On October 17th, I wrote that demonizing Trump as fascist had consequences.
To most Americans fascist = holocaust, Hitler, and World War II. To be a fascist is to be the worst thing possible.
Popular culture is full of references of going back and killing Hitler before he became powerful. We bewail that no one did anything. We blame Neville Chamberlain for responding to Hitler’s provocations by making concessions.
It is generally accepted that trying to make peace with a fascist is foolishness.
Donald Trump is a fascist, so are many of his followers, and those who follow him but who aren’t fascists are still working to try and get a fascist into power. They must be stopped, and our culture believes violence is justified in stopping fascists.
That is the logic of the rhetoric.
I think it is now pretty clear that Trump is not Hitler reborn. He is not even Mussolini reborn. He was, at most, a right-wing populist, but he’s not even that. He’s just another oligarch who flirted with populist-right ideas, but has mostly not even followed through on those.
He was never Hitler. I didn’t think he was during the campaign, and said so.
And now we have polarization: antifas and fascists. People who didn’t exist on the public stage before they were vaulted there, and with that polarization, we have violence.
I don’t have anything in particular against punching Nazis (though I do have something for free speech), but these people have been elevated from cranks no one knew about, to somebodies.
Only one prominent Trump advisor can credibly be called something of a fascist: Bannon, and he is outweighed by people who are just standard, out-of-the-can neoliberals, like Trump’s daughter, and son-in-law, and, well, almost everyone else. There are a few nasty racists, like Sessions, but they existed long before Trump. There are climate denialists, but that’s a Republican party thing, and so on.
Trump’s not Hitler. He never was. There is not going to be a Reichstag fire in which he seizes power.
The fascist line, like the Russian pawn line, were simply anti-Trump political lines. Extremely dangerous, and in the case of the Russian line xenophobic and dangerous, but just propaganda.
And millions have fallen for it, hook, line, and sinker and are now basing their lives and identities around it, on both sides. This hasn’t weakened the “alt-right,” it has strengthened it, and it sure as hell didn’t stop Trump from being elected.
Skipping a few half million dollar a plate dinners and campaigning in the rust-belt? That might have stopped it. Not opposing a $15/minimum wage, that might have stopped it. Not trying to get “moderate” Republicans to vote Democratic and ignoring traditional Democratic constituencies, that might have stopped it.
Not Hitler, and calling him Hitler didn’t work.
Genius.
I wonder if our next dynastic appointee, Chelsea Clinton, is even just a little more competent as a campaigner than her mother?
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marku52
It also makes the Dems look stupid and complicit. The ran around screaming during the campaign OMFG don’t vote for this man, he is a fascist!”
And then once elected, they (Obama) had him over to the WH, and most of his appointees approved in the Senate by large margins.
If he truly was Hitler incarnate, as they insinuated, Obama should have had tanks all around the WH and blown him up as he approached.
But no, it was all BS as most of Dem messaging is.
Stirling S Newberry
He is an unelected right-wing leader – there is a difference.
mc
please. why hasn\’t he been arrested for trespassing if he was \”unelected\”? that\’s exactly the kind of silliness that this post refutes.
bruce wilder
OK, I’ll bite.
What’s “unelected” about him, Stirling?
The Stephen Miller Band
I agree. Trump is no Hitler. He’s more akin to, or identical to really, Kim Jong-un therefore, his impending & imminent assault on North Korea is rather fitting.
Trump is bullying his own reflection and that of his followers by facing off with North Korea.
Look at the way Ivanka fawns over her father — it is reflective of the way North Koreans fawn over Kim Jong-un, their Great Leader. And his followers will zealously follow him off the nuclear armageddon cliff like lemmings, no, strike that, better than lemmings because lemmings are smart enough to not even do that & that whole meme about poor lemmings is a myth.
The Trump supporters, like the Obama & Clinton supporters, have no credibility. So long as their Man and/or Woman does it, it’s okay, damn the principle of the matter. Trump supporters are just fine with Trump conjuring WWIII just so long as it wasn’t Hillary or Obama doing it. All of them, on both sides of the political binary bind, are massive hypocrites for whom I have zero respect and zero patience.
Hello Handsome
The Stephen Miller Band
What’s unelected about Trump is this.
It’s A Fu**ing Blueberry
How come Congress isn’t investigating this angle instead of the Russian angle? Because if it does, it undermines people’s delusional faith in America’s joke & sham of an electoral system. Russia’s the foil. Not that Russia doesn’t try to meddle, because no doubt it does, but what Greg Palast has uncovered is much more credible & pertinent than “Putin stole the election for Donald Trump.”
RJMeyers
Bruce wilder:
Popular vote.
Willy
Pretty much every POTUS = Hitler these days, for somebody. More interesting would be if POTUS = Hitler reflected an unconscious feeling of increasing helplessness and loss of personal power to the PTB as a whole. I dunno. In the days before Hitler, when did political opponents carry POTUS = Satan signs (or equivalent)?
different clue
If the Clintobamacrats are already grooming Princess Chelsea to run for something, that gives the Real Democrats time to organize to obstruct and prevent Princess Chelsea’s coronation to whatever office her owner/handler/sponsors are targeting.
#NotOneMoreClinton!
#Never!Ever!
No more Clintons. Never! Ever! No. No more.
bob mcmanus
Nah, Obama was Hitler. Just kidding. Of course Trump isn’t Hitler, and neoliberalism isn’t fascism. They’re something new, and maybe something worse, something we can’t recognize or understand yet, and won’t before it’s too late. What does perfect neoliberalism look like? War probably isn’t part of it.Maybe a party for some, and the natural order for the rest? Maybe a party for all? I hesitate because people will think I am predicting, and it will not go that way, but Huxley’s Brave New World, where everybody is happy and thinks they’re free?
