divine right

“I, of all people, am aware that there is some irony in the fact that I am leaving while a man who has bragged on tape about his history of sexual assault sits in the Oval Office, and a man who has repeatedly preyed on young girls campaigns for the Senate with the full support of his party.”_____________al franken___________shades of tricky dick…it isn’t illegal if the president does it…nixon invoking the divine right of presidency…well…hypocrisy is a common weapon of power and we are up our necks in it vevery day…al franken may indeed have used a position of celebrity to unduly impose himself on women ( I don’t know…i wasn’t there…neither were you…or kristie gillibrand for that matter ) and there may indeed be some with cause to be angry over that…that isn’t the issue in the senate however…I believe franken when he says his intention was to represent all the people of his state...even though the system would never allow that…what franken’s problem was is that he brought a sense of critical thinking and heterodoxy to an august and thoroughly orthodox institution...the government set up by the constitution was never meant to represent all the people…it was the successful counter-revolution put up in the face of the assumption of the mass of people that the “spirit of 1776” was the valid grounding for the government "by and for the people” ( shay’s rebellion, among other events )…when he wrote “the fundamental constitutions of carolina” in 1669 john locke ( putative philosophical godfather of the framers ) wrote that his intent was to “avoid erecting a numerous democracy”…in other words the franchise should be limited to what the federalist paper called “the best men”...read white male landowners ( and there is a significant movement in this direction in the present era )…you cannot survive questioning the prime directives of an oligarchy posing as a democracy…wealth and special interest have always been at the heart of congress…during the first congress there was considerable debate over the “impost” ( tariff ) bill that was to serve as a financial basis for the federal government…merchants in congress haggled, debated, and delayed the bill until they could land the cargoes they had at sea to avoid paying the proposed tariff ( it eventually passed ) all the while charging customers higher prices to cover the cost of the proposal…one hand has always washed the other in swamptown…or wherever the capitol has been located ( for a clearer understand of how all this came to be, a three book reading list..the federalist papers[dreary as it may be at times]. An economic interpretation of the constitution of the united states by Charles beard…and William maclay’s journal of the first congress )...so roy moore...oligarch wannabe and cracker…will be elected...oh the urban areas will reject him…the rural cracker will not…and he will be seated in the senate because he will do the bidding of his handlers just like the rest of the whores...there is nothing unusual in this…northing unexpected if you pay close attention…it is the way of things and the institutions are buttressed against change…minority rule over the “ interested and overbearing majority” [madison federalist X] was always the intent.

tools of opulence and ambition

"viewing the subject on its merits alone, the freeholders of the country would be the safest depositories of republican liberty. in future times a great majority of the people will not only be without landed, but any other sort of property. these will either combine under the influence of their common situation; in which case the rights of property and the public liberty will not be secure in their hands, or, which is more probable, they will become the tools of opulence and ambition; in which case there will be equal danger on another side." james madison. the records of the federal convention of 1787. max farrad ed. vol.II p.203___________like jay or hamilton, madison doesn't have much faith in the ability of "the people" to actually rule themselves...and at fist glance, given the current state of the presidency, it may seem his prediction has a touch of prescience...except for the "freeholder" part...it starts to come unglued there...a freeholder, in this context, is someone who holds real property...a landed individual...a member of the upper crust...the elite in varying proportions...but of a superior class than the industrial masses...elite rule, of which republicanism is a milder form than say oligarchy...but elite rule none the less...that the "great majority" was kept "without any other sort of property" through policies promulgated by that "republican liberty" ( especially the upward redistribution of wealth that has been going on for the last thirty-six years ) which was allegedly established to represent those self-same "people" was of little consequence to madison since he equated "property" ( which would not be "secure" in the hands of the people ) with "the public liberty" ensuring that, in his view, the unpropertied could not grasp "liberty" and so could not rule themselves much less the country...as much as some of the elite may loathe him, don trump is of that elite..no less so than clinton is...or madison was for that matter...unfortunately for madisons analysis "the people" are more than able to see the deck is stacked against them and they are irate...trump manipulated that anger to his and the elite's advantage...there is nothing new here people..nothing at all.

