What's Goin' On

Today Everyone Votes

Today's election will not result in peace at home or abroad. There will be no immediate universal, empathetic connection with our human kin. Poverty will not be erased. Hatred and fear of The Other will not go away. Our Fabled Wealthy will not suddenly find themselves Regular Joes and Janes, living in rented digs, expected to do a day's work for a day's pay and treated fairly so long as they don't act like jackasses. The climate of the Great Planet will not suddenly calm itself and give us temperate skies and balanced seasons; the vanished animals will not appear again. Our beloved dead will not rise, whole and smiling. The sicknesses of body and spirit will not dwindle and vanish, never to return. There will not be Enough For All, and the children of the world will not all go to warm beds feeling safe, and loved, and excited about what will come on the morrow. 

Today's election will not result in any of this. But all the same -- show up and exercise the franchise, while we can.

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Reprint Heaven: Civ 103; The Seldon Theories

We Were Where We Have Always Been
(This, originally posted in August, 2010.)

Glenn Greenwald posted an article at Salon ("What Collapsing Empire Looks Like"), illuminating the slow-motion of deterioration wrought by the Crash.

>> Plenty of businesses and governments furloughed workers this year, but Hawaii went further -- it furloughed its schoolchildren. Public schools across the state closed on 17 Fridays during the past school year to save money, giving students the shortest academic year in the nation. [Where we are in 2018: Hawaii's schools were famous for 'furlough Fridays' with their teachers placed on unpaid leave. The state almost immediately returned to a full, 5-day weekly schedule -- but the costs of public education and the effective freezing of already small teacher's salaries have forced teacher's unions in a number of states to organize and push back.]

>> Many transit systems have cut service to make ends meet, but Clayton County, Ga., a suburb of Atlanta, decided to cut all the way, and shut down its entire public bus system. Its last buses ran on March 31, stranding 8,400 daily riders.  [Where we are in 2018: Clayton Co.'s public bus system did not return until spring, 2015, when it was absorbed into the Greater Atlanta transit system.]

>> Even public safety has not been immune to the budget ax. In Colorado Springs, Co., the downturn will be remembered, quite literally, as a dark age: the city switched off a third of its 24,512 streetlights to save money on electricity, while trimming its police force and auctioning off its police helicopters. [Where we are in 2018:  Colorado Springs' municipal government took a hard-right turn in response to the Crash, and originally slashed it's police force and turned off streetlights in 2010 rather than raise property taxes to pay for public services. Thieves stole the copper wiring in the abandoned streetlights, and there weren't enough police to stop them. It later cost over $5 million to fix the lights, which are back on. It's municipal government is still conservative, but not insane.]

>> It's probably also worth noting this Wall St. Journal article from last month -- with a subheadline warning: "Back to Stone Age" -- which describes how "paved roads, historical emblems of American achievement, are being torn up across rural America and replaced with gravel or other rough surfaces as counties struggle with tight budgets and dwindling state and federal revenue." [Where we are in 2018:  Plowing paved roads back to gravel, instead of paying maintenance costs to keep them, has only accelerated since 2010. In an era of dismal infrastructure spending, transportation agencies in at least 27 states now have unpaved roads, or are considering gravel roads as options.]

>> Utah is seriously considering eliminating the 12th grade, or making it optional. [Where we are in 2018:  While Utah's school board didn't follow through on this idea, a proposal was successfully floated in 2016 to make Middle School classes in art, health, Phys Ed, and careers 'optional'.]

>> And it was announced this week that "Camden [New Jersey] is preparing to permanently shut its library system by the end of the year, potentially leaving residents of the impoverished city among the few in the United States unable to borrow a library book free." [Where we are in 2018:  The city of Camden's municipal libraries were nearly shut down -- but in 2011, they were absorbed by the Camden county library system.]

The nation didn't stop falling after the Crash of 2008. Only the pace has slowed, enough to make us believe that, somehow, we avoided real trouble. And as we continue to fall, the descent is accompanied by commercials and television, iPads and SmartPhones; anything to keep people from realizing what's happening to the society they've lived in all their lives, and to the promises that society has held out to them as the American Dream.

It's human to not want to see the water rising, to focus on the familiar and the comforting, not to hear the sound of the steady drummer, "drumming like a noise in dreams".

... It's different to live through times which -- with the added crisis of climate change -- we're just on the cusp of. The fun hasn't even started in earnest yet...

Natley (Art Garfunkle) And The Old Man: Catch-22 (1970)

OLD MAN: ...Italy is a poor, weak country. And that is why we will survive, long after your country has been destroyed.
NATLEY: What are you talking about? America's not going to be destroyed.
OLD MAN: Never?
NATLEY: Well...
OLD MAN: Egypt was destroyed; Greece was destroyed; Rome was destroyed; Persia was destroyed -- Spain was destroyed. All great countries are destroyed. Why not yours?
NATLEY: ...What you don't understand is that it's better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.
OLD MAN: You have it backwards. It's better to live on your feet than to die on your knees. I know.
NATLEY: How do you know?
OLD MAN: Because I am a hundred and seven years old. How old are you?
NATLEY: I'll be twenty in January.
OLD MAN: If you live.
          -- Buck Henry / Screenplay to Mike Nichols' Film of Catch-22 (1970)

Will America dissolve into a State run by 'Pastors', conservative Oligarchs? Will most of us queue up for water, clothing; living space? Will we become like Britain, with CCTVs on every light pole and an electronic dossier on every citizen's email, personal buying and travel habits? Will someone in the Nuclear Club finally decide to uncork the Genie again?

People don't believe these things are possible; not here, in America. This is a land of opportunity, almost a meritocracy -- we don't have a class structure here based on family lineage or money; and we are the guardians of truth, justice, and the Rule Of Law™. You can rise as high as you can reach through hard work and the Free Enterprise system.

We say that we don't murder our leaders. We don't single out people for imprisonment or harassment because they espouse unpopular opinions. We are free to speak or write or create as we like. We are the strongest military and economic power on the face of the earth. We're not dictators. We don't quit, we don't surrender; we treat our enemies fairly and with compassion because that's the American Way.

Right.

As I've mentioned before, a Romanian acquaintance once said, while Ceausescu was still in power, "In the Eastern Bloc, if you are enough of a problem for the authorities, they take you out into the woods and shoot you in the back of the head. In America, if you are enough of a problem, they restrict your ability to make money."

And, today, what passes for common wisdom among the political elite, pundits and media is that in order to prevent higher deficits and more National Debt, the government should enact policies that reduce it -- to privatize Social Security, reduce Medicare to a voucher system, freeze the pay of the military... and slash every Federal program possible. To cut, and not stimulate.

At the same time, these same Austerians say that raising income taxes is regrettable, but must be done. Only -- they mean raising taxes for everyone except the top two per cent or so, who will receive a tax cut. Because the wealthy are the ones who,through their purchases of Bulgari jewelry, Bentleys and designer clothing, will raise the rest of us up from poverty... a millimeter at a time.

This isn't a joke. It's policy. As Paul Krugman notes, "We must place priority on reducing the deficit, say Republicans and “centrist” Democrats. And then, virtually in the next breath, they declare that we must preserve tax cuts for the very affluent, at a budget cost of $700 billion over the next decade."