First they came for your politicians, then they came for your public works, then they came for your jobs, then they came for your souls. UBI, twitter, and pot for everybody.
https://thenewinquiry.com/misery-loves-company/
About László Krasznahorkai, author of Satantango
I kinda like Hungarian movies and other culture of SE Europe, Romania, Serbia, Greece. They know horror.
“Krasznahorkai’s apocalypse, in the end, does not take the form of a great disaster. Instead, it revels slowly in the destruction of distinction, the homogenization of the world. This is the horrible realization at the heart of Krasznahorkai’s books: the day of judgement has already passed, there is no other hell than this.”
In any case, Trump is really fucking bad, as Obama was terrible, and we should have been burning shit down for decades. But we’re not. The hope is the horror.
nihil obstet
Hitler was the greatest monster of human history, so we have to bomb the Hitler of the month wherever in the Middle East or East Asia he may be and we also have to vote against him here in the US but not prosecute him for breaking labor laws in his businesses. This is very important, so it all has to be screeched at 100 decibels.
I suspect that most people, living in this world of noise, just turn it off or assign it lower priority than the daily weather. Do elections have consequences? Not that the average person can see. Talking heads and learned statisticians will explain how their party has produced more jobs and greater freedom, but the statistics don’t line up with people’s experiences. So, shrug.
It seems as though the political fear hype has gotten louder, worse, and more dangerous for the last thirty-five years, but I’m about to conclude that it’s leading people to simply withdraw consent from the establishment, and I don’t know that that’s a bad thing.
BradK
The whole Trump-as-Hitler meme serves another purpose. That is to demonstrate how Dem’s are even more ungracious losers than Repub’s and that, for all of their self-identified enlightenment and social justice purity, they are just as quick to resort to playground taunts and ad-hominems.
For the past eight years to dare call into question The Messiah’s policies, actions, words, or indeed anything less than full on idol worship risked one being branded a racist. Now that we have a White Male with an (R) after his name back on the throne, it is once again perfectly acceptable to make Hitler/fascist comparisons, refer to him as a orangutan (imagine for a second Obama being the brunt of that?), and to go after his entire family publicly.
Conflating Trump with Hitler is nothing more than Freudian Projection. Fascism is just fine, so long a I agree with it.
realitychecker
There will be no means of escaping the consequences of unrestrained lying other than to make it painful for the liars, somehow.
Liars should be rare in any healthy society. Instead, we have allowed a society where truthtellers are the rare ones, and frequently characterized as being the bad guys.
It’s really not that complicated.
It’s good to consider the basics sometimes. 🙂
Willy
Chelsea = (pic of Chinese sweatshop)
would be more painful than
Chelsea = Hitler
if the truth does indeed hurt.
Willy
The way things are now, “make it painful for the liars, somehow” would be retaliated against by wingnut gunslingers holding up signs of Bill O’Reilly = Jesus, who’d be going after “far left” / “hate group” organizations such as Slate and Bill Nye the Science Guy.
Hugh
Neoliberalism is the cover theology for kleptocracy. Trump isn’t a fascist. He’s far too self-absorbed, lazy, and unbelieveably ignorant to be much of anything other than the 70 year old rich jerk that he is.
Given his near daily contradictions: China is a currency manipulator, no, it’s not; NATO was obsolete last week but not this week, etc., you could argue that Trump has no core values. But this isn’t quite true. Personnel is policy, and he has been quite consistent on this. As Ian says, Trump’s Administration is full of neoliberals, and as I would say, kleptocrats. Rather than a radical populist, he is deeply, deeply conservative, and this shines through in his nominees. Just as his laziness and lack of discipline do in his failure to fill most of the major positions in the federal government.
I would say too that polarization is a tactic of class war. It pits one set of us rubes up against another, and leaves the rich and elites to carry on unmolested with their looting.
As for the Democrats, they are, with their identity politics, very much a part of this class war. They could stand for something, but they don’t. They stand for nothing. That is all you need to know about them, that is before rejecting them.
bruce wilder
it is all noise after a while — not even lies, really.
the “Russkies ate her email; teh Donald is
Hitleran incompetent surrounded by traitors” narrative is evidence of two important things: one is how easily the Media Wurlitzer can be driven to play an arbitrarily chosen tune, and second, how easily a significant fraction of the American people can be driven by tribal signals to absorb that arbitrarily chosen narrative. Both are indicators of the extent to which the collective people have lost their capacity for critical reason.If people still had some capacity for critical reason, it would be necessary to tell better quality lies, to doctor recent history a bit or to do pirouettes in obeisance to that hobgoblin, consistency. But, the assigned pundit watchdogs are fops who have made their bones never questioning perpetual war at enormous cost nor an economic policy of blowing bubbles and protecting large-scale criminal fraud as a growth industry, and apparently, the audience is so completely passive that they don’t really process what they are told. We used to joke about what disappeared down the memory hole; not it’s all hole.
Jonathan
Calling Trump as Fascist is just a clear demonstration of the incredible historical illiteracy of the USA public—both on the part of the name callers and anyone who could possibly believe such nonsense.
