It's Friday and their lips are moving, so that must mean Republican trolls are lying again.

(Parts 1 & 2)

10/22/18 from Truthdig / Axis of Logic (under Fair Use; Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107)

"American History for Truthdiggers: Original Sin"

By Maj. Danny Sjursen:

(Truthdig editor’s note: The past is prologue. The stories we tell about ourselves and our forebears inform the sort of country we think we are and help determine public policy. As our current president promises to “Make America great again,” this moment is an appropriate time to reconsider our past, look back at various eras of United States history and re-evaluate America’s origins. When, exactly, were we “great”?

The “American History for Truthdiggers” series, which begins with the installment below, is a pull-no-punches appraisal of our shared, if flawed, past. The author of the series, Danny Sjursen, an active-duty major in the U.S. Army, served military tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and taught the nation’s checkered, often inspiring past when he was an assistant professor of history at West Point. His wartime experiences, his scholarship, his skill as a writer and his patriotism illuminate these Truthdig posts.)

PART ONE

American Slavery, American Freedom (Colonial Virginia 1607-1676)

Origins matter. Every nation-state has an origin myth, a comforting tale of trials, tribulations and triumphs that form the foundation of “imagined communities.” The United States of America—a self-proclaimed “indispensable nation”—is as prone to exaggerated origin myths as any society in human history. Most of us are familiar with the popular American origin story: Our forefathers, a collection of hardy, pious pioneers, escaped religious persecution in England and founded a “new world”—a shining beacon in a virgin land. Of course, that story, however flawed, refers to the Pilgrims, and Massachusetts, circa 1620. But that’s not the true starting point for English-speaking society in North America.

The first permanent colony was in Virginia, at Jamestown, beginning in 1607. Why, then, do our young students dress in black buckle-top hats and re-create Thanksgiving each year? Where is the commemoration of Jamestown and our earliest American forebears? The omission itself tells a story, that of a chosen, comforting narrative (the legend of the Pilgrims), and the whitewashing of a murkier past along the James River.

The truth is, the United States descends from both origins—Massachusetts and Virginia—and carries the legacy of each into the 21st century. So why do we focus on the Pilgrims and sideline Virginia? A fresh look may help explain.

The Age of ‘Discovery’

When it comes to history—like any story—the starting point is itself informative. I taught freshman history at West Point, a far more progressive and thoughtful school than many readers probably imagine. Nonetheless, with cadets required to take only one semester of U.S. history, we had just 40 lessons to illuminate the American past. So where to start? The official answer—as in so many standard history courses—was Jamestown, Virginia, 1607.

That, of course, is a fascinating, perhaps absurd, choice. Such a starting point omits several thousand years of Native American history, of varied, complex civilizations from modern Canada to Chile. Time being short and all, 1607 remains a common pedagogical starting point. As a result, from the beginning, our understanding of U.S. history is Eurocentric and narrow (covering only the last 400 or so years). Consider that Problem No. 1.

Next, contemplate the language we use to describe the “founding” of new European colonies. This is, say it with me, the “Age of Discovery.” In 1492, Columbus discovered (even though he wasn't first) America. Now, that’s a loaded term. Isn't it just as accurate to say that Native Americans discovered Columbus—a lost and confused soul—when he landed upon their shores?

When we say Europeans discovered the “New World,” we’re—not inadvertently—implying that there was nothing substantial going on in the Americas until the Caucasians showed up. Europe has a dated, chronological history, reaching back at least to the Greeks, which most students learn in elementary school and later on in Western Civilization classes. Not so for the Native Americans. Their public history starts in 1492, or, for Americans, in 1607. What came before, then, hardly matters.

Inauspicious Beginnings

Englishmen came neither to escape religious persecution nor to found a New Jerusalem. Not to Virginia, at least. No, the corporate-backed expedition—by the Virginia Joint Stock Company—sought treasure (think gold), to find a northwest passage to India, and balance the rival Catholic Spaniards. But, first and foremost, they pursued profit.

The expedition barely survived. That should come as little surprise. They chose a malarial swamp for a home. The first ships carried mostly aristocrats—“gentlemen,” as they were then labeled—with a few laborers and carpenters for good measure. Gentlemen didn't work or deal with the dirty business of farming and settling. But they did like to argue—and there were too many “chiefs” on this voyage. The first party did not include any farmers or women. Only 30 percent survived the first winter. Two years later, only 60 out of 500 colonists survived the “Starving Time.” Over the first 17 years, 6,000 people arrived, but only 1,200 were alive in 1624. One guy ate his wife.

So why the disaster? Why the poor site selection and early starvation? First off, the colonists chose a site inland on the James River because they feared detection by the more powerful Spanish. But mainly the disaster came down to colonial motivations. Jamestown was initially about profit, not settlement. Corporate dividends, not community. This was the private sector, not a permanent national venture. In that sense, matters in early Virginia were not unlike modern American economics.

Saved by Tobacco, the First Drug Economy

They never did find much gold, or, for that matter, a northwest passage. Then again, they didn't all starve to death. Rather, the venture was saved by a different sort of “gold”—the cash crop of tobacco. Tobacco changed the entire dynamic of colonization and control in North America. Finally, there was money to be made. The Englishmen shipped the newest vice eastward and pulled a handsome profit in return. Our beloved forefathers were early drug dealers. More migrants now crossed the Atlantic to get in on the tobacco windfall.

The plentiful “gentlemen” of Virginia sought to re-create their landed estates in England. Despite significant early conflict with the native Powhatan Confederacy, large tobacco plantations eventually developed along the coast. Who, though, would work these fields? Certainly not the landowners. The burgeoning aristocracy had two choices: lower-class English or Scots-Irish indentured servants (who worked for a fixed period in the promise of future acres) and African slaves. Whom to choose? Unsurprisingly, ethics played little role, and cost was the defining factor.

When mortality was high in the colony’s early years, plantation owners favored the cheaper indentured (mainly white) servants. But as more families planted corn, kept cattle and improved nutrition, death rates fell and slaves became more appealing. After all, though expensive in upfront costs, slaves worked for life, and the slave owners got to keep their offspring. Nevertheless, for the first several decades, an interracial mix of slaves and servants worked the land in Virginia.

Bacon’s Rebellion and the American Future

The problem with the tobacco economy was one of space. To be profitable, cash crops require expansive acreage, and in Virginia this meant movement inland. This expansion set the Englishmen on a collision course with local Native Americans. Furthermore, what was plantation society to do about those indentured servants who survived and matriculated? Land would have to be found somewhere. (Though not near the coasts and early settlements. The “gentlemen” weren't about to divide up their own large estates.) In order to maintain their chosen societal model—landed aristocracy—in which the wealthiest 10 percent possessed half the wealth and the bottom 60 percent held less than 10 percent of accumulated wealth, new land would have to be found further west—in “Indian territory.”

