History will eat the rich, but unfortunately they’re dragging the rest of us down with them

Brad DeLong has a few words of warning for the rich plutocrats who support Trump and are enjoying the ill-gotten gains of their gigantic tax cut. Pay attention to history, because it really sucks to be rich under a tyranny. You’ve created a machine that sucks wealth upward, and when you’ve got all the money, you become the target.

To be blunt: a social democratic middle-class society is much better society in which to have a large stock of entrepreneurial, inherited, or rent-derived wealth than is a communist society. But it is also a much friendlier society to the wealthy than is a fascist society. And social democracy and fascism—hard or, if you are lucky, soft—are the only options the future will allow: tertium non datur.

The political descendants of the politicians today you support who lead chants of “lock her up“ will be the greatest threat to the liberty, the wealth, and perhaps even the lives of those of your grandchildren and great grandchildren who are plutocrats. Look ahead into the future a little bit. Do not focus on the pile of moolah under your nose.

It did not take long for the breakdown of elite political norms provoked by the desire of the political military plutocrats of the Roman Republic to aggrandize the benefits of the post Hannibal creation of the empire to lead the vultures home to roost. In Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica led a mob of senators into the street, shouting “Now that the consul has betrayed the state, let every man who wishes to uphold the laws follow me!” to murder the tribune Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus and annul the Lex Sempronia Agraria as too great a distribution of the profits of empire away from the oligarchy. Ten years later Lucius Opimius armed himself with the legal figleaf of the Senatus Consultum Ultimum before murdering Tiberius’s brother Gaius and 3000 of Gaius’s affinity. Thus was the Roman Republic set on to the “why speak of laws? we carry swords” road of Marius, Sulla, Pompey, Crassus, Caesar, and Octavian—and that road ended at a place where the wealthy found themselves attainted and executed at the pleasure of the princeps in order to fund bribes to praetorians.

Under the Roman Empire, the way to become the subject of a treason trial wasn’t necessarily to have committed treason — it was to have a big pot of wealth that the Emperor wanted. Look up the law of maiestas. Look up delatores. If we go down that path,the rich are going to have to hide, or face death, disgrace, and most intolerable to you greedy motherfuckers, confiscation of all of your properties by the Top Dog, whoever that is.

We aren’t going to last as long as the Roman Empire, though. One thing about an imperial tyranny where a few authoritarians can lay down an iron law is that it can last quite a long time — 1500 years of bloody imperial Roman history was quite impressive. We’ve added something novel to the mix here in the United States of America: we’ve given all the citizens a megaphone, and every lunatic fringe element is babbling away. The likes of Alex Jones gibbering away incessantly in the background, the transparent propaganda of Fox News hypnotizing the foolish, militias popping up everywhere with ludicrous interpretations of the Constitution, megachurches peddling death cult Christianity — in addition to undermining democracy, the right-wing authoritarians have normalized crazy. Destabilizing the country is what they want, but they’re going to reap what they sow.

You know, I grew up in the shadow of The Bomb, where there was fear of a looming apocalypse everywhere. We thought that what was going to kill us was our dangerous technological brilliance — we were just too dang smart for our own good. We were wrong. It’s our ignorance that is going to destroy us, our contempt for the social sciences and humanities, our dismissal of the importance of history, sociology, and psychology in maintaining a healthy, stable society that people would want to live in. A complex society requires a framework of cooperation and interdependence to survive, and without people who care about how it works and monitors its functioning, it’s susceptible to parasites and exploiters and random wreckers. Ignorance and malice allow a Brexit to happen, or a Trump to get elected, or a Sulla to march on Rome to ‘save the Republic’.

This is my dream

We must destroy the Republican party. Fairly, but utterly.

Then in 2020, Trump must be crushed at the ballot box. His corrupt administration must be thoroughly investigated, and any criminal acts punished. More importantly, the economic base of Republican plutocracy — Wall Street, monopolist corporations, and idle rich heirs and heiresses — must also be crushed. Monopolies must be broken up, taxes on the rich and corporations dramatically increased, and the size, profitability, and power of Wall Street sharply reduced with cricket bat regulations.