Unfortunately, this illiteracy is deliberately cultivated so as to serve the interests of the ruling party in this country. It is part of the BIG lies that surround WW II. You know, we won the war almost single-handedly, we liberated all the death camps including Auschwitz (ask Obama), Spielberg’s war movies are damn near documentaries, WW II was a death struggle between Hitler and B’nai B’rith, and the biggest lie of all, USSR had almost nothing to do with the defeat of the Wehrmacht. In that shitstorm of falsehood, Donald Trump, Veblen’s classic petty real estate speculator, can be called a fascist—but it adds nothing to the political debate.
Mandos
I think this take misunderstands what is being communicated by the “Trump-as-fascist” idea — it’s not about Trump himself but about the legitimization of sentiments that brought him to power. It’s about who likes that he won, and why.
Ten Bears
Took nineteen comments for someone to state the obvious. The figurehead doesn’t develop the movement, the movement develops the figurehead. Hitler was a hapless suicidal nobody until the multi-nationals began financing him.
bruce wilder
Mandos: what is intended may be shameless misdirection, and also heedless of readily anticipated consequences; it is very clear that part of the intended misdirection is to obscure the motivations for discontent among the deplorables set — is that what you are saying?
Mandos
No, I am talking about Pepe.
Peter
@Hugh
You’re misusing the term kleptocracy and it seems to be for the same effect that the Hitler/Fascist smear of Trump is used. He has bought and paid for many things but I know of nothing he has stolen, the meaning of kleptocracy. The real successful kleptocrats in our world such as those in Russia, China and elsewhere used their political power once in office to skim or just steal what they want.
If you didn’t consume bits of what Trump says as sound-bites from the MSM you might be able to digest his deal making style. The Chinese were manipulating their currency and they admitted it so Trump and their leaders are moving on to todays issues now that that is settled. They promised not to do it again and offered up some unexpected concessions to sweeten the deal.
The only thing Trump said about NATO during the election that could be called policy was that the Europeans must pay their fair share of its funding. The response to that demand was immediate and negative even personally aggressive so Trump stoked up his rhetoric and gave a personal opinion about obsolesce. The threat of a US/Russia détente was enough to shut the Euros up, for a while anyway.
Peter
@Jonathan
I think you overestimate the penetration of the anti-Trump histrionics among the people. 60 million people who voted for him don’t buy this nonsense. I doubt everyone who didn’t vote for him believes this smear even if it is repeated ad nauseam.
This meme seems to be stuck in the echo chamber of the Clintonite/snowflake cult with about l3 million parrots talking to each other. This is a large supposedly educated group but doesn’t reflect any majority opinion.
Jonathan
@Peter
I certainly hope you are right. I am usually surprised by how many people believe the purest BS. Remember all those who thought Saddam Hussein was the next Hitler with weapons of mass destruction?
Ivory Bill Woodpecker
If the Clintons are as powerful and as evil as many of you lot say they are, then why are all of you still alive and unjailed?
Ivory Bill Woodpecker
THIS.
Without the Trump campaign’s partial re-legitimization of traditional r@cism, and other traditional forms of ethnic bigotry, and traditional misogyny, Trump would be just another *yawn* Fat-Cats-Uber-Alles GOP kleptocrat, who would inspire mere contempt, rather than fear and loathing.
The deplorables love Trump because he and his minions tell them their sinful sentiments are actually virtuous. This makes it harder to control the deplorables through shaming, which has been the chief means of controlling them for some 50 years now.
V. Arnold
Trump. He’s but a moment in the continum.
The Clintons are the genuine threat; and Usians had better armour up against their continuing attempts at control; fully supported by the deep state.
Trump is but a temporary blip in the deep state’s attempt at total control of the political process.
Trump just taught them where their weak points exist; that will be corrected immediately.
The distractions are so numerous and intense as to be surprisingly effective.
Hitler? Oh please; grow the fuck up! Trump is Trump; clown, buffoon, charletan, harlequin; but, dangerous never the less, in his ignorance, of which he has no clue…
…and the band played on…
Ché Pasa
The White Rightist (Fascist if you want)/Antifa street brawls have been going on for many years, and they are likely to continue. Once that box is opened, it’s very hard to close. Because the brawls can be useful for diverting attention from other things that matter, the more there are of them, the more likely they will be used for just that purpose by the PTB.
They remind me a little bit of the many street brawls and riots that took place in this country prior to WWII (some took place during and after WWII, of course.) Issues then involved labor demands, race, immigration, civil rights, elections and fulfillment of promises — not unlike today.
You can dismiss them if you want, but they served a purpose.
As for Fascism/Hitler comparisons, Fascism is a relatively new political ideology. There has always been a strong authoritarian streak in US governments at every level. It’s not Fascism per se because it long predates the advent of Fascism. Authoritarianism is a fundamental component of Fascism, however, as are certain organizing and operating principles that arbitrarily deny the People a voice in their government. Demagoguery is also a component of Fascist rule.
But the key element is the Führerprinzip which Trump takes full advantage of. Arnold Schwarzenegger did the same thing in California on his way to becoming governor. Are they Nazis? No. Are they Fascists? Somewhat. But they are entertainers at root, incompetents at governing, and have no real base within the power structure. They are flukes.
Let’s not forget that the United States has a long and inglorious history of supporting overtly Fascist regimes throughout the world. At least since WWI, the US has flirted with combining its innate authoritarianism with a full on domestic propaganda machine and a corporate-dominant state. When dissent is stifled more or less completely, I think we can say we’re there.
Trump gets people on edge because he is a demagogue, he is an authoritarian, he plays on peoples’ prejudices, he exists in a world almost completely dominated by his own self-aggrandizing propaganda, and he’s clearly incompetent to handle the intricacies of the Imperial USofA. In addition, he incites violence domestically and he’s a bloodthirsty murderer overseas.