Thing is, after some bloody, early wars with the Powhatan, most “gentlemen” preferred a stable, secure status quo. (Not another war. That’d be bad for business.) However, falling tobacco prices, increased competition from nearby colonies and the relentless search by the former indentured class for more land brought frontier Virginians into conflict with an easy scapegoat: nearby Native Americans. Frustrated lower-class men—both white and black—rallied behind a young, discontented aristocrat, a firebrand named Nathaniel Bacon. Bacon led his interracial poor-people’s army in attacks on local Natives and, eventually, on Gov. William Berkeley and the establishment “gentlemen.” In 1675 and 1676, Bacon’s throng destroyed plantations and even burned Jamestown before Bacon died of disease (the “bloody fluxe”) and the rebellion petered out.

Bacon’s Rebellion was one of the foundational—and most misunderstood—events in American history. Here, a populist army savagely assaulted hated Native Americans and aristocrats alike. A mix of black and white former indentured servants demonstrated the fragility of Virginian society. The planter class was terrified. In order to avoid a repeat at all costs, the landed gentry made a devil’s bargain. To ensure stability, they realized they must co-opt some of the poor without ceding their own privileged status.

Enter America’s original sins: racism and white privilege. Plantation owners simply hired fewer indentured servants and became more reliant on (black) African chattel slaves for their labor force. The planters also threw a bone to the middling whites, lowering some taxes and allowing more political representation for white male Virginians.

The implications were as disturbing as they were enduring. White unity became the organizing principle of life in colonial Virginia. To be fair, poor whites lived difficult lives and always outnumbered their aristocratic betters. Nonetheless, these lower-class Caucasians benefited from the new, racialized social system. Pale skin became a badge of honor—life may not be optimal, but “at least we are white.” Black freemen became a thing of the past, and soon “blackness” became inseparably associated with slavery and the lowest of social classes. Black skin became a brand of slavery, and runaways could no longer blend into colonial society. Slaves were easily spotted by virtue of their color.

Bacon’s Rebellion linked land, labor and race together in nefarious ways. Land (ownership) remained the path to freedom. Labor remained essential to profiting from the land, and race came to define the relationship between land and labor. After 1676, a class-based system morphed into a race-based system of labor and social structure. The demand for African slaves rose and a triangular trade developed among North America, Africa and Europe. It seemed everyone benefited from slave labor—it became an Atlantic system. The American South had transformed from a society with slaves to a slave society. It would remain so for nearly two centuries. Race became a prevalent fact of life in the Americas—and still is, 342 years later.

There’s nothing simple about America’s origins, and it is well that this is so. In that way, the United States is like most other modern nation-states. Leaving behind exceptionalist rhetoric and exploring uncomfortable truths signify intellectual maturity. Should this country wish to move forward, be its best self and fulfill the dream of its finest rhetoric, then the citizenry must dispense with reassuring myths and grapple with inconvenient truths.

What, then, do Jamestown and early Virginia have to tell us in 2018? Perhaps this: American slavery arose alongside and intertwined with American freedom. Our society descends from a sinister original sin: the development of a race-based caste system along the banks of the James River. Race, class, labor and slavery were inextricably linked in our colonial past. They remain so today.

PART TWO

It is the image Americans are comfortable with. The first Thanksgiving. Struggling Pilgrims—our blessed forebears—saved by the generosity of kindly Native Americans. Two societies coexisting in harmony. If Colonial Virginia was a mess, well, certainly matters were better in Massachusetts. Here are origins all can be proud of.

Our children re-create the scene every November, and we watch them with pride through the lenses of our smartphones. But is this representation of life in Colonial New England an accurate portrait of Anglo-Native relations at Plymouth, or, for that matter, in the larger Massachusetts Bay Colony? Of course it isn't, but nonetheless the impression—the myth—persists. That’s a story unto itself.

Consider this: How many Americans even know there was a difference between Pilgrims and Puritans? The distinctions matter. The Pilgrims, of course, arrived first. Calvinists of humble origins, the Pilgrims were Protestant separatists who believed the mainstream Church of England was beyond saving. They fled England for the Netherlands in the early 17th century, and then, in 1620, about a hundred boarded the Mayflower to go to North America. It was they who landed on Plymouth Rock.

The far more numerous Puritans were also pious, dissenting Protestants, but they initially believed the Church of England could be reformed from within. They were generally wealthier, more prominent citizens. In about 1630, about 1,000 Puritans formed the first wave to settle the area claimed by the Massachusetts Bay Colony. They were, indeed, fleeing the persecution of King Charles I, but—unlike the Pilgrims—they received a royal charter for their colony. They hoped to found a “New Jerusalem” in the New World.

Stark Contrasts: Virginia vs. New England

These weren't the gold-hungry aristocrats of Colonial Virginia. The Puritans (and Pilgrims) came as families—they included women. The Massachusetts climate and natural population growth made for far lower mortality than that experienced at early Jamestown in Virginia. Everyone was willing to work, and the productive family units made, eventually, for bountiful harvests. This was not a land of “gentlemen” and cash crops, as in Virginia, but of dutiful families tilling the land.

The motivations and origins of the two English colonies affected the social structure of each. Differing goals set the tone from the first. Virginians sought to exploit the land, mine its resources, compete with the Spanish and turn a quick profit. Not so the Puritans. They strove to settle, to put down roots and thrive in an idealized community. Their middling origins combined with communal goals and resulted in familial plots with widespread land ownership—another contrast with the tobacco plantations of Jamestown. All this translated into a rough economic equality, at least in the early years. There was also a near total absence of chattel slavery: The climate didn't support the most common cash crops, and so there was little incentive to import Africans to New England.

God Wills It: The Motivations of the Puritans

It all sounds harmonious, idyllic even. Yet something lurked below the surface, something dark and unpleasant to modern eyes. These were fundamentalist zealots! These insufferable, millenarian Calvinists held themselves in shockingly high esteem. They were chosen, they would transform the world by their example. If the Pilgrims sought separation from a world of sin, the Puritans meant to create a New World, an example for all to emulate. It briefs well, and makes for an agreeable origin narrative, but isn't there something disturbing about such a people, about such overbearing confidence?

Ponder the words of John Winthrop, an early governor of the Bay Colony:

"… wee shall find that the God of Israel is among us, when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies, when he shall make us a praise and glory, that men shall say of succeeding plantations: the Lord make it like that of New England: for we must Consider that we shall be as a City upon a Hill, the eyes of all people are upon us. …"

These were people on a mission, the Lord’s mission, come what may. Such people would seem to be on a collision course with the region’s natives and Anglo nonconformists. And this would soon come to pass.

The Puritans’ motivations and goals raise some salient questions. What does it say about, and what are the implications for, a society founded on such colossal self-regard? Is it, ultimately, a good thing? That’s certainly a matter of opinion, but the questions themselves are instructive. Americans must make such queries to get an honest sense of themselves and their origins. This much is hard to argue with: Here, in Massachusetts, we find the geneses of American exceptionalism—the blessing and curse that has shadowed the United States for more than three centuries, driving domestic and especially foreign policy. Divergent modern political figures, from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama, stuck carefully to an American exceptionalist script, in rhetoric if not in deed. One wonders whether this “City on a Hill” milieu, on the whole, has been a positive attribute. This author, at least, tends to doubt it. Perhaps we should mistrust such pride, and conceit, in even its most American forms.