Meanwhile, Democrats must strengthen their own political base by strengthening democratic freedoms. They should make D.C. and Puerto Rico states, establish an inalienable right to vote, make Election Day a holiday, and strengthen and update labor law to spark a new wave of union organizing. Then they must overhaul the economy to cut the middle and working class in on the fruits of the last 40 years of economic growth, actually provide health care for all, and perhaps strengthen the welfare state for parents and children. Only by establishing a new political economy that functions for the great majority of the citizenry — as FDR and the New Deal Democrats did in the 1930s — can Republicans be firmly exiled from political power. For a political party as diseased as the GOP, a generation in the political wilderness is just what the doctor ordered.

Ahed Tamimi: now that’s bravery

Tamimi is a Palestinian teenager who was protesting the occupation of her home by Israeli soldiers — and she is not shy about kicking and slapping these heavily armed men who tower over her.

If you’re wondering why Tamimi is so furious, you haven’t been paying attention. The government of Israel has been following a pattern of brutal oppression for decades.

Two Fridays ago, one week before Ahed chased the soldiers from her yard, it was her cousin Mohammad, one of her little brother’s closest friends. A soldier shot him in the face. The bullet—rubber-coated but a bullet nonetheless—lodged in his skull. A week later, he was still in a medically-induced coma.

If you’ve seen the video that led to her arrest, you might have wondered why Ahed was so angry at the soldiers who entered her yard, why she yelled at them to leave, why she slapped them. That’s why. That and a thousand other reasons. Her uncle and her cousin killed. Her mother shot in the leg and on crutches for most of a year. Her parents and her brother taken from her for months at a time. And never a night’s rest without the possibility that she might wake, as she did early Tuesday morning, as she had so many times before, to soldiers at the door, in her house, in her room, there to take someone away.

Tamimi has now been arrested. Apparently trying to throw soldiers who are occupying your front yard out is a crime so heinous it warrants threats of life imprisonment.

The gulf between the two opposing fantasies that define Israel’s self-image has only grown with the years: a country that still imagines itself to be David to the Arab Goliath—noble, outnumbered, and brave—while taking pride in the unrivaled lethality and sophistication of its military. Ahed made both those convictions crumble. Before the world, she had again revealed Israel to be the bully. And watching that video, they knew that their guns are worthless, their strength a sham. For revealing those secrets, for showing the world how weak and fearful they know themselves to be, Ahed had to be punished. And so the Defense Minister of the country with the most technologically advanced military in the world stooped from his throne to personally promise that not just Ahed and her parents but “everyone around them” would get “what they deserve.” The Minister of Education was more specific: Ahed should be locked up for life, he said, so serious was her crime.

That’s not all. Some Israelis think the appropriate response would be to torture or rape her.

Prominent Israeli journalist Ben Caspit caused international furor last week, when he wrote in his Maariv article that “in the case of the girls, we should exact a price at some other opportunity, in the dark, without witnesses and cameras”.

Israel is our ally, as is Saudi Arabia. When will we wake up and realize that our friends are horrible and abusive, and maybe shouldn’t be our friends?

(Maybe when we wake up and realize the US has been horrible and abusive to its own citizens.)

A repugnant and short-sighted “what if?” scenario

Have you ever wondered how long the US military would last in a war against the rest of the world? Let’s ask a a delusional military fantasist!

What would happen if the U.S. found itself facing off against the rest of the world? Not just its traditional rivals, but what if it had to fight off its allies like the United Kingdom, France, and South Korea as well?

In short, America would stomp them. Especially if it pulled back to the continental U.S. and made its stand there.

I guess we’re going to pretend Vietnam never happened by imagining that we bunker down behind our borders with a wall of steel facing outwards. The author then laughs triumphantly about all our aircraft carriers, our F-22s (What? Not the F-35?), our Patriot missiles that will shoot down their missiles, our wonderful tanks and our superior infantry. It’s kind of disgusting. What he’s proposing is the North Korea strategy: us against the world! Close our borders! Everyone is our enemy, we must destroy them, and we can!

He imagines our forces as they are, except all conveniently concentrated right here at home, and the rest of the world as it is, only generaled by idiots who decide to throw everything they’ve now got right at us, all at once. That’s not how it would happen.

