If I wasn't already sober that would sober me up. The first thought that comes to mind is that we have to add more judges to the SC, 4 would be a start. To do that we will have to get back control of the Federal Govt, not easy but not impossible. We will need to rewrite all of the laws that they have negated and then add some others to supplement them like the new voting rights legislation that is dead in the water for the time being. We can break these bastards, it's going to take time and focus, but it can be done, we need to use the repugnantkins playbook, we know it works. Demographics are on our side, we just need to stay focused on the goal, if we want our country to live up to it's Constitution and Bill of Rights we are going to have to work for it. Messaging is going to be critical to success, the Democrats need to get way better at messaging, an order of magnitude better, last week wasn't soon enough. They need to make the repugnantkins afraid to give interviews, because they will be shown to be such fools, they are out of step with America, there is no both sidesism that applies here and that needs to be demonstrated relentlessly. We have an opportunity to prevent a fascist state from flowering, I pray that future generations will look back at us in awe of what we accomplished, much like we look back at our fathers generation and what they did in WWII.
This can be done, Dick. I believe it, but don't wait for anyone...start messaging now and tell everyone you can. And call your representatives...tell THEM to get the word out.
Make a lot of noise-GOOD noise.
And help anyone who needs it to get to the polls to vote!
Several things you have to factor in along with the browning of the US population are the fact that young people don’t care about race as much as us oldies, but they care a hell of a lot more about global warming (surprise?), women’s rights, guns, student debt and other things that affect their lives more and more.
The surprising thing about young voters is that they vote at 80% IF REGISTERED. They have a bad voting rap in the corporate media--but this is BECAUSE only 20% ARE registered. So support everything you possibly can to register young folks and help get them to the poles in 2024--ALL IS NOT LOST.
See, I agree with you, John. The Gen Xers are on the prowl. They are well organized and ready to take on anyone. Tonight, I listened to a young woman who has been elected to chair the NC Democratic Party. She is 25 years old. Articulate and politically savvy. She knows that rural NC has been ignored and she said everyone just assumes poor whites live there. In fact, she said it was the black population living in those areas. She is going to concentrate on involving them. She’s white and her name is Anderson Clayton. Here’s an NYT article on her: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/04/us/democrats-north-carolina-anderson-clayton.html
Thank you for your uplifting thought and information Marlene—it’s my impression from all the campaign financing requests I get that this kind of thing is happening all over the place—great news when we need it most.
At some point don't we have to say enough? We are no longer going to obey the nonsensical edicts of a rump antebellum federal judiciary. We will not recognize a judge in Amarillo outside of North Texas. Or the alternative, cut them loose to fend for themselves. I'm in California and I'm getting damn tired of sending red states money and have them turn around and flip me the bird. we need to clean our own house at this point.
Love this piece! Yes, we are going to have to fight them as fight them we must! Women are seeing the handwriting on the wall clearer than ever. With reproductive rights and healthcare being smashed to smithereens by the right, women are being mobilized in great numbers. Now that Social Security and Medicare have been declared as fair game by the cruel and sadistic Republican party, more people will be galvanized including senior women.Gray panthers of the world unite!I may not be around to see it but the numbers of white wealthy old men who are now calling the shots will catch up to them and they will age out. Praise be when that glorious day comes and it will come.
Dear Lord, it's all so damn depressing. I happen to live in a gated retirement community. We have people of all skin tones but, of course, I live in California. For the record, it's a very nice community with two golf courses, pools, gyms, spas, etc. Anyone can rent or buy a home here. That is how it is supposed to be in America.
