None of the above. It was stein Who took a vantage of all those people you
mentioned. And left a mess in her awake
Sincerely
Frank Ventura
Sent from my iPhone
On Nov 14, 2016, at 9:01 AM, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Who are the far left cult leaders? Do you mean the native Americans at
Standing Rock or Black Lives Matter? Do you mean Occupy Wall Street or Code
Pink? Do you mean the Socialist Workers' Party? Do you mean Jewish Voice For
Peace or the ACLU or the Center For Constitutional Rights? Is Carl a far
left cultist leader? Am I? Do you mean the people working for Palestinian
rights? Do you mean Chris Hedges or Bernie Sanders or Keith Ellison or
Elizabeth Warren? And who is it whom you respect? Who are the leaders in the
Democratic party whom you support?
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Frank Ventura
Sent: Monday, November 14, 2016 5:00 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: How America Got It So Wrong
This article uses the phrade "we must all pay the price". How wrong that is,
neither the far right or far left cult leaders will pay the price. It is
merely us in the middle that will pay the price.
Frank
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Miriam Vieni
Sent: Sunday, November 13, 2016 12:42 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] How America Got It So Wrong
But the title of this article should be, "I'm sorry that I got it So Wong"
because that's what Taibbi is saying.
Miriam
Taibbi writes: "Trump enters the White House as a lone wrecking ball of
conspiratorial ideas, a one-man movement unto himself who owes almost
nothing to traditional Republicans and can be expected to be anything but a
figurehead."
Donald Trump enters the White House as a lone wrecking ball of
conspiratorial ideas, a one-man movement unto himself who owes almost
nothing to traditional Republicans. (photo: Molly Riley/AP)
How America Got It So Wrong
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
13 November 16
Journalists and politicians blew off the warning signs of a Trump presidency
- now, we all must pay the price
uesday, November 8th, early afternoon. Outside the Trump Tower in
Manhattan, a Aman in the telltale red Make America Great Again hat taps me
on the shoulder.
"You press?" he says, looking at a set of lanyards around my neck.
I nod.
"Fuck yourself," he says, thrusting a middle finger in my face. He then
turns around and walks a boy of about five away from me down Fifth Avenue, a
hand gently tousling his son's hair.
This was before Donald Trump's historic victory. The message afterward no
doubt would have been the same. There's no way to overstate the horror of
what just went down. Sure, we've had some unstable characters enter the
White House. JFK had health problems that led him to take amphetamine shots
during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Reagan's attention span was so short, the
CIA had to make mini-movies to brief him on foreign leaders. George W. Bush
not only didn't read the news, he wasn't interested in it ("What's in the
newspapers worth worrying about?" he once asked, without irony).
But all of these men were just fronts for one or the other half of the
familiar alternating power structure, surrounded by predictable, relatively
sober confederates who managed the day-to-day. Trump enters the White House
as a lone wrecking ball of conspiratorial ideas, a one-man movement unto
himself who owes almost nothing to traditional Republicans and can be
expected to be anything but a figurehead. He takes office at a time when the
chief executive is vastly more powerful than ever before, with nearly
unlimited authority to investigate, surveil, torture and assassinate
foreigners and even U.S. citizens - powers that didn't seem to trouble
people much when they were granted to Barack Obama.
Shunned during election season by many in his own party, President-elect
Trump's closest advisers are a collection of crackpots and dilettantes who
will make Bush's cabinet look like the Nobel committee. The head of his EPA
transition team, Myron Ebell, is a noted climate-change denier. Pyramid
enthusiast and stabbing expert Ben Carson is already being mentioned as a
possible Health and Human Services chief. Rudy Giuliani, probably too
unhinged by now for even a People's Court reboot, might be attorney general.
God only knows who might end up being Supreme Court nominees; we can only
hope they turn out to be lawyers, or at least people who played lawyers
onscreen. And sitting behind this fun-house nightmare of executive-branch
worthies (which Politico speculates will be one of the more "eclectic"
cabinets ever) will be a rubber-stamping all-Republican legislature that
will attract the loving admiration of tinhorn despots from Minsk to Beijing.
