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The America I knew has almost disappeared


Thom Hartmann: The America I knew has almost disappeared

What’s left of our democratic institutions are under siege

THOM HARTMANN, ALTERNET

Like an alcoholic family that won’t discuss alcoholism (proving Don Quixote’s warning never to mention rope in the home of a man who’s been hanged), far too many Americans are unwilling to acknowledge or even discuss the ongoing collapse of democracy in the United States.

President Jimmy Carter took it head on when he told me on my radio program that the Citizen’s United decision:
“[V]iolates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or to elect the president. And the same thing applies to governors and U.S. senators and congress members. So now we’ve just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect and sometimes get favors for themselves after the election’s over.”
This “complete subversion of our political system” grew, in large part, out of Richard Nixon’s 1972 appointment of Lewis Powell to the Supreme Court. Powell, in 1971, had authored the infamous Powell Memo to the US Chamber of Commerce, strongly suggesting that corporate leaders needed to get politically involved and, essentially, take over everything from academia to our court system to our political system.
In 1976, in the Buckley case, Powell began the final destruction of American democracy by declaring that when rich people or corporations own politicians, all that money that got transferred to the politicians wasn’t bribery but, instead, was Constitutionally-protected First Amendment-defined “Free Speech.” The Court radically expanded that in 2010 with Citizens United.

As a result, there’s really very little democracy left in our democracy. Our votes are handled in secret by private, unaccountable for-profit corporations. Our laws are written, more often than not, by corporate lawyers/lobbyists or representatives of billionaire-level wealth. And our media is owned by the same class of investors/stockholders, so it’s a stretch to expect them to do much critical reporting on the situation.
In his book The Decline of the West, first published in German in 1918 and then in English in 1926, Oswald Spengler suggested that what we call Western civilization was then beginning to enter a “hardening” or “classical” phase in which all the nurturing and supportive structures of culture would become, instead, instruments of the exploitation of a growing peasant class to feed the wealth of a new and strengthening aristocracy.
Culture would become a parody of itself, average people’s expectations would decline while their wants would grow, and a new peasantry would emerge, which would cause the culture to stabilize in a “classic form” that, while Spengler doesn’t use the term, seems very much like feudalism—the medieval system in which the lord owned the land and everyone else was a vassal (a tenant who owed loyalty to the landlord).

Or its more modern incarnation: fascism.
Spengler, considering himself an aristocrat, didn’t see this as a bad thing. In 1926 he prophesied that once the boom of the Roaring Twenties was over, a great bust would wash over the Western world. While this bust had the potential to create chaos, its most likely outcome would be a return to the classic, stable form of social organization, what Spengler calls “high culture” and I call neofeudalism and/or fascism.

He wrote:
In all high Cultures, therefore, there is a peasantry, which is breed stock, in the broad sense (and thus to a certain extent nature herself), and a society which is assertively and emphatically “in form.” It is a set of classes or Estates, and no doubt artificial and transitory. But the history of these classes and estates is world history at highest potential.
Twentieth and 21st century cultural observers, ranging from billionaire George Soros in his book The Crisis of Global Capitalism, to professor Noreena Hertz in The Silent Takeover: Global Capitalism and the Death of Democracy, have pointed to deep cracks in the foundational structure of Western civilization, traceable in part to the current legal status of corporations versus humans.
Most recently, Jane Mayer has laid out in painful detail how the Koch Network and a few other political-minded billionaires have essentially taken over the entire Republican Party in her book Dark Money as has Nancy MacLean with her new book Democracy in Chains. The extent of the problems within our political and economic structures are laid bare with startling and sometimes frightening clarity.
As a result, Princeton scholars Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page famously found that the odds of average Americans’ political desires being translated into policy are about the same as random noise, whereas what they referred to as “economic elites” frequently get everything they want from the political class.
They wrote that we still have the “features” of democracy like elections, but ended their paper with this cautionary note: “[W]e believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened.”

It seems that America has arrived at the point Spengler saw in early 20th century Europe, and, indeed, there are some concerning parallels, particularly with the late 1920s and early 1930s. Italy, Germany, and Spain all lost their democracies and moved to fascism, while many of Spengler’s acolytes cheered.
And, indeed, it was one of FDR’s biggest challenges in the early 1930s – steering America through a “middle course” between communism (which was then growingly popular) and fascism (also growingly popular). He pulled it off with small (compared to Europe) nods to democratic socialism, instituting programs like Social Security, the minimum wage, and establishing the right to unionize (among other things).
Mark Twain is often quoted as saying that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. Many look at the all-out war being waged against American government right now by the hard right, from Trump and his cronies to the billionaire networks funding right-wing propaganda and lobbying outlets, and think “it can’t happen here.”
They’re wrong. It can happen here.
We now have police intervening in elections, privatized corporate voting systems, and a massive voter suppression campaign to prevent elderly, young, and non-white Americans from being able to vote.
Meanwhile, as Lee Fong reported, Republican politicians and the billionaires who own them are now dropping any pretense at all to caring about the fate and future of our country’s fiscal health, so long as they get their tax cuts now.
In summary, what’s left of our democratic institutions are under siege.

