The hubris of the US after the fall of the Soviet Union is an example of the complete lack of foresight and wisdom of the GOP in contrast to the democrats post WWll help in rebuilding Japan and Germany making Allie’s who were once enemies.
The hubris of the US after the fall of the Soviet Union is an example of the complete lack of foresight and wisdom of the GOP in contrast to the democrats post WWll help in rebuilding Japan and Germany making Allie’s who were once enemies.
Is it really just lack of foresight, or are some of the major backers of current right wing "Republican" ideology part and parcel of the problems The Corporate Transparency Act and like regulation is aimed to curtail? Seems like the coziness of big money and tyrants goes back a bit, along with the sorts of shenanigans seen in Pandora, Paradise and Panama Papers.
Was I dumbfounded - tremendously surprised and curious - as to why and how so many people involved with trump and his MAGA movement (basically now confirmed as a cult) seemed be so closely tied and/or connected in some way - like trips to - Russia! But then all one has to do is to realize the connections (involvement) of Russians in American men’s, gentlemen [strip] clubs and luxury (high valued) real estate properties - not just here ... but in other countries around the globe like England (London), France (Paris) and other choice places in our world!
How about checking out the chemical, fossil fuel and mining companies and links between regime change, corruption and attacks on democracy .
Look at the MPS and Atlas network foundation. There are very obvious links between certain polluting corporate interests and funding of deceptively inclusive green waahing .
What country benefits the most from Climate Change/Global Warming/Greenhouse effect?
Without Artic Ice, the Northwest passage is real and year round. Controlling it is power. Imagine the US not having the West Coast? Imagine France or England or any of the historical European countries with 90% less access to ocean ports as they developed? This is why Russia has always played a back seat to European and world affairs. Russia has never had a strong Navy. It has always been vulnerable to shifts in global power throughout the centuries because it lacks access to enough ports and Oceans. Some may argue that it doesn't matter, but it does. A permanently thawed Arctic Ocean gives Russia shorter trade routes to export and ship cheaply its gas, oil, minerals around the world. More ports, more ocean, more access to export equals more $, thus more power for Putin and his kleptocratic hydrocarbon oligarchs global network. Putin has laid the ground work with the GOP and every Conservative Party in every democracy around the globe, from payoffs, dark campaign funding ( GOP through the NRA, Loans to Frances' LaPen's party, vacations with Italy's Berlusconi, making former world leaders his lobbyist like Gerhard Shroeder, a board seat on Rosneft, to licensing deals and real estate to TFG, etc etc. The West needs to completely decouple from Russia's influence for democracies to survive and thrive.
Yes , yes, yes . I think this is exactly how Putin and local people interested in Oil Gas adn Mining. None understand or care about the Nine Planetary Boundaries and how this thaw will affect sea levels nor has a majority of top decision makers. Scary, scary, scary .
Russia has built a fleet of nuclear powered Ice Breaking ships. Next up, nuclear powered ships that can follow the ice breakers to power up mines, ports, entire towns to mine etc all along their artic coasts.
Yes! Yes! Yes! Is anyone else in this group getting The Barents Observer? It appeared in my email so I keep on reading about Russia in the Arctic, Russians fleeing over the border, etc.
No I am scared enough. I live in St.John's, Nl . My colleagues Pakistani husband who is a professor of mechanical engineering is mad keen that Canada races to exploit the arctic before Russia. Lots of people here think like this. I wonder also how much the fact that Svetkana kraskova is Ukrainian and a senior scientist at the IPCC. might have played into Putin's decision to invade Ukraine Check her out. I think Putin is very keen on world domination and has played brilliantly into many peoples valid terror of communism and the Gulags to push people to the far right. Fear of the gulags drives all kinds of people fleeing brutal authoritarian regimes to vote for parties that seek to privatize everything . I am reading there was dreadful criminality and violence as the USSR collapsed. Violence against women is massive in Russia and Putin has changed the law to literally allow killers off if they murder a family member. Oh my. Fear ruins our ability to problem solve. ..... I think there is a massive need to communicate with Russians outside those in the Kremlin and to support Russians brave enough and mad enough to stand up to Putin and his thugs.
Not sure Putin gives a damn about regular people in large cities like we do in the west. That is our economy, not his. Who knows for sure. He cares about $ and power. Russia's northern unfrozen Arctic Coast is all he needs to export Russia's vast mineral resources as cheaply as possible which is by sea not by land and a swampy tundra highway is impossible. Keeping Russia contained with Ice is good for global democracy.
What about the Atlas Networks network connects to attacks on democracy? A lot of their programs lobby for lower taxes and less regulation to enhance shareholder value but how is that a bad thing?
Unless you can't save and invest or can't get used to asset poverty and welfare level retirement I don't see a problem. Not everyone that earns income from personal assets is corrupt. I think the majority would be proud to be a capitalist. We continue to be colonized by thousands of immigrants every day with that intention.
The economists who support this program work at top universities. None suggest getting rid of capitalism. At least not that I am aware of. I am unsure what you mean by being colonized by?
Lots of people flee corruption and chaos. This is exactly why it is so important to stop corruption.
I am in favour of capitalism. I am not in favour of corruption, money laundering and posting record profits and price gauging consumers. Exon Mobile has cheated and lied for decades and funds the Atlas Network Foundation . Looking at their website they look wonderful. They are very sneaky.
Christo-Fascism is not wholly-owned by American evangelicals. The "exercise of Faith" demonstrated by the Patriarchs is tied closely to Putin and the Kremlin. There is no "Jesus" in Russian Theocratic Orthodoxy anymore than there is in America's evangelicalism. Neither is truly a praxis of Christian Doctrine, but an instrument of political heresy, manipulation and deception. Do we believe that Mike Johnson is really an accident? We have been set on a perilous, a VERY perilous, path.
Thank you for this. I note the caption under the photo of Mike Pence: "World Summit in Defense of Persecuted Christians." Persecuted Christians is a satanically driven myth. It is as outrageously foolish as "the WAR on Christmas". If ever there were a war on Christmas, that "war" was initiated by the mercantilists and the retailers. Christmas for years (decades) has been a moneyed gift to the well-to-do. Pence is the LAST person to be standing up as a "savior" of Christ and the Faith. His, like so many others, is bargain-basement Christianity. He has long been rumored as a closet queer. I often have wondered about those Orthodox Patriarchs and what THEY might be doing in the wine closet. (And not with the wine.) Lincoln Graham is a theocratic fascist. His "faith" has little to do with Jesus and much more to do with power and influence. "Beware the wolves".
It is a deliberate strategy of the Kremlin to restore the and fund the Russian Orthodox church.
This helps Putin maintain higher approval ratings. Restoring the ROC gives him an aura of moral authority to a misinformed electorate ( the church leaders are paid off this way too), so they give him their support but do not disclose their payoffs to their congregations.