Trump made idiots of us all. From the end of primary season onward, I felt
sure Trump was en route to ruining, perhaps forever, the Republican Party as
a force in modern American life. Now the Republicans are more dominant than
ever, and it is the Democratic Party that is shattered and faces an
uncertain future.
And they deserve it. The Democratic Party's failure to keep Donald Trump out
of the White House in 2016 will go down as one of the all-time examples of
insular arrogance. The party not only spent most of the past two years
ignoring the warning signs of the Trump rebellion, but vilifying anyone who
tried to point them out. It denounced all rumors of its creeping
unpopularity as vulgar lies and bullied anyone who dared question its
campaign strategy by calling them racists, sexists and agents of Vladimir
Putin's Russia.
But the party's willful blindness symbolized a similar arrogance across the
American intellectual elite. Trump's election was a true rebellion, directed
at anyone perceived to be part of "the establishment." The target group
included political leaders, bankers, industrialists, academics, Hollywood
actors, and, of course, the media. And we all closed our eyes to what we
didn't want to see.
The almost universal failure among political pros to predict Trump's victory
- the few exceptions, conspicuously, were people who hailed from rust-belt
states, like Michael Moore - spoke to an astonishing cultural blindness.
Those of us whose job it is to cover campaigns long ago grew accustomed to
treating The People as a kind of dumb animal, whose behavior could sometimes
be unpredictable but, in the end, almost always did what it was told.
Whenever we sought insight into the motives and tendencies of this elusive
creature, our first calls were always to other eggheads like ourselves. We
talked to pollsters, think-tankers, academics, former campaign strategists,
party spokes-hacks, even other journalists. Day after day, our political
talk shows consisted of one geek in a suit interviewing another geek in a
suit about the behaviors of pipe fitters and store clerks and cops in
Florida, Wisconsin, Ohio and West Virginia. We'd stand over glitzy video
maps and discuss demographic data points like we were trying to determine
the location of a downed jetliner.
And the whole time, The People, whose intentions we were wondering so hard
about, were all around us, listening to themselves being talked about like
some wild, illiterate beast.
When 60 Minutes did its election-eve story about the mood of the electorate,
they had to call up a familiar Beltway figure, pollster Frank Luntz, to put
together a focus group. Luntz's purpose was to take the white-hot rage and
disgust hurled at him by voters on both sides of the aisle during the "focus
group" portion, and translate it all into a media-speak during the sit-down.
Luntz did his job and gave Steve Kroft his sound-bite diagnosis of The
People's temperature. "That's not blowing off steam," he said. "That is a
deep-seated resentment."
Deep-seated resentment. There was a catchy, succinct line, over which we
could all collectively stroke our chins in quiet contemplation. That's as
opposed to what the voters intended, which was to sock us all so hard for
our snobbism and intellectual myopia that those very chins of ours would get
driven straight through the backs of our skulls.
There was a great deal of talk in this campaign about the inability of the
"low-information" voter to understand the rhetoric of candidates who spoke
above a sixth-grade language level. We were told by academics and analysts
that Trump's public addresses rated among the most simplistic political
rhetoric ever recorded.
But that story cut in both directions, in a way few of us silver-tongued
media types ever thought about. The People didn't speak our language, true.
But that also meant we didn't speak theirs.
Beavis and Butthead creator Mike Judge's Idiocracy, ostensibly a comedy but
destined now to be remembered as a horror movie, was often cited this past
year as prophecy. The film described a future dystopia of idiot Americans
physically unable to understand the tepid grammatical speech of a half-smart
time traveler from the past. Many reporters, myself included, found
themselves thinking about this film when we heard voters saying they were
literally incapable of understanding the words coming out of Hillary
Clinton's mouth.
"When [Trump] talks, I actually understand what he's saying," a young
Pennsylvanian named Trent Gower told me at a Trump event a month ago. "But,
like, when fricking Hillary Clinton talks, it just sounds like a bunch of
bullshit."
So these Trump voters had a comprehension problem. But we were just as bad.
We couldn't understand what they were saying to us. We refused to accept
every signal about whom they hated, and how much. Why? Because Trump's
voters were speaking a language that has been taboo in America for decades,
if not forever.