Reading all of this we really are in the midst of a war. On the one side the Democrats believing in all the principles of democracy - a fair and just system where all are considered equal with equal opportunity and freedom within the law. On the other side which also claim to be believers in democracy but not so much in the equality of all races and life partner preferences. Let's imagine for a moment an all Republican government, president, House and Senate as well as all states and all judiciary controlled by Republicans. What would life be like? A nightmarish thought I know. I think human rights in many areas would be a thing of the past, a national ban on abortions for sure just as a start, little or no taxes for corporations and the wealthy individuals (we're close to that now), all the burdens would be on the backs of the poor and middle class. No restrictions whatsoever on guns of all descriptions, With absolute power would come all manner of restrictions, even unthinkable ones like a return to ,segregation, very restrictive voting rights, virtually no immigration, certainly an end to asylum. No foreign aid to help f governments maintain democratic systems of government. To be fair there is Republican support for Ukraine, but not among the freedom Caucus members. Any way I'm sure there would be plenty more adverse effects. Democracy as envisioned by the founding fathers would be finished in short order. .If you think they would never go to such extremes there are plenty of examples in history where absolute power has bred the worst atrocities. Hitler was killing everyone he thought undesirable from political foes to the infirm and that was just the start. Stalin killed an estimated 20 million, many of those millions in Ukraine by starving them to death. "Either way, Stalin’s policies triggered extremely brutal famines, especially in Soviet-controlled Ukraine. Ukrainians dub the famine of 1932-1933 “Holodomor which means “murder through starvation” and see it as a purposeful genocide."
Great job Lucian. But take heart. as with any dynamic system that runs without a governance feedback mechanism it eventually runs out of control and blows up, melts down and destroys itself. Spinning faster and faster until ka-blooie!
Have at it dudes, you will destroy yourselves. And faster than you think. I can just smell the bearings of civility overheating. I'm all out of metaphors for today.
Charlie, I must tell you that I am fond of "kablooie" and have not heard it used in way too long. I appreciated reading all of your metaphors! I wait, though somewhat impatiently, for their self-destruction. The sooner these obstinate, regressive types go away, the better! Or at least diminish greatly in numbers and/or how loud they tend to be. I have very little bandwidth for the troglodytes amongst us.
Kathy, Totally with you. It can't happen soon enough. And when it does it will be a huuuge kerplosion. I'm thinking Augustish while Congress is away on vacay.
Phew. Mr. T. touched a lot of bases with this one. I’m so old fashioned that I thought putting up judicial candidates with family money was to make them less likely to be bribed. (I spent a big chunk of my life in Chicago.) And mentioning judges with family money, “the creepy-faced judge,” Kasmaryk, comes to mind. He’s one of the heirs to the Publix fortune, righter than whom you cannot get. The right picking judges is scandalous, of course; not least because many of the Federalist judges were deemed unfit by several bar associations. And so the country is saddled with judges like Loose Cannon, the babe Trump’s lawyers shopped for who was reversed on all points. And she’s there for life.
It is tiring to be angry a lot of the time and wanting to slap the stupid people other stupid people have sent to Washington. It won’t go on forever, though, because the smart fixers will run the country and its institutions into the ground.
Yes, yes, and yes again! The infamous Daley machine, and so much more in that vein, going back to the 19th century roots of Chicago, at least you got a really valuable education about venial, tawdry corruption, so there's that...
I try to channel my "righteous moral outrage/anger" in various ways, mocking humor posted on various websites, sending some small $$ to causes that fight the (Multiple expletives deleted}, and political engagement locally - sometimes it really doesn't seem to work, though!
This is one of two of my classic Chicago stories. Maybe half a century ago I took my husband's rental car to do an errand in Beverly Hills. I was, perhaps, speeding. An officer waved me over and asked for ID. I responded, "Could we talk this over?" "Let me guess," he said. "You're from Chicago." With genuine surprise I said "Yes! But how do you know?"
"Chicago," he said, "is the only place where they 'talk it over.'"