Church leaders abroad, especially American evangelicals are courted and invited to Russia to be swooned and swayed by the ROC's Islamophobia, homophobia, immigrant phobia. Fear of other "non believers" and proof of a decadent "West" that is destroying "the blood of our country", sound familiar?
The Kremlin also pays for and invites far right White Supremist leaders like David Duke and Richard Spencer ( organizer of Charlottesville Unite the Right March that killed Heather Hyer). BTW, Richard Spencer ended up meeting his ex wife at one of these Russia organized Evangelical/White Supremist Kumbaya gatherings in Moscow. He married Alexander Dugan's Translator. Dugan is a Christian Fascist Philosopher and close political adviser to Putin. Now go figure? The NRA is also a big Kremlin benefactor. Not because Gun Rights are available in Russia, but because excess guns always destabilize a society. These are the old style "active measures" deployed by the Russian's to poison the well of decency that erode democracy. And we haven't even discussed Russian Social Media Influence Campaigns yet.
Concentration of power tends to corrupt, and that can me seen in all manner of organizations. Corporations, academia, churches, unions, any organization in which one has the power to increase the organization's power and one's own personal power at the peril of it's public mission and/or responsibilities. The current "Republican" Party is as illustrative of this as it gets. And here I'm talking about organizations with a legitimate role in the functions of a free and just society. Organized Crime (what the "GOP" has become) is that from the inception.
"Government is the problem" is nonsense, like saying "people are the problem". Well, yes, but... Corruption is the problem. Malignant narcissism is the problem. We need to upgrade our collective thinking to avert or soften multiple emerging disasters.
I know a brilliant Serbo-American who is in thrall to all of this. It’s fascinating and terrible to see Christianity “taken over” for greed and hatred. The Pharisees could win and will if they destroy the planet. Climate change denial is part of the “program.” Will Liz Cheney speak to that? And Jill Stein, at dinner with Putin and Flynn, now running for president again. Green Party with Putin? The only green with Putin (as with Trump) is Navalny in upper Siberia with whatever is left of evergreens in that part of the world.
Thank you JL. There has been some significant US foresight going back to 1948 with our post WWII relations with Northern European nations. I will cite the "close 75 year security partner "DENMARK & the growing security agreements in 2023 going into 2024 with SWEDEN & FINLAND. Turkey has dropped its opposition to SWEDEN joining NATO
As previously posted on LFAA just after 12/21/23, US Secretary of State (SOS) Antony J. Blinken met with the Danish Minister LARS RASMUSSEN in the Treaty Room on 12/21 & signed a "DCA", a Defense Cooperation Agreement with DENMARK. Intelligence operations with the Danes have & will remain important.
Putin's quite active war with Ukraine has cemented active military & security operations with the BALTIC states. Relations with POLAND have improved dramatically but, I await Anne Applebaum's reports in the coming New Year. Anne is living in Poland & is easy to Link up to on anything Euro.
Thank you Professor R for the historical context to deal with all the urgent matters.
I am slightly confused as to passing this act (Transparency) originally not in the Senate , but when? to in fact ‘take place shortly in 2024...’ and this Blinken revelation...seems WE can’t possibly know the undercurrents ( good /bad, apparently 🥹) and me thinks more behind the scenes is the forever tug of war ...I’m relying on the progressive though not alt left ..to do the real correct(ion) and have to trust that. 💙☮️
Patricia, I get daily official digital feeds from the US State Dept. Sometimes 6 in 1 day.
The emails are carefully worded. These are not sensitive in anyway bu,t just not the relevant info that major Platforms chose to pass on to viewers/Readers/and/or actors.
How considerate Bryan, thank you, I would be very interested to read the contents . Do you see/understand more from these messages sent?
For me there’s a lot of trust, part extracting the principle, and volumes of history to absorb their juggle -filtering for important directives...I can’t imagine the input needed from trusted advisors for daily decisions playing the hand dealt. I’d dare say 85% (?)of the population has little clue!
Pardon my jumping to conclusions but War can be interpreted as brutal manipulation to own more real estate? The Democrats build back up the ‘conquered ‘ to realize their own potential whereas the oligarchs /Republican set about framing us and constructing their ‘owned gain’ or is that game.....? ...no FOR THE PEOPLE intent there folks 🙄🤦♀️!
J L Graham, your comment brings to my mind the timing of the defunding of the government that will be caused by the gop House not passing another CR or new budget. You cannot pay for enforcement of a new Corporate Transparency Act policy with no funding. This adds an angle to their timeline I never knew to consider before.
Yes! You found it. I was wondering what current activities by the Magas would be in preparation for this, and you identified it. Also could be part of the reason they were holding those high official positions hostage. Some sort of bargaining chip. I'd dare say we are already in the somewhat early stages World War III. It's mostly transaction-based (as opposed to physical) conflict at this point, though obviously not exclusively.
Politics is a game for those who regard other people as prey. Not that the best of politics lacks a coherent and well thought out strategy, but it seems to me a some point "the love of money" and other forms of social power becomes an end in itself, for which any other consideration is sacrificed. For the thrill of being the last person standing, and the owner of the whole, entire world in a fortress of steel, concrete and costly decor.
Exactly, J L. The very same interests involved in the support of Hitler in this country in the 1930s, as documented by Rachel Maddow so clearly. Many of those very same Republicans actively fomenting a coup to bring Fascism to the US and indicted and brought to trial. Instead of me blathering on about it, you and many others can read her Prequel and listen to the eight Ultra podcasts.
That movement away from hubris was not immediate in 1945. America's initial temptation was to punish the losers forever, de-industrializing Germany and Japan.
Hubris that followed the utterly foreseeable yet unforeseen collapse of the Soviet empire was as immense as it was idiotic and we may be paying the price for this a long time into the future.
At the time of the final implosion, I noted:
"Crass materialism has triumphed over dialectical materialism. But it won't last 70 years, maybe not much more than 7."
It took rather longer till the Subprime crash in 2007-2008...
I saw and still see the two opponents as far more Tweedledum & Tweedledee than either cared to admit. The West promptly draped itself in the propaganda cloak of Comintern... turned inside out. Daily garbage pronouncements about the superiority of Holy Market and Free Enterprise, reading just like those paeans to The Coming Triumph of Socialism, the theological presentation of History.
There's a Spanish proverb:
"The vanquished are vanquished; the victor is lost."
What a bleak view. We actually didn’t exercise a vanquished strategy over the losers, but actually helped rebuild the world. Then after the Soviet Union collapsed we traded with the Soviet Union in the hope it might normalize and stabilize relations. So it didn’t work. We tried.
Bleak view, Paul, that fits the bleak developments of the past three decades and more; as against a misty, not to say fogbound memory of what actually happened.
Some of those you refer to as "we" did actually try to help; but, just as we -- yes, we here, we now -- are already seeing and shall probably be seeing for quite some time to come, it is hard to find one's way out from a system founded on delusions and the merest of appearances, and even harder to escape a world built from lies. Soviet lies and Rupert Murdoch's may be different, but lies are lies. And all lies induce chaos and confusion, only advantageous to criminals, who plant and spread them.