Nobody in this country knows how to talk about class. America is like a
giant manor estate where the aristocrats don't know they're aristocrats and
the peasants imagine themselves undiscovered millionaires. And America's
cultural elite, trained for so long to think in terms of artificial
distinctions like Republicans and Democrats instead of more natural
divisions like haves and have-nots, refused until it was too late to grasp
the meaning of the rage-storm headed over the wall.
Just like the leaders of the Republican Party, who simply never believed its
electorate wouldn't drop and roll over on command when the time came, we
media types never believed all that anger out there was real, or at least
gathered in enough force to matter.
Most of us smarty-pants analysts never thought Trump could win because we
saw his run as a half-baked white-supremacist movement fueled by last-gasp,
racist frustrations of America's shrinking silent majority. Sure, Trump had
enough jackbooted nut jobs and conspiracist stragglers under his wing to
ruin the Republican Party. But surely there was no way he could topple
America's reigning multicultural consensus. How could he? After all, the
country had already twice voted in an African-American Democrat to the White
House.
Yes, Trump's win was a triumph of the hideous racism, sexism and xenophobia
that has always run through American society. But his coalition also took
aim at the neoliberal gentry's pathetic reliance on proxies to communicate
with flyover America. They fed on the widespread visceral disdain
red-staters felt toward the very people Hillary Clinton's campaign enlisted
all year to speak on its behalf: Hollywood actors, big-ticket musicians,
Beltway activists, academics, and especially media figures.
Trump's rebellion was born at the intersection of two toxic American myths,
the post-racial society and the classless society.
Candidate Trump told a story about a conspiracy of cultural and financial
elites bent on finishing off a vanishing white middle-class nirvana, first
by shipping jobs overseas and then by waving hordes of crime-prone,
bomb-tossing immigrants over the border.
These elites lived in both parties, Trump warned. The Republicans were tools
of job-exporting fat cats who only pretended to be tough on immigration and
trade in order to win votes, when all they really cared about were profits.
The Democrats were tools of the same interests, who subsisted politically on
the captured votes of hoodwinked minorities, preaching multiculturalism
while practicing globalism. Both groups, Trump insisted, were out of touch
with the real American voter. Neither party saw the awesome potential of
this story to upend our political system.
Republicans had flirted with racist (and sexist) rhetoric for decades,
refusing to the last to understand how dangerous this behavior was. They
never imagined their voters would one day demand that they act on all this
race-baiting talk. They believed their own pablum about racism being a thing
of the past and reverse discrimination being the true threat to the American
polity.
Meanwhile, the Democratic leadership, even as it was increasingly indebted
to banks and corporations, never imagined that it could be the target of a
class uprising. How could we be seen as aristocrats? We get union
endorsements! We're the party of FDR! We're pro-civil rights! And so on.
Trump drove his tens of millions of followers right through each of these
major-party blind spots. He called the Republicans' bluff on race almost
from the start with his crazy Mexican wall idea, which instantly positioned
the rest of the party field as nationalist pretenders. As for the Democrats,
he lucked into a race against a politician he would portray as a 30-year
symbol of a Beltway-insider consensus, one he said had left Middle America
behind through trade deals like NAFTA.
Way back in February, after following Trump in New Hampshire, I guessed at
the probable nominee's general-election strategy: "Trump will surely argue
that the Clintons are the other half of the dissolute-conspiracy story he's
been selling, representing a workers' party that abandoned workers and
turned the presidency into a vast cash-for-access enterprise, avoiding
scrutiny by making Washington into Hollywood East and turning labor leaders
and journalists alike into star-struck courtiers."
Back then, I thought Trump had a real chance at the presidency. But later I
made the same mistake most every other reporter did. I listened to polls and
media outlets, instead of people. I thought Trump's maladroit and ridiculous
general-election campaign, in which he went back on virtually every major
primary-season promise while being revealed through seemingly hourly
scandals as one of the world's most corrupt and personally repulsive
individuals, would do him in. He would lose and lose huge, ending up a
footnote to history, having served no purpose beyond the destruction of the
Republican Party. Conventional wisdom said so, and wasn't conventional
wisdom always right?
