Open Thread

Gotta love our rulers’ reasons for inflation: they gave us too much with the smaller portion of the COVID legislation that actually benefited us and not them, we’re spoiled now and too lazy to get back to work, and of course they’re paying us too much.

So, it has nothing to do with the vast majority of the COVID legislation that benefited them, nor the Fed’s money spigot which is hooked up directly to BlackRock and is being used to prop up rental property values which allows them to consolidate ownership and easier for them to collude to drive up rental prices, nor the immense amount of free Fed money they have used to drive up all markets and which has found its way into damn near every commodity known to man, nor their destruction of our supply chain in their maniacal greed to send our jobs overseas and boost corporate profits, nor the artificial shortages due to that damaged supply chain that includes car computer chips which leads to increased car prices, nor our criminal health care system they’ve devised and refuse to allow to be reformed that will rob you while you are under anesthesia with surprise billing.

Nope, it’s just us. We’re being too lazy and too greedy.

Z

So the media loves their “Dems in disarray” narrative, but if we look at what’s happening right now, there’s a lot of disarray on the right, too. And I think maybe we are underestimating how much impact Rush Limbaugh’s death had. His death was a seismic shift on the right and a major downgrade in GOP unity.

Limbaugh set the tone for some 600 radio stations and policed messaging for another 1,000 Republican stations. They lost that centralized spin control and that arm of their propaganda machine is headless now. Limbaugh’s replacements are all over the place and they are much lousier liars than he was. Some are going more extreme while others are actually trying to moderate their rhetoric since they are no longer as afraid of the dittoheads.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens there. Will a new Limbaugh-type figure emerge, or will talk radio stay the way it is now?

Limbaugh developed his act over time and won his loyalty and command presence over time. And he helped evolve the right wing cultural-fascist radio ecosystem to where it is now. He was the keystone species and his death leaves the cultural fascist ecosystem without a keystone species. And all the little righties want to be the Head Limbaugh In Charge. Let us hope they all eat the living meat off of eachothers’ faces all the way down to the living skull beneath.

Trump is sort of a unifying magnet for a certain set of iron filings. When he goes they will look for another magnet to arrange themselves around.

Fox News will desperately try to keep the band together and on the same page. Tucker Carlson has big dreams for himself.

The DLC Clintonite Shitobamacrats will desperately try to hold the line against the more liberadical future-seekers and will try their hardest to buy the Right as much time to re-organize as they can for as long as they can.

We unhappy campers outside the power structures and the propaganda structures will have to try evolving our own eco-Betterculture of political-economic resistance, rejection, refusal and combat. Perhaps we can become numerous and powerful enough in eachothers’ distributed presence to where we can grow a durable-over-time movement to use as a foundational base for a social fortress full of political strike-forces launching destruction-raids and then sustained “extermination” attacks against the opponents of whatever we finally decide our agenda-for-political-conquest is going to be.

Limbaugh was a tool.

Limbaugh “made it” on Clinton’s corruption and in particular the big corporate lap dawg putting his mug on NAFTA. I used to listen to him back then sometimes to hear to what he had to say about that lowlife and it was often observations that were obvious but couldn’t be heard on TV. As f*cked and as intellectually dishonest as Limbaugh was, he was often spot-on about Clinton and that’s how he grew his credibility with his audience.

Talk radio’s greatest influence is on the individual listener driving on the road alone. When you are driving, if you are paying proper attention to the task at hand, you are expending a large amount of your brain’s capacity and are in a low grade trance which makes you more susceptible to influence. And there was Rush’s friendly voice and often accurate observations about Clinton to fill the void in the Heartland to confirm what they knew: their future was being sold out . It wasn’t all Clinton and the democrats mind you, it was also the GOP, but they would be reckoned with later with the Tea Party movement.

Z

Should we just admit that present day politics has little to do with how to solve problems (something few voters actually believe could happen) and instead is about giving you permission to hurt and hate? (Giving you the most destructive form of catharsis possible.)

It’s not hard to see how this happened (decades of institutional rot) and how it continues (a media ecosystem that married user engagement to outrage).