From chaos and confusion come eventual downfall.
*
Outlook bleak for those who don't wake up, wash drug-induced dreams from their minds and wash their eyes clean.
Is that not what HCR and we readers of Letters from an American are trying to do?
A two-parter. Heather and those of her subscribers who take concrete action -at least voting, hopefully more - are frantically signaling to the rest of America that the patient is critically wounded and death will be imminent.
I have noticed (and felt generally grateful for) that Heather is taking a very one-sided pro-Biden view of America in the last year or so of her articles. Being a careful and honest historian, she does not tamper with the truth in the slightest. But her points of emphasis are clear. And her thesis is ringing siren-like.
For some time now Heather has been pointing out the successes of Biden’s Presidency. There have been frequent articles on the power of Biden’s casting aside the trickle-down theory of economic growth and its success in leveling the playing field. As well she has emphasized his signature legislative accomplishments and consistently noble foreign policy ventures.
In this series of newsletters we are not hearing much on the momentum Trump is gaining through his lawyers’ success in slowing the legal system to a crawl. We are not being warned of the potential for an election in which Trump has not been fully tried and hopefully convicted on even one count. Although she is undoubtedly aware of the psychological potency of this strategy, Heather is not supercharging the atmosphere with comment on how, as time passes, Americans care less and less about seeing justice done and in their inertia and exhaustion (see NYT article - Tuesday this week I think) are paving the way for a Trump victory.
Nor has Heather pointed the finger in any meaningful way at the second-tier villain of this tragedy, the astonishingly feckless head of the DOJ Merrick Garland who inexplicably let 18 months go by and the momentum to bring the monster to justice fade possibly irrevocably, before hiring Jack Smith.
I deeply appreciate Heather’s spiritual quest to always propagate the truths of this Administration and thus prop it up so we are not overwhelmed by the daily storms of scorn and criticism. Again, she is unique in how honestly and without sensation she does this.
And yet I feel a bit uneasy. The sheer accumulation of articles which beg us to see how Biden has turned the country around is beginning to arouse in me a sensation that Letters to an American is becoming one-sided, in its own brilliant, earnest way. The other side is having successes too. Trump has been canny in his choice of lawyers. The obstruction of justice has been successful to my deep disappointment. Trump’s tone has been again uncannily matched to what his followers need, but he is also wooing new voters in what for him at least is a traditionally political, non-hysterical way. The polls at the moment are unequivocal that Biden has a steep uphill climb to win the Presidency. Polls this far out are veritable smorgasbords of useless empty calories, but they have a nasty habit of creating their own truths, which in turn grow if the actual news cycle is at all slow.
In short, I am beginning to feel infantilized. We are not getting a balanced picture of the deeper truths of the current scene. We are not getting the temperature of the nation.
We need galvanizing through being made fully aware of current unpalatable realities that threaten to coalesce and ignite further. We need to meet the enemy - in a calculated, realistic appraisal. We must hear once or twice a month how truly endangered the American ideal is. We need to hear about the Republicans in detail, not just when they are committing hara-kiri as in the comical but sad quest for a speaker. We need to know what they are doing that is working to further this appalling threat, so that we are better able to fight it.
And yet, as I examine this concern over and over, I cannot honestly say that I’m sure this is Heather’s job. She buoys our spirits. We trust her implicitly, because she wins that trust everyday with her commentary and extensive footnoting. Is this the forum to point out that the sky is beginning to crack and may soon be falling? I simply cannot answer this question with any sense of clarity. And so, I am restlessly anxious.
Ten years from now, Heather’s columns will no doubt appear in a book and from then on be a Valhalla for historians. She will be acknowledged as being true to her mission. But will she gently be chided for a mission that is too limited? I don’t know.
I believe that when the calendar turns to 2024 we will see the beginnings of the real battle for America’s soul. The stakes are incredibly high. - the chips are all in. Obviously we have primary season ahead of us and then conventions and then the run up to the myriad of elections in November. The temperature always rises slowly but steadily during a Presidential year. But this year is different. The forces of irrationality are loose upon the land. The stakes are of the “all or nothing” ilk. There will be violence - how much is hard to say. There will be cheating and it may not be limited to one side. As for Election Day, I’m not sure it will even be held successfully. November 2020 will ok like a child’s three-legged race. Election Day may dissolve into chaos never witnessed in America.
I will read you every day, Heather. Your calm reporting (and unearthing) of realities that a lot of media find too boring to report, or qualify until they’ve crippled it, is welcome. The connections you draw or peerless.
But I would love you to be the voice of reason as to how great this challenge is. I would accept it unequivocally because my trust in you is implicit. But we need an accounting of our losses, our mistakes, the pitfalls in our path. You may not feel it your calling, but I for one beg you for it.
I was going to be short with the above point and then talk about America’s role after the Second World War and then after the fall of the USSR. But I have worn out my welcome by being too garrulous and so you will be blessed with a “one-parter” only today.
The situation's more desperate with every passing day, yet distractions and diversions hold the people's attention.
Why no clamor, why no noisy pots-and-pans demos outside media corporation offices demanding real info and nothing but real info? And the heads of those who publish daily lies and statistical lies...
We need HCR to get US to the polls. I need HCR to keep me writing GOTV postcards. At 89, I hear all the bad news, but reported by lawyers, ex-federal prosecutors, Luttig, Tribe, etc. Everyone is worried, but all seem to believe that the possibility of defeating Trump and having a substantive aftermath is doable if Biden is re-elected. The age “thing” may have come from Russia and may be ignored as propaganda. The “crew” is doing well. And if Americans can get over gas and egg prices long enough to think about their relationship to climate change, there is indeed hope. r
Paul and Paul, that’s an oversimplification of a complexity of decades long developments that brought the biggest war in Europe since WW2 and that almost destroyed the European Union, and threatens our democracy at home.
It’s a paragraph Ted, not a book. Peter is a fanciful writer and paints a bleak world full of confusion, lies, downfall, drug induced dreams. If I’ve learned anything from Heather it’s that our history is full of trying times. It just doesn’t feel that bleak to me. Challenging but not bleak.
Born one month into the second world war in an island under attack. Bombs, rockets. Not being in Germany, in Poland, in Russia, in Italy, little by comparison with what people suffered in continental Europe. But quite enough for a child.
I've spent a lifetime sitting, fence-sitting close to the political arena, taking it in.
Especially since the mid-1980s, I have seen too much.
And looking back, I see that I have often developed and shown the foresight that comes of alertness and long attentiveness.
A German friend recounted his stay in Communist East Germany in 1986. When he'd finished telling I said if the Germans can't make this system work, the Russians certainly can't and concluded that the Soviet empire must die like a very old man, worn out but all organs still just functioning, as soon as one failed.
We then forgot that until it happened.