I can vividly remember trips to Chicago, and I mean staying in the city near the Loop, not the suburbs, fascinated by the Museum of Science & Industry's U-505 exhibit,
- Seeing a game my father covered for the D.M. Register, August 2, 1968, a Friday night game at Soldier Field, between the College All-Stars and the NFL Champion Packers --- only weeks before the infamous events, "Battle of the Hilton/Police Riot" at the Democratic National Convention, Russian tanks rolling into Prague soon after,* visiting my Heidelberg-born "German" cousin Emily as she finished her second year at U. of Chicago, other trips too...Plenty of INTENSE concentrated energy in Chicago, seems to me, despite all its problems, irrepressible positive vibe as well. Jeez, I just remembered we (Macalester College Drama Choros) did Sandburg's poems too, every show, in the Twin Cities, other shows in the state, in Kentucky and Tennessee, in Bradford UK at Nat'l Student Drama Festival of the British Isles...
This has sent me on another "journey down memory lane" for sure!
^^^^^ These 64 quotes do not occur, are not selected, in the order Kundera
has them in the novel - they're all damn provocative, controversial, interesting, some hyperbolic as hell, in any event.
One definite advantage of Scribd (to which I need to re -subscribe) is that I was able to download PDFs of novels like Unbearable Lightness of Being, and much else, really convenient to be able to zoom up the magnification although I still read "the old fashioned way" too!
The Daley Machine had a good side. He did let corruption run rampant - we joked that "corruption breeds progress". That was how he motivated his pols. But Daley demanded that public services served the citizens well. When you needed a city service, you called your Democratic Ward Committeeman. Daley's passion was "His" city. He never took money for himself. When he died he left a modest house in Bridgeport and a modest lake house on the south shore of Lake Michigan.
Wow indeed. The problem is exacerbated by redistricting and voter discouragement, two of Chief Justice Roberts' lifelong avocations. Jim Jordan's district is so bizarre and so misshapen that (a) his suit jacket must be in there somewhere, and (b) high school teams from one end of his district only play teams from another end (there are several) if they make it to state finals.
That's exactly what we're going to do, Lucian...fight them every step of the way. First, and always, get the vote out. Get everyone registered and get them to the polls. Second, continue with the 'accountability trend'...prosecute the election deniers and those who attempted to overthrow the government, and any other politicians and civilians who commit crimes against the Constitution. Third, when we vote out enough of these lame ass republicans and achieve the majority in both houses (something I think is very likely due to them stripping away our rights one by one), we work our collective skin off to get the number of justices increased to 13 so that the rule of law according to the Constitution is practiced fairly again.
So, get ready to fight. Make a lot of noise about it. And VOTE.
Great article. Thank you, Lucien. From a more distant perspective, I sense it will be much worse. Middle and upper class whites will be in encampments, as you describe. At the same time, bankruptcy rules will change and defaulting on loans or mortgages will become a felony.
The indebted will enter into indentured servitude, forced to work off their debts in the coming re-industrialization of America. For example, debtor's prisons will feature massive assembly plants, of all kinds of manufactured products, (America is almost there now) Other camps will feature slaughter houses, or guarded encampments will be built in close proximity.
Social credit scores will be a huge feature, and fully endorsed by a theocratic state, overseen by a corrupt stacked supreme court. A big part of the scoring process will be based on church attendance, the amount that the Christian tithes, and how time they devote to Christian "charity" work. Of course, charity work will be working for free for corrupt big tent fundamentalist outreach programs.
Oh, its going to be swell. And, of course any dirt poor foreigner crazy enough to immigrate illegally will be forced into the theocratic system, as an automatic felon, working side by side the indebted.
Your analyses, Lucian, provide frequent doses of reality that the corporate media wouldn’t touch under any circumstances, let alone with a ten-foot pole. What the Reich-wing really wants is to destroy democracy in fact, but let a gloss of it remain over the oligarchy that pretty much already runs things. Citizens United, voter suppression in all its forms, legalized bribery (campaign contributions) of legislators, the wholesale capture of the judiciary, and gerrymandering election districts to guarantee perpetual one party control are all designed to effectively make elections irrelevant. The Rethugs have realized they can’t win honest elections any longer so they are designing dishonest ones with guaranteed outcomes. I certainly appreciate your optimism, Lucian, and wish I had some. On the other hand, efforts to end referendums, restrict voting by students, raising the minimum age for voting, silly talk about ending women’s suffrage, are definitely signs the dark side is worried, and hanging on by its fingernails. In the short run they may certainly succeed taking over completely. I just don’t see the road out of this miasma of corruption absent a real awakening, or possibly a lot of bloodshed.lFlip a coin. FYI: gated communities are popular in many places, but one place where there are none, and none planned, is Martha’s Vineyard. I can say this with certainty because I live there. There were developers in the ‘80s and ‘90s who tried to create some, but the local and regional land planning agencies prohibited them. As we have no fast food outlets, so we don’t have any gated communities. We have a severe housing crisis, but efforts to build ‘affordable’ housing have ramped up exponentially in recent years. Some towns (there are six) have also now prohibited mcmansions, although there are some existing older ones. The public perception of this Island is very far from reality.