(The wealthy, in America particularly, remind me now of the 'Owners' in Paul Theroux's 1986 novel, O-Zone, which I strongly recommend.)

So official policy is to protect the wealthy, and allow the country to pass slowly into history. Greenwald concluded his column with a quote from International Monetary Fund Chief Economist Simon Johnson, from his article last year in The Atlantic Monthly, "about what happens in under-developed and developing countries when an elite-caused financial crises ensues" -- and not targeting the rich is just par for the course:

Squeezing oligarchs, though, is seldom the strategy of choice among emerging-market governments.  Quite the contrary: at the outset of the crisis, the Oligarchs are usually among the first to get extra help from the government, such as preferential access to foreign currency, or maybe a nice tax break, or -- here's a classic Kremlin bailout technique -- the assumption of private debt obligations by the government.

Under duress, generosity toward old friends takes many innovative forms. Meanwhile, needing to squeeze someone, most emerging-market governments look first to ordinary working folk -- at least until the riots grow too large... 

But there’s a deeper and more disturbing similarity: elite business interests —- financiers, in the case of the U.S. -— played a central role in creating the crisis, making ever-larger gambles, with the implicit backing of the government, until the inevitable collapse. More alarming, they are now using their influence to prevent precisely the sorts of reforms that are needed, and fast, to pull the economy out of its nosedive. The government seems helpless, or unwilling, to act against them.

I don't know why, but I keep thinking of a poem written just before the beginning of the Great War; Barbara Tuchman used it as a section title ("The Steady Drummer") in her 1966 book, The Proud Tower -- another book I recommend; not many are being written like them any longer.

On the idle hill of summer,
Sleepy with the flow of streams,
Far I hear the steady drummer
Drumming like a noise in dreams.

Far and near and low and louder
On the roads of earth go by,
Dear to friends and food for powder,
Soldiers marching, all to die.

East and west on fields forgotten
Bleach the bones of comrades slain,
Lovely lads and dead and rotten;
None that go return again.

Far the calling bugles hollo,
High the screaming fife replies,
Gay the files of scarlet follow:
Woman bore me, I will rise.

A.E. Housman, "A Shropshire Lad" (1896)

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The Party Of Bone Saw Murder Apologists

Cutting Right To It

(Via The Great Curmudgeon, October 18, 2018)

It's a simple scheme, really. Whenever [Republicans] control the government they immediately pass massive tax cuts and massive increases in military spending, always promising that the wealthy and the corporations will pour all that money back into the economy and it will end up increasing revenues because of all the growth it will stimulate. But it never does.

...the real goal isn't just to give tax cuts to the rich and spend huge sums of money on the military. It's also to run up the debt so Republicans can turn around and wring their hands over the need to be "fiscally responsible" and force the government to cut spending on ... the big-ticket items of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

They have wanted to end those programs ever since they were enacted, but this debt scam was cooked up in the 1980s when all the smart young Reaganites came to Washington. They tagged the Democrats as "tax-and-spend liberals" (now it's "socialists") so that whenever the Democrats finally come back into power, anxious to be seen as responsible stewards of the economy, they are immediately on the defensive.

Republicans screech in unison that the entitlements are all going to break the bank and they must be cut or the sky will fall. Unfortunately, the political media join the chorus, beating their chests about how the people must "take their medicine" and "face up to the truth" that the country simply cannot afford to take care of the old and sick anymore.

Pundits and journalists seem to take particular pleasure in lecturing their audience about how they'll have to "sacrifice" for the greater good and tut-tut all the supposedly irresponsible liberal politicians who are unwilling to tell them the "truth."

-- Digby Parton, "Mitch and the budget scam"; Salon 'Zine, via Hullabaloo, October 17, 2018

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Random Barking Friday: Notes From Above Ground

Just Because We Agree That Any Day Above Ground Is A Good Day 
Doesn't Mean We Agree To Put Up With This Shit

The fascist movements ... that came to power in Italy and Germany boasted their regimes were totalitarian. The most original revelation of the current wave of authoritarians is ... overtly antidemocratic dictatorships ...[are] unnecessary for holding power. Perhaps the most apt designation ... is the insidious term “illiberal democracy.” 

...Erdoğan in Turkey, Putin in Russia, Rodrigo Duterte ... and Viktor Orbán ... have all discovered that opposition parties can be left in existence...  in order to provide a fig leaf of democratic legitimacy, while in reality elections pose scant challenge to their power. Truly dangerous opposition leaders are neutralized or eliminated one way or another. 

Total control of the press and other media is likewise unnecessary... a flood of managed and fake news so pollutes the flow of information that facts and truth become irrelevant as shapers of public opinion. Once-independent judiciaries are gradually dismantled through selective purging ... Crony capitalism opens ... a symbiosis of corruption and self-enrichment between political and business leaders... 

Xenophobic nationalism (and ...explicitly anti-immigrant white nationalism), as well as the prioritization of “law and order” over individual rights, are also crucial to these regimes in mobilizing the popular support of their bases and stigmatizing their enemies. 

-- Christopher R. Browning, "The Suffocation Of Democracy" (Article), The New York Review Of Books; October 25, 2018 Issue (Paragraphing added for emphasis)

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The age demanded that we dance

And jammed us into iron pants.

And in the end the age was handed

The sort of shit that it demanded.

-- Ernest Hemingway, In "Der Querschnitt"; February, 1925

I move to work in the dark, 5:00AM on public transit in a large urban area. Passengers are dressed for maintenance or construction, administrative or 'food service industry' jobs; almost everyone is looking down at their smartphones, scrolling and texting. A third are women, dressed in expensive workout clothes, heading for the gym; few white-collar, non-managerial 'Individual Contributors' like me ride to work this early. The real flood of San Francisco's Tech workers don't begin their commutes until after 7 o'clock.

San Francisco's Municipal Transit Authority is replacing its fleet of older electric busses, one by one, with new, 'hybrid' ones. There are fewer seats in the new busses.  I get off at the usual stop downtown, walking a nearly-deserted two blocks towards BART. Crossing a street, I register  someone moving on my left, riding towards me on a bicycle, and so make assumptions: I'm a pedestrian, they see me, they'll avoid me.

Suddenly, I hear the sound of pedals being cranked; the rider speeds up and passes, inches behind me; I feel a gust of air as their weight moves through space. And as they move past, I feel the rider pat me, once, on the top of my head, like a Plains Indian counting coup. Standing in the dim street, looking -- at him, a nondescript male: scruff of beard, dark baseball cap, clothing and bike -- I shout HEY!! at his back. 

I'm not particularly surprised (and I think: it's more surprising that I accept this as normal, now); my yelling is mostly for form's sake. He's riding on, casual, slowing to make a lazy S down the street and leaning back in his seat. He starts to cycle back in my direction, maybe take things to the next level -- then turns away. I can hear him, almost conversationally, say, "Welcome to Cali-for-nia, bay-bee."

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5:00AM in the Underground: increasing numbers of homeless, lying on the granite floors as if tossed there, discards, not asleep so much as comatose (I remember living rough in a stressful environment, a literal jungle, and how desperately needed and all-consuming sleep, unconsciousness, was for us).