I can believe the first part happening, now that our government has wrecked itself. I can picture an increasingly paranoid, isolationist America bottling itself up and wallowing in propaganda, treating the rest of the world as useless and unimportant. Yeah, we could get that far. Of course, our triumphalist author who is busy counting tanks isn’t bothering to consider economics and the importance of world-wide communication to advancements in science and technology. He doesn’t care that we don’t have the industry to support his military machine without external cooperation and trade.

He also doesn’t consider a realistic response by the rest of the world. They would treat the US like we now treat North Korea, a pariah nation that is going to be confined and allowed to rot within the ruins of its own economy, while keeping a wary eye out for outburst of externally directed violence. If we are a real military threat rather than a bunch of mad-eyed fanatics hunkered down behind our Border Walls™, they’re not going to just throw their currently smaller forces at us. They’re going to build with the resources of a world economy. They’re going to wait for ingrown, decaying nation to spend itself on corruption and waste and stupid decision-making, like the kind that would have put us into this situation in the first place.

Like the kind that allows military day dreamers like that author to play victorious war games in their head. Our security does not rest in more and bigger guns, it resides in greater cooperation and trust. We can’t stand alone, and what I find scary is that there are people who think a bunch of M1 Abrams tanks is all we need to be safe and happy, and that military porn is reassuring.

Where’s Libertarian Gavin?

The latest company to be shaken up by revelations about corporate culture is Vice Media, maker of edgy documentaries, and a booming 4+ billion dollar organization. It turns out the company is run by assholes. This thread is full of enraging stories from insiders. It was so bad that the founders had to openly admit to it and apologize.

Cultural elements from our past, dysfunction and mismanagement were allowed to flourish unchecked. That includes a detrimental ‘boys’ club’ culture that fostered inappropriate behaviour that permeated throughout the company.

From the top down, we have failed as a company to create a safe and inclusive workplace where everyone, especially women, can feel respected and thrive.

Whoa. It must be awful if the company doesn’t even try denial or making a dodgy not-pology.

Only there’s one thing missing here: I read through the articles in the New York Times and the Guardian, and they mention two of the three founders of Vice, Shane Smith and Suroosh Alvi, but they never mention Gavin McInnes. I know McInnes was rather thoroughly excised from the company years ago, but you know he had to have played a part in establishing Vice’s culture. You know, racist, sexist, dumbass McInnes.

McInnes wasn’t a silent, passive cog in the VICE machine, either. While Shane Smith may have become its public face, McInnes is its soul. In the early years, he almost single-handedly wrote entire issues of the magazine, using multiple pseudonyms to make it feel like a fully-fledged publication rather than the amateurish, DIY operation that it was in reality. Smith and Alvi sold ad space and handled logistics. But that snide, facetious tone that VICE is so renowned for today is McInnes’s creation, as is the legendary DOs & DON’Ts column and just about everything else that made it worth reading. Without him, there would probably be no VICE as we know it today.

What I found most interesting about that article on McInnes, though, is the sharp and accurate deconstruction of Libertarianism, a toxic ideology that thoroughly saturates many of the worst people in politics, the media, and social media.

While the Christian right wants to moralize and snoop on people in their bedrooms to prevent them from having anything but very vanilla, Jesus-celebrating sex purely for the purposes of procreation, libertarians rarely tell other people how to live. But this shouldn’t be mistaken for tolerance: while liberals believe in maximizing collective freedom for everybody in society through laws and government policy, even if that means sacrificing a degree of personal freedom, libertarians want to selfishly maximize their individual freedom by eroding the state.

There’s a reason why most prominent libertarians are straight, well-off white men: because they don’t need government to intervene on their behalf. They occupy a default position of privileged dominance that has historically infringed upon women, the poor and minorities.

They like to paint government as an oppressive force, because it has taken away some of their privilege – although they prefer to call it “freedom” for propaganda purposes, in the same way that former slave-owning states objected to the Civil Rights Act on the basis of “state rights,” rather than “white supremacy” – and redistributed it across society. Although its adherents would argue otherwise, American libertarianism is pretty much just run-of-the-mill conservatism only without such actively fascistic tendencies. That’s not to say that those tendencies aren’t there, they’re just not so overt.

Libertarians don’t want to actively discriminate against any particular group, at least not officially, but they do want to dismantle government-imposed safeguards that protect those vulnerable to discrimination and make society fairer – a clear sign that people who drift towards libertarianism do so because they have likely never felt oppressed, marginalized or exploited.