Some may have understood more about the truth behind your concluding sentence, by closely following the news coverage of the right-wing kook governors' stunt, when they sent migrants there - after lying to them, promising them a kind of earthly paradise, jobs, nice housing, who knows what else.
After all their traveling travails and suffering, to LIE to them about that kind of thing, how heartless can it get? Apparently there are just no limits. see also:
If I wasn't already sober that would sober me up. The first thought that comes to mind is that we have to add more judges to the SC, 4 would be a start. To do that we will have to get back control of the Federal Govt, not easy but not impossible. We will need to rewrite all of the laws that they have negated and then add some others to supplement them like the new voting rights legislation that is dead in the water for the time being. We can break these bastards, it's going to take time and focus, but it can be done, we need to use the repugnantkins playbook, we know it works. Demographics are on our side, we just need to stay focused on the goal, if we want our country to live up to it's Constitution and Bill of Rights we are going to have to work for it. Messaging is going to be critical to success, the Democrats need to get way better at messaging, an order of magnitude better, last week wasn't soon enough. They need to make the repugnantkins afraid to give interviews, because they will be shown to be such fools, they are out of step with America, there is no both sidesism that applies here and that needs to be demonstrated relentlessly. We have an opportunity to prevent a fascist state from flowering, I pray that future generations will look back at us in awe of what we accomplished, much like we look back at our fathers generation and what they did in WWII.
This can be done, Dick. I believe it, but don't wait for anyone...start messaging now and tell everyone you can. And call your representatives...tell THEM to get the word out.
Make a lot of noise-GOOD noise.
And help anyone who needs it to get to the polls to vote!
A smart mentor once said "You can pretty much ignore what's coming out of powerful people's mouths. Keep your eye on where their money is going."
Welp. You've pulled back the curtain once again and now we know.
I think you should get credit for 'The Thomas Doctrine." Brilliant Lucian.
Several things you have to factor in along with the browning of the US population are the fact that young people don’t care about race as much as us oldies, but they care a hell of a lot more about global warming (surprise?), women’s rights, guns, student debt and other things that affect their lives more and more.
The surprising thing about young voters is that they vote at 80% IF REGISTERED. They have a bad voting rap in the corporate media--but this is BECAUSE only 20% ARE registered. So support everything you possibly can to register young folks and help get them to the poles in 2024--ALL IS NOT LOST.
See, I agree with you, John. The Gen Xers are on the prowl. They are well organized and ready to take on anyone. Tonight, I listened to a young woman who has been elected to chair the NC Democratic Party. She is 25 years old. Articulate and politically savvy. She knows that rural NC has been ignored and she said everyone just assumes poor whites live there. In fact, she said it was the black population living in those areas. She is going to concentrate on involving them. She’s white and her name is Anderson Clayton. Here’s an NYT article on her: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/04/us/democrats-north-carolina-anderson-clayton.html
Thank you for your uplifting thought and information Marlene—it’s my impression from all the campaign financing requests I get that this kind of thing is happening all over the place—great news when we need it most.