In the mid-90's I made a loud public remark in the political environment where I worked, declaring that democracy might not last longer than another generation. Fanciful? Surely, looking at the world at that time. I was labeled "a philosopher" and it was not meant as a compliment. Now? We have only to consider the worldwide movement against representative government, the dictators and would-be dictators everywhere -- even in the United States of America.
In late August 2001, I remarked that our world was sleepwalking on the edge of the abyss. Fanciful? Sure. The friend to whom I made the remark was politically very savvy, far more than most people, but her response was that I was "exaggerating, as usual".
Ditto on September 10th, when I wrote to the same friend that "our democracies are like a dog asleep in the middle of the highway. One doubts our survival mechanisms".
We saw what happened on the next day.
We also saw the unbelievable mess the then administration made of the situation and the damage they -- yes, they -- inflicted on the whole world, in particular the Middle East. It should have been obvious that the attack on New York was designed as a trigger mechanism, designed to set off a chain reaction bomb. It was not. The Bush Administration must, with the invasion of Iraq, have gone beyond the wildest hopes and dreams of Al-Qaida.
If even that direct assault on America could not awaken Americans to reality, what could? And now, on October 7th, an infernal machine from which there was and is no escaping, setting off multiple chain reactions and, by the horrible look of things, succeeding in doing what it was intended to.
Such deep cynicism is very hard to contemplate.
I refuse discouragement, yet, the past decades have been discouraging to one who came of age at a time of high hopes, and the current situation could not be more challenging. The challenge is indeed without precedent.
I may be uncomfortably sensitive to the situation -- and that to a degree that is unhealthy for me and those close to me. One must needs stay calm; but complacency is out of the question. Given the vast material power of America and the ambitions of nuclear-armed States, the dangers we now face are greater even than those that confronted the world on September 1st 1939 or December 7th 1941.
*
Prove me wrong. Reassure me if you can. I'd rather be mistaken.
Noted. Bleak to me, I guess would be to lose the war in Ukraine, lose democracy in the US 2024 elections from an apathetic misinformed not voting majority, and then EU falls apart. Russian and Oil exporting countries expand. The Arctic ceases to freeze and the northwest passage is secured/controlled by Putin and his Oligarchs. Corruption rules. What then?
Paul, I've posted further down this thread a word about the Morgenthau Plan for Germany -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgenthau_Plan -- explaining that the brilliant Marshall Plan was adopted only in March 1948, superseding this plan to, in the words of Goebbels, "make Germany into a giant potato patch".
Readers really should read information about the Morgenthau Plan and how it played into the hands of Dr Goebbels and his formidable propaganda machine when it came to fighting the last battles of the war. "Worth thirty divisions to the Germans"...
I’m sorry I don’t share some of what you expressed about post WWII. We learned from the previous war to not punish but assist and that worked beautifully. As to the rest of your mini diatribe, I simply don’t understand what you are expressing. You might want to simply your thoughts, well… in my opinion.
Bill, the Marshall Plan did not follow Allied victory immediately. Initial intentions were contained in the Morgenthau Plan, which it superseded. And, if you and Christopher L Groesbeck consult https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgenthau_Plan, you will see America's original plans for Germany.
I understand that Churchill did much to persuade the US to drop this approach, but I am simply speaking from memory here.
As for simplifying my thoughts, they are a good deal simpler than the complexities of the situation, but those are such that further simplification might be over-simplification. Let's leave that to the likes of tfg.
Welllllll, let's not forget who was president for, basically, the first decade of that period--and that foreign policy is first and foremost the domain of the executive branch. If we're gonna color ourselves "arrogant," and with "lack of foresight," it is not wholly a GOP thing, not at all.
I am more than OK saying that the modern decline and corruption of America is bipartisan.
Because it is and was.
Having said that, Trump is a new level of corruption not before seen. Trump laundered money for the Russians and his son even openly bragged that one of the big golf courses Trump purchased in Scotland was bought with laundered Russian money and his comment was actually published in a newspaper.
Of course, we all know why there were no arrests and no jail time for admitting in public to money laundering. So, I won't add that obvious bit of information here again.
Re-electing Trump is == re-electing a patsy of the Russian Oligarchy.
Not just the Russians. Read Bill Browder's book. The Western money that poured into the former USSR became a breeding ground for a worldlevel cabal. Those that worshipped Milton Friedmans philosophy are willing to allow the world to burn as they have built their doomsday bunkers in far away places. They avoid all the security of airports and shipping terminals with their private planes and yachts. They have walled themselves away from "those people", which is the rest of is.
I really am not sure why he became famous. I guess one liners are a path to being famous.
"The only responsibility of a corporation is to its shareholder".
Anyone living near a garbage dump, a mining operation, a chemical plant, a busy highway, or anyone able to think their way out of wet paper sack on hot summer day can see that Milton Friedman's statement that made him famous is wrong.
Maybe being wrong is the easy path to fame??
Being right is WAY more work, research, effort and time.
Maybe I should come up with a few dumb one-liners and see how it works out for me.
Generally, Mike S, being wrong is easier because it usually involves being simplistic, avoiding the hard choices embraced by devotion to the complexity of reality as far as one can see it. One suspects Milton Friedman became so famous not because of his accuracy but because of his simplicity to those who chose the most self-serving concepts available. Simple Self-Serving Statements gain long legs!
In my childhood, kids sometimes called each other selfish. They got from parents, religion, the culture, that selfish was not the way to be. Today’s parents are more likely to teach their kids how to get an advantage over other kids. Self-serving is the new morality.
I’d argue that Friedman was wrong on almost everything, particularly his cheerleading for trickle-on economics. But he’s correct about corporations being responsible only to their shareholders.
What he and others leave out is that We the People are the ultimate shareholders of America, and should use the power of government to make corporate shareholders play by the rules WE demand.
So corporations are beholden only to their shareholders, yes. But they’re all beholden to us, the people of America.
Shane, I’d argue that the position from the right is that capitalism is inherently more moral than socialism, allowing capitalists to have it both ways. Meaning, they get to claim moral superiority while actually dodging moral responsibility through the actions of their corporations. It’s sort of a system of moral currency laundering.
Everyone interested in what Russia is all about must read "Red Notice" by Bill Browder. It's simple. Putin is the godfather of a Russian mafia.
There was a hint of democracy in Russia as the USSR collapsed. But the Russian people succumbed to the attraction of a strong man instead. It's the same primitive vicious psychology that makes Trump so attractive to so many.
It baffles me that the US and the EU haven't established a powerful publicity campaign to inform the Russians of Putin and his oligarch's theft of the national treasure. They eat caviar on their yachts and in their dachas and the average Russian suffers. With enough info about this and the number of young Russians lost to a stupid war, Putin could be toppled just like Nicholas Romanov.
Not time to go into this, but I can assure you that you are greatly oversimplifying both recent Russian history and the current situation.
One current problem is that, for Putin, now that he has invested the country's all in war, he will never be able to leave off making war. If he were to do that, return of soldiers from the front would have the same effects as it had in 1917, when disgruntled soldiers did so much to overthrow the Tsar and his regime.
