ancianita
ancianita's Journal2020 Big Donors Want Us Doxxing Misguided Dupes -- It's Easier For Them To Win Again
It's a given that we feel rightfully conflict driven for the very best of reasons. Against our will. For so long, the peace of Obama's days seems a distant, old timey feeling.
Added to our election trauma is how hard we've had it for the last two years to identify the corrupt system that got 45 on that 2017 inauguration platform, how many hundreds more have yet to be driven out of hiding by the FBI.
Another given. 2020 is coming. We need to keep our eye on major donors. No matter who runs.
Below: Sheldon Adelson, Robert & Rebecca Mercer, and 15 more of 45's top payors. The Mercers bought Cambridge Analytica to push data they then used in bots-for-hire to do thread shitting in nationwide social media, tweets, FB, and whatever else.
I never want to see them gather -- in all their well-dressed evil intent -- on another fucking inauguration platform again.
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(Don't fuss about the picture source. Good info is good info.)
They need us to believe what they tell us is "reality," much of it being in finger pointy headlines that imply "we" are the cause of our body politic's problems.
But they don't give a fuck about Nathan Phillips, the doofus kids who made fun of him; murderous cops, mass shootings, caged children, governance or government, and why it exists to keep Americans alive; murdered journalists, censored journalism, border "security," or any fucking thing we care about.
They don't give a fuck about you or me. Partisan politics? Pffft...
We're all just clay pigeons to them. They toss 'em up, we shoot.
Just because we've been conflict driven for all the right reasons when it comes to 45 himself; and just because we're surrounded by misguided doofuses on all sides, doesn't mean we need to lose our best selves at the expense of nailing democracy's enemies. They don't give a fuck about democracy, either.
Going into 2020, we'll need to stay focused, know the money, pick the battles wisely.
Why "Neoliberal" Is The Epithet Of The Right Wing -- A History of Who They Come From
Duke historian, Nancy MacLean, has written one of our most hidden histories. (Democracy In Chains (2017).
I hold its writing and original document research as the best our current body politic has. What she tells is too important for Americans to ignore. So I’m here to boil it down; first, in the hope that it helps our deeper understanding of our place in history; second, to motivate discussion or debate we must endure with our right wing opponents in the next two years. Or longer.
We can draw a straight line from John C. Calhoun to today’s Right Wing and Alt-Right. Even Centrists and Independents.
1.
John C. Calhoun was the prime mover to establish the “property rights of slavers” into the Constitution by holding property rights the prime rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. Calhoun insisted in debate that if something must be sacrificed to square the circle between economic liberty and political liberty, it was political liberty. Property rights should trump all else. How he “disciplined his labor force to keep his enterprise profitable was no one else’s business." Calhoun was the loud establisher of “states rights,” with “interposition” of states against Supreme Court rulings for racial equality under the 14th Amendment. That idea never disappeared.
Calhounists like James M. Buchanan, in the 1950’s Eisenhower years, held that because the economy should be the realm of total liberty for the owning class, government was the realm of potential abuse such that men of property must ever guard against the certainty of “oppression” if that government came under the control of the majority. As his class’s interests diverged from those of other citizens’, Calhoun had identified the federal government as a menace to liberty.
Scared of what democracy portended for slavery, Calhoun became almost hysterical in his denial that such a “community ever existed as the people of the United states. All “sovereignty was vested ‘in the people of the several states” that consented to the federal Union — “not a particle resides…in the American people collectively.”
2.
Modern day libertarians have exhumed, networked and institutionalized Calhoun’s analysis.
Denying the legitimacy of government power to act for the common good, while using government power to suppress others, has been the guiding dogma of right wing economists and politicians ever since.
James M. Buchanan, in his sidestep of overt racist class war, developed his “economic theory” of “public choice economics.” Buchanan’s evil genius lay in his intuitive grasp of the importance of trust in political life. If only one could break down the trust that now existed between the governed and governing, even those who supported liberal objectives would lose confidence in government solutions.
Buchanan’s theory stated how the rules of government might be altered so officials could not act on the will of the majority -- he called it “constitutional economics”. The enemy became “the collective order. ” Buchanan, A.F. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises (NYU), the University of Chicago Dept. of Economics became part of the Mont Pelerin Society. It used the code phrase “the collective order” for organized social/political groups that looked to government.
Note: (U.of C's Economics Dept was headed by Frank Knight; he was later eclipsed by Milton Friedman, whose populist version of Austrian economics evolved as PR parlance like “bootstrapping,” “tough love,” “compassionate conservatism” in recent years).
These architects of “liberty” in libertarianism never have seen their “theory” as a tool of domination; to them, unrestrained “free market” capitalism IS freedom. But what their cause really sought is a return to oligarchy — to shift the tide of history away from what they called “statism” (or what we would call the strong role of government) with economic and effective political power concentrated in the hands of a few. Today’s right wing American lodestar is John C Calhoun, who offered “property rights” — today’s corporate rights — and his “state’s rights,” both of which are the political basis for today’s right wing and racist control systems.
3.
Harry F. Byrd, archnemesis of Roosevelt and his New Deal, executed, as governor, this “rule” making over Virginia, just as James M. Buchanan arrived to help exhume Calhoun’s theories for their joint battle against Brown v. Board of Ed, just as Virginia became a defendant in one of the five cases that folded into Brown.