There is no element of Gavin’s libertarianism that contradicts the drugs, the sex, the gay people, or anything else that defined VICE during his time at the publication. In fact, all throughout his 14-year tenure, he was known for making politically outrageous remarks that regularly drew accusations of racism, homophobia and every other sort of indictment that right-wingers contend with on a regular basis.

The articles also don’t discuss Smith’s or Alvi’s politics, but I’m going to go out on a limb and guess they lean libertarian, too. It’s exactly the kind of ideology that allows offenses to run rampant, just as we’re seeing now.

People are really bad at assessing risk

From Statistic of the Year:

It’s disgraceful. We need to do a better job of prioritizing damage reduction. To that end, I’m starting a foundation to lobby for an immediate ban of all toddlers. ALL toddlers, not just the armed ones. You never know when a harmless toddler might pick up a gun and be radicalized.

I might be willing to make an exception for toddlers who are official card-carrying members of the NRA, since you wouldn’t want to penalize the responsible armed toddlers, after all. Send your non-tax-exempt, irresponsible donations to paypal.me/pzmyers, where I’ll see to it that a certain toddler-to-be gets what’s coming to him.

When will people wake up to the truth about Elon Musk?

He’s a PT Barnum. He’s a know-nothing. His latest: Musk thinks he knows more than transit experts.

The fracas began when Wired on Thursday published comments made by Musk at an artificial intelligence conference earlier this month. Musk said that public transport is painful. It sucks. Why do you want to get on something with a lot of other people, that doesn’t leave where you want it to leave, doesn’t start where you want it to start, doesn’t end where you want it to end?

Musk further said that using public transit meant rubbing shoulders with like a bunch of random strangers, one of who might be a serial killer. . . that’s why people like individualized transport, that goes where you want, when you want.

In other words, he rejects society, which requires you to cooperate with other people, that sometimes demands that you make compromises with others. And that’s the motivation behind his absurd proposal to rip up existing infrastructure in cities and replace it with a network of tubes to deliver his cars to places without him ever having to get out and see another human being.

I guess when you get a billion dollars you are expected to automatically become intelligent.

OK, I still think he’s a fraud, but I’m going to back off on the comparison to PT Barnum, since Barnum was a truly horrible, awful person.

He basically bought an elderly black woman.

Growing up in the antebellum North, Barnum took his first real dip into showmanship at age 25 when he purchased the right to “rent” an aged black woman by the name of Joice Heth, whom an acquaintance was trumpeting around Philadelphia as the 161-year-old former nurse of George Washington.

You think that’s bad? How about this:

When she died in February 1836, rather than let her go in peace, Barnum had one more act up his sleeve: he drummed up a final public spectacle, hosting a live autopsy in a New York Saloon. There, 1500 spectators paid 50 cents to see the dead woman cut up, “revealing” that she was likely half her purported age.

I don’t think Musk is quite that bad.

Whenever I see TPUSA signs, I always think “Toilet Paper USA”

I’ve never been shy about saying that I despise Turning Point USA. It’s a horrible organization that makes rancid pro-capitalism arguments from a Libertarian perspective, and that tangles it all up in an anti-diversity reactionary package that Republicans all love. There’s somebody at my university who slaps up their stupid declarative posters everywhere, which means that just walking down a hallway give my superior rectus and oblique ocular muscles a painful workout.

Welp, now TPUSA has been investigated. They’re worse than I thought, which means they’re probably on par for a sleazy right wing organization.

Perhaps most troubling for an organization that holds up conservatives as the real victims of discrimination in America, Turning Point USA is also alleged to have fostered an atmosphere that is hostile to minorities. Screenshots provided to me by a source show that Crystal Clanton, who served until last summer as the group’s national field director, sent a text message to another Turning Point employee saying, “i hate black people. Like fuck them all . . . I hate blacks. End of story.”

The good news: she got fired. The bad news: it was probably for making their opinions public, not for having those opinions.