Below the surface: The display of rock-bottom despair and crazy is manifest and confounding. Most people, myself included, just want to move down to the train platform and get where we're going -- because if we stopped for a moment to look at these people, and contemplate where we all are and where we're going, it would plunge you into tears at the same time it drives you back, within yourself, shrinking away from these Others -- as if they might infect you with lice or bad luck. That what I am could happen to you.

This morning, a man -- skin and hair blackened with dirt, torn clothing scumbled up with diesel soot and grease -- sat on the floor of the BART station, his back against a wall at the base of an Up escalator, legs splayed out, repeatedly shouting a single word, "FUCK!?" at the top of his lungs every few minutes.

He didn't use it as an obscenity. What had happened to him was the obscenity. He was asking a question -- of fate and circumstance; he was making an making an exclamation: This is what happened?? What the fuck???

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As ever, Trump is the parody of the neoliberal consensus, which shows us the truth of its intellectual and political bankruptcy. And the neoliberal Democrats’ answer is not to mobilize the population in protest, not to take direct action against an obviously illegitimate political structure — but to double down on elitism and technocracy by imagining that the FBI will somehow save us. 

--  Adam Kotsko, "Lies And Neoliberalism"; An und für sich, October 6, 2018

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The domestic agenda of Trump’s illiberal democracy falls considerably short of totalitarian dictatorship as exemplified by Mussolini and Hitler. But ... [n]o matter how and when the Trump presidency ends, the specter of illiberalism will continue to haunt American politics. A highly politicized judiciary will remain... racial division, cultural conflict, and political polarization [which] Trump has encouraged and intensified will be difficult to heal. Gerrymandering, voter suppression, and uncontrolled campaign spending will continue to result in elections skewed in an unrepresentative and undemocratic direction. Growing income disparity will be extremely difficult to halt, much less reverse. 

Finally, within several decades after Trump’s presidency has ended, the looming effects of ecological disaster due to human-caused climate change—which Trump not only denies but is doing so much to accelerate—will be inescapable... 

Trump is not Hitler ... but regardless of how the Trump presidency concludes, this is a story unlikely to have a happy ending. 

--  Christopher Browning, ibid.; New York Review Of Books; October 25, 2018 Issue 

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MEHR, MIT "WAS SIE GEMACHT HAT":

If you consider the main currents in American culture and politics since the Declaration, a move towards the 'illiberalism' Browning describes in his article doesn't seem like an aberration. More like a logical procession. 

Let's be clear: It's a class war. Who wins and who loses in the current circumstances remains the same, no matter which end of the spectrum is in control.

America's political right will never, truly, upset The Owners. The neoliberal Left wants a Wonderful One World which keeps The Owners intact and in charge. In either scenario, you and I are expendable resources. 

The same tools of misdirection, propaganda, appeals to a mythic America that never was; and at the very bottom of it all, a threat of ultimate power (I kill You!) has been used in that America to sink the pitch and rig the game, since forever. 

At its most basic, Trump and his crew owns the political Right. Every kind of bottom-feeding nightcrawler and slug have attached themselves to The Trump Halftrack -- because there's money to be made, and power to be had; it is really no more complicated than that. The only notable thing is, they are right out in the open about it, now. 

Even though the 0.01% (that number could even be smaller; I use it only to make the point) will truly benefit from Trump, 'The Base' feel stronger and more powerful. They wave The Flag, wear The Red Hat, and allow free-floating rage to take form in love of the christian nation and racial pride. Their purpose is simply in "being Americans".  Build that wall. Piss in faces of the Iranians. Use force on the streets. Love The Leader.

Neoliberals at home and abroad are disorganized and hiding, for the moment. If Clinton had won the election, they would have been the ones flexing muscle -- but quietly, through internationalist organizations. The same 0.01% would ultimately benefit. 

We'd still be rubes and sheep, like the Red Hats -- but we'd feel better about turning over our autonomy to The Owners, because it's for the greater good. We would have a sense of purpose in building a better future world.  

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I'm not advocating a specific group's point of view. But, all this is an approximation of an answer to the question of that anguished underground dweller, yelling FUCK!!?? The structures human beings have built through five thousand-plus years of history to organize living on the planet have been bent, and altered, to favor a few and eat the rest of us alive.

... and no matter how clear that becomes, there's been little direct action. No matter how crazy things have gotten. There is no shortage of analysis and commentary about what is happening -- Christopher Browning's article is a crystal-clear example. The general outlines are there for everyone to see. 

But even in responding to Trump's lies with truth, his malfeasance with exposure, and narcissistic spewing with laughter, people rarely go into the streets. Given the stakes, our passivity in America is staggering -- and that comment only shows I assume having a high standard of living means people will act to support their best values and, you know, do stuff. 

All I'm sure of is, future historians will go over whatever documentation survives us and shake their heads, or laugh until they herniate themselves.

If you're waiting for the midterms; or Mueller's report; or for a tentacle to pop out of Trump's head while he bloviates at a rally, somewhere -- and then expect that hey presto! All Will Be Just Like It Was -- then something is happening here, but you don't know what it is. 

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UND NOCH IMMER MEHR:  Oh, yeah! Forgot to include the recent UN report which says we're  effectively fucked and will all die in the fire in the fire in the fire, or at least bake a lot. So maybe none of this matters. It could explain why Our Glorious Wealthy have been so openly avaricious lately. Maybe all that talk about "future historians" doesn't mean anything, either. Hey; my bad!

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In The Epistemic World

Wherein We Are Shewn How The Sausage Is Made

Politics: So Many Choices.

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GOP Confident Kavanaugh Is Cleared
-- CNN Headline, October 4, 2018

...By “epistemic world”, I mean a broadly shared framework for knowing [where] emotions, moral sensibilities and reason are all informed by certain values, either consciously or unconsciously...  When our epistemic world is threatened, we feel ourselves being undone. As a philosopher, I am inclined to see [the nomination of Kavanaugh] as a war between two epistemic worlds.

In the first world, privileged white men get to do with impunity what other men at least have to think twice about, and for women who dare to speak of them, the punishment is swift and devastating. ... In the second epistemic world, the default position is to believe [the] women who make sexual assault allegations...

Much of the media spectacle around the Kavanaugh nomination has made it seem as if the epistemic battle is about the truth... Kavanaugh’s supporters want to be sure that what is at stake is not truth, but meaning. It isn’t really about who you believe, so much as which epistemic world you believe in.

Will the first epistemic world retain its power to determine the status of such happenings, to determine what they mean, how they matter? ... make no mistake -- the “old” world ... is right here, right now, and despite the remarkable gains of the #MeToo movement, it controls every branch of our government.

-- Bonnie Mann, "Trump’s New Taunt, Kavanaugh’s Defense and How Misogyny Rules"; New York Times, October 3, 2018 (Minor edits for clarity)

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A Simulacrum Of A Pretense Of Caring

...A predatory society doesn’t just mean oligarchs ripping people off financially. In a truer way, it means people nodding and smiling and going about their everyday business as their neighbours, friends, and colleagues die early deaths in shallow graves.

The predator in American society isn’t just its super-rich — but an invisible and insatiable force: the normalization of what in the rest of the world would be seen as shameful, historic, generational moral failures, if not crimes, becoming mere mundane everyday affairs not to be too worried by or troubled about...