I never thought I would say this but maybe the American people should find religion and get out of politics. (Few mainstream religions are as degenerative as our present political ideologies.)

Both the Democrats and Republicans are minority parties and both Parties have party establishments dedicated to serving constituencies of predators and parasites. Neither Party is willing to empower a constituency with a broad-base in the population to pursue economic interests in conflict with corporate business, the financial sector, the tech giants or the billionaire oligarchs. For the elites of the Republican Party, Trump is a solution, a lightening rod that draws off the electric charge of anger, resentment and dissatisfaction of many millions of Republican voters and delivers in policy little of policy substance, while furthering the long-term projects of a far-right judiciary and a stunted capacity to collect taxes from giant business corporations and the mega-rich.

Institutionally the Republican Party and its ideological and policy support infrastructure remains very strong nationally, with a deep bench of pseudo-academic operatives active in law and economics to further an authoritarian agenda and retain control of or contest control of most States.

Institutionally, the Democrats are the weaker Party, though the geographic distribution of their support encompasses the large cities of the East and West Coasts. They managed to elect Biden, the oldest President ever and one associated with many policy choices destructive of the economic interests of many tens of million though also one with a working-class persona, against the ridiculous Trump, but just barely — in a high-turnout election 5 million of their 7 million popular vote margin came in one State, California. The Vice-President in this Administration of oldest President only won a single primary, the one held in the Hamptons to secure approval from the wealthy elites who back the Party financially.

Few spectacles in politics are more boring than watching the Democrats enact another variation on a kayfabe of struggle with the heels in their own Party (or the heels in the other Party) as they fail to enact promised reforms or make the programs they do manage, effective for people.

The two Parties are far from identical, but each has among its core functions the channeling of popular anger and resentment into economically impotent (and economically ignorant) symbolic struggles and symbolic gestures. American politics on the whole is responsive only to large business corporations and the very wealthy. This is a fact of politics systematically demonstrated by academic studies. This fact is created by neither Party taking on the cause of popular issues unpopular with the extremely rich in effective ways and thus neither Party feels any strategic pressure to do anything but continue to contain the 80%-90% and let their financial backers feed on the prostrate carcass of the American political economy.

The American People — the vast majority of that 90% — are complicit in this state of affairs. Vast numbers rarely vote or participate at all — more than those who identify however weakly with either Party. Those who do vote at least sometimes divide their identifications between the two Parties and let themselves be manipulated by the vast stream of propaganda paid for by the billionaires and millionaires and managed by the most important operatives of the permanent campaigns deployed by the Parties.

The most important function of representative democratic government is disabled in this state of affairs, in this top-down politics of manipulative propaganda and kayfabe paid for by global business corporations and billionaires. Democratic government ought to provide a channel for countervailing power to operate for the masses expressing their interests electorally against the economic bosses of a hierarchical economy.

Historically, that worked imperfectly at best, and depended delicately on the willingness of a few talented folks to “betray their class” and contribute leadership to popular causes alongside such leadership as emerged from below. And, it was often subverted by corruption of popular leaders. But it was also aided by a vast diversity and numbers in small business and also in other voluntary social organization — churches and clubs and civic organizations where politics was discussed.

It is tougher now for the same reasons it is more to be desired: the domination of the economic system by many fewer businesses and the monopoly of wealth in fewer hands grows intense.

It does not help at all to fool one’s self that the differences between the Parties — of which there are many — or the entertaining kayfabe some of those differences give rise to — matter much at all to the important, desperate work of finding realistic ways out of this degenerate political system. I think one needed step is to stop identifying with or feeling any kind of loyalty to either Party or pre-packaged ideology. Stop participating even as a voting spectator in this mad spectacle and call the bs

Ideological self-encapsulation!

Or as NL suggests, narrow down the window of critical thinking so much just like our conservative corporate minions have, until everything “USA” hits bottom. And then watch Latinos swarm over our great wall to avoid heat stroke like something outta that WWZ movie. Maybe they’ll have some ideas.

metamars: The question is, “how much”?