divine right of presidency

i have read recently that the presidents legal team has claimed that don's tweets about the non-existence of any "comey tapes" constitute evidence that they do not exist...if true it is a wonderful example of magical thinking and one of the best attempts at evasion of an issue since old dick nixon offered to allow the stone deaf john c. stennis listen to his white house tapes and...when that failed had his counsel argue in open court that the president was above the law for four years at a time...effectively arguing that the divine right of kings had been democratized into the republic...this did not work incidentally...of course this was in the days before "alternate facts" existed ( or, at least were termed such...plenty of orwellian machinations and "special vocabularies " back in the 70s children...this is nothing new...in fact it is laughably familiar )...one supposes that this puny and almost mindless effort will not either but the politically "uneducated" are howling and the national psyche grows stupider by the day...the best i can come up with is the trump team has opted for the "chaos defense"...if the marx brothers were still alive they'd be top advisors.

time to get out of dodge

okay...history does not repeat itself...the variables of non linear causality prevent that...things never happen exactly the same and the dialectic grinds on...like it or not...but christ on a bike the parallels are getting weird...richard nixon was not a stupid man..he was utterly twisted and he believed fervently that the president was above the law for four years at a time ( he was wrong and when he ordered his counsel to plead that defense in open court his lawyer damn well made sure the judge understood it was his client that was saying that, not him )...even believing he could do anything he pleased he was astute enough to know he had to be quiet about it...inverse of the current washington freak show masquerading as a national government but coming off as being venal as a low-rent county board of commissioners...is this hubris or just stupid? i know where my opinion falls on this...you may come to your own decisions in your own sweet time...but don't dawdle...one of these days is going to be a fast one and you will bludgeoned by events so warped you'll need fun house mirror to see them straight..so..where is this screed going? just a note to point out that old dick flew off to saudi arabia and then israel in june of 1974...in a strong international diplomatic position reflective of his "outhouses in peoria" outlook on public affairs...he cam back and resigned the presidency on august ninth...

( i always keep a copy of dick's resignation handy..have one up on the wall )...repeat..history does not repeat itself...hope spring s eternal too...of course that would leave us with mike pence...hope may be deffered.

oh i've seen failed coverups

when archibald cox ( bottom photo ) issued a subpoena for tapes relating to the watergate break-in held by richard nixon, the president refused and offered the "stennis compromise" on 19 october 1973 instead...offering to allow the notoriously hard of hearing john c. stennis of mississippi review the tapes...cox refused and on 20 october 1973 nixon ordered attorney general eliot richardson ( top photo )to fire cox...both elliot richardson and his deputy wiliamr uckelshaus refused, resigning instead fo carrying out the president's order...nixon appointed robert bork as attorney general who eventually did the deed...the upshot? in the end public opinion forced the appointment of a new special prosecutor, leon jaworski who continued to look at the corrupt practices of the nixon administration...is don trump's canning of comey another cover-up...probably...there was some integrity in the nixon administration despite his example of leadership by "because i say so" ( sounding familiar ) that seems utterly lacking in the current swamptown freak show...there still is public opinion...and there may be some spines left in the house of representatives ( i know...it seems unlikely...but stranger things have happened )...nixon was as venal and dismissive of the constitution as don is...we all know where that ended up..his arrogance detached him from the political realities and he found himself claiming victory ( the famous image of the "vee" salute from the steps leading to the helicopter ) as he resigned...there is still hope...hope that dims when we have a close look at who the successor might be.

corporate agenda

a 21st century corporate labor relations primer 1.) hire those rendered desperate by class warfare at the most marginal hourly rate possible. 2.) accept error and poor workmanship as long as productivity does not fall to more than 40%-50% of previous production standards, lower wages will compensate for losses. 3.) simplify and outsource work processes whenever possible to deny employees as much knowledge based leverage over terms and conditions of work as possible and insure corporate survival as older, skilled employees leave/die/retire. 4.) Automate processes when and wherever possible