What could go wrong, right?
Peter
@Jonathan
Saddam was more a creature of Stalinism but that didn’t have the effect that the Hitler hyperbole produced. He was one bad dude. I think enough people were ready to support war in Iraq before the Saddam as Hitler with WMD was the PR program for varying reasons.
I think that Bush Co were caught up by the belief that many Amerikans need to be lied to or their reality will become too confusing. Simple black or white choices are best and easiest, Saddam had and used poison gas, WMD, on Iran and his own people so it was believable that he still possessed these weapons.
realitychecker
Trump IS Hitler!
That’s why you never see them both in the same place at the same time.
Peter
@IBW
I see you are an unrepentant snowflake stooge of the Red Queen virtue signaling frantically for backup. This nasty attitude about a large group of people because of the behavior of a tiny minority is typical guilt by association used by losers.
The deplorables don’t care what you say or signal while many other people also know that your PC Newspeak is used to cover the institutional racism your cult is responsible for and dependent on.
The Stephen Miller Band
Just as there are Shades of Grey, there are Shades of Hitler. Trump is an orange Shade of Hitler, meaning, not Hitler entirely by any means and for many reasons, but he has some Hitler in him.
One of the yuuuuuge differences between Hitler & Trump is, Hitler could draw incredible crowds much like Obama could. Trump’s crowds pale in comparison. Seriously, what a sad facsimile of Hitler’s famous Nuremberg Rallies was Trump’s Inaugural Coronation that he & his staff had to lie about.
Trump Hitler? Not even close. Hitler was believable and an entity of Absolute Conviction. Trump is not believable and has no conviction.
A REAL Rally
Trump’s Inaugural Limp Dick Coronation
The Stephen Miller Band
Trump is certainly not Hitler, but his supporters, the ones who would vote for him again even after his first 100 days record thus far, are certainly the epitome of the Good Germans who enabled & complied with Hitler & The Nazis.
They’ll stay with their Man ’til the end when they are vanquished once and for all and required to bury the bodies they pretended didn’t exist and their conquerors seize their former property and rape their wives and daughters and murder them as the Americans and Soviets did to the Germans when they defeated Hitler & The Nazis..
That’s how recalcitrant and morally & ethically bankrupt Trump Supporters are. They can read history and study it and instead of learning from it, they instead prefer to relive it in perpetuity.
atcooper
There’s been a fault line on the left between the professionals and the rest for as long as I can remember. If we’re going with the racist explanation, then the squishy left needs to deal with it’s soft racism problem.
Otherwise we’re looking at Meyer style feminism, Cosby style integration, etc, etc
Or in other words, only the most superficial kind of social justice imaginable.
Willy
It’s shapeshifting superficial social justice for the rubes! (say that one fast)
Trump is notorious for repeatedly stiffing suppliers, contractors, investors and creditors using many methods. Trump’s use of bankruptcy can be considered stealing when he never honorably paid up after becoming the billionaire he’s claiming to be. And his taxes?
He had no intention of ever locking Clinton up after all the years of enabling their kind. They’re the same. They just lie differently. Is that what this is all about, the kind of lying that we’ll accept from our overlords?
Peter
@Willy
You only know what the Clintonite media has spun as the fable about Trump’s business history. Everyone gets stiffed during these large bankruptcies and contract disputes are common. These contractors are trying to get Trump’s money for work that may not have been done or shoddy.
Bankruptcy allows these businesses to stay functioning and provide revenues and jobs and investors know the risks involved before they offer their capital. Trump lost nearly a $billion of his personal fortune from the failure of his business so calling that stealing is moronic.
The Stephen Miller Band
Peter’s response reveals the pernicious mendacity of Crony Capitalists. Capitalism is not about Free Enterprise. If it was, we wouldn’t even be talking about the douche Trump. He’d be drowning his sorrows on The Bowery.
I’m all about, and for, Free Enterprise and making Capital Formation & Capital Access more equitable & fair, but Capitalists are not. Quite the contrary.
Capitalists write the rules in their favor so they can maintain their monopoly positions. They use the companies they own as foils to avoid liability and shed them like a snake sheds a skin when they’re no longer useful. They are anti-competitive & anti-free market. They’re cheaters & crooks because if you decide to try & compete with them, you quite literally cannot — it’s not a level playing field because they’ve seen to it that it isn’t and never will be. And none of that is possible without all the crooked accountants & lawyers. That’s why I left the profession and have not, and will never, return.
Trump is highly skilled at surfing a sea of debt. He’s done it his entire career — surfing his way from one bankruptcy to the next with six in total and counting. Yes, “and counting” because the biggest one is yet to come. He may bankrupt his most prodigious & prominent business of all — America. And Peter & his ilk already forgive him and have awarded him a preemptive pardon just as Trump pardoned his best friend Billary.
Surfin’
different clue
@Che Pasa,
Your beloved Clinton drove the Overthrow Qaddafi policy and let her Inner Psychopath cackle into open view over the Qaddafi Snuff Video. Your beloved Clinton drove the Support-The-Coup-Against-Zelaya policy in Honduras when the Obama Administration was thinking of going along with OAS desires to restore Zelaya to legitimate power. She then supported sending back to Honduras the child Hondurans fleeing from Clinton’s beloved coup-regime drug-gang serial killers. Your beloved Clinton ruled from her State Department perch that Saudi Arabia should be allowed to purchase certain weapons to use in its mass slaughter war against Yemen . . . after the Clinton Foundation received a major bribe from Saudi Arabia. Your beloved Clinton supported Overthrow Assad as hard as she could in order to bring her Jihadis to power in Syria. Shall I go on. . . ?