Seen accurately. American collapse is a catastrophe of human possibility without modern parallel. And because the mess that America has made of itself, then, is so especially unique, so singular, so perversely special — the treatment will have to be novel, too. The uniqueness of these social pathologies tell us that American collapse is not like a reversion to any mean, or the downswing of a trend. It is something outside the norm. Something beyond the data. Past the statistics.

It is like the meteor that hit the dinosaurs: an outlier beyond outliers, an event at the extreme of the extremes. That is why our narratives, frames, and theories cannot really capture it — much less explain it. We need a whole new language — and a new way of seeing — to even begin to make sense of it.

But that is America’s task, not the world’s. The world’s task is this. Should the world follow the American model — extreme capitalism, no public investment, cruelty as a way of life, the perversion of everyday virtue — then these new social pathologies will follow, too.

They are new diseases of the body social that have emerged from the diet of junk food — junk media, junk science, junk culture, junk punditry, junk economics, people treating one another and their society like junk — that America has fed upon for too long.

--  Umair Haque, "Why We're Underestimating American Collapse"; Eudaimonia&Co., January 25, 2018

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Democracy Means Someday You Can Do It Too

Mr. Trump won the presidency proclaiming himself a self-made billionaire, and he has long insisted that his father, the legendary New York City builder Fred C. Trump, provided almost no financial help.

But The Times’s investigation, based on a vast trove of confidential tax returns and financial records, reveals that Mr. Trump received the equivalent today of at least $413 million from his father’s real estate empire, starting when he was a toddler and continuing to this day.

Barstow, Craig and Buettner, "Trump Engaged in Suspect Tax Schemes as He Reaped Riches From His Father", New York Times, October 2, 2018

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Obligatory Cute Small Animal Photo In Middle Of Blog Ogg Ogg

The Oldest Friend Asks: "Why do you undercut your writing with humor 

that detracts from whatever your point is?"

Golden Days

America has a thriving mutual support network of family trusts and estates. The Trump administration is serving their interests well. What caught the headlines in Mr Trump’s tax bill last December was the cut in the corporate tax rate. Private wealth also had plenty to cheer. The bill doubled the floor at which people must start paying inheritance taxes.

Couples can now shelter their children from paying a cent on the first $22 million of what they inherit. The previous floor was already high, even by America’s standards. [In 2000, only] 2% of American estates paid any estate tax. That has now fallen to [ 0.01% ], according to the Joint Committee on Taxation...

...Mr. Kavanaugh boasted that he had “busted a gut” to make it to Yale, and benefited from “no connections”. In fact, he attended a Washington private school that churns out Ivy League material... Mr Kavanaugh’s grandfather studied at Yale.

Like Mr. Trump, Mr. Kavanaugh offers a cracked reflection of society. America’s elites do not like what they see. It distorts their world as they like to see it: meritocratic, fair-minded, and politically correct. Each in their way presents a grotesquerie of America’s less noble side.

In Mr. Kavanaugh’s case, it is the slipped mask of a man trying to imitate Lady Justice. In Mr. Trump’s it is a president who reinforces an economic structure that sustains them.

--  Edward Luce, "Donald Trump and The Golden Age Of America’s Oligarchy," Financial Times, October 4, 2018

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Is She Big Is She Moving Is She Hellbound

America makes prodigious mistakes, America has colossal faults, but one thing cannot be denied: America is always on the move. She may be going to Hell, of course, but at least she isn't standing still.
-- e. e. cummings, May, 1927; as quoted in George Firmage's A Miscellany (1958)

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But, It Mimics Nature

In 2011, the Swiss Institute of Technology (Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule [ETH], Zürich) released a comprehensive study of the ownership structures of ~43,000 transnational corporations.

The ETH determined that all of them were owned by just 147 corporate entities, which they referred to as a 'Super Entity' -- and 75% of them are financial corporations (Vitali, Glattfelder and Battiston, "The Network Of Corporate Global Control", ETH Zürich, 2011)

... But don't grab a pitchfork and head to the nearest Occupy protest just yet. Systems researchers say this isn't the result of an Illuminati-type global conspiracy, but rather a natural force to be expected.
"Such structures are common in nature," complex systems expert George Sudihara told NewScientist.

The researchers say that while there's nothing wrong, in and of itself, with the concentration of capital in the hands of a small number of companies, when those companies become too interconnected, they can cause chain reactions that can harm the economy.

--  Daniel Tencer, " 'Super-Entity' Of 147 Companies At Center Of World's Economy, Study Claims", Huffington Post Canada, October 24, 2011

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Keep Them From Noticing The Fire As Long As Possible

What will trigger the next crash? The $13.2 trillion in unsustainable U.S. household debt? The $1.5 trillion in unsustainable student debt? The billions Wall Street has invested in a fracking industry that has spent $280 billion more than it generated from its operations? Who knows.

What is certain is that a global financial crash, one that will dwarf the meltdown of 2008, is inevitable. And this time, with interest rates near zero, the elites have no escape plan. ...

An emergency clause in the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 allows the Fed to provide liquidity to a distressed banking system. But [After the 2008 Crash] the Federal Reserve did not stop with [providing banks with] a few hundred billion dollars. It flooded the financial markets with absurd levels of fabricated money. This had the effect of making the economy appear as if it had revived. And for the oligarchs, who had access to this fabricated money while we did not, it did.

...The global financial system is a ticking time bomb. The question is not if it will explode but when it will explode. And once it does, the inability of the global speculators to use fabricated money with zero interest to paper over the debacle will trigger massive unemployment, high prices for imports and basic services, and a devaluation in which the dollar will become nearly worthless as it is abandoned as the world’s reserve currency...

...Given the staggering amount of fabricated money that has to be repaid, the banks need to build greater and greater pools of debt. This is why when you are late in paying your credit card the interest rate jumps to 28 percent. This is why if you declare bankruptcy you are still responsible for paying off your student loan, even as 1 million people a year default on student loans, with 40 percent of all borrowers expected to default on student loans by 2023.

This is why wages are stagnant or have declined while costs, from health care and pharmaceutical products to bank fees and basic utilities, are skyrocketing. The enforced debt peonage grows to feed the beast until, as with the subprime mortgage crisis, the predatory system fails because of massive defaults...

--  Chris Hedges, "Conjuring Up The Next Depression", TruthDig, September 10, 2018
     (Links Added)

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WALLACE GLADSTONE: ... And now, here's a contingent of our heroic POWs, many of whom spent years in prison in Hanoi, courageously resisting the persistent efforts of their North Vietnamese captors to brainwash them into thinking that the United States is run by a tiny clique of criminals, dominated by powerful business interests; bankrolled by huge, monopolistic corporations working hand in glove with the CIA in a campaign of intrigue at home and abroad.  

BARBARA MERKIN: Jesus, why do they bother?  

GLADSTONE:  Oh; I don't know, Barbara.  

-- "Impeachment Day Parade Coverage", Chevy Chase (Gladstone), Rhonda Coulett (Merkin); National Lampoon's Missing White House Tapes (Blue Thumb Records, 1974)

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Let Us Now Something Famous Men

You Know Where This Is Going

Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing; September 27, 2018 (Osita Nwanevu / New Yorker)

As Dr. Christine Blasey Ford detailed her sexual assault accusation against Trump Supreme Court pick Brett Kavanaugh before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday, a photo taken by New Yorker staff writer Osita Nwanevu shows that Ford was positioned directly in front of seven male GOP senators who have worked to ram through Kavanaugh's confirmation as quickly as possible without an FBI investigation. 