Stifling Dissent: Life in Colonial New England

Could you imagine living with these people, comporting with their way of life? It sounds like a nightmare. Yet we Americans hold these antecedents in high esteem. Perhaps it’s natural, but this much is certain: Such veneration requires a certain degree of willful forgetting, a whitewashing of inconvenient truths about Puritan society.

Sure, Massachusetts avoided the worst famines of Jamestown’s early years, but life in Colonial New England was far from serene. It rarely is in repressive religious societies. Remember, the Puritans constructed exactly what they said they would, a theocracy on the bay. The Massachusetts Bay Colony may indeed have more in common with modern Saudi Arabia—executing “witches” and “sorcerers”—than it does with contemporary Boston. Our ancestors were far more religious than most Americans can fathom. But there’s also a problem of framing; we’ve omitted the uncomfortable bits to fashion an uplifting origin narrative.

There were many subgroups that certainly didn’t enjoy life in early Colonial Massachusetts: religious dissidents, agnostics, free thinkers and, well, assertive women. We’ve all heard of the infamous Salem Witch Trials, but nearly four decades earlier the widow Ann Higgins was executed, hung for witchcraft, after having the audacity to complain that hired carpenters had overcharged her for a remodeling job on her house.

All told, 344 citizens were accused of witchcraft in 17th-century Massachusetts. Twenty were executed. The accused had commonalities that are indicative of the nature of gender relations in the Bay Colony. Seventy-five percent were women. Most of those women were middle-aged or older and demonstrated some degree of independence. Many were suspected of some sort of sexual impropriety. The point is that Colonial New England was inhabited by zealots—conformist and oppressive fundamentalists who strictly policed the boundaries of their exalted theocracy. Forget the Thanksgiving feast: This was Islamic State on the Atlantic!

If life was as idyllic as the settlers intended in hail-the-Protestant-work-ethic Massachusetts Bay, then why were so many colonial “heroes” kicked out? Roger Williams, for example, founder of Rhode Island, promoted religious toleration and some separation of church and state, and asserted (gasp) that settlers ought to buy land from the native inhabitants. His thanks? A ticket straight out of Massachusetts. Slightly less well known was Anne Hutchinson. She had the gall to organize weekly women’s meetings to discuss theology and even contemplated the concept of individual intuition as a path to salvation. She too was banished. There was simply no room for dissent in Puritan society.

‘We Must Burn Them’: Puritan and Native Relations

This, naturally, brings us to the native peoples of New England. If nonconformist Englishmen fared so poorly in Massachusetts, then what of the Indians? You can probably guess.

Once again, as in Virginia, the Native Americans did not, or could not, wipe out the nascent colonial community, even though, initially at least, there were fewer soldiers among the settlers in Massachusetts. The explanation for the settlers surviving among the native Americans is far more complex than the simple myth of the noble, benevolent savage. The Puritans were the “beneficiaries of catastrophe,” for New England native communities had recently been ravaged by infectious European diseases that spread up and down the coastline. The thinned-out native populations thus posed less of a demographic threat to Massachusetts.

Far from the serene images of Thanksgiving amity, Anglo-Indian relations quickly turned from bad to worse. Land was a factor, but not the only one. A permanent settler community such as the Puritans’ would require inevitable expansion and rapidly grow, to be sure. As in Virginia, land ownership cohered with “freedom”—Anglo land and Anglo freedom, that is. Still, in New England, ideology was as much of a stimulus for war as land, wealth or further economic motives. The native tribes, swarthy and “unbelieving” Pequot, Wampanoag, Naggaransetts and others, simply did not fit into the Puritan’s messianic worldview. Conquered or converted were the only acceptable states for local Indians.

Early colonial wars in Massachusetts were as brutal and bloody as wars anywhere else on the North American continent. Here there was a direct connection between the Puritan religion and the cruelty seen in the Pequot War and King Philip’s War. In the Pequot War, Massachusetts militiamen attacked a native fort at Mystic, Connecticut, and through fire and fury burned alive 400 to 700 Indians, mostly women and children. The survivors were sold as slaves.

The militia relied on allied native scouts. Observing the ruthlessness of the Puritan fighting men, one native auxiliary asked Capt. John Underhill, “Why should you be so furious? Should not Christians have more mercy and compassion?” Underhill’s reply was as instructive as it is disturbing:

"I would refer you to David where, when a people is grown to such a height of blood, and sin against God and man … sometimes the Scripture declareth women and children must perish with their parents; some-time the case alters: but we will not dispute it now. We had sufficient light from the word of God for our proceeding."

Should, from time to time, a tinge of doubt betray the Puritans’ devout certainty, faithful zeal quickly assuaged the guilty conscience. Consider the words of another participant in the “Mystic Massacre,” William Bradford: “It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire … and horrible was the stink … but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave the praise thereof to God.”

Nearly simultaneous to the Virginian Bacon’s Rebellion, the Puritans fought King Philip’s—or Metacom’s—War in Massachusetts. Mercilessly executed on both sides, this was a war of survival that forever broke native power and independence in New England. Nearly one in 50 colonists were killed in what was by far the bloodiest war in American history, with 11 times the death rate of World War II. The native leader Metacom, known to the settlers as King Philip, was betrayed by an informer and killed, and his head was displayed on a pole in Plymouth, Mass., for decades. Such was the savagery of colonial war that the tactics and symbolism bring to mind Islamic State in today’s Syrian civil war.

When it came to Native American affairs, the Puritans hardly set the “City on a Hill” example. Or did they? After all, John Winthrop believed the “God of Israel”—a jealous, smiting deity if ever there was one—was among the Puritans, guiding their every move. As noted here earlier, Winthrop claimed this God provided the colonists such strength that 10 of their number could “resist a thousand enemies.” Viciousness and intolerance toward racially distinct, heathen natives were actually at the heart of “City on a Hill” teleology from the start. What Americans now decry in the Greater Middle East is but an echo of their colonial past. That much is worth remembering.

Not So Different: What Virginians and New Englanders Shared

When considering the two origin-societies of Virginia and Massachusetts, the differences are stark and effortlessly leap forth. More difficult, but just as relevant, are their significant commonalities. For it is in the overlap that we find our shared heritage, that which is universal in the American past, and, perhaps, the past of all settler-colonial societies.

Anglo dominance—and arrogance—acutely pervaded both colonial civilizations. In Massachusetts, as in Virginia, conflict and brutality toward the native peoples were regular features of settler life. In each setting, though to differing extents, a fever for land combined with exceptionalist ideology to conquer slave and native alike. For Englishmen, property ownership corresponded with liberty, but all along the Eastern Seaboard, Anglo liberty portended native death and displacement.

If Colonial Virginian society was fundamentally based on white unity at the expense of African slaves, then perhaps Puritan Massachusetts was founded upon Anglo zealotry at the expense of a “savage” Indian “other.” As proud descendants—some of us literally, most figuratively—of these twin settler-colonial enterprises, Americans must grapple with their inconvenient past. Here there’s much work left to be done.