Stalin understood this kind of danger to himself, and took such actions as purging the entire Leningrad leadership for having successfully withstood the 900-day blockade... without his help or direct instructions. Worse still, from the dictator's point of view, Leningrad no longer feared anything, not even Stalin. They'd seen and survived the worst ordeal possible.
The Bush I administration actively allowed Russia to devolve into a state run by organized crime. If I recall correctly, Boris Yeltsin sought help from the US for guidance in setting up a democracy and was turned down. If I’m wrong about that I’d appreciate comments from anyone who knows better.
Interesting. What if Yeltsin had solicited help from several successful democracies - an advisory group, if you will. But Boris was too drunk to imagine such a thing. And there were already gangsters after him. He sought Putins protection and got it. Putin got the country in return. Democracy never had a shot. The Russians love a strong man.
Americans at least had the influence of centuries long development of shrinking the influence of a monarch and slowly gaining a government run by the people. We're still working on it, eh?
As others have mentioned above it really had a lot to do with Milton Friedman and his Chicago School of Economics. Friedman's ideology & insistence on how to implement the "free market" in these newly formed republics from the previous Communist regime's orbit and economic conditions was to completely remake the economy is these places. Which caused great suffering and chaos as Naomi Klein describes in much detail in 'The Shock Doctrine- the Rise of Disaster Capitalism'.
Yeltsin and his team of economists were to trying to establish some Chicago School economic program which was really some idealistic capitalist fantasy than a truly democratic republic. There were several shocks within these few first years of Yeltsin's rise to power and leadership.
First, the Soviet Union was the only country many Russians had ever known or been born into and a very powerful shock to their psyche.
The second shock was this drastic economic shock therapy program, including immediate privatization of Russia's nearly 225,000 state-owned companies. A third of the population fell below the poverty line. Millions of middle-class Russians had lost their life savings when the currency lost its value, drastic cuts in state funding for the jobs of millions of workers that didn't get paid was too much to take.
Up till then Yeltsin had been able to promote economic reform and democratic reform as the desired approach to the 'new' Russia. He became more dictatorial, thinking of him less as the president and more like a monarch. Russia's brief democracy was destroyed little by little. Eventually the oligarchs, mafia and old Communist party members would just retake the brutalized economy on their own terms like some allegorical bleak Russian winter...
Adding: Mitt Romney warned who the enemy was and is. He was laughed out of the party. Mitt didn’t need a Russian infusion into his campaign coffers. Mitt already had all the cash he needed for his Senate seat. We are now at a point of oligarchy infused foreign Funded GOP doesn’t need regular American donors. They only need the votes ( for now), and they achieve that through demagoguery rhetoric. If they win 2024, it’s a new ball game with no rules, no election laws. Elections become ceremonial, like in Russia. And was attempted in Ukraine till Yankovich fled to Moscow.
And are we the people strong enough to fight for Democracy? We should be saying/doing/warning, more loudly. Here I sit, though, 83 and where do I get started? Hold a press conference? But it would help if there were a planned group that would have a million press conferences all at the same time/day.
I don’t think it is about political bipartisanship as much as it is a sorting out of diverse cultures that are and always have been present in our countries history. Republicans grabbed the disaffected southern Dixiecrats, created the opportunity to draw in christian societies into politics around abortion in the 70s and made their false claim that they owned the moral high ground in the 80’s. No one can dispute that the repugs were much better than the Dems at identifying causes which attracted various segments of our society. The dems kind of lost their way and the 20th century New Deal progressivism got thrown under the bus in the 80s and 90s.
Are you talking about 1992 onward with Bill Clinton? I was busy in college and grad school during 1992-2002, and was still forming my political beliefs.
I recall Clinton suddenly getting a tear in his eye when marching in a funeral march and pointed out by an aid that the cameras were on him. That is what the press was pushing in circa 1992. I also recall Clinton working tirelessly on an accord between Israel and Palestine and despite the effort, failing and coming away exasperated. The latter I think defines the Best of Bill Clinton.
I don't know if you are blaming the Dems for the Yeltsin era, basically giving way to Putin. I don't think either party in the US should claim credit or blame for the fall of the Soviet Union and subsequent rise of Russia under Putin.
Sorry if my comment is totally off base. That is entirely possible as these are just comments and there is just a lot of reading between the lines as a consequence.
People give Reagan credit for the demise of the USSR, but it was a decades long process that wore communism down, culminating in the actions of Gorbachev.
YES Matt, the complexity of reality affects both sides of any conflict. Truly accurate statements tend to be more boring and harder to grasp or write on a banner or bumper sticker or even a billboard. There are far more nuances than many (most?) people have time or energy to contemplate. Give us a good slogan any day!
...makes me aware why I usually seek out the longer comments to HCR's posts (e.g.- Peter Burnett, Matt Fulkerson, George Polisner, S B Lewis, Linda Weide, Barbara Jo Krieger, Robert McTague, Fay Reid, etc) because they seem more likely to encompass more of the complexities of any given stance or add new information.
I think the Press was wallowing in the Lewinsky mess instead of distributing the news. Tabloid Journalism was just getting started and Fox took over from there. A lot of blame to spread around.
I am aware - now - how little attention I paid to any form of politics or the real issues of governing for far too long. Becoming a single mother & having to earn a living sort of requires focusing on providing for family! There tends to be quite an abrupt learning curve involved after a divorce. Life did get better.
That doesnt excuse me - but I wasnt alone in that respect.
It’s the Senate, not the President that writes and approves our treaties with foreign governments. However, both parties are complicit in their assertions that capitalism was/is a guarantee of democracy. Just another reminder that the role of government is to protect the rule of law, provide institutional oversite/regulate. The other is free, fair, and transparent elections.
“ Nothing was more to be desired than that every practical obstacle should be opposed to Cabal, intrigue, and corruption. These most deadly adversaries of republican government might have been expected to make their approaches from more than one "querter", but chiefly from the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant (DJT) in our councils. How could they better gratify this, than by raising a creature (Mr. Orange) of their own to the chief magistracy of the Union?” -Alexander Hamilton 1788
It occurred to me re reading F # 68, that not only have the obstacles to cabal and corruption have been removed by the court and by the laws passed, and that has given way to encouraging corruption and cabal from every corner and quarter. The former chief magistrate, his orangeness a creature saved by Putin’s $ and raised because of a lame reality TV show. The most important election in history is the next one.
Civilizations rise, and civilizations fall. It's one of the arrhythmic heartbeats of human time. The US has passed its second centennial. On the long historical record, it's done pretty well, particularly for a democracy. Two decades ago, during the Bush/Cheney misrule, I predicted we would not see a third centennial as a functioning national democracy. I won't be alive in 2076 to see if I was right.