"This is what Christine Blasey Ford is looking at as she describes her sexual assault," Nwanevu noted. "I mean this literally. The Dems are there of course, but from her angle at the table, the GOP side of the semicircle is right in front of her."

--  Jake Johnson, Common Dreams; "As Christine Blasey Ford Details Sexual Assault Allegation Against Kavanaugh, This Is What She's Looking At"

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Thursday's hearing will also raise fundamental questions of fairness. And perhaps the biggest risk is that despite its deeply divisive impact, it solves nothing... 

It's conceivable that at the end of the day, Republicans see one truth and Democrats another. If the GOP goes ahead under those circumstances the nomination could enflame the nation's blazing political culture even more.

--  Stephen Collinson, CNN; "A Day That Will Resonate In History"

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President Trump and Congressional Republicans are not afraid to take unpopular actions in pursuit of their ideological goals. 

Last year, they spent many months trying and failing to pass a repeal of Obamacare, even though those efforts were extremely unpopular. And they passed a tax bill that was highly unpopular at the time of its passage, although its [popularity as shown in polling data has] since improved some. The Supreme Court is at least as much of a priority for Republicans.

--  Nate Silver, FiveThirtyEight; "The GOP's Least-Worst Option Is If Kavanaugh Withdraws -- And Soon"

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Then, late on Wednesday an anonymous fourth woman accuser emerged when NBC reported that the Senate Judiciary Committee was inquiring about at least one additional allegation of misconduct against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Republican Senate investigators asked Kavanaugh about an anonymous complaint alleging that he physically assaulted a woman in 1998, according to a transcript from that phone call...

--  Tyler Durden, ZeroHedge; "Fourth Woman Accuses Kavanaugh"

The New Aristocrats feel entitled to remain untouchable, regardless of the enormity of their crimes. People are starting to wake up to neofeudal realities of life in America, but the sexual privileges of this class are only the tip of the iceberg.

--  Tyler Durden, ZeroHedge; "Exposing The Neofuedal Privileges Of Class In America"

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Your Weak Under Way

Entertainment

As a result of his recent appearances, Paul Manafort will be crooning in the Metro D.C. area for your pleasure through the rest of this year, with an option for a series of public recitals during 2019.

His recent hit single of the old Ukrainian ballad, "Fix My Heart", has been remixed by DJ Roddy; even The Leader, taking time away from thinking about the plight of The Little People, has taken notice.

Accompanied closely by the Bob Mueller DOJ Orchestra, Paul's special brand of Family entertainment is keenly anticipated to please millions of Americans, and the Superintelligent Parakeet. Rumors are Paul may be joined by fellow singers Micky Flynn, Pinky Gates, and Michael Cohen; if true, these performances promise to be spellbinding in their warmth and cheer. Watch your local news broadcasts for dates and times!

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Whither The Weather Channel

Insult to Injury: A Weather Channel on-the-spot-weatherperson in the Carolinas, seen rocking back and forth in "high winds" while delivering a live report about the impact of Hurricane Florence making landfall, unaware of the two casually-strolling Dudes in the background. This has been flogged all over the Intertubes and needs no further description here.

The Weather Channel defended its weatherperson by saying they were exhausted, under stress, and had recently been painted blue. Or remodeled. Or had a head gasket replacement. And anyway, how can viewers expect things to function under such circumstances?

The two men in the background, walking along and apparently not affected in any serious way by wind, were part of a -- different space-time continuum! Yeah, that's it, hot damn; Science To The Rescue!!

If Deepak Chopra were here, he would tell us Quantum Mechanics explains that the two Dudes exist in all states of motion, inaction, and being, at the same time. The camera, as part of the observer paradox, simply pushed The Waveform to collapse when the men were thinking about a decent, balanced breakfast. Yeah. That has to be right.

But, consider: The Weather Channel deals with -- wait for it -- The Weather. They don't discuss politics, report on the effect of Betsy DeVos forcing children to work in sweatshops, the purchase of a third chin for Mikey Pompeo, or report on the latest Tweets of The Leader. The Weather Channel reports on The Weather, a set of science-based, factual occurrences.

It's one of the few things that are reported on that can't really be lied about, unless Fox gets into the weather-reporting business. We don't expect those people reporting the weather to be 100% accurate (the joke is that they rarely are), but we don't expect them to fake the effect of the weather they do report on. Sad!

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Biffy Wants His Balloon

Priviledged, pudgy Brett 'Biff' Kavanaugh has been reported as allegedly attempting to "force himself" on a girl while he was attending an exclusive, all-male Prep School in Potomactown back in the day.

Apparently, Senator Dianne Feinstein, ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, had been made aware of the allegation through a letter sent to her by Biffy's alleged victim. Senator Dianne held on to the letter and did not raise the issue, or question Kavanaugh about it during his hearings before the Committee, when he promised to be a team player, but would not reveal which team he was referring to. Biffy was clear that only he can fill the tiny, stretchy shoes left by the tubby, angry, maleficent "Fat Tony" Scalia.

Biffy vociferously denied that any such alleged thing had ever happened. He was outraged, and squidgy, and pressed his lips together firmly in a display of putting up with the politics of the peasants. He wanted his candy and his balloon and his seat on the Biggest Court In The Land, because it is owed to me.

The Leader told him so, even if The Leader is an odious little puffed-up poseur and not Biffy's sort at all. He can give Biffy what is so rightfully his -- ergo, Biffy loves The Leader.

A letter was produced, signed by sixty-five women whom Biffy went to high school with, essentially saying he was a perfect gentleman and never ever conducted himself in any way that did not involve copper wiring or optical-fiber cabling.

How these women could have attended Prep school with him at an all-male institution, or how Kavanaugh could have used optical fiber cabling before it became available, was not addressed.

Senator Dianne's late revelation of Biffy's alleged conduct was seen by some as an attempt to delay what had been Biffy's de facto appointment to the Supremes by the Committee's Giant Slug Republican majority. It might even cause Biffy to be sent home without a copy of the Home Game.

But Senator 'Chuck' Grassley (who is even older than Senator Dianne and barely able to remember what year it is), Republican Chair Man of the Judiciary Committee, is determined this will not stand.

"I have pants," Grassley said when he believed he was alone in the Lois B. Lane Senate Maintenance Trailer, "Pants no one can fill. Judge Kavanaugh fills the pants of Tony, and all America can see they are filled. And goddamn it, I'm not going anywhere until those pants encompass all America. We will breathe and think and find our way through those pants.

"Thank you, and good night. Where's my damn check? I want to get paid and go drinking."

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MEHR, MIT "WER, ICH??" :  Apparently, in July of this year, both Grassley and Feinstein were contacted by an attorney who indicated that Federal employees in the United States Courts had specific information about Kavanaugh they were willing to impart, but were concerned about possible retaliation.  

The information came from an attorney who had helped to blow the whistle on Alex Kozinski, Chief Judge of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, who resigned after accusations by several women of improper workplace conduct -- including holding pornographic material on his work hard drive and making employees in his office view it, and sending unsolicited emails to others, including employees, with contents of a sexual nature. 