The exceptionalism and chauvinistic Protestantism of the Massachusetts Puritans long influenced the American experiment. From the “City on a Hill” it is but a short journey to Manifest Destiny and the conquest of a continent—native inhabitants be damned!

Again, origins, and origin stories, matter. They inform who we were, and who we are, in stark contrast to who we’d like to think we were and are. America is its best self when it searches its soul and reforms from within. When, that is, it confronts its demons and seeks a better, more inclusive and empathetic future.

ttp://axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/Article_81676.shtml

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/jacobin-fueling-lies-syria/

Óinseach, aother obnoxious racist and liar clinging to her guns and religion (and this blog) resorts to classic "whataboutism" every time Trump's, Republican's, and her over-the-top, outrageous, nonstop lying and crude racism is pointed out, a deflection that is tacit approval of such disgusting behavior.

Téigh trasna ort féin.

Coalage3

The leftie/socialists have been trying to divide the country into separate groups that they can exploit for voting purposes. Note their all too frequent use of terms like White privilege, misogynistic, old white men, Nazi’s, Brown people, Nazi’s, homophobic, Nazi’s, people of color, Nazi’s, and their favorite of all, racist’s.

These hate filled little drones are still trying to figure out why they got their collective asses handed to them in 2016 and the amount of Pepto Bismol, therapy dogs, safe spaces, screaming at the sky events, drum circles, the knitting of little pink pussyhats, and anti-depressants they have consumed attests to that fact.

Jesus, give us a break.

I wish them well in the midterms for if they fail even on a small level, exploding heads will prevail and my dream of a “caravan” of leftie/socialists marching SOUTH seeking Mexican citizenship may not come to fruition.

DianeR,

Lefties never win a disagreement, they just change the subject. If they can't come up with a subject they call you names. They live by their feelings, logic & facts don't matter. Above all, is their obsession with their genetlia. Bill Maher can't get through a program without obssesing on Trumps. Pitiful.

Look how obsessed DS is with Thom's site that shows Thoms proud photos of Thom with a 40 ca. gun, what happened to the leftie gun control screech?

Thoms pic of Hillary.....No No they don't like her anymore.

Thoms pic with the pope and Gandhi, but they hate religion....really?

You've got it right when you say....give me a break!

...meanwhile...

OpEdNews - 5/1/2018 - From Common Dreams

"Fascists Compete To Own America.

Now might be a really good time to examine the origins and nature of the whole right-wing collusion between business and government."

By Thom Hartmann:

Given how reactive hard right snowflakes have gotten in response to a few truth-based jokes from Michelle Wolf, and that Mick Mulvaney has confessed to running a pay-for-play operation out of his congressional office, and Trump is daily breaking the Constitution's emoluments clause, now might be a really good time to examine the origins and nature of the whole right-wing business/government model known as "fascism."

Although most Americans remember that Harry Truman was Franklin D. Roosevelt's Vice President when Roosevelt died in 1945 (making Truman President), Roosevelt had two previous Vice Presidents -- John N. Garner (1933-1941) and Henry A. Wallace (1941-1945).

In early 1944, the New York Times asked Vice President Henry Wallace to, as Wallace noted, "write a piece answering the following questions: What is a fascist? How many fascists have we? How dangerous are they?"

Vice President Wallace's answer to those questions was published in The New York Times on April 9, 1944, at the height of the war against the Axis powers of Germany and Japan.

"The really dangerous American fascists," Wallace wrote, "are not those who are hooked up directly or indirectly with the Axis. The FBI has its finger on those. The dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information."

And [he] continued, "With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power."

In this, Wallace was using the classic definition of the word "fascist" -- the definition Mussolini had in mind when he claimed to have invented the word. (It was actually Italian philosopher Giovanni Gentile who wrote the entry in the Encyclopedia Italiana that said: "Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power." Mussolini, however, affixed his name to the entry, and claimed credit for it.)

As the 1983 American Heritage Dictionary noted, fascism is: "A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism."

Mussolini was quite straightforward about all this. In a 1923 pamphlet titled "The Doctrine of Fascism" he wrote, "If classical liberalism spells individualism, Fascism spells government." But not a government of, by, and for We The People -- instead, it would be a government of, by, and for the most powerful corporate interests in the nation.

In 1938, Mussolini brought his vision of fascism into full reality when he dissolved Parliament and replaced it with the "Camera dei Fasci e delle Corporazioni" -- the Chamber of the Fascist Corporations. Corporations were still privately owned, but now instead of having to sneak their money to folks like Mick Mulvaney or Scott Pruitt and covertly write legislation in a soundproof telephone booth, they were openly in charge of the government.

Vice President Wallace bluntly laid out in his 1944 Times article his concern about the same happening here in America:

"If we define an American fascist as one who in case of conflict puts money and power ahead of human beings, then there are undoubtedly several million fascists in the United States. There are probably several hundred thousand if we narrow the definition to include only those who in their search for money and power are ruthless and deceitful. ... They are patriotic in time of war because it is to their interest to be so, but in time of peace they follow power and the dollar wherever they may lead."

Nonetheless, at that time there were few corporate heads who would run for political office, and, in Wallace's view, most politicians still felt it was their obligation to represent We The People instead of corporate cartels.

"American fascism will not be really dangerous," he added in the next paragraph, "until there is a purposeful coalition among the cartelists, the deliberate poisoners of public information..."

Noting that, "Fascism is a worldwide disease," Wallace further suggest that fascism's "greatest threat to the United States will come after the war" and will manifest "within the United States itself."

In Sinclair Lewis's 1935 novel "It Can't Happen Here," a conservative southern politician is helped to the presidency by a nationally syndicated radio talk show host. The politician -- Buzz Windrip -- runs his campaign on family values, the flag, and patriotism, while being covertly supported by the richest and most powerful of America's corporate elite. Windrip and the talk show host portray advocates of traditional American democracy as anti-American.

When Windrip becomes president, he opens a Guantanamo-style detention center, and the viewpoint character of the book, Vermont newspaper editor Doremus Jessup, flees to Canada to avoid prosecution under new "patriotic" laws that make it illegal to criticize the president.

As Lewis noted in his novel, "the President, with something of his former good-humor [said]: 'There are two [political] parties, the Corporate and those who don't belong to any party at all, and so, to use a common phrase, are just out of luck!' The idea of the Corporate or Corporative State, Secretary [of State] Sarason had more or less taken from Italy."

And, President "Windrip's partisans called themselves the Corporatists, or, familiarly, the 'Corpos,' which nickname was generally used."

Lewis, the first American writer to win a Nobel Prize, was world famous by 1944, as was his book "It Can't Happen Here." And several well-known and powerful Americans, including Prescott Bush, had lost businesses in the early 1940s because of charges by Roosevelt that they were doing business with Hitler.

These events all, no doubt, colored Vice President Wallace's thinking when he wrote:

"Still another danger is represented by those who, paying lip service to democracy and the common welfare, in their insatiable greed for money and the power which money gives, do not hesitate surreptitiously to evade the laws designed to safeguard the public from monopolistic extortion. American fascists of this stamp were clandestinely aligned with their German counterparts before the war, and are even now preparing to resume where they left off, after 'the present unpleasantness' ceases."