If you can show any actual blood-thirsty actions by Donald Trump to match Clinton’s “Hannibal Lecter” ethics, we would all be happy to study your evidence to see if it is even real or not.
different clue
Hitler . . . Hitler . . . who’s the Hitler?
Erdogan in Turkey seems to be pretty Hitlerish in terms of rallying an inspired crowd, taking high-stakes high-risk gambles, and just lately his rolling night of the long knives. Also his “early Hitler” style territorial ambitions against neighboring countries.
Willy
TSMB, Peter dissembles:
“Trump lost nearly a $billion of his personal fortune from the failure of his business so calling that stealing is moronic.”
Trump’s net worth is said to now be $3.5B (although he claims much more). Do bankruptcy laws require businesses to eventually settle up with those they’ve stiffed once they’ve declared profitability?
…so that those stiffed businesses themselves don’t have to use bankruptcy laws?
different clue
@atcooper,
The squishy feminism you have referred to has been referred to as Goldman-Sachs Feminism.
Its supporters and admirers are strictly concerned with breaking through their own Tiffany Glass Ceilings. They identified with Goldman-Sachs Feminist Hillary’s campaign to break through the ultimate Tiffany Glass Ceiling . . . and psycho-em0 identified their meaning in life with Hillary’s pursuit of the ultimate Tiffany Glass Ceiling.
The Clintons’ “anti-racism” ( and Holder’s and Obama’s “anti-racism” too) is the pursuit of the Rainbow Oligarchy.
The Clintons want their daughter, Little Miss Princess Nepotism, to get into politics so that the Clintons can start making money again selling influence and taking ill-disguised bribes laundered through their family of Clinton Foundation Vehicles. Destroying Princess Chelsea’s political career as soon as the Clintonites get it started is very important in order to keep this dirty little dynasty confined to private life where that other dirty little dynasty, the Bushes, is currently confined.
( Would anyone be surprised in 10 or twenty years if the Clintonite DePublicrats get Jeb Bush’s handsome young son and Chelsea together on One Unity Ticket to Win the White House and Bring Us All Together?)
The Stephen Miller Band
@ Willy said: Do bankruptcy laws require businesses to eventually settle up with those they’ve stiffed once they’ve declared profitability?
Exactly, Willy. The Little People can declare bankruptcy, but the laws are different for personal bankruptcy and The Oligarchs have made those laws much less forgiving in the past couple of decades.
Student Loans & Healthcare Liabilities are not forgiven and so, when The Little People return to profitability, if they ever do and most don’t and profitability isn’t really the right word when we’re talking about crumbs & peanuts, they still have to pay it back, but not The Rich who conduct their business through their “companies” which are really their personal piggy banks and when said “companies” go bankrupt, The Rich are not personally held liable.
In fact, Obama voted, while in the Senate, to make the personal bankruptcy laws less forgiving (showing his True Colors early on even before his bid for POTUS) and yet paraded himself as a Champion of The Little People.
These people are so crooked, they’re such incredible cheaters & liars, but what makes it worse, much worse, is that they pretend to be the exact opposite & people still fall for this shit.
They all belong to the same club and the last thing they would ever want to be is you or me. That’s anathema to them. Young children of wealthy families know this and feel it & think it at a very early age — as early as four or five. My wife taught a very wealthy young student, an otherwise highly intelligent & adorable Eastern Indian girl, one year and she expressed to my wife that the worst thing in the world is to be poor and she would do anything never to be poor. No kidding. This is the mentality they learn & assimilate at a very early age.
Tony’s response is appropriate.
You Need People Like Me
binky
Stephan Gorka is not fascist enough for you? He wears the medals of a fascist group from Hungary.
Maybe instead of waxing poetic about how smart you are, you could try doing a little bit of actual analysis and research. Trump doesn’t have to be Hitler if he can be Admiral Horthy or Francisco Franco.
That’s the secret hidden in plain view by the purportedly left leaning but anti Democratic Party movement and its backhanded Putin love: Putin is not so much a communist as an authoritarian and his present policy is white supremacist, State church centered; anti-gay and anti-women’s equality. No problems with oligarchs because concentration of wealth makes for fewer points of control, not so different from the US.
Ivory Bill Woodpecker
Speaking of Der Fuehrer, he seems to be having some trouble with his Asian allies:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1QlzUhjSkg
Peter
@Willy
You seem to have a personal vendetta for Trump that confuses your understanding of how these investments and projects work. Only a fool would risk their entire fortune on a project so they find investors to share the risk and the rewards if they are successful. Trump and his investors didn’t see the Indians coming and paid a huge price when they were scalped by the rise of Tribal gaming.
The debt restructuring that bankruptcy brought reflected that new reality and the restructured debt was brought in line with what the business could pay with its revenues and that is before any profits might be realized. The loses suffered by all parties involved are written off and partially recouped with tax breaks as we saw on Trump’s returns. The wealthy investors who you think should be paid for their loses aren’t any different than Trump so why the BS about honorable debt paying?
I can see how you pine for an altered reality where Trump was stripped of all his wealth and didn’t have the means and celebrity to pursue and capture the grand prize of Hegemon. That fits in with the continuing denial of the reality of watching the arrogant certainty of the Clintonites swept away by a well planned and executed direct assault on the status quo led by a master of the medium.
Willy
Did trump pay everybody back for work completed, yes or no? (Investing is a completely different situation.)
Which returns?