Former Turning Point employees say that the organization was a difficult workplace and rife with tension, some of it racial. Gabrielle Fequiere, a former Turning Point employee, told me that she was the only African-American hired as a field director when she worked with the group, three years ago. “In looking back, I think it was racist,” she said. “At the time, I was blaming myself, and I thought I did something wrong.” Fequiere, who now works as a model, recalled that the young black recruits that she brought into the organization suddenly found themselves disinvited from the group’s annual student summit, and that when she herself attended, she watched speakers there who “spoke badly about black women having all these babies out of wedlock. It was really offensive.”

Also, they sponsored Milo Yiannopoulos.

Speakers at Turning Point events on various college campuses have been accused of going out of their way to thumb their noses at ethnic and cultural sensitivities. The conservative provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, for instance, whose appearance Turning Point co-hosted with the College Republicans at the University of Colorado, in Boulder, said that despite being gay, he hated “faggots,” lesbians, and feminists, who, he said, “fucking hate men.”

Also, they’re a 501(c)3 charity, forbidden from engaging in partisan political activities. Yeah, sure.

Susan Walker, who worked for Turning Point USA in Florida, in 2016, told me that the group did aid Republican political campaigns. Walker said that a list she created while working for Turning Point, with the names of hundreds of student supporters, was given without her knowledge to someone working for Marco Rubio’s Presidential campaign. “That list had, like, seven hundred kids, and I worked my ass off to get it,” she said. “I had added notes on every student I talked to, and they were all on it still.” The Rubio operative, she added, “shouldn’t have had that list. We were a charity, and he was on a political campaign.”

Also, they’re propping up conservative take-overs of student government.

ast May, The Chronicle of Higher Education published an investigative report on what it called Turning Point’s “stealth plan for political influence.” The story recounted accusations on multiple campuses that the group had funnelled money into student elections in violation of the spending caps and transparency requirements set by those schools. It detailed how student candidates backed by Turning Point had been forced to drop out of campus elections at the University of Maryland and Ohio State “after they were caught violating spending rules and attempting to hide the help they received from Turning Point.” It also quoted Kirk saying in an appearance before a conservative political group in 2015 that his group was “investing a lot of time and money and energy” in student-government elections. (In the story, Kirk denied any wrongdoing and said it was “completely ludicrous and ridiculous that there’s some sort of secret plan.”)

Student government? What can they do with student government?

Once in control of student governments, the brochure says, Turning Point expects its allied campus leaders to follow a set political agenda. Among its planks are the defunding of progressive organizations on campus, the implementation of “free speech” policies eliminating barriers to hate speech, and the blocking of all campus “boycott, divestment and sanctions” movements. Turning Point’s agenda also calls for the student leaders it empowers to use student resources to host speakers and forums promoting “American Exceptionalism and Free Market ideals on campus.”

Also, if you, like me, have been wondering where they get their money, it’s from the oil and coal industries.

In a phone interview, Kirk declined to identify the donors who have supplied his group’s eight-million-dollar-plus annual budget, noting that many prefer to remain anonymous. But Kirk has spoken and fund-raised at various closed-door energy-industry gatherings, including those of the 2017 board meeting of the National Mining Association and the 2016 annual meeting of the Independent Petroleum Association of America. In our interview, Kirk acknowledged that some of his donors “are in the fossil-fuel space.”

I’m glad someone is turning over this rock and snapping pictures of all the vermin wriggling beneath it.

Finally! I discover who is pulling my strings and sending me those fat paychecks!

I’ve been hearing so much over the years about this guy, George Soros, who is supposedly my puppetmaster. Unfortunately, I knew nothing about Soros except that he was a really rich guy, and right-wing nutjobs seemed to think he was hiding under their bed. Now, all is explained.

OK, so he’s a billionaire philanthropist who donates to good causes. That’s about it.

A classic eugenics image

A fascinating bit of historical propaganda.

The message is about “The danger of increasing procreation of inferiors” and shows how the good German family on the left, with their two children, will be overwhelmed by the crude nose-picking progeny of those others. How awful! Clearly the people on the right must be culled. We know how that turned out.

We’ve outgrown all that, right? Only alt-right neo-Nazi scum are still peddling that kind of nonsense.

You know, like @WhiteHouse.

I just want to say that it is true that some people will have larger families than other people, but it doesn’t matter — all those children are still people, still have the same potential, and it is the responsibility of the nation to care for them all and give them all the opportunity to use that potential.

(via Kieran Healy)