Fascists have an agenda that is primarily economic. As the Free Dictionarynotes, fascism/corporatism is "an attempt to create a 'modern' version of feudalism by merging the 'corporate' interests with those of the state."

Feudalism, of course, is one of the most stable of the three historic tyrannies (kingdoms, theocracies, feudalism) that Thomas Jefferson identified as the ones that ruled nations prior to the rise of American republican democracy, and can be roughly defined as "rule by the rich."

Thus, the neo-feudal/fascistic rich get richer (and more powerful) on the backs of the poor and the middle class, an irony not lost on author Thomas Frank, who notes in "What's The Matter With Kansas" that, "You can see the paradox first-hand on nearly any Main Street in middle America -- 'going out of business' signs side by side with placards supporting [the Republican president]."

The businesses "going out of business" are, in fascist administrations, usually those of locally owned small and medium-sized companies. As Wallace wrote, some in big business "are willing to jeopardize the structure of American liberty to gain some temporary advantage."

He added:

"Monopolists who fear competition and who distrust democracy because it stands for equal opportunity would like to secure their position against small and energetic enterprise [companies]. In an effort to eliminate the possibility of any rival growing up, some monopolists would sacrifice democracy itself."

But American fascists who would want former CEOs to fill the roles as the leaders of the GOP, and write legislation with corporate interests in mind, don't generally talk to We The People about their real agenda, or the harm it does to small businesses and working people.

Instead, as Hitler did with the trade union leaders and the Jews, they point to a "them" to pin with blame and distract people from the harms of their economic policies.

In a comment prescient of Donald Trump's recent suggestion that America itself is at risk because of brown-skinned immigrants, Wallace continued:

"The symptoms of fascist thinking are colored by environment and adapted to immediate circumstances. But always and everywhere they can be identified by their appeal to prejudice and by the desire to play upon the fears and vanities of different groups in order to gain power. It is no coincidence that the growth of modern tyrants has in every case been heralded by the growth of prejudice. It may be shocking to some people in this country to realize that, without meaning to do so, they hold views in common with Hitler when they preach discrimination..."

But even at this, Wallace noted, American fascists would have to lie to the people in order to gain power. And, because they were in bed with the nation's largest corporations -- who could gain control of newspapers and broadcast media -- they could promote their lies with ease.

"The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact," Wallace wrote. "Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism. They use every opportunity to impugn democracy."

In his strongest indictment of the tide of fascism the Vice President of the United States saw rising in America, he added:

"They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection." (emphasis added)

In contrast to GOP fascism, the progressive vision of an egalitarian America in which very large businesses and media monopolies are broken up under the 1890 Sherman Anti-Trust Act (which Reagan stopped enforcing, leading to the mergers and acquisitions frenzy that continues to this day) was the driving vision of the New Deal (and of "Trust Buster" Teddy Roosevelt a generation earlier).

As Wallace's President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, said when he accepted his party's renomination in 1936 in Philadelphia, "...out of this modern civilization, economic royalists [have] carved new dynasties.... It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction.... And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man...."

Speaking indirectly of the fascists that Wallace would directly name almost a decade later, Roosevelt brought the issue to its core:

"These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power." But, he thundered, "Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power!"

Standing up to corporate and billionaire power, now firmly in charge of the Trump administration, we again stand at the same crossroad Roosevelt and Wallace confronted during the Great Depression and World War II.

Fascism is rising in America, this time calling itself "conservativism." The Republican politicians and their billionaire donors' behavior today eerily parallels that day in 1936 when Roosevelt said, "In vain they seek to hide behind the flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the flag and the Constitution stand for."

It's particularly ironic that the very news media trashing Michelle Wolf seems blind to the fact that the billionaire Koch Network and its related organizations now have more employees and a larger infrastructure and better funding than the GOP. Republicans are so beholden to fossil fuel billionaire's money that they're willing to lie about basic science and put our entire species at risk.

Like Eisenhower's farewell address, which also warned about the "misplaced" rise of corporate power in the defense industry, President Roosevelt and Vice President Wallace's warnings about the rise of corporate and billionaire power are more urgent now than ever before.

https://www.opednews.com/articles/Fascists-Compete-To-Own-Am-by-Thom-Hartmann-American-Facism_American-Hegenomy_American-History_American-Presidents-180501-19.html

CoalAge3

Coalage3,

I had low expectations of Alex after this.

Alec Baldwin apologises for calling daughter, 11, a 'rude thoughtless pig'Alec Baldwin apologised for his angry voicemail to his daughter, blaming the stress of his custody fight with Kim Basinger and insisting: "I have a normal relationship with my daughter."

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-449775/Alec-Baldwin-apologises-calling-daughter-11-rude-thoughtless-pig.html

What can you say about a man who thinks this is normal?

OMG,

NASTY WOMEN: DEMOCRAT WOMEN Strip Naked To Persuade People To Vote Against Republicans…Twitter DESTROYS Them

https://100percentfedup.com/nasty-women-democrat-women-strip-naked-to-persuade-people-to-vote-against-republicanstwitter-destroys-them/

I'm pretty sure their Stuff is safe...who would want to grab it?

HotCoffee, I tend to ignore the little pony as it is obvious that there is a lot of alcohol involved as the keyboard is frantically pounded, but I do my best to annoy the little fella because it clearly drives him/her/alphabet up a wall and it is the only attention given until mom calls him/her/alphabet to "come up for dinner".

Todays interesting short video is Trumps visit to the hospital in PA where some were recovering from their wounds. You will never see this on the mainstream media because all leftie/socialists hate the police (unless they need them), but 1:20 of Trump and the first lady visiting the wounded.

Till later.

Hey DianeR,

I haven't read a thing posted by pony since the flip off...articles I'm posting are responses to counter lefts desire to keep shifting topics as they lose out on each!

Well, I guess I did point out the hero worship of Thom is misplaced! My Bad!

Just no point to it, that much hate must really eat at him/her/whatever. The obsession with p*ssy grabbing shows total lack of maturity at whatever age as do the gifs. Not to mention the determination to be annoying with no results.....yep it's a temper trantrum.

Enjoy!

Ok, Facts are Facts, and the real facts are that President Trump has given us
The Lowest ever black unemployment rate✅
The Lowest ever Hispanic unemployment✅
The Lowest women unemployment in 60 yrs
The Korean War is finally over ✅
The Economy is best it has ever been✅
Our Taxes are at 60 year low ✅
ISIS is all but obliterated ✅
The USA is energy independent ✅
So what the hell is the left resisting?

OpEdNews - 3/16/2018 - From Alternet

"The Trump Administration Is a Government of Billionaires and Their Sycophants.

The GOP lackeys are eager to do the bidding of whichever oligarch will give them the most money."

By Thom Hartmann:

A few years back, former President Jimmy Carter told me that, because of Citizens United and its predecessors (like the Buckley decision in 1976), we're no longer a democracy, but instead, "an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery."

For proof that Carter was right, one need look no further than Mike Pompeo taking Rex Tillerson's job, stepping into Thomas Jefferson's shoes as Secretary of State.