coolidge might as well be president

i recently received an email which included the phrase )…in an era when everyone is becoming more focused on personal gain…” which go me to pondering on what that means exactly…it certainly does seem that we are reverting to the “greed is good “ credo of the 1980s and 90s…but where did that come from and why are we reverting? well …smilin’ cal Coolidge said “the business of America is business” and the 1920s were vaguely like the present with their “I got mine, you’d better get into the market and get yours” mentality so you’d have to think the credo of greed is older than dutch reagan and slick willie…it was around at least sixty years before nancy led ronnie into the white house…and the rockefellers got their start by asking the federal government outrageous prices for the goods they sold abe Lincoln during the civil war…so even smilin’ cal had precedents to allow for…i am thinking it goes back to the year 1789 when the twin principles of “ I got mine, you get yours” and “ protect the elite from the mob at all costs” ( by making appear that the constitution guarantees rights rather than limiting them…the bill of rights was tacked on to make the whole contraption fly ) became institutionalized as government policy…so what was the anomaly that the system had to “revert” from? i am inclined to think it was the great depression and the impact it had on our parents ( i am one of those horrible boomers the kids are on about…wait a bit…give them time…they are young, there is still hope they may understand )…it made them mistrustful of authority ( except for roosevelt )…it showed them the elite was not infallible…that authority didn’t always know what it was talking about…that politicians ( except Roosevelt ) lied to achieve their own agenda or those of their true constituents….and they pass those doubts on to us…now we are aging and we have lost control of the kids…we , seemingly, did not have the depth of conviction our parents did and could not pass that mistrust of authority and elites on to the kids ( pardon me but don trump is nothing if not of the elite despite his racist, nativist yahoo credentials…he lied to those people who elected him…they will be unhappy…they won’t like what they get )…two anomalous generations are fading and the institutions that preserve the privilege of wealth are reasserting themselves…and it looks like the kids are buying it.

putin on the ritz

just a short note to wonder out loud if the president is responding to what seems to be a chemical weapons attack by the syrian government...or is he dissembling and redirecting attention from the probe into the russian connections in his administration by lobbing tomahawk missiles into an airbase and tacitly saying " would i do this if i were in bed with vladi?" once again, just letting my mind wander...no megalomaniac politician ( for that is what he has become...if he weren't one all along ) would pull such a transparently manipulative stunt, right?

we are the people publius warned us against

"...that we may avoid erecting a numerous democracy..." john locke. the fundamental constitutions of carolina. 1669_________ "measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority." james madison. federalist X._______"on some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the white house will be adorned by a downright moron." h.l.mencken in 1920________john locke was the philosophical godfather to the framers of the constitution and madison, hamilton, and jay worked mightily to limit the franchise to the "better" sort...it is important to note that the constitution is about limiting rights, not guaranteeing them and that the first ten amendments were a rider tossed in at the last minute to make the whole thing more palatable to the state's righters...i had thought of bush the junior as the preeminent moron in the white house...this may need revision..the jury is still out on the bafflement that emanates from whoretown...is this idiocy or just a lack of a filter? we have time to find out...however we will need to know soon...the unquiet grave of reaganism is stirring and there is no telling where that could end...mencken was prescient in his statements...there have been many unenlightened tools of special interests in the executive branch...there seems and endless supply...some are better schooled in the arts of camouflage than others having absorbed more of their ivy league educations than others..others have been transparent in their ineptitude or malevolence...whichever is ensconced in the executive mansion you can be assured that if you work for an hourly wage you can be sure their interests are in direct opposition to yours...we are more numerous...that "interested and overbearing majority"...yet they find ways to keep us from realizing it..and we bite...every time...why they "love the uneducated"...time to smarten up people...this foolishness has gone on long enough.

advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.