Ivory Bill Woodpecker
Under the old status quo, the rich got the gold mine, while everyone else got the shaft.
Under the New Order, the rich get the gold mine, while everyone else gets the shaft.
So, the status quo got “assaulted” how, exactly?
Also, I assume the “master” Baghdad Peter means is Chessmaster Putin. I will admit that he played brilliantly, though even he was the beneficiary of a perfect storm of Black Swan Events, not all of which he arranged.
Ivory Bill Woodpecker
Oh, his life isn’t over yet. We can still hope. 😈
Hugh
Our ruling classes when they commit violence against us call it something else or pretend that they have nothing to do with it. For them, violence is only something bad when it is directed against them. Then it is the sky is falling. The universe is being turned upside down, and natural law is being contravened. The same thing happens when they steal from us. Nothing to see here move along. The markets are weaving their magic. What happens was meant to happen, winners and losers, and all that. But again suggest that some of their stolen wealth be returned, and it’s like we are trying to pry the fillings out of their mouths.
We live in an age of the Big Lie, and one of the forms it takes is the Big Denial. The rich, the billionaire class, can amass huge fortunes but they can never earn them. Think of it this way: if we put the Gates, Jobs, and Trumps on an island somewhere away from us, they would not be creating billions in wealth. Indeed they probably wouldn’t last a month before they died and rotted away. Now look at it the other way. Where would we be without them? Actually, we would be doing fine, almost certainly better than we are doing now. There still would have been personal computers and New York City would still be there. What this gets down to is that our ruling class needs us a lot more than we need them. We can get along fine without them, but they could not survive without us. They use, and abuse, our society, our resources, our work, our knowledge, but somehow they are the wealth creators. They are necessary, while we are not. All convenient, malevolent fictions. We all contribute to our society, and without that society, each of us nothing. So it is perfectly legitimate to ask how much is enough for each of us. If we want to value the contributions of some more than others, fine. But at what point do we say enough is enough?
In our kleptocracy, of course, this question is never asked, is actively suppressed, vilified. It’s socialist, or communist, or against the laws of Nature. Enough is never enough. No limits should be put on personal wealth no matter if that wealth contributes nothing to society (from where it came) or is helping to undermine and destroy that society. Gates didn’t even create DOS on which his fortune was based. He got the inside track to acquire it from IBM from his mother. He then created a predatory monopoly which catapulted him into the richest man in the world. Jobs did much the same at Apple. And Trump? He is a 70 year old self-promoting egomaniac real estate developer born rich who got a lot richer by catering to the rich, crony deals with government, dumping his costs on to his subcontractors and telling them they could sue him into eternity before they would ever see a dime, and dumping his debts on to everyone through his bankruptcies. Did Trump contribute anything to our society by doing any of this? No. Did he harm it? Yes. Did he steal his billions from the rest of us? Yes. Will any of this impress people like Peter? Of course not.
It’s just so much easier not to think, and cheer. As Some Guy wrote a while ago, a society is in irrevocable decline when it can’t come together to do obvious things. And if you look around, and across the political spectrum, the purposeful avoidance of the obvious permeates all our political thought. Our system is broken, and we need to look to ourselves, and not those who broke it, to make it right. But it’s just so much easier to embrace the Big Denial, and cheer.
VietnamVet
At its root, the shared denial of reality is the fear that the world is actually as science says it is. A brief passage on a blue orb in an expanding universe. Our minds and society valiantly try to make order out of randomness.
There was an elite counter-coup starting with Reagan and Thatcher to overthrow social democracy. To fight inflation, western workers were thrown under the bus. Corporate media ignores this except for a few voices like Tucker Carlson or Thomas Frank. Donald Trump’s election and Brexit are vain attempts of the remnants of democracy to change course. The President has flopped back into the establishment’s graces. The question is what will the youngsters do about it. Fast food, LEDs and drugs beckon; or will they return to barricades to reclaim the air, water and earth.
Peter
@Willy
You don’t seem to understand that Trump doesn’t pay or not pay these subcontractors or suppliers. He has vassals, general contractors, who he gives a budget to hire and pay these subcontractors or refuse to pay usually a final payment for breach of contract.
If his general contractors had a history of arbitrary refusal to pay for completed inspected work he wouldn’t be able to hire anyone to do his work. Trump does have a reputation of going to court and fighting these claims winning some and losing others, it’s part of the business but there is no profit from this hassle.
The most recent of these contract disputes involves the electrician subcontractor working on Trump’s DC hotel. They want an extra $2 million for overtime they performed to get the building ready for the pre-opening campaign rally that was televised. The subcontractor apparently didn’t renegotiate their contract with the general contractor and they are who is being sued but Trump is included because he has the money.
different clue
Has anyone done a study of the percentage of lowest-level subcontractors not paid on Trump’s projects as against the percentage of lowest-level subcontractors not paid on other Tycoons’ projects?
Willy
“…personal vendetta for Trump…”
and
“…the continuing denial of the reality of watching the arrogant certainty of the Clintonites swept away by a well planned and executed direct assault on the status quo led by a master of the medium.”