The attorney, writing to Grassley and Feinstein, stressed that any claims by Kavanaugh that he was unaware of Kozinski's behavior at the time it occurred would not be credible. Testimony by the former Federal employees' would support that.

It was also in July that Feinstein alone was made aware of Kavanaugh's alleged sexual assault by the woman who advised she had experienced it.

Kavanaugh had clerked for Kozinski in the 1990's. Kozinski recommended him as a clerk to Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, and that clerkship began Kavanaugh's career -- from the Supreme Court, to Ken Starr's investigation of the Clintons, to his appointment as  a Federal Judge.  And, when announcing his retirement earlier this year, Anthony Kennedy recommended Biffy to The Leader as his replacement.

Biffy testified to the Judiciary Committee that he was unaware of Kozinski's past behavior -- and that his old mentor's resignation was a shock, a "gut punch". However, the Federal employees mentioned to Senators Chuck and Dianne in July might have been able to refute that, if they had been contacted and allowed to give testimony. They weren't.

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MEHR, MIT "ER IST DER GUTES FÜHRER":  The Leader's Twitter feed has been effectively free of whining and bile and invective since Monday, September 17. It is very very quiet.

The Leader.  (Tom Brennan / New York Times)

And, he has appeared recently, and said efforts to pack the Supreme Court with right-wing morons things with Biffy Kavanaugh's confirmation are "very sad" and that the judge is "very nice", and has a very nice wife. "It's a very unfair thing, what's going on," said Leader -- and that was all he said.

He has gone before the cameras and said that "nothing will be left undone" for North Carolina (as opposed to Puerto Rico, nicht so?), and even travelled a short ways from DeeCee to the area, and to be seen to appear and be photographed while saying nice things. Supportive things.

Trump then visited a church in New Bern, a town of 30,000 located at the confluence of the Neuse and Trent rivers that was hit especially hard by flooding, and joined volunteers in passing out boxed meals to locals in a drive-through line. He also walked through a neighborhood lined with discarded wet furniture, hugging residents and posing for pictures.

Stormy Daniels' book will be appearing soon, but The Leader has said nothing. Even when excerpts refer to her experience of The Donny as 3.5 on a scale of 10, to his raging insecurity, that he "didn't expect to be president", and the fact that he was having carnal relations with women not his wife ... The Leader has refrained from commentary.

You see, this is the Good Leader. The Kind Leader. The one who does not Tweet incendiary things and who hands out meals to persons he will never think about again. It's true -- he did talk to The Hill and say bad things about Ol' Jeffy 'Kiss-My-Sink' Sessions ("I don't have an attorney general; it's very sad") -- but otherwise The Leader has been quiet. Very very quiet.

This is the Leader who has been told by someone that he must be Soft and Kind and Good, a Leader who "is seen to care" until after a Republican majority can shove Kavanaugh down the throats of the country. Until after the mid-terms. 

He must be seen to be the one who cares about you (unless you live in Puerto Rico, Yemen, Syria, California, or other 'shithole countries'). And must be seen as Kind. And Good. He's the reincarnation of FDR. He's your Pal.

And so shall he be -- now, and until November 7th. Unless, of course, someone close to him is indicted, or he is accused of High Crimes and Misdemeanors, before then. In which case you will see Wonderboy, A Man In Full, come roaring back ahead of schedule.  Because he is not gone away. 

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Trust Only The Children

Burning Down The House

Brazil's National Museum; 200 years of priceless artifacts and historical records, burns (John Moraes / Reuters 2018)

I keep trying to read the tea leaves about the future, a foolish, stupid thing to do. Predictions are an illusion; the world has too many variables influencing what that future will become -- though some people have a frightening talent for being able to predict large-scale swings in the culture. It's also a foolish thing to do because I'm not very good at it.

Trying to predict what will happen is just what humans do -- attempt to exercise control in a chaotic mystery world. Americans are a pack of 400 million proto-Chimps who possess just enough intelligence and socialization to prevent us from acting like the Australopithecines in 2001: A Space Odyssey all at the same time. Still, we're dragged around by our genome and our hormones. Our level of consciousness allows imaginative conceptualization, including an awareness of our mortality, and that we have no idea what this chaotic mystery world is.

The leitmotiv of the human condition is not having absolute answers to the obvious questions arising from self-awareness. Every ridiculous and sublime thing we do or have ever done to define or organize or protect ourselves is a response to that. Whatever we come up with are only operating assumptions. They're not absolutes. They're not the answers. But when we insist those assumptions are The Answers, we feel less anxious and insecure.

For thousands of years, religions, cruise lines, governments, distillers, investment bankers, snack food and condom manufacturers have made good money by selling other proto-Chimps on the idea that [Fill In Blank] is The Truth / makes you feel better /lets you boss other Chimps around.  We want to be distracted -- and, as in so many things, America has been Number One in the Distraction Industry for generations.

As we convince ourselves the collective assumptions are The Answers -- at the same time we know that's a lie. When the balance between those two opposites becomes hard to maintain, the reality can come home to roost with a vengeance: Hubris. The Comeuppance. The Fire Next Time. And -- you know -- Things will happen. 

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Tea leaves, then: America is collectively being sheep-dipped in unreality. Since Trump, the negative feedback loop of cognitive dissonance has gone into overdrive. The effort to maintain a collective illusion that All Is OK In The USA has become progressively more difficult.

It's a Meatball Moment for so many people (if 2008 wasn't enough). And it's happening on so many levels at once -- political, financial; artistic; race, age, and gender (and, hovering in the background, climate deterioration, species extinction). All feed on and amplify each other, and the general dysfunction -- which loops back; 'round and 'round.

All Is Not OK.

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As a society, we've been here before. There's some Summer of '68 in the air.  Then, we had our Foreverwar, too; we had Tet, we had My Lai. We had protests; "People carryin' signs / mostly say, "Hooray For Our Side" '. Left politics and Civil Rights were quashed by assassination, by Daley's police. We had larger versions of Ferguson in Harlem, Watts, Chicago, Cleveland, Boston; Baltimore.

We had an honest-to-god World Struggle For Domination with the Soviets in that 1968, with real thermonuclear war a possibility (well, we do now, too, but everyone thinks it will never happen). It was more likely the Russians would invade somewhere, as the Czechs found out.

The DJIA slumped a bit in 1968 (but the economy hadn't taken a full-on greedhead Ooopsie!, brought to you by America's Fabled Wealthy™) and the average price of an American home was $14,000 (that's about $120K today).

There was Feminism, but no #MeToo; Gays and Lesbians, but no Stonewall (yet) and a nascent Castro. There were drugs and rock 'n roll in long-ago-68; there was Woodstock and Youthtribe! but no Burning Man -- and, there was more hopeful naivety. There seems way more cynicism, more jock-like readiness to take offense, more fuck you today than in 1968.

Might be there's a reason for that -- given what's gone down since.

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The most positive thing Wonderboy has done for America in nearly twenty months is to be precisely who he is -- a congenital liar and an abusive bully.  On a daily basis, he shows us in stark contrast the difference between our collective illusions, and the Real. As Americans, what we do with that understanding is critical.