If a man is his own measure, the answers will vary with individual perceptions. Even in a mal-functioning politics of representative democracy and law, some enterprising politicians and pundits will find opportunities in the widespread discontent and give voice to the frustration and anger and desperation. It is what Tucker Carlson is doing (I think cynically and hypocritically given his reactionary history) it is what Matt Taibbi is doing (with some idealistic conviction imho). I am cynical enough to think some corporate Media do a bit of it, just as a way of taking the temperature of a possibly feverish polity. I have speculated that The Hill, an establishment right-wing outfit, was doing that with Rising with Krystal & Saagar (the right & left populist combo resonated with the commentariat here I think — Ball’s history as a con artist and John Solomon’s early involvement as producer were tells). I find it hard to read Steve Bannon — I get that he is smart, but for me he comes across as a bundle of personality disorders, a bit “borderline” if you know the psychiatric lingo.

The thing is mass-movement reform needs some institutional bottoms, platforms with resources to employ people to plan and organize “outside”. Movement conservatism and the economic policies it set in motion back in the late 1970s and early 1980’s was phenomenonly successful in destroying those ” bottoms”, the institutional foundations of liberal reform. It is what Chris Hedges wrote about in Death of the Liberal Class Much of that destruction was deliberate; some was dumb luck, like the internet destroying classified advertising, the economic basis for big and medium city dailies owned by local real estate developers invested in boosterism and fighting machine politicians for control of city hall.

Local oligarchs, such as newspaper publishers often were, are usually pretty reactionary as you might expect, but historically local newspapers, local bankers, local industries played an important part in making reforms possible nationally because they were natural antagonists to both other regions and to the “big boys” in New York, say. It is too little appreciated that Trump, as a real estate developer with near-death experiences with big banks, represents a species of reactionary conservatism hostile to cosmopolitan centralized power.

What I am saying is that you need not look to the substance or integrity of what a pundit or politician says, to detect the seeds of reform or revolution. Look at whether their success, if it comes, can be cancelled. Rush Limbaugh, I would submit, was always a creature of the right-wing Media empire that gave him a home. It is not that a liberal/left hope (or even a genuine conservative populist) could not arise in talk radio or YouTube or cable news or TikTok. Heck, RT puts on talking heads, who were professionally successful on teevee news. But any of those types of venues will happily cancel them, too. Where code is law, the algorithim rules — so no actual person or institutional face has to take responsibility for intentionally ending a career, or “blowing it up” with viral spread either. Carlos Slim never has to explain why Tom Friedman continues to write opinion for the New York Times; Mrs Steve Jobs is never asked to explain the PMC drivel dripping from the virtual pages of the Atlantic; we can joke about the Bezos Daily Shopper, but can we imagine the paper publishing the Pentagon Papers when AWS is fighting Microsoft for access to the Pentagon/IC pig’s trough? They can barely manage a mild word of protest against the persecution of Assange.

Facing the reality of our plutocratic political extremes is too much for many, I think. They want to swallow any blue pill on offer, and give up on anything changing while pretending to themselves and others, that they are doing something and cling to hope.

We are in an era when we do not have the luxury of hoping that we are going to get thru this, whatever “this” is in your mind: the collapse of empire, global warming, ecological collapse, the fascism of plutocracy, economic chaos . . . . I see people reject a lot of political discourse as “conspiracy theory” or “alarmism” (about the environment or AI & surveillance e.g.) and swallow a lot of bs sweetened with, say, the hope that their Tesla is a harbinger of hi-tech salvation. Consider that it may not be about your feelings.

Tucker Carlson is just another carnie. There is a difference between expressing the popular discontent and trying to exploit it. Metamars remains lost in his right wing miasma trying to figure out which of his many nutcases is the most credible.

@Willy,

Wait a few decades and then watch a hundred million or more Ameranglos and Amerafros swarm over the border into Canada to beat the heat. Along with millions of Latinos and Caribbeanos. Canada will run out of bullets before we run out of climate refugees.