John
Here also is Lawrence O'Donnell's interview of Anderson Clayton last night on The Last Word. https://www.msnbc.com/the-last-word/watch/youngest-gen-z-party-leader-on-gop-abortion-overreach-175107653947
At some point don't we have to say enough? We are no longer going to obey the nonsensical edicts of a rump antebellum federal judiciary. We will not recognize a judge in Amarillo outside of North Texas. Or the alternative, cut them loose to fend for themselves. I'm in California and I'm getting damn tired of sending red states money and have them turn around and flip me the bird. we need to clean our own house at this point.
Wow again. Keep it up, old friend. And take a rest now and then. Sit with the cats and let them purr.
I'm taking tomorrow off.
You DESERVE it!
Enjoy!
After what you put into this piece you'd better take a day off! Chill with the kittties.
Love this piece! Yes, we are going to have to fight them as fight them we must! Women are seeing the handwriting on the wall clearer than ever. With reproductive rights and healthcare being smashed to smithereens by the right, women are being mobilized in great numbers. Now that Social Security and Medicare have been declared as fair game by the cruel and sadistic Republican party, more people will be galvanized including senior women.Gray panthers of the world unite!I may not be around to see it but the numbers of white wealthy old men who are now calling the shots will catch up to them and they will age out. Praise be when that glorious day comes and it will come.
Dear Lord, it's all so damn depressing. I happen to live in a gated retirement community. We have people of all skin tones but, of course, I live in California. For the record, it's a very nice community with two golf courses, pools, gyms, spas, etc. Anyone can rent or buy a home here. That is how it is supposed to be in America.
Reading all of this we really are in the midst of a war. On the one side the Democrats believing in all the principles of democracy - a fair and just system where all are considered equal with equal opportunity and freedom within the law. On the other side which also claim to be believers in democracy but not so much in the equality of all races and life partner preferences. Let's imagine for a moment an all Republican government, president, House and Senate as well as all states and all judiciary controlled by Republicans. What would life be like? A nightmarish thought I know. I think human rights in many areas would be a thing of the past, a national ban on abortions for sure just as a start, little or no taxes for corporations and the wealthy individuals (we're close to that now), all the burdens would be on the backs of the poor and middle class. No restrictions whatsoever on guns of all descriptions, With absolute power would come all manner of restrictions, even unthinkable ones like a return to ,segregation, very restrictive voting rights, virtually no immigration, certainly an end to asylum. No foreign aid to help f governments maintain democratic systems of government. To be fair there is Republican support for Ukraine, but not among the freedom Caucus members. Any way I'm sure there would be plenty more adverse effects. Democracy as envisioned by the founding fathers would be finished in short order. .If you think they would never go to such extremes there are plenty of examples in history where absolute power has bred the worst atrocities. Hitler was killing everyone he thought undesirable from political foes to the infirm and that was just the start. Stalin killed an estimated 20 million, many of those millions in Ukraine by starving them to death. "Either way, Stalin’s policies triggered extremely brutal famines, especially in Soviet-controlled Ukraine. Ukrainians dub the famine of 1932-1933 “Holodomor which means “murder through starvation” and see it as a purposeful genocide."
https://luciantruscott.substack.com/p/what-is-the-whole-right-wing-campaign/comments?
Great job Lucian. But take heart. as with any dynamic system that runs without a governance feedback mechanism it eventually runs out of control and blows up, melts down and destroys itself. Spinning faster and faster until ka-blooie!
Have at it dudes, you will destroy yourselves. And faster than you think. I can just smell the bearings of civility overheating. I'm all out of metaphors for today.
Charlie, I must tell you that I am fond of "kablooie" and have not heard it used in way too long. I appreciated reading all of your metaphors! I wait, though somewhat impatiently, for their self-destruction. The sooner these obstinate, regressive types go away, the better! Or at least diminish greatly in numbers and/or how loud they tend to be. I have very little bandwidth for the troglodytes amongst us.
Kathy, Totally with you. It can't happen soon enough. And when it does it will be a huuuge kerplosion. I'm thinking Augustish while Congress is away on vacay.