Why do you automatically believe these things? Trump has a shady presentation and past which is far too similar (though not in scope), with successful sociopaths I’ve known personally, who screwed me. I can relate to the victims, where no proof was given of their “incompetency”.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/jul/20/phil-ruffin/businessman-friend-donald-trump-says-he-always-pay/
http://fortune.com/2016/10/08/donald-trump-taxes-contractors/
https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2017-01-05/trump-s-dc-hotel-tagged-with-5-million-in-unpaid-worker-liens
Clinton has her shady past as well, but a less shady presentation. For all I know she’s a more polished sociopath, but she appears to be less capable of lying about her enabling support for the PTB than he’s appeared to be. Where is Trump’s “direct assault on the status quo”, outside of disposing of the disposable Red Queen figurehead to the comfort of Chappaqua? If he can successfully rework NAFTA and the ACA to the benefit of the poor worker and the small business owner, I might consider the status quo being assaulted. But if the corporate wealthy are the only ones who come out ahead regardless of intention, then he’s no master.
Stirling S Newberry
>please. why hasn\’t he been arrested for trespassing if he was \”unelected\”?
I don’t know – the same reason that Bush wasn’t? You have much to learn about Democracy in America.
Stirling S Newberry
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/apr/30/citizen-jane-jacobs-the-woman-who-saved-manhattan-from-the-bulldozer-documentary
Ché Pasa
@dc
“….Clinton”
“….Clinton”
“….Clinton”
“….Clinton”
“….Clinton”
“….Clinton”
“….Clinton”
Seven times you invoke “Clinton” in response to my comment about Trump. Cluestick: Clinton is not president and is not going to be president.
The thousands of civilian dead since Trump was installed in the White House are all on him. The number is rising fast. They demonstrate quite clearly Trump’s bloodlust as does his constant saber rattling.
He’s as much of a war criminal as any previous president; they should all be tried, convicted, and sent to hell. But it’s not going to happen. Not in our lifetime anyway.
Your obsession with the Clintons is not healthy. Get help.
Peter
@DC
Trump has moved on from chasing subcontractors into the poorhouse and is in the much more lucrative emoluments business now. When he leaves office in eight years he should have hundreds if not thousands of dollars stashed in his secret accounts.
Ten Bears
I’m sick of hearing about Clinton, period. She’s not the “president”, doesn’t live in the “white house”, is not the problem at hand. I don’t care if you love her or you hate her, your obsessions with her are deranged, and based on that alone should disqualify you all from further participation.
realitychecker
@ Ten Bears
Clinton is Hitler!
Seriously, it’s not smart or healthy to be in denial about the reality that the Bush loyalists and the Clinton loyalists continue to comprise powerful groups of active return-to-power aspirants. Plus, all critiques of the new current President should be considered in the context of the abysmal choice that was available.
Peter
@Ten B
You’re trying to take all the fun out of tormenting the Red Queen and her loser cult. They are still loyal to their mistress and focusing on Schumer, Pelosi or Sanders is just boring.
It’s g0ing to take years to deprogram the snowflakes and purge the Clintonites from the deep state so we need to drag out the humiliated Red Queen now and then to show what’s possible and to occasionally frighten the children.
Willy
Meanwhile the constitution remains archaic for those with very good brains. And if they’ve said a lot of things, they still can’t sue the media very easily.
karenjj2
Here’s an interesting view from outside the North American gated community: https://youtu.be/3xlVkNTZwiI
and an interesting perspective from the “deplorables” alt-media on airlines’ staff, climate change and France’s presidential candidate Macron: https://youtu.be/RT-VSe8UOQk
karenjj2
And this Kaiser Report from 2 days ago is an interesting explanation of the “Pivot to the Pacific” that has commenced: https://youtu.be/RQMO53TMSiA
Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Libya’s Moamar Qaddafi were murdered and their Nations destroyed when they tried gold as a currency standard; maybe China and partner, Russia, will succeed. “May you live in interesting times” indeed!
Buzzard
No, Trump is not Hitler.
He is our Erdogan, our Duterte. He’s close to our Juan Peron.
We can all understand why he and they got into office. It doesn’t mean they’re good.
This will not end well, either way.
Ivory Bill Woodpecker
Hill & Bill live rent-free in Baghdad Peter’s skull, and apparently they also maintain a time-share condo with Jeb! Bush in RC’s noggin.
I wonder which one–Hill, Bill, or Jeb!–is Emmanuel Goldstein. 😆
realitychecker
@ IBP
Righteo, those families never think beyond the present moment. Nor do their loyalists./s
Don’t you ever get tired of being wrong?
Peter
@Buzz
If the Clintonite/deep state coup attempt had been more pointed with snowflake mobs rioting and other direct threats to the republic Trump would have been forced to declare a state of emergency and deal effectively with our cult of personality and power.
Erdogan has the authority to remove the infected people from positions of influence and only a fool would leave them or those guilty of crimes free to undermine Turkish democracy. A bloody military coup attempt led by a strange and widespread cult left him responsible for cleaning the decay from the healthy part of their society. Many of the people detained have been released but even that is dangerous as the Gulenist assassin who murdered the Russian ambassador showed.
Trump has to use different methods to get at the anti-democratic fanatics in the US but his intention of using libel laws on the lying media is a start along with the pruning going on in many agencies. The latest media spin seems to be an attempt to portray Trump as confused to feed the BS incapacitated impeachment ploy. The media is usually confused by what Trump says but that doesn’t mean Trump is confused.
Ivory Bill Woodpecker
May I remind Baghdad Peter that the candidate of the “anti-democratic fanatics” won a majority of the popular vote? Sounds rather democratic to me.
And if they were actually “fanatics”, would they not indeed have rioted?
Fuddy-duddy Clinton voters (if Peter can imagine such people rioting, he boasts a more vivid imagination than I) are a “personality cult”, but Trump Chumps aren’t?
Project much?
