Did I ever mention that I am a real fan of Chris Hedges? He must be
left handed. All geniuses are...I am!
But seriously, I'd not thought much in terms of the Clinton people
manipulating conditions to assist Donald Trump to become the "People's
Choice". Still, after seeing some of the emails Hillary and her staff
dabbled in...anything is possible.
Of course my personal bias is so colored that all of the Neanderthals
seeking the Republican blessing, looked like...like...Neanderthals.
Indeed, if Hillary wasn't so busy sneaking around kissing the rings of
her Empire Masters, she could mount any sort of a campaign and win
walking away. As it is, she's becoming so manipulative that even half
wits can see through her mouthings.
Carl Jarvis
On 10/17/16, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I'd suggest that you read this very carefully. Interestingly, my daughter
and I hypothesized, months ago, that the Clinton campaign plotted for Trump
to be the Republican candidate to ensure that Clinton would win the
presidency.
Miriam
Truthdig
Donald Trump: The Dress Rehearsal for Fascism
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/donald_trump_the_dress_rehearsal_for_fas
cism_20161016/
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Posted on Oct 16, 2016
By Chris Hedges
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump speaks at an event hosted by
the Republican Hindu Coalition in Edison, N.J., on Saturday. (Julio Cortez
/
AP)
Americans are not offered major-party candidates who have opposing
political
ideologies or ideas. We are presented only with manufactured political
personalities. We vote for the candidate who makes us "feel" good about him
or her. Campaigns are entertainment and commercial vehicles to raise
billions in advertising revenue for corporations. The candidate who can
provide the best show gets the most coverage. The personal brand is
paramount. It takes precedence over ideas, truth, integrity and the common
good. This cult of the self, which defines our politics and our culture,
contains the classic traits of psychopaths: superficial charm, grandiosity,
self-importance, a need for constant stimulation, a penchant for lying,
deception and manipulation, and incapacity for remorse or guilt. Donald
Trump has these characteristics. So does Hillary Clinton.
Our system of inverted
totalitarianism(http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/sheldon_wolin_and_invert
ed_totalitarianism_20151101 ) has within it the seeds of an overt or
classical fascism. The more that political discourse becomes exclusively
bombastic and a form of spectacle, the more that emotional euphoria is
substituted for political thought and the more that violence is the primary
form of social control, the more we move toward a Christianized fascism.
Last week's presidential debate in St. Louis was only a few degrees removed
from the Jerry Springer TV show-the angry row of women sexually abused or
assaulted by Bill Clinton, the fuming Trump pacing the stage with a
threatening posture, the sheeplike and carefully selected audience that
provided the thin veneer of a democratic debate while four
multimillionaires-Martha Raddatz, Anderson Cooper, Clinton and
Trump-squabbled like spoiled schoolchildren.
The Clinton campaign, aware that the policy differences between her and a
candidate such as Jeb Bush were minuscule, plotted during the primaries to
elevate the fringe Republican
candidates(http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3828897/Hillary-Clinton-s
-campaign-wanted-elevate-Donald-Trump-extreme-Republicans.html )
-especially
Trump. To the Democratic strategists, a match between Clinton and Trump
seemed made in heaven. Trump, with his "brain trust" of Rudy Giuliani and
Chris Christie, would make Clinton look like a savior.
A memo addressed to the Democratic National Committee under the heading
"Our
Goals & Strategy" was part of the trove of John
Podesta(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Podesta ;) emails released this
month by WikiLeaks.
"Our hope is that the goal of a potential HRC [Hillary Rodham Clinton]
campaign and the DNC would be one-in-the-same: to make whomever the
Republicans nominate unpalatable to the majority of the electorate. We have
outlined three strategies to obtain our goal .," it reads.
The memo names Ted Cruz, Donald Trump and Ben Carson as candidates, or what
the memo calls "Pied Piper" candidates who could push mainstream candidates
closer to the positions embraced by the lunatic right. "We need to be
elevating the Pied Piper candidates so that they are leaders of the pack
and
tell the press to [take] them seriously."
READ: WikiLeaks Should Be Applauded for Removing the Mask of U.S.
Power(http://tdig.it/2dX8fe8)
The elites of the two ruling parties, who have united behind Clinton, are
playing a very dangerous game. The intellectual and political vacuum caused
by the United States' species of anti-politics, or what the writer Benjamin
DeMott(http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/01/education/benjamin-demott-81-author
-and-cultural-critic-dies.html?_r=0) called "junk politics," leaves
candidates, all of whom serve the interests of the corporate state, seeking
to exaggerate what Sigmund Freud termed "the narcissism of small
differences(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism_of_small_differences ;)
."