While Pompeo has an impressive resume on paper, something endlessly mentioned on cable news and other corporate media, the one skill-set that has truly enabled his rise to power, first in Congress and now in the Executive Branch, is his fine-tuned ability to suck up to #MorbidlyRich billionaires.

Prior to Trump arriving, Pompeo was one of Congress's single largest beneficiariesof money from the Koch brothersand groups associated with them. Forget Pompeo's army service and Harvard law degree; you don't get to be the favorite son of the morbidly rich if you don't know how to suck up to them.

Billionaire Trump, like so many others of America's billionaire oligarchs, doesn't take kindly to people who have their own minds. He wants fealty and sycophancy, not brilliance or competence.

For example, Rex Tillerson, actually looking at facts and political realities, made the mistake of pointing out to Trump that tearing up the Iran no-nukes deal at the same time you're trying to negotiate a brand-new no-nukes deal with North Korea was contradictory messaging. What country, after all, would want to cut a deal with a partner who kills agreements unilaterally without contractual justification?

Tillerson, of course, was right. But he wasn't sucking up to Trump in the way the oligarch wanted (and apparently, needed). Tillerson even occasionally put our nation's security ahead of his subservience to Trump. Big mistake.

Many members of today's billionaire class think of themselves as "self-made," and so have a sneering disregard for the working people of America who "merely" aspire to the American Dream of being in the middle class with a safe job, good benefits, and a secure retirement. These oligarchs are more concerned with their profits than with the impact of their products or services on our country.

And they only want people around them who share their vision of their own greatness; who, in other words, are pathetic suck-ups. Pompeo has developed this to an art form.

After years of sucking at the Koch teat, Pompeo apparently realized that Trump, too, wanted only to surround himself with people who eagerly agreed with him. Probably Trump is even needier than the Kochs, and so would only elevate people who tell him daily how brilliant and strong and noble he is.

Thus, Pompeo apparently saw a career opportunity to ingratiate himself with another billionaire oligarch.

To make it happen, Pompeo changed the normal daily routine by which the president is briefed by the CIA. Instead of it being done with clear, cold precision by a career intelligence officer, henceforth, Pompeo decreed, the Director of the CIA himself (Pompeo) would take hours out of his day to make the daily trek to the White House to hang out with Trump and give him a pleasant daily tongue-bath.

Trump loved it.

Just like when he was a shill for the Kochs, Pompeo is more than willing to take any position -- regardless of how badly it may hurt America or risk war or environmental destruction -- that's being pushed by his new billionaire overlord.

One imagines Pompeo as a loyal dog, constantly eager to please his master.

On its surface, this seems like an indictment of Pompeo himself, but it's really not. It's an indictment of the entire political system in the United States, as it has been re-invented by a "conservative" Supreme Court that created a brand-new legal structure around the notion that "corporations are persons" and using money to buy politicians is First Amendment-protected "free speech."

No legislature or president had ever advocated those radical, anti-democratic positions, and neither had any American political party other than the Libertarians. The 1974 campaign finance reforms after the Nixon scandals, struck down by SCOTUS in 1976 with the Buckley case, were scrupulously bipartisan.

But Lewis Powell reached out to the oligarchs who often hired his legal services, and in 1971 his infamous "Powell Memo" charted how corporations and billionaires should take over virtually all the institutions of America, from Congress and the courts to our schools and local governments.

Later that year, Richard Nixon put Powell on the Supreme Court, where he dutifully made the Buckley case happen in 1976, throwing open the door to corruption of our political system by American oligarchs. Citizens United, in 2010, took it even further, allowing foreign governments and non-U.S. oligarchs to take a simple step through a U.S. corporation (like, for example, the NRA) to, themselves, own American politicians.

In a breathtaking power seizure not authorized by the Constitution, the Supreme Court singlehandedly created an entire new body of law, and thus began the process of turning America from a representative democracy into an oligarchy.

And now, predictably, we have a billionaire oligarch as president, multiple billionaire oligarchs in his Cabinet, and the billionaire oligarch Kochs committing hundreds of millions of dollars to oligarch-friendly Republicans in every election cycle.

In an oligarchic nation, there is one singular skill for political success: one must willingly, ably, and enthusiastically suck up to the rich and powerful, subordinating one's ethics, reason, and even humanity.

This is a tragedy for both the USA and for democracies all over the world that emulate us.

Oligarchy (and its companion, strong-man pseudo-populism) is spreading rapidly, subsuming former liberal democracies like Turkey, the Philippines, and Hungary while nibbling away at other democratic countries. China is holding oligarchy up as the new model for the world.

We must reverse these disastrous Supreme Court decisions with a Constitutional Amendment, explicitly stating that corporations are not people and that money is not speech; otherwise, our rapid march to total oligarchy will continue to gather speed and power.

And suck-up politicians like Pompeo will continue to rise to the top, eager and willing to do the bidding of whichever oligarch will give them the most money, prestige and power.

https://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Trump-Administration-I-by-Thom-Hartmann-Billionaires_Corporations_Government-Crime_Trump-Bully-In-Chief-180316-730.html

The Supreme Court gets Trumped...

Gobshite.

Looks like Óinseach's "whataboutism" google machine is down a couple quarts. Here, try this...

Army assessment of migrant caravans undermines Trump’s rhetoric.

Michael Cohen says Trump made racist remarks in conversations.

Fact Check: Trump’s Falsehood-Laden Speech on Immigration.

Operation Midterm Demagogue...

OpEdNews - 1/8/2018 - From Alternet

"Time to Overthrow Our Rulers.

Is it time to bring a monarchy to the United States, or time to end one?"

By Thom Hartmann:

Is it time to bring a monarchy to the United States? Or is it time to end one?

The New York Times recently ran a fascinating article by Leslie Wayne putting forth arguments from the International Monarchist League. Summarizing them, Wayne wrote, "Their core arguments: Countries with monarchies are better off because royal families act as a unifying force and a powerful symbol; monarchies rise above politics; and nations with royalty are generally richer and more stable."

What the author misses is that we already have an aristocracy here in the United States: rule by the rich. In fact, much of American history is the story of the battle between the interests of the "general welfare" of our citizens, and the interests of the #MorbidlyRich.

Here's where we are right now:

• A billionaire oligarch programs his very own entire television news network to promote the interests of the billionaire class, with such effectiveness that average working people are repeating billionaire-helpful memes like "cut regulations," "shrink government," and "cut taxes" -- policies that will cause more working people and their children to get sick and/or die, will transfer more money and power from "we the people" to a few oligarchs, and will lower working-class wages over time.
• A small group of billionaires have funneled so much money into our political sphere that "normal" Republicans like Jeff Flake and Bob Corker point out that they couldn't get elected in today's environment because they'd face rightwing-billionaire-funded primary challengers.
• The corporate media (including online media), heavily influenced by the roughly billion dollars the Koch Network, Adelson, Mercers, etc. poured through their advertising coffers and into their profits in the last election, won't even mention in their "news" reporting that billionaire oligarchs are mainly calling the tunes in American politics, particularly in the GOP.
• Former President Jimmy Carter pointed out on my radio show that the US "is now an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery," in part as a result of the right-wing Supreme Court decision in Citizens United.
• Nobody in corporate media, even on the "corporate left," is willing to explicitly point out how billionaires and the companies that made them rich control and define the boundaries of "acceptable" political debate in our country.
• Thus, there's no honest discussion in American media of why the GOP denies climate change (to profit petro-billionaires), no discussion of the daily damage being done to our consumer and workplace protections, and no discussion of the horrors being inflicted on our public lands and environment by Zinke and Pruitt, the guys billionaire-toady Mike Pence chose to run Interior and the EPA. There's not even a discussion of the major issue animating American politics just one century ago: corporate mergers and how they damage small business and small towns.