For forty years, Byrd had turned VA into a Calhounist rule by minority state. Byrd’s Organization, as he called it,
— imposed a poll tax,
— established rule by gerrymandering,
— outlawed the closed shop, and invented “right to work” laws to weaken labor unions,
— closed schools rather than integrate, and set up segregation academies;
While Byrd outlawed the embarrassing KKK and lynching, he also suppressed, by laws, all black citizens collective access to democracy. The Byrd Organization’s aim was also to insulate government from citizen pressure for public spending or other reform — How? by punishing dissent — the Organization “put the word out” on anyone who spoke out, and had their business or career shut down. (Such minority ‘rules’ of societal order are still practiced against dissent by Southern elites and Northern allies.)
By 1956, Byrd’s Virginia
— led eleven Southern states to adopt a national Southern Manifesto that rebuked the Earl Warren court,
— upheld “interposition"
— eliminated local control of schools and school spending
— provided tax-funded tuition grants to enable white parents to send their kids to segregation academies
— passed seven laws to debilitate the NAACP.
4.
Once Buchanan set up his Thomas Jefferson Center for Studies in Political Economy and Social Philosophy at the University of Virginia, (paid for by The William Volker Fund); and once Calhounist Harry F. Byrd got to Congress, Byrd's mantra was “Pay As You Go.” It’s relevant that his favorite book was F.A. Hayek’s The Road To Serfdom, with its case against collectivism. PayGo — still around.
Wikipedia details the coming together of the Mont Pelerin Society. Post their 1956 global meeting, Buchanan and Mont Pelerin participants considered how to present themselves and their ideas. They first acknowledged that they were radical, and that they had to hide their radical minority rule agenda behind other economic labels. Their outrage over Brown made them no longer happy calling themselves “libertarian,” which they decided could never become a household word. They feared “radical” would turn off wealthy donors to their cause.
5.
So these self-styled economic and social engineers opted for “conservative” as interchangeable with “libertarian.” Though those two words might attract powerful allies, the Mont Pelerin membership went further. They chose to refer to themselves as “neoliberals.” “ Neoliberal" confused Americans, because FDR Democrats now had a hammerlock on the word “liberal.” So, some called themselves “classical liberals” of the 18th/19th Century mold. But, then they realized they had split with the real classical liberals, Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill.
What they all did agree on, was that they were “the right,” or the “right wing, “ and against “the left” and anything “left wing.”
6.
Charles G Koch met Buchanan in 1974. Koch funded/ founded the Cato Institute, George Mason University’s Center For Humane Studies; add to that the help of the Scaife Family Charitable Trusts; the establishment of Buchanan’s and The Chicago School’s theory "invested" in across 500 universities by the Koch network; add to that the political work of all the other name-dropped, right wing billionaire neoliberals for the last twenty years (Mercers, DeVoses, Adelsons).
Today's Rich Right, with all their watered down epithets of "effete snobs," "limosine liberals," "weak socialists," "radical socialists," "feminazis," etc. have been coming for us -- America -- since Eisenhower. The Right we face today hasn’t legitimized itself for just 62 years. No. It has existed since Calhoun in one century, Byrd in another, and the GOP (with Russian friends) in this one.
7. The Rich Right — Koch brothers, et. al. — are moving, ultimately, to pay and manipulate states to apply for a constitutional convention to cement this longstanding desire for government of the few. We're six state applications away from that future. They’re getting neoliberal help.
Of all the many problems we discuss -- reason v fear; change v stasis; old ways v modernity... This is our historical governance problem. It is the core fight of Democracy, my friends.
Created by Americans and globalists before most of us were born.
Mending Wall by Robert Frost -- Still Relevant
These times remind me of how we think. Or don't.
This reading is the most relevant, spirited interpretation I've seen.
The last eight lines are my favorite.
The Mending Wall
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
"Stay where you are until our backs are turned!"
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, "Good fences make good neighbors."
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
"Why do they make good neighbours? Isn't it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down." I could say "Elves" to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."
You've Got To Run (Spirit Of The Wind) -- Buffy St. Marie and Tanya Tagaq
To keep up the fight in us. (headphones and crankin' it up are recommended)
New Word For 2019: Pelosi
From the dictionary:
pelosi
noun
: an implement for protection
When they attacked, we pulled out our semi-automatic pelosi's.
A good pelosification cures what ails a body politic.
verb
pel·o-si, pel-o-si-ing, pel·o-sied...
transitive verb
: to attack, strike, or fell with or as if with a pelosi
Examples
He went down as if he'd been pelosied.
adjective
pelosiful, pelositous
There were national celebrations full of pelositous fun.
Men and women feel pelosiful for such leadership.
BIG DAY FOR US ALL!
Parity and good governance are in the House! 
102 women from 46 states
-- two Native American
-- two Muslim
-- four Latinas(I think);
-- mostly lawyers sprinkled by Harvard, Georgetown degrees;
-- mostly masters degrees;
-- military officers, combat vets (one helicopter pilot)
-- engineers
-- executives.
All of America should be extremely proud.
La lucha continua.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_the_United_States_House_of_Representatives#Number_of_women_in_the_United_States_House_of_Representatives_and_Senate_by_Congress
Profile Information
Gender: Do not displayHometown: New England, The South, Midwest
Home country: USA
Current location: Sarasota
Member since: Sat Mar 5, 2011, 12:32 PM
Number of posts: 36,023