Not quite. We journalists made the same mistake the Republicans made, the
same mistake the Democrats made. We were too sure of our own influence, too
lazy to bother hearing things firsthand, and too in love with ourselves to
imagine that so many people could hate and distrust us as much as they
apparently do.
It's too late for any of us to fix this colossal misread and lapse in
professional caution. Now all we can do is wait to see how much this failure
of vision will cost the public we supposedly serve. Just like the
politicians, our job was to listen, and we talked instead. Now America will
do its own talking for a while. The world may never forgive us for not
seeing this coming.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Donald Trump enters the White House as a lone wrecking ball of
conspiratorial ideas, a one-man movement unto himself who owes almost
nothing to traditional Republicans. (photo: Molly Riley/AP)
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/president-trump-how-america-go
t-it-so-wrong-w449783http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/president
-trump-how-america-got-it-so-wrong-w449783
How America Got It So Wrong
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
13 November 16
Journalists and politicians blew off the warning signs of a Trump presidency
- now, we all must pay the price
uesday, November 8th, early afternoon. Outside the Trump Tower in
Manhattan, a man in the telltale red Make America Great Again hat taps me on
the shoulder.
"You press?" he says, looking at a set of lanyards around my neck.
I nod.
"Fuck yourself," he says, thrusting a middle finger in my face. He then
turns around and walks a boy of about five away from me down Fifth Avenue, a
hand gently tousling his son's hair.
This was before Donald Trump's historic victory. The message afterward no
doubt would have been the same. There's no way to overstate the horror of
what just went down. Sure, we've had some unstable characters enter the
White House. JFK had health problems that led him to take amphetamine shots
during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Reagan's attention span was so short, the
CIA had to make mini-movies to brief him on foreign leaders. George W. Bush
not only didn't read the news, he wasn't interested in it ("What's in the
newspapers worth worrying about?" he once asked, without irony).
But all of these men were just fronts for one or the other half of the
familiar alternating power structure, surrounded by predictable, relatively
sober confederates who managed the day-to-day. Trump enters the White House
as a lone wrecking ball of conspiratorial ideas, a one-man movement unto
himself who owes almost nothing to traditional Republicans and can be
expected to be anything but a figurehead. He takes office at a time when the
chief executive is vastly more powerful than ever before, with nearly
unlimited authority to investigate, surveil, torture and assassinate
foreigners and even U.S. citizens - powers that didn't seem to trouble
people much when they were granted to Barack Obama.
Shunned during election season by many in his own party, President-elect
Trump's closest advisers are a collection of crackpots and dilettantes who
will make Bush's cabinet look like the Nobel committee. The head of his EPA
transition team, Myron Ebell, is a noted climate-change denier. Pyramid
enthusiast and stabbing expert Ben Carson is already being mentioned as a
possible Health and Human Services chief. Rudy Giuliani, probably too
unhinged by now for even a People's Court reboot, might be attorney general.
God only knows who might end up being Supreme Court nominees; we can only
hope they turn out to be lawyers, or at least people who played lawyers
onscreen. And sitting behind this fun-house nightmare of executive-branch
worthies (which Politico speculates will be one of the more "eclectic"
cabinets ever) will be a rubber-stamping all-Republican legislature that
will attract the loving admiration of tinhorn despots from Minsk to Beijing.
Trump made idiots of us all. From the end of primary season onward, I felt
sure Trump was en route to ruining, perhaps forever, the Republican Party as
a force in modern American life. Now the Republicans are more dominant than
ever, and it is the Democratic Party that is shattered and faces an
uncertain future.
And they deserve it. The Democratic Party's failure to keep Donald Trump out
of the White House in 2016 will go down as one of the all-time examples of
insular arrogance. The party not only spent most of the past two years
ignoring the warning signs of the Trump rebellion, but vilifying anyone who
tried to point them out. It denounced all rumors of its creeping
unpopularity as vulgar lies and bullied anyone who dared question its
campaign strategy by calling them racists, sexists and agents of Vladimir
Putin's Russia.