Not OK, but we'll take what we can get.

It would be a relief, if this was the tipping point in Il Duce's rule.  If that's true, however, think about this:  It means America's population put up with an insane level of behavior by that Orange Suet Pudding-In-A-Bag for nineteen months.  It will have taken 19 months for us to collectively say hey, fuck this, you Jackass! 

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I was once shown a photograph of an older man, taken in Iowa in 1944, standing on a semi-rural neighborhood street with a small girl, possibly his granddaughter. The man appeared to be at least in his late sixties, and looked a little like the author, Kurt Vonnegut (in fact, a lot like him). That would mean he had been born at some point between 1865 and 1875. 

He had grown up in a world where the Civil War, even the First World War, weren't Ken Burns' specials on PBS; it's conceivable he could have been a child when Custer stumbled into the Little Big Horn. His expectations of how the world worked would have been rooted in the 19th century. But there are automobiles in the photo behind him; far beyond Iowa, the Second World War was playing out in all its awful technological splendor.

I don't look anything like Vonnegut, but I could be the Old in someone else's photo, having lived in that long-ago 1968, my expectations about the world based in analog television, 25-cent double-feature movies, rotary phones and slide rules -- but more important, how social behaviors and human institutions worked. 

In the present, we can feel a shift in culture and society, in consciousness, is coming. Driven by changes in climate, technology, in the (im)balance between rich and poor, and unstable global politics, the changes coming will be as radical in their effect as transitions from the 19th to the 20th centuries. 

It's crystal clear that Trump, Alt-right nationalists and Bundist billionares, can't be allowed to shape the debate in America about those social transformations. But I'm not in favor of anyone wired into the neoliberal elite determining our priorities, either. 

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The End Of Trump will play out. One way or another, he's done. It may happen within months; it may take two years. It may involve a "Constitutional Crisis", or not -- but it will be ugly; the only question is to what degree. 

If I had a wish, it would be that Trump's unbelievable, foul-mouthed repeated lying about whatever comes into his head, finally brings about the end of the Murdoch business model of selling lies as facts. That Americans might finally demand truth (or a higher standard of accuracy, at least) from our government, from politicians, political activists, the media, educators, corporations. I mean, you don't lie to people whom you respect; right? And Americans are still treated with casual contempt. 

Yes; this is either setting the bar too high, or it's laughable. Lying -- boldface, or by omission -- is baked into the institutions of human affairs, so I'm pissing into the wind, making this wish; but, still. There are much bigger questions to be answered so that any of us might avoid being forced to wipe the bottoms of America's Fabled Elite™, and provide them with many soft treats.

Will we? I told you: I'm only a Dog. I'm not very good at this.

Obligatory Cute Small Animal Photo

In Middle Of Blog Thing About Congenitally Lying President.
Smooth! Shiny! Crazy!

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• Lil' Brett Kavanaugh is a scum-sucking pig-dog. He is going to be the next Justice of the United States Supreme Court. The confirmation hearings are a sham -- everyone gets to preen and bellow and act outraged, for different reasons -- but he'll sit on the court. He'll overturn Roe. He'll protect Wonderboy, Because Freedom. He'll do everything Fat Tony Scalia would, were he still staining the bench. Bretty will represent power and privilege, and be feted and stroked by the Federalist Right forever; amen. And they'll say such nice things about him when he leaves, full of years and glory. Abschaum-saugen Schweinhund.

• It doesn't matter what Bob Woodward says. 98% of the 'revelations' in his book had already been reported (though the new bits about stealing papers off the Clown King's desk are choice). Woodward reinforces the view, for those not still Führertreu, that Wonderboy is a cartoon of a man, a scrawl of needs and demands for gratification, piggish and infantile. And, no one is shocked by Bobby's book, really, because (wait for it) it was written for the Villagers! 

          The Great Curmudgeon Says: Fuck Off, The Rest Of Us Can

Many (most? who knows) even benevolent elites think that elites, in the very specific context of what that means in the United States, should run the country, and by implication, the world.  

Upper middle class (at least) background, elite universities (and elite high schools!), connections, etc. The "good" [elites] might not express this. They might not actually know that they believe this. But it doesn't take too many overheard "jokes" about who did and didn't go to Ivy equivalents, or even just understanding that this is a perfectly normal topic of conversation for people who are 20 years out of college, to get the point. 

Good liberal federal judges aren't hiring law clerks from Kabumfuck State University Law School, for example. (I am sure there are exceptions proving the rule). 

And the non-benevolent [Elites?]. Well, they truly think they should run the world. And own it. And the rest of us can fuck off.

Digby Says: A Slice From The Loaf Of Amoral And Unprincipled

It's obvious now that Trump's odious public persona is not a performance. He is even worse in private...  

On Wednesday the New York Times published an anonymous op-ed written by a "senior official" in the Trump administration that further supports Woodward's reporting. This person claims that members of the White House staff are acting as guardians of the country by keeping Trump from going off the rails. It's an astonishing essay in which this unnamed official admits that members of Trump's Cabinet actually spoke about evoking the 25th Amendment. 

This person characterizes the president as an amoral, unprincipled oaf who has no idea what he's doing, so he or she, along with others in the administration, have taken it upon themselves to save the nation, essentially patting themselves on the back and saying "You're welcome" to what is presumed to be a grateful nation.

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TPM Says: Trump Has A Friend?

Trump’s “volcanic” anger and “absolutely livid” (in the Post’s words) reaction to the op-ed sent top aides, like chief of staff John Kelly, scuttling to sniff out the renegade, according to the Times, which reported that aides have already produced a list of at least six possible culprits. Some believe the defector works in the administration, but not the actual White House, while two people familiar with the matter told the Post that Trump is convinced the turncoat is involved in national security or a member of the Justice Department. 

“It’s like the horror movies when everyone realizes the call is coming from inside the house,” one former White House official who remains in contact with ex-colleagues told the Post.  

The publication of the anonymous note of dissension has only added to Trump’s increased “sense of paranoia,” according to the Post, and has pushed the President — who was already feeling vulnerable following reports on Bob Woodward’s new book filled with anonymously sourced palace intrigue — to question his closest allies. 

Only his children remain trusted confidantes, a Trump friend told the Post. 

“He’s surrounded by strangers,” one former Trump campaign official told Politico. 

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MEHR, MIT HUHN:  I just really like this graphic.

At the Friday propaganda session, when Missy Sarah told Another Big Fib, she was immediately shamed by the Chicken. All the Boys and Girls laughed at her because she was such a Big Fibber.

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That Narrow Way Towards A Precipice

It Can't Happen Here Unless It Already Happened Here

(Graphic Mongo)

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It Can't Happen Here is a 1935 political novel by American author Sinclair Lewis. 

Published during the rise of fascism in Europe, the novel describes the rise of Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip, a politician who defeats Franklin Delano Roosevelt and is elected President of the United States, after fomenting fear and promising drastic economic and social reforms while promoting a return to patriotism and "traditional" values. 

...Windrip is less a Nazi than a con-man-plus-Rotarian, a manipulator who knows how to appeal to people's desperation, but neither he nor his followers are in the grip of the kind of world-transforming ideology like Hitler's National Socialism.