It's been this way before in American history, though not in our lifetimes. The last time the morbidly rich had this much power in American politics was the 1920s, when an orgy of tax-cutting and deregulation of banking led to the Republican Great Depression.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt stepped up to challenge those he called the Economic Royalists, explicitly calling them out. In 1936, FDR said:

"For out of this modern civilization economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things. Through new uses of corporations, banks and securities, new machinery of industry and agriculture, of labor and capital -- all undreamed of by the Fathers -- the whole structure of modern life was impressed into this royal service.

"There was no place among this royalty for our many thousands of small business men and merchants who sought to make a worthy use of the American system of initiative and profit...

"It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over Government itself."

"They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction. In its service new mercenaries sought to regiment the people, their labor, and their property.

"And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man."

Roosevelt, then the president of the United States, even explicitly called for the "overthrow of this kind of power":

"These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power.

"Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power.

"In vain they seek to hide behind the Flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the Flag and the Constitution stand for.

"Now, as always, they stand for democracy, not tyranny; for freedom, not subjection; and against a dictatorship by mob rule and the over-privileged alike."

The American people overwhelmingly agreed with FDR, particularly after they'd seen how badly "dictatorship by the over-privileged" worked out for us in 1929. The result was that from 1932 until 1980 American politicians knew how important it was for government, representing the best interests of both our nation and all of its people, to hold back the political power that the morbidly rich could marshal with their great wealth.

This was such conventional wisdom in both parties that Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote to his brother Edgar in 1956:

"Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history.

"There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid."

And business knew it, too. Big corporations and wealthy businesspeople largely stayed away from politics from the 1930s onward, not wanting to draw the ire of the American people.

Until 1971. In August of that year, Lewis Powell, a lawyer who largely defended tobacco and the interests of the Virginia's upper classes, wrote an apocalyptic memo to his neighbor and friend who was the head of the US Chamber of Commerce. In it, he suggested that America itself was under attack from "leftists" and people on "college campuses."

The solution, Powell proposed, was for a small group of very, very wealthy people to reshape American public opinion through think tanks, funding of universities and schools, and an all-out assault on the media. Take over the courts and at least one of the political parties, he suggested, and wrest control of our economy away from government regulation.

As I noted in The Crash of 2016:

Powell's most indelible mark on the nation was not to be his 15-year tenure as a Supreme Court Justice, but instead that memo, which served as a declaration of war -- a war by the Economic Royalists against both democracy and what they saw as an overgrown middle class. It would be a final war, a bellum omnium contra omnes, against everything the New Deal and the Great Society had accomplished.

It wasn't until September 1972, 10 months after the Senate confirmed Powell to the Supreme Court, that the public first found out about the Powell Memo (the actual written document had the word "Confidential" stamped on it -- a sign that Powell himself hoped it would never see daylight outside of the rarified circles of his rich friends). Although by then, however, it had already found its way to the desks of CEOs all across the nation and was, with millions in corporate and billionaire money, already being turned into real actions, policies, and institutions.

During its investigation into Powell as part of the nomination process, the FBI never found the memo, but investigative journalist Jack Anderson did, and he exposed it in a September 28th, 1972, column titled, "Powell's Lesson to Business Aired."

Anderson wrote, "Shortly before his appointment to the Supreme Court, Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. urged business leaders in a confidential memo to use the courts as a 'social, economic, and political' instrument."

Pointing out that how the memo wasn't discovered until after Powell was confirmed by the Senate, Anderson wrote, "Senators...never got a chance to ask Powell whether he might use his position on the Supreme Court to put his ideas into practice and to influence the court in behalf of business interests."

This was an explosive charge being leveled at the nation's rookie Supreme Court Justice, a man entrusted with interpreting the nation's laws with complete impartiality.

But Jack Anderson was no stranger to taking on American authority, and no stranger to the consequences of his journalism. He'd exposed scandals from the Truman, Eisenhower, Nixon, and later the Reagan administrations. He was a true investigative journalist.

In his report on the memo, Anderson wrote, "[Powell] recommended a militant political action program, ranging from the courts to the campuses."

Back in 1936, Franklin Roosevelt had declared war on his generation's Economic Royalists and booted the worst of them out of the nation's political, economic, and cultural institutions. But now, two generations later, Lewis Powell was speaking of another war.

Powell's memo was both a direct response to Roosevelt's battle cry decades earlier, and a response to the tumult of the 1960's.

He wrote, "No thoughtful person can question that the American economic system is under broad attack."

When Sydnor and the Chamber received the Powell Memo, corporations were growing tired of their second-class status in America.

Even though the previous 40 years had been a time of great growth and strength for the American economy and America's middle-class workers -- and a time of sure and steady growth and increases of profits for corporations -- CEOs felt something was missing.

If only they could find a way to wiggle back into the people's minds (who were just beginning to forget the Royalists' previous exploits of the 1920s), then they could get their tax cuts back; they could trash the "burdensome" regulations that were keeping the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat safe; and the banksters among them could inflate another massive economic bubble to make themselves all mind-bogglingly rich. It could, if done right, be a return to the "Roaring 20s."

But how could they do this? How could they convince Americans to take another shot at what was widely considered a dangerous free-market ideology and economic framework and that Americans once knew preceded each Great Crash and war?

Lewis Powell had an answer, and he reached out to the Chamber of Commerce -- the hub of corporate power in America -- to lay out a strategy to reclaim their power with a strategy.

As Powell wrote, "Strength lies in organization, in careful long-range planning and implementation, in consistency of action over an indefinite period of years, in the scale of financing available only through joint effort, and in the political power available only through united action and national organizations." Thus, Powell said, "The role of the National Chamber of Commerce is therefore vital."

In the nearly-6,000-word memo, Powell called on corporate leaders to launch an economic and ideological assault on college and high school campuses, the media, the courts, and Capitol Hill.

The objective was simple: The revival of a Royalist-controlled so-called "free market" system.

Or, as Powell put it, using Royalist rhetoric, "[T]he ultimate issue...[is the] survival of what we call the free enterprise system, and all that this means for the strength and prosperity of America and the freedom of our people."

The first area of attack Powell encouraged the Chamber to focus on was the education system. "[A] priority task of business -- and organizations such as the Chamber -- is to address the campus origin of this hostility [to big business]," Powell wrote.