However, this battle between small differences, largely defined by the
culture wars, no longer works with large segments of the population. The
insurgencies of Trump and Bernie Sanders are evidence of a breakdown of
these forms of social control. There is a vague realization among Americans
that we have undergone a corporate coup. People are angry about being lied
to and fleeced by the elites. They are tired of being impotent. Trump, to
many of his most fervent supporters, is a huge middle finger to a corporate
establishment that has ruined their lives and the lives of their children.
And if Trump, or some other bombastic idiot, is the only vehicle they have
to defy the system, they will use him.
The elites, including many in the corporate press, must increasingly give
political legitimacy to goons and imbeciles in a desperate battle to
salvage
their own legitimacy. But the more these elites pillage and loot, and the
more they cast citizens aside as human refuse, the more the goons and
imbeciles become actual alternatives. The corporate capitalists would
prefer
the civilized mask of a Hillary Clinton. But they also know that police
states and fascist states will not impede their profits; indeed in such a
state the capitalists will be more robust in breaking the attempts of the
working class to organize for decent wages and working conditions.
Citibank,
Raytheon and Goldman Sachs will adapt. Capitalism functions very well
without democracy.
In the 1990s I watched an impotent, nominally democratic liberal elite in
the former Yugoslavia fail to understand and act against the population's
profound economic distress. The fringe demagogues whom the political and
educated elites dismissed as buffoons-Radovan Karadzic, Slobodan Milosevic
and Franjo Tudman-rode an anti-liberal tide to power.
The political elites in Yugoslavia at first thought the nationalist cranks
and lunatics, who amassed enough support to be given secondary positions of
power, could be contained. This mistake was as misguided as Franz von
Papen's assurances that when the uncouth Austrian Adolf Hitler was
appointed
the German chancellor in January 1933 the Nazi leader would be easily
manipulated. Any system of prolonged political paralysis and failed
liberalism vomits up monsters. And the longer we remain in a state of
political paralysis-especially as we stumble toward another financial
collapse-the more certain it becomes that these monsters will take power.
Fascism, at its core, is an amorphous and incoherent ideology that
perpetuates itself by celebrating a grotesque hypermasculinity, elements of
which are captured in Trump's misogyny. It allows disenfranchised people to
feel a sense of power and to have their rage sanctified. It takes a
politically marginalized and depoliticized population and mobilizes it
around a utopian vision of moral renewal and vengeance and an anointed
political savior. It is always militaristic, anti-intellectual and
contemptuous of democracy and replaces culture with nationalist and
patriotic kitsch. It sees those outside the closed circle of the
nation-state or the ethnic or religious group as diseased enemies that must
be physically purged to restore the health of nation.
Many of these ideological elements are already part of our system of
inverted totalitarianism. But inverted totalitarianism, as Sheldon Wolin
wrote, disclaims its identity to pay homage to a democracy that in reality
has ceased to function. It is characterized by the anonymity of the
corporate centers of power. It seeks to keep the population passive and
demobilized. I asked Wolin shortly before he died in 2015 that if the two
major forms of social control he cited-access to easy and cheap credit and
inexpensive, mass-produced consumer products-were no longer available would
we see the rise of a more classical form of fascism. He said this would
indeed become a possibility.
Bill Clinton transformed the Democratic Party into the Republican Party. He
pushed the Republican Party so far to the right it became insane. Hillary
Clinton is Mitt Romney in drag. She and the Democratic Party embrace
policies-endless war, the security and surveillance state,
neoliberalism(http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=376 ;) , austerity,
deregulation, new trade agreements and deindustrialization-that are
embraced
by the Republican elites. Clinton in office will continue the neoliberal
assault on the poor and the working poor, and increasingly the middle
class,
that has defined the corporate state since the Reagan administration. She
will do so while speaking in the cloying and hypocritical rhetoric of
compassion that masks the cruelty of corporate capitalism.
The Democratic and Republican parties may be able to disappear Trump, but
they won't disappear the phenomena that gave rise to Trump. And unless the
downward spiral is reversed-unless the half of the country now living in
poverty is lifted out of poverty-the cynical game the elites are playing
will backfire. Out of the morass will appear a genuine "Christian" fascist
endowed with political skill, intelligence, self-discipline, ruthlessness
and charisma. The monster the elites will again unwittingly elevate, as a
foil to keep themselves in power, will consume them. There would be some
justice in this if we did not all have to pay.
The Ascendance of Hillary Clinton and Paul Ryan Will Mark a Win for Big
Business and Wall Street
The Billionaire Oligarchs Won't Give Out Bread Any Longer, but They Will
Gleefully Supply Circuses
Is Your Ballot Being Thrown in the Trash?
In the Fight to Rein In Drug Prices, Bernie Sanders Shows He's Still Got
It
Truthdig: Drilling Beneath the Headlines
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