"and it is important to realise that its [totalitarianism] control of thought is not only negative, but positive. it not only forbids you to express, even to think, certain thoughts but it dictates what you shall think, it creates an ideology for you, it tries to govern your emotional life as well as setting up a code of conduct. and, as far as possible, it isolates you from the outside world, it shuts you up in an artificial universe in which you have no standards of comparison. the totalitarian state tries, at any rate, to control the thoughts and emotions of its subjects at least as completely as it controls their actions." george orwell. from literature and totalitarianism_______________________________"all things not forbidden are compulsory". t.h. white. from the once and future king_____________________________i hear a lot of calls to "resist" don trump...which is fine as far as it goes but i am inclined to think he is just another mouthpiece/bit player in an ongoing corporate agenda that is focused on creating control through debt peonage and, in and of himself, not that important...ridding the white house of him won't alter that agenda one scintilla...you can bemoan the passing of barry obama but the trans-pacific partnership was moving along on his watch and that was no friend of anyone who works for an hourly wage...and hillary wouldn't have been less venal...just less obvious..the header is another orwell quote and it demonstrates that the corporate agenda is the totalitarian agenda...we are branded...divided..made to compete for the privilege of going into debt ( and so creating wealth ) for material goods that we are manipulated into desiring...totalitarian control need not be overt and it has been with us in a highly refined system that is so enculturated we hardly notice for a long while...and it takes a great deal of strength, work, and disregard for the prevailing cultural norms to see what is, to borrow from orewell again, what is "in front of your nose"...the current administration is just one more act in the play publius drafted long ago.

hypocrisy is a common weapon of power

"a successful claim to [imperial]power also rested on behind-the-scenes manoeuvers, on the support of key interest groups, on being groomed for the part, and on the careful manipulation of opinion." from "spqr: a history of ancient rome_____________"what the bolsheviks were up to words cannot describe. one time someone brought a newspaper from town. inside a photo. grain growing high in the fields. and the...text said that the cities were going hungry, that there were lines for bread night and day because the peasants were lazy, they didn't want to harvest the crops, and everything was rotting in the field. the hatred toward the peasants was great, and yet it was after all the peasants themselves who were dying of hunger." branislawa kamieloska on the ukrainian famine of the 1930s from "imperium"______“I turn on the T.V., open the newspapers and I see stories of chaos. Chaos! Yet it is the exact opposite. This administration is running like a fine-tuned machine.” don trump_________"in our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics'. all issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia." george orwell_____________"post-truth", "alternative facts", "fake news"...the "special vocabulary" of the current era continues to expand and distort...it is different but, in the end, it is still the "mass of lies" and no less the "evasions" of orwell's day...from the not so crypto-fascist right to the censorious, politically correct liberals everyone is indulging in distortions and outright untruths to enhance and expand their views...the media? from the new york times and wall street journal to breitbart and fox they all have an editorial policy that pander to their advertisers and the world view of their core readers who want nothing more than reinforcement of bias...no one is "objective" ( and, frankly, i am uncertain if that exists anywhere except, perhaps, in terms of the force of gravity... a ten story fall will injure or kill rightist, leftist, or centerist without regard to opinion or status )and everyone has an agenda..so..who to believe? no one...if it is going to be cast as an orwellian age then let us be orwellian in the terms of his writing and intellect...he was good at exposing hypocrisy and just because he wrote about a dystopian future doesn't mean he wanted to live it..his writing ( and i mean that beyond animal farm and 1984...he was a prolific writer and a good journalist ) looked to go beyond the distortions and the special vocabularies and dig into what was actually going on...he was widely read and intellectually skeptical...and he wrote in the most straightforward and clear language he could muster to make it plain what he thought...we could do with a bit more straightforwardness in this behavioral sink we have tumbled into...coming clean will take some serious linguistic analysis...no one in power likes clear thought...it raises too many questions...we need george now...but no the dystopian george...that person has been hugely misrepresented...what we need is the clear headed and unflinching semantic analyst that george was...even when it came to his own language use.