What worried Powell was the new generation of young Americans growing up to resent corporate culture. He believed colleges were filled with "Marxist professors," and that the pro-business agenda of Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover had fallen into disrepute since the Great Depression. He knew that winning this war of economic ideology in America required spoon-feeding the next generation of leaders the doctrines of a free-market theology, from high school all the way through graduate and business school.

At the time, college campuses were rallying points for the progressive activism sweeping the nation, as young people demonstrated against poverty, the Vietnam War, and in support of Civil Rights.

So Powell put forward a laundry list of ways the Chamber could re-retake the higher-education system. First, create an army of corporate-friendly think tanks that could influence education. "The Chamber should consider establishing a staff of highly qualified scholars in the social sciences who do believe in the system," he wrote.

Then, go after the textbooks. "The staff of scholars," Powell wrote, "should evaluate social science textbooks, especially in economics, political science and sociology...This would include assurance of fair and factual treatment of our system of government and our enterprise system, its accomplishments, its basic relationship to individual rights and freedoms, and comparisons with the systems of socialism, fascism and communism."

Powell argued that the Civil Rights movement and the Labor movement were already in the process of re-rewriting textbooks.

"We have seen the civil rights movement insist on re-writing many of the textbooks in our universities and schools. The labor unions likewise insist that textbooks be fair to the viewpoints of organized labor." Powell was concerned the Chamber of Commerce was not doing enough to stop this growing progressive influence and replace it with a pro-plutocratic perspective.

"Perhaps the most fundamental problem is the imbalance of many faculties," Powell pointed out. "Correcting this is indeed a long-range and difficult project. Yet, it should be undertaken as a part of an overall program. This would mean the urging of the need for faculty balance upon university administrators and boards of trustees." As in, the Chamber needs to infiltrate university boards in charge of hiring faculty to make sure only corporate-friendly professors are hired.

But Powell's recommendations weren't exclusive to college campuses; he targeted high schools as well.

"While the first priority should be at the college level, the trends mentioned above are increasingly evidenced in the high schools. Action programs, tailored to the high schools and similar to those mentioned, should be considered," he urged.

Next, Powell turned the corporate dogs on the media. As Powell instructed, "Reaching the campus and the secondary schools is vital for the long-term. Reaching the public generally may be more important for the shorter term."

Powell added, "It will...be essential to have staff personnel who are thoroughly familiar with the media, and how most effectively to communicate with the public."

He then went on to advocate that same system used for the monitoring of college textbooks be applied to television and radio networks. "This applies not merely to so-called educational programs...but to the daily 'news analysis' which so often includes the most insidious type of criticism of the enterprise system."

This was not, of course, the first time that American oligarchs and their supplicants plotted to subvert American democracy in favor of a harsh capitalist-controlled "free enterprise" system that handed virtually all the spoils of business over to a wealthy few.

In the early 1880s, railroad barons funded six major attempts at the US Supreme Court to create, from the 14th Amendment, a "right of corporate personhood." In 1886, although the Court rejected their theory for the last and final time, the Clerk of the Court, John Chandler Bancroft Davis, inserted into the not-legally-binding headnote of the Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad case that the Chief Justice had, offhandedly, certified corporate personhood.

Reacting to that and the general rise of the men then called robber barons, Democratic President Grover Cleveland, in his 1888 State of the Union address, said:

"The gulf between employers and the employed is constantly widening, and classes are rapidly forming, one comprising the very rich and powerful, while in another are found the toiling poor.

"As we view the achievements of aggregated capital, we discover the existence of trusts, combinations, and monopolies, while the citizen is struggling far in the rear or is trampled to death beneath an iron heel.

"Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people's masters."

From President Cleveland's comments, you can draw a straight line to the trust busting and inheritance tax of progressive Republican Teddy Roosevelt in the first decade of the 20th century.

But the oligarchs fought back and, in the election of 1920, regained the power to cut taxes and regulations sufficiently that the rich got explosively richer, while the entire economy was set up for the Great Crash. (Warren Harding ran for president with two slogans -- "More business in government, less government in business" [privatize and deregulate], and cutting the top tax rate from 90% to 25%...both of which he did.)

And Lewis Powell's contribution to today's problems is easily found in the 1976 Buckley v Valeo decision, which struck down many of the campaign finance laws that had been passed in the wake of the Nixon scandals. Money transferred from billionaires to politicians, he and his conservative friends on the court ruled, wasn't "money" -- instead, it was Constitutionally-protected First Amendment Free Speech.

Just in time for the Reagan Revolution, the morbidly rich could again own individual politicians, and with the 2013 McCutcheon case, the Court ruled that morbidly rich individuals could own a virtually unlimited number of politicians. Citizens United, in 2010, radically expanded corporate personhood and the rights of billionaires and corporations to influence politics.

Thus, here we are again.

We have a billionaire oligarch in the White House.

We have a man as VP who's such a toady to oligarchs he actually promoted the idea in 2000 that tobacco doesn't cause cancer, and today denies climate science on behalf of the petrobillionaires who have funded much of his political career.

We have an entire Republican Party that's been captured by toxic-emissions corporations, petro-billionaires, and others among the morbidly rich. On the left, thanks to the DLC and its heirs, substantial parts of the Democratic Party are beholden to the banking, insurance, and pharmaceutical industries (although the Congressional Progressive Caucus is working to change this).

The Washington Post recently ran an article about how the very institutions of America are beginning to break down under the sustained assault of the oligarchs (although the Post doesn't use that word). The main point of the article is that Donald Trump actually believes that both Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama, committed major crimes, and that the attorney general and others in the Department of Justice covered up those crimes.

Where did Trump get such a wild idea? It seems certain that he got it from billionaire oligarch Rupert Murdoch's Fox News. And because he actually believes that previous presidents got away with committing major crimes both to win elections and to stay in office, he apparently thinks he should be able to as well.

It's perhaps amusing to well-informed Americans when their friends and relatives spout the billionaire-enabling propaganda that Fox dishes out every day. But there's nothing amusing about a president of the United States believing, based on what he learns in right-wing media, that he can easily get away with breaking the law. This is the result of the billionaire capture of our public spaces, driving a "profits over democracy" mentality.

To save our republic, we must acknowledge that the American aristocracy of the morbidly rich is destroying our country. And then overturn (via constitutional amendment) the twin policies of right-wingers on our Supreme Court that say that billionaires can own their own personal politicians, and that corporations are "persons" with human rights.

Once we reject America's new self-appointed royalty, with their billionaire and corporate money fouling our system, our elected officials can restore protections for working people -- and we can once again see our wages begin to rise like they did for 40 straight years before the advent of Reaganism.

Only then can we bring back rules to keep the oligarch's poisonous money out of our political system, and begin to break up their control of American business and media so that small- and medium-sized businesses, unions, and local media can once again thrive. And, with them, we can return to something resembling a democracy.

https://www.opednews.com/articles/1/Time-to-Overthrow-Our-Rule-by-Thom-Hartmann-Aristocracy_Corporations_Money_Politics-180108-611.html

Truth isn't truth; collusion isn't collusion.

Tips for stopping extremist violence.

Republican hellcare

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The Thom Hartmann Program - 11/2/18

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