But the party's willful blindness symbolized a similar arrogance across the
American intellectual elite. Trump's election was a true rebellion, directed
at anyone perceived to be part of "the establishment." The target group
included political leaders, bankers, industrialists, academics, Hollywood
actors, and, of course, the media. And we all closed our eyes to what we
didn't want to see.
The almost universal failure among political pros to predict Trump's victory
- the few exceptions, conspicuously, were people who hailed from rust-belt
states, like Michael Moore - spoke to an astonishing cultural blindness.
Those of us whose job it is to cover campaigns long ago grew accustomed to
treating The People as a kind of dumb animal, whose behavior could sometimes
be unpredictable but, in the end, almost always did what it was told.
Whenever we sought insight into the motives and tendencies of this elusive
creature, our first calls were always to other eggheads like ourselves. We
talked to pollsters, think-tankers, academics, former campaign strategists,
party spokes-hacks, even other journalists. Day after day, our political
talk shows consisted of one geek in a suit interviewing another geek in a
suit about the behaviors of pipe fitters and store clerks and cops in
Florida, Wisconsin, Ohio and West Virginia. We'd stand over glitzy video
maps and discuss demographic data points like we were trying to determine
the location of a downed jetliner.
And the whole time, The People, whose intentions we were wondering so hard
about, were all around us, listening to themselves being talked about like
some wild, illiterate beast.
When 60 Minutes did its election-eve story about the mood of the electorate,
they had to call up a familiar Beltway figure, pollster Frank Luntz, to put
together a focus group. Luntz's purpose was to take the white-hot rage and
disgust hurled at him by voters on both sides of the aisle during the "focus
group" portion, and translate it all into a media-speak during the sit-down.
Luntz did his job and gave Steve Kroft his sound-bite diagnosis of The
People's temperature. "That's not blowing off steam," he said. "That is a
deep-seated resentment."
Deep-seated resentment. There was a catchy, succinct line, over which we
could all collectively stroke our chins in quiet contemplation. That's as
opposed to what the voters intended, which was to sock us all so hard for
our snobbism and intellectual myopia that those very chins of ours would get
driven straight through the backs of our skulls.
There was a great deal of talk in this campaign about the inability of the
"low-information" voter to understand the rhetoric of candidates who spoke
above a sixth-grade language level. We were told by academics and analysts
that Trump's public addresses rated among the most simplistic political
rhetoric ever recorded.
But that story cut in both directions, in a way few of us silver-tongued
media types ever thought about. The People didn't speak our language, true.
But that also meant we didn't speak theirs.
Beavis and Butthead creator Mike Judge's Idiocracy, ostensibly a comedy but
destined now to be remembered as a horror movie, was often cited this past
year as prophecy. The film described a future dystopia of idiot Americans
physically unable to understand the tepid grammatical speech of a half-smart
time traveler from the past. Many reporters, myself included, found
themselves thinking about this film when we heard voters saying they were
literally incapable of understanding the words coming out of Hillary
Clinton's mouth.
"When [Trump] talks, I actually understand what he's saying," a young
Pennsylvanian named Trent Gower told me at a Trump event a month ago. "But,
like, when fricking Hillary Clinton talks, it just sounds like a bunch of
bullshit."
So these Trump voters had a comprehension problem. But we were just as bad.
We couldn't understand what they were saying to us. We refused to accept
every signal about whom they hated, and how much. Why? Because Trump's
voters were speaking a language that has been taboo in America for decades,
if not forever.
Nobody in this country knows how to talk about class. America is like a
giant manor estate where the aristocrats don't know they're aristocrats and
the peasants imagine themselves undiscovered millionaires. And America's
cultural elite, trained for so long to think in terms of artificial
distinctions like Republicans and Democrats instead of more natural
divisions like haves and have-nots, refused until it was too late to grasp
the meaning of the rage-storm headed over the wall.
Just like the leaders of the Republican Party, who simply never believed its
electorate wouldn't drop and roll over on command when the time came, we
media types never believed all that anger out there was real, or at least
gathered in enough force to matter.