Phew. Mr. T. touched a lot of bases with this one. I’m so old fashioned that I thought putting up judicial candidates with family money was to make them less likely to be bribed. (I spent a big chunk of my life in Chicago.) And mentioning judges with family money, “the creepy-faced judge,” Kasmaryk, comes to mind. He’s one of the heirs to the Publix fortune, righter than whom you cannot get. The right picking judges is scandalous, of course; not least because many of the Federalist judges were deemed unfit by several bar associations. And so the country is saddled with judges like Loose Cannon, the babe Trump’s lawyers shopped for who was reversed on all points. And she’s there for life.
It is tiring to be angry a lot of the time and wanting to slap the stupid people other stupid people have sent to Washington. It won’t go on forever, though, because the smart fixers will run the country and its institutions into the ground.
Yes, yes, and yes again! The infamous Daley machine, and so much more in that vein, going back to the 19th century roots of Chicago, at least you got a really valuable education about venial, tawdry corruption, so there's that...
I try to channel my "righteous moral outrage/anger" in various ways, mocking humor posted on various websites, sending some small $$ to causes that fight the (Multiple expletives deleted}, and political engagement locally - sometimes it really doesn't seem to work, though!
This is one of two of my classic Chicago stories. Maybe half a century ago I took my husband's rental car to do an errand in Beverly Hills. I was, perhaps, speeding. An officer waved me over and asked for ID. I responded, "Could we talk this over?" "Let me guess," he said. "You're from Chicago." With genuine surprise I said "Yes! But how do you know?"
"Chicago," he said, "is the only place where they 'talk it over.'"
lol, Makes sense to me!
I can vividly remember trips to Chicago, and I mean staying in the city near the Loop, not the suburbs, fascinated by the Museum of Science & Industry's U-505 exhibit,
www.msichicago.org/explore/whats-here/exhibits/u-505-submarine/
- Seeing a game my father covered for the D.M. Register, August 2, 1968, a Friday night game at Soldier Field, between the College All-Stars and the NFL Champion Packers --- only weeks before the infamous events, "Battle of the Hilton/Police Riot" at the Democratic National Convention, Russian tanks rolling into Prague soon after,* visiting my Heidelberg-born "German" cousin Emily as she finished her second year at U. of Chicago, other trips too...Plenty of INTENSE concentrated energy in Chicago, seems to me, despite all its problems, irrepressible positive vibe as well. Jeez, I just remembered we (Macalester College Drama Choros) did Sandburg's poems too, every show, in the Twin Cities, other shows in the state, in Kentucky and Tennessee, in Bradford UK at Nat'l Student Drama Festival of the British Isles...
This has sent me on another "journey down memory lane" for sure!
www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpEGxHLJpK4
My Kind of Town (Chicago) - Frank Sinatra - YouTube
https://www.youtube.com › watch 3:12
Scenes of Chicago,
YouTube · TheCrazyCrooner · Jun 28, 2013
* en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unbearable_Lightness_of_Being_(film)
www.readthistwice.com/quotes/book/the-unbearable-lightness-of-being
^^^^^ These 64 quotes do not occur, are not selected, in the order Kundera
has them in the novel - they're all damn provocative, controversial, interesting, some hyperbolic as hell, in any event.
One definite advantage of Scribd (to which I need to re -subscribe) is that I was able to download PDFs of novels like Unbearable Lightness of Being, and much else, really convenient to be able to zoom up the magnification although I still read "the old fashioned way" too!
😂
lmrao
The Daley Machine had a good side. He did let corruption run rampant - we joked that "corruption breeds progress". That was how he motivated his pols. But Daley demanded that public services served the citizens well. When you needed a city service, you called your Democratic Ward Committeeman. Daley's passion was "His" city. He never took money for himself. When he died he left a modest house in Bridgeport and a modest lake house on the south shore of Lake Michigan.
Wow indeed. The problem is exacerbated by redistricting and voter discouragement, two of Chief Justice Roberts' lifelong avocations. Jim Jordan's district is so bizarre and so misshapen that (a) his suit jacket must be in there somewhere, and (b) high school teams from one end of his district only play teams from another end (there are several) if they make it to state finals.