One of the things playing out now also started in 1980, along with the entire Reagan misrule, namely the doctrine of "originalism" in the courts. We now have a case -- the DC insurrection trial of a former president, Whiny Don -- in which the lawyers for the defense are arguing for absolute, lifelong Presidential immunity for crimes. It's not surprising that this would be fielded as a defense, since the defense has pretty much nothing else. What is surprising is that a) this hasn't already been thrown out as absurd, and b) there is no confidence on either side which way the Supreme Court might rule.
The Court has become arbitrary. That's never a good sign.
What an important thread has HCR laid out for us. No strategies in the present are simple or new. They have origins and core goals going all the way back, in this case, to the battle for the New Deal, which took a war to be effected and remained under attack these many decades. Where do evil, avarice, and greed originate if the great American experiment was the antidote to regencies and empires and autocracies? What forces must be in place to protect the ideals or aspirational foundations of an American government in service to esposed goals and the interests of the plurality of its people? What standing force must be in place when the greater threat is not the arms and soldiers of foreign powers or ideologies, but the extremism of a battle between ideologies we now (and will) fight against? When does desireable tension become unsustainable?
Yes. And it strikes me that we and our allies will need to rebuild the Gaza, Palestinian and Israeli lands once the current horrible war comes to a close.
The hubris of the US after the fall of the Soviet Union is an example of the complete lack of foresight and wisdom of the GOP in contrast to the democrats post WWll help in rebuilding Japan and Germany making Allie’s who were once enemies.
Thanks Heather!
Is it really just lack of foresight, or are some of the major backers of current right wing "Republican" ideology part and parcel of the problems The Corporate Transparency Act and like regulation is aimed to curtail? Seems like the coziness of big money and tyrants goes back a bit, along with the sorts of shenanigans seen in Pandora, Paradise and Panama Papers.
Was I dumbfounded - tremendously surprised and curious - as to why and how so many people involved with trump and his MAGA movement (basically now confirmed as a cult) seemed be so closely tied and/or connected in some way - like trips to - Russia! But then all one has to do is to realize the connections (involvement) of Russians in American men’s, gentlemen [strip] clubs and luxury (high valued) real estate properties - not just here ... but in other countries around the globe like England (London), France (Paris) and other choice places in our world!
How about checking out the chemical, fossil fuel and mining companies and links between regime change, corruption and attacks on democracy .
Look at the MPS and Atlas network foundation. There are very obvious links between certain polluting corporate interests and funding of deceptively inclusive green waahing .
What country benefits the most from Climate Change/Global Warming/Greenhouse effect?
Without Artic Ice, the Northwest passage is real and year round. Controlling it is power. Imagine the US not having the West Coast? Imagine France or England or any of the historical European countries with 90% less access to ocean ports as they developed? This is why Russia has always played a back seat to European and world affairs. Russia has never had a strong Navy. It has always been vulnerable to shifts in global power throughout the centuries because it lacks access to enough ports and Oceans. Some may argue that it doesn't matter, but it does. A permanently thawed Arctic Ocean gives Russia shorter trade routes to export and ship cheaply its gas, oil, minerals around the world. More ports, more ocean, more access to export equals more $, thus more power for Putin and his kleptocratic hydrocarbon oligarchs global network. Putin has laid the ground work with the GOP and every Conservative Party in every democracy around the globe, from payoffs, dark campaign funding ( GOP through the NRA, Loans to Frances' LaPen's party, vacations with Italy's Berlusconi, making former world leaders his lobbyist like Gerhard Shroeder, a board seat on Rosneft, to licensing deals and real estate to TFG, etc etc. The West needs to completely decouple from Russia's influence for democracies to survive and thrive.
Yes , yes, yes . I think this is exactly how Putin and local people interested in Oil Gas adn Mining. None understand or care about the Nine Planetary Boundaries and how this thaw will affect sea levels nor has a majority of top decision makers. Scary, scary, scary .
Russia has built a fleet of nuclear powered Ice Breaking ships. Next up, nuclear powered ships that can follow the ice breakers to power up mines, ports, entire towns to mine etc all along their artic coasts.
Yes! Yes! Yes! Is anyone else in this group getting The Barents Observer? It appeared in my email so I keep on reading about Russia in the Arctic, Russians fleeing over the border, etc.
No I am scared enough. I live in St.John's, Nl . My colleagues Pakistani husband who is a professor of mechanical engineering is mad keen that Canada races to exploit the arctic before Russia. Lots of people here think like this. I wonder also how much the fact that Svetkana kraskova is Ukrainian and a senior scientist at the IPCC. might have played into Putin's decision to invade Ukraine Check her out. I think Putin is very keen on world domination and has played brilliantly into many peoples valid terror of communism and the Gulags to push people to the far right. Fear of the gulags drives all kinds of people fleeing brutal authoritarian regimes to vote for parties that seek to privatize everything . I am reading there was dreadful criminality and violence as the USSR collapsed. Violence against women is massive in Russia and Putin has changed the law to literally allow killers off if they murder a family member. Oh my. Fear ruins our ability to problem solve. ..... I think there is a massive need to communicate with Russians outside those in the Kremlin and to support Russians brave enough and mad enough to stand up to Putin and his thugs.
Next some super rich creepster will try to buy Greenland.
"Without Artic Ice, the Northwest passage is real and year round."
Minus Saint Petersburg, Murmansk, Archangelsk (alongside most of the world's other port cities) once sea levels have risen...
Not sure Putin gives a damn about regular people in large cities like we do in the west. That is our economy, not his. Who knows for sure. He cares about $ and power. Russia's northern unfrozen Arctic Coast is all he needs to export Russia's vast mineral resources as cheaply as possible which is by sea not by land and a swampy tundra highway is impossible. Keeping Russia contained with Ice is good for global democracy.
Agreed, Ted, and the sooner the better.
What about the Atlas Networks network connects to attacks on democracy? A lot of their programs lobby for lower taxes and less regulation to enhance shareholder value but how is that a bad thing?
Unless you can't save and invest or can't get used to asset poverty and welfare level retirement I don't see a problem. Not everyone that earns income from personal assets is corrupt. I think the majority would be proud to be a capitalist. We continue to be colonized by thousands of immigrants every day with that intention.
I very much support capitalism.
I do not support criminality, corruption and pollution. I do not support tax evasion by an excessively greedy elite.
It is possible to have capitalism, fair taxation, avoid corruption and pollution.
To understand more on these issues check out these resources.
https://inequality.org/facts/taxes-inequality-in-united-states/
Transparency International works on fighting corruption.
https://www.transparency.org/en/news/international-youth-day-15-ways-young-people-can-fight-corruption
The economists who support this program work at top universities. None suggest getting rid of capitalism. At least not that I am aware of. I am unsure what you mean by being colonized by?
