Hearst or, more recently, Silvio Berlusconi. But both Hearst and Berlusconi benefitted from controlling media empires. Trump has earned publicity all on his own, by playing the role of that quintessential American figure the huckster.
As others have observed, the businessman he most resembles is P. T. Barnum, whose success rested on what he called “humbug,” defined as “putting on glittering appearances . . . by which to suddenly arrest public attention, and attract the public eye and ear.”
Barnum’s key insight into how to arrest public attention was that, to some degree, Americans enjoy brazen exaggeration. No American businessman since Barnum has been a better master of humbug than Trump has.
Take the debate over how much Trump is worth. It’s impossible to get a definitive accounting of his wealth, since almost all of it is in assets—mainly real estate—that don’t have clear market values. Still, he’s clearly enormously rich. Bloomberg estimates his wealth at $2.9 billion, while Forbes pegs it at $4.1 billion—both tidy sums.
But Trump will have none of that: thanks to the value of his brand, he says, he’s worth at least a cool ten billion. This number seems so absurdly over the top as to be self-defeating. But there is a kind of genius in the absurdity. Trump understands that only an outrageous number can really “attract the public eye and ear.”
Trump’s lack of interest in policy and his inflammatory rhetoric make it easy to dismiss him as a serious candidate, and it’s highly improbable that he could ultimately win the nomination. [emphasis mine.] But his bizarre blend of populist message and glitzy ways has allowed him to connect with precisely the voters that any Republican candidate needs in order to get elected (including many whom Romney couldn’t reach).
As Greenberg says, as long as he’s in the race, “Trump is a huge problem for the Party. He’s appealing to a very important part of the base, and bringing out the issues the other candidates don’t want to be talking about.”
Republicans may be praying that his campaign is just a joke, but right now Trump is the only one laughing.
Don’t know if that orange blight is capable of laughing.
Not since his last private parlay with Putin, who is not happy with all the losing. “проигравший,” Vlad calls him.
But that’s not important.
What’s important is convincing a few among the MAGA crowd that reality – the recognition thereof – plays a role in our harmonious survival as a nation. As a people.
Watch how Putin treats his people, especially those white folks out in the country.
That is our future.
Republicans are grooming fascists and suppressing the vote.
That is our future.
Trump’s sales pitch 2020: I’ve got a list for you
It’s a Trumpian tactic to sell his administration’s work, touting big numbers or a large group of participants as proof of success. Context is less important.
“You know, when you say ‘per capita,’ there’s many per capitas,” Donald said. “It’s like, per capita relative to what? But you can look at just about any category, and we’re really at the top, meaning positive on a per capita basis, too.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/05/23/trump-lists-275120
AND NOW THIS