...Windrip takes complete control of the government and imposes a plutocratic / totalitarian rule ... Windrip's administration, known as the "Corpo[ate]" government, curtails women's and minority rights, and eliminates individual states by subdividing the country into administrative sectors... managed by "Corpo" authorities, usually prominent businessmen.

Those accused of crimes against the government appear before kangaroo courts presided over by "military judges". Despite these dictatorial ... measures, a majority of Americans approve of them, seeing them as necessary but painful steps to restore U.S. power... 

The novel's plot centers on [a journalist, Doremus Jessup's] opposition to the new regime and his subsequent struggle against it as part of a liberal rebellion. 

Reviewers at the time... emphasized the connection with Louisiana politician Huey Long, who was preparing to run for president in the 1936 election...  

-- Wikipedia Entry for "It Can't Happen Here"

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Better Endings Than The Ones We Presume To Write

We're All Going To Indianapolis, Bill

BURR:  ... then the guy goes, "Hey, you know; I'm sorry, man, I just got off on the wrong foot, there". He goes, "My name's so-and-so; what's your name?" ... And I was thinkin' of saying something like, 'Steve'... I wish I'd said some silly name; but I didn't think of one. I just went, 'It's Bill'. 

And he goes, "Oh, cool... why you goin' to Indianapolis, Bill?" He starts doin' this shit. And I just look at the guy, and ...I'm like -- 'Yeah; I don't have to answer your questions.' 

ROGAN:  Whoa. 

BURR:  I don't! He has no fucking authority; 'You're not a Sky Marshal; you're drinkin' booze! You're an asshole! What are you on? Are you afraid to fly? Go fuck yourself; leave me alone; right?' 

So; then he goes, like, "All right. Now -- now, I am concerned. Okay? I am concerned! Why are you going to Indianapolis, Bill?" ...He says this, right? They're closing the doors [to the aircraft]... I just started smirking... I'm sitting there, shakin' my head at the guy, right?... I'm so not worried about anything you're gonna do; all this passive-aggressive shit, just to piss this guy off... And he's askin', "Why are you goin' to Indianapolis, Bill?" I didn't say anything to him; I just kept laughing... 

... I could've squashed the whole thing, and just been like, 'Look; I'm a comedian. I'm goin' to Indianapolis; if you'd like to come out to the show--" I could have done that, but I'm a dick. I hate authority -- and this guy doesn't have any. So, fuck him. I'm sitting there with a blindfold on, laughing at him; it was driving him fucking nuts; it was great.

So then: five minutes of silence, ten minutes of silence goes by; and I'm finally thinkin' that maybe this shit's over -- or, is he just sittin' there, staring at the side of my head? -- and all of a sudden... right as I'm startin' to nod off, I just hear [whispers]: Why are you goin' to Indianapolis, Bill??

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Look, man: It's 2018. The world is in the hands of inbred, malevolent greedheads, fascist land rapers and child molesters. I don't know about you, but I need to laugh.

Bill Burr is a standup comic and comedy writer from Boston, based in Los Angeles; you may have seen him as the character 'Patrick Kuby' in the series Breaking Bad, or heard him as the voice of the father in the animated series, F Is For Family.  I'm relatively confident that he will make you laugh.

A friend at the Place O' Witless Labor™, also from Boston, observed about Burr that "He's pretty funny. He's pretty angry, too." Burr is also Buds with fellow standup comedian and Podcast Impresario, Joe Rogan, whose program on UTub -- which first appeared in 2009, not long after The Crash -- now has 1,100-plus episodes.

Rogan's format is an hour-and-a-half, or longer, conversation with a fair range of guests (e.g., Neil DeGrasse Tyson; Jordan Peterson; Sam Harris; Graham Hancock; Ben Shapiro), and many fellow comics. His UTub popularity is high.

In 2014, Burr appeared in an episode, describing his taking a Redeye flight to Indianapolis for a comedy booking. There was something bizarrely familiar about Burr delivering his story, which I couldn't place -- then, a person bobbed up in my memory, like a drifting Sea Mine, someone I hadn't thought about in a long time. And when you get to be an Old, 'a long time' isn't just a trite turn of phrase.

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Burr is almost a dead ringer for Mark, a fellow I once worked with back in the FedGov days for about twenty minutes, almost forty years ago. Mark was from Boston, where his father had been some kind of local notable. He called everyone by their last name (unlike the Left Coast, all of us on a first-name basis with all humanity), and had that cheerful, lean-forward, it's all fucked up, kid; you gotta laugh attitude that most Irish cops I've met seemed to have.

It's an attitude nestled in Catholicism, nourished by angry parents who survived the Depression ("You kids behave or I'll break your damn legs!" Mark recalled his mother saying to siblings and himself when growing up), motivated by fearful memory and PTSD.

It's predicated on a belief that a disappointing humankind, already marked by Original Sin, displays all the other Sins in all their forms on an hourly basis. Laughing at life's ironies, maintaining an outward display of bemused tolerance for the stupidity of human folly, is just putting Christmas decorations on a fresh grave: All the Happy-Shiny is window dressing for something dead serious and final.

Mark always referred to the palm trees lining San Francisco's Embarcadero as "those poles with the bushes on top". He had already been warned once about drinking on the job. I had a reputation for being squeaky-clean, and Mark convinced me to keep his bottle of Jameson's in the lower drawer of my desk ("Nobody's gonna look in there!"). Enabler that I was, I let him.

In those days, Federal law enforcement workspaces were relatively open 'squad bays' filled by large, heavy wooden desks, scarred with cigarette burns at the edges, and each built by inmate labor in a U.S. Federal prison. Several of us (including myself, then) were two-pack-a-day smokers; there was a constant veil and fug of tobacco smoke in the room, the fibrous ceiling tiles tinted a diseased amber color because the HVAC system in the Federal Building only wheezed like an asthmatic runner, and the windows didn't open far.

Mark's usual question, his way of asking How's it goin'? was to walk up to my desk at least two days a week at 7:30AM and say, "So, [Mongo] -- is it 'in the drawer' ?", broad smile and working-class Irish accent on full display; then, retrieve the bottle, wrap it in a copy of the morning edition of the SF Examiner, and stride off confidently to the Men's room.

Why he chose whiskey, which could easily be smelled on the breath, over gin or vodka was a mystery. But when you assume things are fucked, you act out, flip off the boss. You spit in god's eye and say Now what? Let's see where this fuckin' goes next, hah?

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But, one thing Mark could do was tell a story. Watching Burr on the Intertubes, delivering his tale about the plane flight in a sharp, rapid-fire cadence, the wise-guy critical, self-depreciating didn't I fucking tell you Life was like this? humor on full display, brought Mark back into memory.

When I left The Job, the Jameson's remained in my bottom drawer. I felt guilty over my Enabler role and never tried to look Mark up, making an unconscious assumption that his alcoholism would eventually pull him under. The world moved on.

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I was wrong. Opening the Googlegerät and entering Mark's full name, I discovered that he had stopped drinking, gotten married, raised a family; founded a program to teach literacy to adults who could not read; and had spent the past thirty-plus years making an astounding, incredible amount of money in real estate. Mark's experience seems to have turned out better than his basic assumptions of the world he lived in.

Sometimes, life has better endings than the ones we would presume to write; I was wrong. And I laughed.

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