Lots of people flee corruption and chaos. This is exactly why it is so important to stop corruption.
https://earth4all.life/
I am in favour of capitalism. I am not in favour of corruption, money laundering and posting record profits and price gauging consumers. Exon Mobile has cheated and lied for decades and funds the Atlas Network Foundation . Looking at their website they look wonderful. They are very sneaky.
https://youtu.be/PpyIZ4DGIK8?si=0AZmhpQ0bO-tSfXP
Here's a Klaas lecture I like
Thanks for the links. I'll check them out. In the mean time try this talk and book.
https://youtu.be/W_Oab42VZRE?si=OhLlaSKneLgKyQ9T
https://www.amazon.com/Corruptible-Who-Gets-Power-Changes/dp/1982154098
This is the best talk I've found yet on corruption and how to fix it. Bottom line is that we can't just depend on democracy to fix it.
Christo-Fascism is not wholly-owned by American evangelicals. The "exercise of Faith" demonstrated by the Patriarchs is tied closely to Putin and the Kremlin. There is no "Jesus" in Russian Theocratic Orthodoxy anymore than there is in America's evangelicalism. Neither is truly a praxis of Christian Doctrine, but an instrument of political heresy, manipulation and deception. Do we believe that Mike Johnson is really an accident? We have been set on a perilous, a VERY perilous, path.
Thank you for this. I note the caption under the photo of Mike Pence: "World Summit in Defense of Persecuted Christians." Persecuted Christians is a satanically driven myth. It is as outrageously foolish as "the WAR on Christmas". If ever there were a war on Christmas, that "war" was initiated by the mercantilists and the retailers. Christmas for years (decades) has been a moneyed gift to the well-to-do. Pence is the LAST person to be standing up as a "savior" of Christ and the Faith. His, like so many others, is bargain-basement Christianity. He has long been rumored as a closet queer. I often have wondered about those Orthodox Patriarchs and what THEY might be doing in the wine closet. (And not with the wine.) Lincoln Graham is a theocratic fascist. His "faith" has little to do with Jesus and much more to do with power and influence. "Beware the wolves".
Thanks for this very interesting article. I’ve been wondering about a lot of this for some time.
It is a deliberate strategy of the Kremlin to restore the and fund the Russian Orthodox church.
This helps Putin maintain higher approval ratings. Restoring the ROC gives him an aura of moral authority to a misinformed electorate ( the church leaders are paid off this way too), so they give him their support but do not disclose their payoffs to their congregations.
Church leaders abroad, especially American evangelicals are courted and invited to Russia to be swooned and swayed by the ROC's Islamophobia, homophobia, immigrant phobia. Fear of other "non believers" and proof of a decadent "West" that is destroying "the blood of our country", sound familiar?
The Kremlin also pays for and invites far right White Supremist leaders like David Duke and Richard Spencer ( organizer of Charlottesville Unite the Right March that killed Heather Hyer). BTW, Richard Spencer ended up meeting his ex wife at one of these Russia organized Evangelical/White Supremist Kumbaya gatherings in Moscow. He married Alexander Dugan's Translator. Dugan is a Christian Fascist Philosopher and close political adviser to Putin. Now go figure? The NRA is also a big Kremlin benefactor. Not because Gun Rights are available in Russia, but because excess guns always destabilize a society. These are the old style "active measures" deployed by the Russian's to poison the well of decency that erode democracy. And we haven't even discussed Russian Social Media Influence Campaigns yet.
Concentration of power tends to corrupt, and that can me seen in all manner of organizations. Corporations, academia, churches, unions, any organization in which one has the power to increase the organization's power and one's own personal power at the peril of it's public mission and/or responsibilities. The current "Republican" Party is as illustrative of this as it gets. And here I'm talking about organizations with a legitimate role in the functions of a free and just society. Organized Crime (what the "GOP" has become) is that from the inception.
"Government is the problem" is nonsense, like saying "people are the problem". Well, yes, but... Corruption is the problem. Malignant narcissism is the problem. We need to upgrade our collective thinking to avert or soften multiple emerging disasters.
I know a brilliant Serbo-American who is in thrall to all of this. It’s fascinating and terrible to see Christianity “taken over” for greed and hatred. The Pharisees could win and will if they destroy the planet. Climate change denial is part of the “program.” Will Liz Cheney speak to that? And Jill Stein, at dinner with Putin and Flynn, now running for president again. Green Party with Putin? The only green with Putin (as with Trump) is Navalny in upper Siberia with whatever is left of evergreens in that part of the world.
Liz is Wyoming. Sinclair oil and gas.
WOW, .... really, hadn’t heard about that before ... But I shouldn't be surprised!!
I'm thinking we, as a country, need to emphasize finance in education, strongly. This got right by us ill-informed on such matters.
A course called "Follow the Money".
😬🤔🫨 interesting puzzle fit...hmmmmm
That’s really interesting. It makes sense and it is also especially creepy.🙏
Thank you JL. There has been some significant US foresight going back to 1948 with our post WWII relations with Northern European nations. I will cite the "close 75 year security partner "DENMARK & the growing security agreements in 2023 going into 2024 with SWEDEN & FINLAND. Turkey has dropped its opposition to SWEDEN joining NATO
As previously posted on LFAA just after 12/21/23, US Secretary of State (SOS) Antony J. Blinken met with the Danish Minister LARS RASMUSSEN in the Treaty Room on 12/21 & signed a "DCA", a Defense Cooperation Agreement with DENMARK. Intelligence operations with the Danes have & will remain important.
Putin's quite active war with Ukraine has cemented active military & security operations with the BALTIC states. Relations with POLAND have improved dramatically but, I await Anne Applebaum's reports in the coming New Year. Anne is living in Poland & is easy to Link up to on anything Euro.
Thank you Professor R for the historical context to deal with all the urgent matters.
I am slightly confused as to passing this act (Transparency) originally not in the Senate , but when? to in fact ‘take place shortly in 2024...’ and this Blinken revelation...seems WE can’t possibly know the undercurrents ( good /bad, apparently 🥹) and me thinks more behind the scenes is the forever tug of war ...I’m relying on the progressive though not alt left ..to do the real correct(ion) and have to trust that. 💙☮️
Patricia, I get daily official digital feeds from the US State Dept. Sometimes 6 in 1 day.
The emails are carefully worded. These are not sensitive in anyway bu,t just not the relevant info that major Platforms chose to pass on to viewers/Readers/and/or actors.
Easy to sign up & modify to your interests. : )
How considerate Bryan, thank you, I would be very interested to read the contents . Do you see/understand more from these messages sent?
For me there’s a lot of trust, part extracting the principle, and volumes of history to absorb their juggle -filtering for important directives...I can’t imagine the input needed from trusted advisors for daily decisions playing the hand dealt. I’d dare say 85% (?)of the population has little clue!
Please advise me of next step , help you somehow?
Yes. I do as I have long read Euro sources which is much easier now in the digital age.
FYI at 12.36 pm today, I got notice from the Dept of State of $250 million shipment to Ukraine in arms & other resources before the end of 2023.