Peter
@IBW
This is priceless watching you wallow in the failure of the attempt to sigh up enough illegal voters to swing the election with diversity. It must be painful now knowing that the reign of PC terror will never be inflicted on the masses by the Red Queen and her quislings.
As I said the Clintonites are dull and uninteresting and even with Soros pushing them there is no militant spark just whining, denial and attempts at being clever.
Writing history or deciding who is discussed in that history is the prerogative of the winner and the Clintonites are definitely the losers in this game so they have no power to set any rules.
Willy
Well hopefully from now on, regardless of who’s your favorite oligarch, the days of getting suckered into fighting over whether fetuses should have guns and who’s a muslim are over. And we’ll all be talking more serious shit now.
Ivory Bill Woodpecker
Which is why when the North won the Civil War, Southerners gracefully accepted defeat, with a massive collective shout, “It’s a fair cop, guvnor, ye’ve got us bang to rights!” and made no attempts to defend the Confederate cause afterward, with not so much as one book published whitewashing the crimes of slavery and (later) Jim Crow…
Your kind hardly set a good example for my kind, Peter. Did the GOP placidly accept defeat and yield to the will of [snark]Teh Kenyan Usurper,[/snark] even though he actually won convincing majorities of the popular vote as well as the electoral vote, twice?
I expect a predominance of USAmerican intellectuals sympathize with the losing side of 2016 more than the winning side, so I rather doubt the verdict of Clio will be kind to Peter’s cause.
Ivory Bill Woodpecker
Oh, Ascended Madoka, I missed these the first time.
Soros? Illegal voters?
Lemme guess, you heard about all of that from Alex Jones, or maybe Jeff Rense.
Oh, Petey, you poor sod, you really have become Crazy Uncle Liberty. 😆
Ultra
There are definitely some similarities between the Trump cult and fascist Ultra-Nationalists. This is what happened in New York today (and in Los Angeles):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYoHcExQjV4
Willy
IBW, If anybody disagrees with anything he says then you’re automatically in league with Clinton. He’s some kind of self-parody troll.
Peter
@Willy
I looked at your links to Trumps crimes against humanity and what I found was half stories tilted to look as if workers were robbed by the greedy tycoon. Yellow journalists feel free to print this trash because Trump’s people didn’t respond immediately to their questions. These are mostly contractor disputes business to business not Oligarch to peasant power-plays. The records of the court cases are available and would show what claims and counterclaims were presented leading to a judgment but readers are led to swallow the reporters smear without complete information.
You admit to being a rube/victim of some, you say, sociopath so this supposedly qualifies you to pass judgment on the contract disputes of large contracting or supply firm’s with Trump.
Trump sets policy for his organization and doesn’t write checks for contractors or employees. The people who manage these tasks are fallible, human and some are surely assholes so mistakes and stupid decisions along with the correct ones are made but the courts seem to sort them out.
Willy
Trump has a continuous pattern ranging from Tony Schwarz to “grab them by the pussy” to his latest “very rough… archaic system… really a bad thing for the country” suggesting some level of sociopathy which you completely ignore because of your hatred for Hillary Clinton.
Wouldn’t it be easier to just hate them both? One wouldn’t have to spend so much time trying to split hairs.
Peter
A majority of women voters didn’t think Trump’s quip about grabbing pussy was indicative of anything but Willy still clings to his pearls over loose words.
I don’t hate the Clintons but I do despise what they represent and have done. The Red Queen displayed evidence of psychopathy beyond simple sociopathic behavior.
I don’t like Trump personally but I do support much of his policies and wish him well. If nothing else the catastrophe spewing climate Warmers are in retreat and won’t be frightening children with the government’s help.
Willy
“A majority of women voters…”
I’ve seen women sexually harassed. I’ve seen worklplace bullying and mobbing. I’ve seen Machiavellians operate and ruin good people. And I’ve seen why these vile creatures get away with it. I can perform a reasonably objective layman’s PCL-R test. In total these people represent less than 1% of everybody I’ve ever had to deal with. IOW, I’m not an overly sensitive easily-influenced butthurt kind of guy who over-reacts to conflicts and perceives anybody I dislike as psychopathic. Indeed, every P I knew started out wanting to be my new best friend (also in line with their MO).
“I don’t hate the Clintons..”
I dislike the Clintons. Their third way wasn’t even competent moderation, but an economic giveaway so foolish that wingnut evangelicals descendants will be living in a world where the most powerful nation is atheist, abortive, and still officially socialist. Still, she was reputed to have been a likeable boss, not an indication of psychopathy (unless her minions are all saying so out of fear).
“I don’t like Trump personally…”
If the wall does indeed get built with confiscated drug lord funds, he’s able to successfully and scientifically refute the 97% GW consensus to where it drops to less than 50%, can revise trade agreements to where I can begin trusting most new products again, I’ll like him more. Right now I see him as either doing whatever it takes to get and wield power, or as an unusually cocky version of Chance Gardener.
Ivory Bill Woodpecker
Aaaaaand another Crazy Uncle Liberty “alternate fact” is checked off the list…
(h/t Driftglass for the term “Crazy Uncle Liberty”)
Peter
@IBW
I’d help you with the most recent research and the discovery that the climate scientists lack an understanding of physics but you’re a bird-brain so why waste the effort.
Ivory Bill Woodpecker
The most recent research from where? Infowars? 😛
different clue
@Che Pasa,
Thank you for your response to my comment. I have read it and will give it all the respect it deserves.
And thank you for your free advice about me getting help. It is worth every cent.
different clue
@Ten Bears,
Thank you for your interest in my comment. I am always happy to hear from you. Please let me know if you have any other concerns.