Add to that a largely billionaire-funded/owned right-wing media machine that’s willing to regularly and openly deceive American voters (documented daily by Media Matters and Newshounds), and you have the perfect setup for a neofeudalist/fascist takeover of our government.
Or, as President Carter so correctly called it, oligarchy.

Last edited by Rigby5, 10/17/2017, 8:41 pm
10/17/2017, 8:40 pm Link to this post PM Rigby5
 
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Re: The America I knew has almost disappeared


America has lost its way. It is now wandering in the wilderness, lost, confused and depressed. We can only hope we will eventually find a familiar path that will take us home. I fear we are getting farther from that path and may never see it again.

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"libido sciendi"..... the passion to know.
10/17/2017, 8:52 pm Link to this post PM Noserose
 
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Re: The America I knew has almost disappeared


Many look at the all-out war being waged against American government right now by the hard right, from Trump and his cronies to the billionaire networks funding right-wing propaganda and lobbying outlets, and think “it can’t happen here.”

But it is Not JUST the "Right Wing" but both sides playing the masses for fools, one calling for more socialism the other the absolute opposite and neither delivering anything more than more propaganda and empty words while feeding off the masses that find they HAVE to believe in something and their something is the ONLY thing.
10/18/2017, 12:23 am Link to this post PM cooter50 Blog
 
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Re: The America I knew has almost disappeared


Bill Clinton, Bush, Hillary, Trump, are all nearly identical. Makes no difference which one is elected.
Obama may be more of the same as well.
What they consider differences may just be ways to get us emotionally invested and more easily confused.
10/18/2017, 5:20 am Link to this post PM Rigby5
 
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Re: The America I knew has almost disappeared


To that I can agree.
10/18/2017, 11:29 am Link to this post PM cooter50 Blog
 
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Re: The America I knew has almost disappeared


Ordinarily I disagree vehemently with both Rigny and Cooter for obviously different reasons But for once I agree with them both at least in principle. And I also agree with Rose -- America has wandered into a deep dark forest, lost its compass, and failed to leave a trail of bread crumbs. And somehow America will have to fInd its own way out of the Woods. As sadly no other group will bother coming to look for her.

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10/18/2017, 12:01 pm Link to this post PM GoHawk Blog
 
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Re: The America I knew has almost disappeared


I find the idea that presidents are all the same - or politicians or political parties - to be ignorant.

In fact this idea may be partly to blame for America losing it's way.

Policies make a difference, and when the current President is trying to undo nearly everything his predecessor did they cannot possibly be the same.

This is simply putting all the blame on our elected officials when it's the people - us - who put them in office.

When you elect an egotistical, self-congratulating, wealthy blow-hard, you get an egotistical, self-congratulating, wealthy blow-hard.

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10/18/2017, 1:35 pm Link to this post PM John1959 Blog
 
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But John, the current President and the Party to which he is ostensibly a member bears no resemblance to the Republican Party of men like Gerald Ford, Everett McKinley Dirksenn, Dwight Eisenhower, Arthur H. Vancenberg, Bob LaFollette, and Teddy Roosevelt. All of whom are spinning in their graves today.

While I will admit that there are some differences between the two major parties, I see little if any difference in several key areas, including foreign affairs, national defense/homeland security, and an obvious reluctance to get off their fat overpaid butts and come up with a meaningful comprehensive immigration plan.

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10/18/2017, 2:36 pm Link to this post PM GoHawk Blog
 
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Re: The America I knew has almost disappeared


quote:

GoHawk wrote:

But John, the current President and the Party to which he is ostensibly a member bears no resemblance to the Republican Party of men like Gerald Ford, Everett McKinley Dirksenn, Dwight Eisenhower, Arthur H. Vancenberg, Bob LaFollette, and Teddy Roosevelt. All of whom are spinning in their graves today.

While I will admit that there are some differences between the two major parties, I see little if any difference in several key areas, including foreign affairs, national defense/homeland security, and an obvious reluctance to get off their fat overpaid butts and come up with a meaningful comprehensive immigration plan.



I totally agree with your first paragraph. I see much of the problem being that people are voting for politicians that stand in contrast to those you mention.


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“I do not believe in the general promiscuous toting of guns. I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses.” - NRA president Karl T. Frederick, 1938
10/18/2017, 3:32 pm Link to this post PM John1959 Blog
 
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Re: The America I knew has almost disappeared


First of all, both parties totally lied to use about things like Domino theory, WMD in Iraq, etc.
So they both not only can not be trusted, but have an agenda that is not in our interests.

Second is that even when a candidate claims to be different, like Obama was the only anti war candidate, absolutely NOTHING different at all happened with any of the war.
Iraq, Afghanistan, TSA, war on drugs, etc., all remained identical, or actually increased.

Obviously that means the individual candidates don't really matter.
Either they were fake from the beginning, or after elected they are told how it is actually going to go down.

Which brings us to the real point, which is that we are in very deep trouble.
How did 1% in the US get to own 90% of the wealth? Clearly it is not hard work. It is deliberately obscure tax laws that are unfair, unfair competition with landlords for housing, extortion rates for health care, no labor representation or collective bargaining, media propaganda, unfair courts, the war on drugs, for profit prisons, etc.
The list goes on.
10/18/2017, 4:25 pm Link to this post PM Rigby5
 


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