Most of us smarty-pants analysts never thought Trump could win because we
saw his run as a half-baked white-supremacist movement fueled by last-gasp,
racist frustrations of America's shrinking silent majority. Sure, Trump had
enough jackbooted nut jobs and conspiracist stragglers under his wing to
ruin the Republican Party. But surely there was no way he could topple
America's reigning multicultural consensus. How could he? After all, the
country had already twice voted in an African-American Democrat to the White
House.
Yes, Trump's win was a triumph of the hideous racism, sexism and xenophobia
that has always run through American society. But his coalition also took
aim at the neoliberal gentry's pathetic reliance on proxies to communicate
with flyover America. They fed on the widespread visceral disdain
red-staters felt toward the very people Hillary Clinton's campaign enlisted
all year to speak on its behalf: Hollywood actors, big-ticket musicians,
Beltway activists, academics, and especially media figures.
Trump's rebellion was born at the intersection of two toxic American myths,
the post-racial society and the classless society.
Candidate Trump told a story about a conspiracy of cultural and financial
elites bent on finishing off a vanishing white middle-class nirvana, first
by shipping jobs overseas and then by waving hordes of crime-prone,
bomb-tossing immigrants over the border.
These elites lived in both parties, Trump warned. The Republicans were tools
of job-exporting fat cats who only pretended to be tough on immigration and
trade in order to win votes, when all they really cared about were profits.
The Democrats were tools of the same interests, who subsisted politically on
the captured votes of hoodwinked minorities, preaching multiculturalism
while practicing globalism. Both groups, Trump insisted, were out of touch
with the real American voter. Neither party saw the awesome potential of
this story to upend our political system.
Republicans had flirted with racist (and sexist) rhetoric for decades,
refusing to the last to understand how dangerous this behavior was. They
never imagined their voters would one day demand that they act on all this
race-baiting talk. They believed their own pablum about racism being a thing
of the past and reverse discrimination being the true threat to the American
polity.
Meanwhile, the Democratic leadership, even as it was increasingly indebted
to banks and corporations, never imagined that it could be the target of a
class uprising. How could we be seen as aristocrats? We get union
endorsements! We're the party of FDR! We're pro-civil rights! And so on.
Trump drove his tens of millions of followers right through each of these
major-party blind spots. He called the Republicans' bluff on race almost
from the start with his crazy Mexican wall idea, which instantly positioned
the rest of the party field as nationalist pretenders. As for the Democrats,
he lucked into a race against a politician he would portray as a 30-year
symbol of a Beltway-insider consensus, one he said had left Middle America
behind through trade deals like NAFTA.
Way back in February, after following Trump in New Hampshire, I guessed at
the probable nominee's general-election strategy: "Trump will surely argue
that the Clintons are the other half of the dissolute-conspiracy story he's
been selling, representing a workers' party that abandoned workers and
turned the presidency into a vast cash-for-access enterprise, avoiding
scrutiny by making Washington into Hollywood East and turning labor leaders
and journalists alike into star-struck courtiers."
Back then, I thought Trump had a real chance at the presidency. But later I
made the same mistake most every other reporter did. I listened to polls and
media outlets, instead of people. I thought Trump's maladroit and ridiculous
general-election campaign, in which he went back on virtually every major
primary-season promise while being revealed through seemingly hourly
scandals as one of the world's most corrupt and personally repulsive
individuals, would do him in. He would lose and lose huge, ending up a
footnote to history, having served no purpose beyond the destruction of the
Republican Party. Conventional wisdom said so, and wasn't conventional
wisdom always right?
Not quite. We journalists made the same mistake the Republicans made, the
same mistake the Democrats made. We were too sure of our own influence, too
lazy to bother hearing things firsthand, and too in love with ourselves to
imagine that so many people could hate and distrust us as much as they
apparently do.
It's too late for any of us to fix this colossal misread and lapse in
professional caution. Now all we can do is wait to see how much this failure
of vision will cost the public we supposedly serve. Just like the
politicians, our job was to listen, and we talked instead. Now America will
do its own talking for a while. The world may never forgive us for not
seeing this coming.
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