That's exactly what we're going to do, Lucian...fight them every step of the way. First, and always, get the vote out. Get everyone registered and get them to the polls. Second, continue with the 'accountability trend'...prosecute the election deniers and those who attempted to overthrow the government, and any other politicians and civilians who commit crimes against the Constitution. Third, when we vote out enough of these lame ass republicans and achieve the majority in both houses (something I think is very likely due to them stripping away our rights one by one), we work our collective skin off to get the number of justices increased to 13 so that the rule of law according to the Constitution is practiced fairly again.
So, get ready to fight. Make a lot of noise about it. And VOTE.
Great article. Thank you, Lucien. From a more distant perspective, I sense it will be much worse. Middle and upper class whites will be in encampments, as you describe. At the same time, bankruptcy rules will change and defaulting on loans or mortgages will become a felony.
The indebted will enter into indentured servitude, forced to work off their debts in the coming re-industrialization of America. For example, debtor's prisons will feature massive assembly plants, of all kinds of manufactured products, (America is almost there now) Other camps will feature slaughter houses, or guarded encampments will be built in close proximity.
Social credit scores will be a huge feature, and fully endorsed by a theocratic state, overseen by a corrupt stacked supreme court. A big part of the scoring process will be based on church attendance, the amount that the Christian tithes, and how time they devote to Christian "charity" work. Of course, charity work will be working for free for corrupt big tent fundamentalist outreach programs.
Oh, its going to be swell. And, of course any dirt poor foreigner crazy enough to immigrate illegally will be forced into the theocratic system, as an automatic felon, working side by side the indebted.
**slaughter houses for beef, chickens. Thinking Tysons not Buchenwald.
Mon dieu! Are not my pearls sacred! I have them but never clutch them, dear friend! Another spot on column.
Your analyses, Lucian, provide frequent doses of reality that the corporate media wouldn’t touch under any circumstances, let alone with a ten-foot pole. What the Reich-wing really wants is to destroy democracy in fact, but let a gloss of it remain over the oligarchy that pretty much already runs things. Citizens United, voter suppression in all its forms, legalized bribery (campaign contributions) of legislators, the wholesale capture of the judiciary, and gerrymandering election districts to guarantee perpetual one party control are all designed to effectively make elections irrelevant. The Rethugs have realized they can’t win honest elections any longer so they are designing dishonest ones with guaranteed outcomes. I certainly appreciate your optimism, Lucian, and wish I had some. On the other hand, efforts to end referendums, restrict voting by students, raising the minimum age for voting, silly talk about ending women’s suffrage, are definitely signs the dark side is worried, and hanging on by its fingernails. In the short run they may certainly succeed taking over completely. I just don’t see the road out of this miasma of corruption absent a real awakening, or possibly a lot of bloodshed.lFlip a coin. FYI: gated communities are popular in many places, but one place where there are none, and none planned, is Martha’s Vineyard. I can say this with certainty because I live there. There were developers in the ‘80s and ‘90s who tried to create some, but the local and regional land planning agencies prohibited them. As we have no fast food outlets, so we don’t have any gated communities. We have a severe housing crisis, but efforts to build ‘affordable’ housing have ramped up exponentially in recent years. Some towns (there are six) have also now prohibited mcmansions, although there are some existing older ones. The public perception of this Island is very far from reality.
Some may have understood more about the truth behind your concluding sentence, by closely following the news coverage of the right-wing kook governors' stunt, when they sent migrants there - after lying to them, promising them a kind of earthly paradise, jobs, nice housing, who knows what else.
After all their traveling travails and suffering, to LIE to them about that kind of thing, how heartless can it get? Apparently there are just no limits. see also:
newrepublic.com/post/172870/viral-story-homeless-veterans-new-york-migrants-made-up?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the_ticker_rss
^^^^^
"No, Hotels Aren’t Evicting Homeless American Vets Because of Migrants
The story was shared by Fox, the New York Post, and more. Because whenever the right can blame migrants, facts come second."