murum versus limites

"the erection of a [roman] limites sets in motion a play of social forces which are bound to end disastrously for the the builders. a policy of non-intercourse with the barbarians beyond is quite impracticable. whatever the imperial government may decide, the interests of traders, pioneers, adventurers, and so forth will inevitably draw them beyond the frontier." arnold toynbee. a study in history. the photo of the remains of hadrian's is one of what's left, not what was...the wall was anywhere from nine to twenty feet wide and eleven to twenty feet tall depending on what was available locally to build with...some of it was stone...some turf..all of it was built to the fortifaction specifications of the roman legions and it was found not o be economically viable to maintain and defend it...it was not cost effective...on hadrian's death the new emperor, antonius pius, promptly abandoned it and began construction of a wall shoter than the seventy three mile length of hadrian's in the scottish lowlands about a hundred miles north...this too proved impractical and antonius' successor, marcus aurelius abandoned it and returned to hadrian's wall as the defended border...latin for wall is murum which is what these were physically...they were also the more abstract limites, a demarcation of the the limits of empire ( the term was also applied to the internal boundaries between roman provinces )...from the gulf of mexico tot he pacific the us/mexican border is 1954 miles i have found estimates of it's construction costs ( not manning and patrolling it ) anywhere from $15 billion to $49 billion...one wonders about the economic viability of that for what it is proposed to do which is essentially stop central and south american peoples from demographically reclaiming territories lost by mexico in the 1845-48 mexican american war...you can put economics aside...this is about revanchism pure and simple and the animus it engenders in nativists...a boondoggle at best one wonders whether a modern hadrian's wall would be more efficacious than the original...i would invite you to look at the map of mexico and the u s with attention to the coastlines...immigrants driven to water by a wall suddenly, and possibly exponentially, increase the costs involved in securing an abstraction as ephemeral as a national border...lots of coves and inlets to make land in...and with the defacto cubanization of south florida safe havens for immigrant landings are entirely possible...seems a better idea to me to embrace the inevitable and make peace with demographic change..the benefits may outweigh the costs.

circus

"...that we may avoid erecting a numerous democracy..." john locke, from the fundamental constitutions of carolina____________"...they have directed the president be chosen by select bodies of electors to be deputed by the people for that express purpose: and they have committed the appointment of senators to the state legislatures. this mode has, in such cases, vastly the advantage of elections by the people in their collective capacity where the activity of party zeal, taking advantage of the supineness, the ignorance, and the hopes and fears of the unwary and uninterested, often places men in office by votes of a small proportion of the electors." federalist LXIV [john jay]_____ in other words when you turn the election into a circus there's a chance one of the clowns might win...john locke was the philosophical godfather of the constitution and jay was certainly not very confident of the "voice of the people" being used in anything resembling an intelligent manner as he sought bravely to limit the franchise...and the political season of 2016 may be a sort of vindication for him on that point...then again, the election results can only be as good as the caliber of candidates that are distilled out of the herd of whore politicians...even a cursory examination of the crop of characters the voters were burdened with last year should have been a indication that something was very wrong and that the results would end in a trip to the white house for the most venal...the current residents of the white house are at least transparent in their venality as they hawk the family brand shamelessly...the clinton venality was just as avaricious but kept under somewhat tighter cover...still it is illumination to remember that the clintons and trumps have been on very friendly terms for some time and the president ( pro tem ) publicly declared his respect for "that woman" after the electoral dust had settled...in short the elite is who have won here..it is the way the system is intended to work...anyone expecting anything but a corporate agenda with, perhaps, some populist cosmetics is delusional...wealth is in as much control as they ever were and talk is cheap...especially political verbiage...there is nothing new here...nothing at all.

a nest of vipers

"he divided the people in this way to ensure the voting power was under the control not of the rabble but of the wealthy, and he saw to it that the greatest number did not have the greatest power, a principle we should always stand by in politics" cicero on servius tullius. "...there quickly formed various rival factions that held divergent views, spied on each other, and held each other in contempt. a mixture of scorn and contempt became the prevailing mood within the party." albert speer "one of the national security council staffers on the asian trip was navy yeoman charles radford, the spy planted by the joint chiefs. the sailor, ostensibly a stenographer, had been copying nsc documents and kissinger's memos for ten months...working at night and searching his burn bags, sending white house paper to the pentagon each morning." president nixon:alone in the white house. richard reeves._____________________________________ ___ the president calls mccain a "loser" and suddenly unsecured servers and android phones are acceptable, not treason...the president's supreme court nominee takes exception to the president's comments about the judiciary...it seems obvious i will have to start paying closer attention to all of this...it will be a long four years...there will be blowback and unexpected moments...there are always uncontrolled variables...expect consequences.