The Detp of State email said this transfer was a previously authorized "drawdown". 🇺🇲
Pardon my jumping to conclusions but War can be interpreted as brutal manipulation to own more real estate? The Democrats build back up the ‘conquered ‘ to realize their own potential whereas the oligarchs /Republican set about framing us and constructing their ‘owned gain’ or is that game.....? ...no FOR THE PEOPLE intent there folks 🙄🤦♀️!
I am redacting ‘ Republicans’ replacing with ‘COMPLICIT’ as I know , truly , many fine people still there...we indeed have much to accomplish.
J L Graham, your comment brings to my mind the timing of the defunding of the government that will be caused by the gop House not passing another CR or new budget. You cannot pay for enforcement of a new Corporate Transparency Act policy with no funding. This adds an angle to their timeline I never knew to consider before.
Yes! You found it. I was wondering what current activities by the Magas would be in preparation for this, and you identified it. Also could be part of the reason they were holding those high official positions hostage. Some sort of bargaining chip. I'd dare say we are already in the somewhat early stages World War III. It's mostly transaction-based (as opposed to physical) conflict at this point, though obviously not exclusively.
Politics is indeed a game for those who consider chess too easy and boring.
Politics is a game for those who regard other people as prey. Not that the best of politics lacks a coherent and well thought out strategy, but it seems to me a some point "the love of money" and other forms of social power becomes an end in itself, for which any other consideration is sacrificed. For the thrill of being the last person standing, and the owner of the whole, entire world in a fortress of steel, concrete and costly decor.
Yes, exactly JL.
Exactly, J L. The very same interests involved in the support of Hitler in this country in the 1930s, as documented by Rachel Maddow so clearly. Many of those very same Republicans actively fomenting a coup to bring Fascism to the US and indicted and brought to trial. Instead of me blathering on about it, you and many others can read her Prequel and listen to the eight Ultra podcasts.
That movement away from hubris was not immediate in 1945. America's initial temptation was to punish the losers forever, de-industrializing Germany and Japan.
Hubris that followed the utterly foreseeable yet unforeseen collapse of the Soviet empire was as immense as it was idiotic and we may be paying the price for this a long time into the future.
At the time of the final implosion, I noted:
"Crass materialism has triumphed over dialectical materialism. But it won't last 70 years, maybe not much more than 7."
It took rather longer till the Subprime crash in 2007-2008...
I saw and still see the two opponents as far more Tweedledum & Tweedledee than either cared to admit. The West promptly draped itself in the propaganda cloak of Comintern... turned inside out. Daily garbage pronouncements about the superiority of Holy Market and Free Enterprise, reading just like those paeans to The Coming Triumph of Socialism, the theological presentation of History.
There's a Spanish proverb:
"The vanquished are vanquished; the victor is lost."
What a bleak view. We actually didn’t exercise a vanquished strategy over the losers, but actually helped rebuild the world. Then after the Soviet Union collapsed we traded with the Soviet Union in the hope it might normalize and stabilize relations. So it didn’t work. We tried.
Bleak view, Paul, that fits the bleak developments of the past three decades and more; as against a misty, not to say fogbound memory of what actually happened.
Some of those you refer to as "we" did actually try to help; but, just as we -- yes, we here, we now -- are already seeing and shall probably be seeing for quite some time to come, it is hard to find one's way out from a system founded on delusions and the merest of appearances, and even harder to escape a world built from lies. Soviet lies and Rupert Murdoch's may be different, but lies are lies. And all lies induce chaos and confusion, only advantageous to criminals, who plant and spread them.
From chaos and confusion come eventual downfall.
*
Outlook bleak for those who don't wake up, wash drug-induced dreams from their minds and wash their eyes clean.
Is that not what HCR and we readers of Letters from an American are trying to do?
A two-parter. Heather and those of her subscribers who take concrete action -at least voting, hopefully more - are frantically signaling to the rest of America that the patient is critically wounded and death will be imminent.
I have noticed (and felt generally grateful for) that Heather is taking a very one-sided pro-Biden view of America in the last year or so of her articles. Being a careful and honest historian, she does not tamper with the truth in the slightest. But her points of emphasis are clear. And her thesis is ringing siren-like.
For some time now Heather has been pointing out the successes of Biden’s Presidency. There have been frequent articles on the power of Biden’s casting aside the trickle-down theory of economic growth and its success in leveling the playing field. As well she has emphasized his signature legislative accomplishments and consistently noble foreign policy ventures.
In this series of newsletters we are not hearing much on the momentum Trump is gaining through his lawyers’ success in slowing the legal system to a crawl. We are not being warned of the potential for an election in which Trump has not been fully tried and hopefully convicted on even one count. Although she is undoubtedly aware of the psychological potency of this strategy, Heather is not supercharging the atmosphere with comment on how, as time passes, Americans care less and less about seeing justice done and in their inertia and exhaustion (see NYT article - Tuesday this week I think) are paving the way for a Trump victory.
Nor has Heather pointed the finger in any meaningful way at the second-tier villain of this tragedy, the astonishingly feckless head of the DOJ Merrick Garland who inexplicably let 18 months go by and the momentum to bring the monster to justice fade possibly irrevocably, before hiring Jack Smith.
I deeply appreciate Heather’s spiritual quest to always propagate the truths of this Administration and thus prop it up so we are not overwhelmed by the daily storms of scorn and criticism. Again, she is unique in how honestly and without sensation she does this.
And yet I feel a bit uneasy. The sheer accumulation of articles which beg us to see how Biden has turned the country around is beginning to arouse in me a sensation that Letters to an American is becoming one-sided, in its own brilliant, earnest way. The other side is having successes too. Trump has been canny in his choice of lawyers. The obstruction of justice has been successful to my deep disappointment. Trump’s tone has been again uncannily matched to what his followers need, but he is also wooing new voters in what for him at least is a traditionally political, non-hysterical way. The polls at the moment are unequivocal that Biden has a steep uphill climb to win the Presidency. Polls this far out are veritable smorgasbords of useless empty calories, but they have a nasty habit of creating their own truths, which in turn grow if the actual news cycle is at all slow.
In short, I am beginning to feel infantilized. We are not getting a balanced picture of the deeper truths of the current scene. We are not getting the temperature of the nation.
We need galvanizing through being made fully aware of current unpalatable realities that threaten to coalesce and ignite further. We need to meet the enemy - in a calculated, realistic appraisal. We must hear once or twice a month how truly endangered the American ideal is. We need to hear about the Republicans in detail, not just when they are committing hara-kiri as in the comical but sad quest for a speaker. We need to know what they are doing that is working to further this appalling threat, so that we are better able to fight it.
And yet, as I examine this concern over and over, I cannot honestly say that I’m sure this is Heather’s job. She buoys our spirits. We trust her implicitly, because she wins that trust everyday with her commentary and extensive footnoting. Is this the forum to point out that the sky is beginning to crack and may soon be falling? I simply cannot answer this question with any sense of clarity. And so, I am restlessly anxious.
Ten years from now, Heather’s columns will no doubt appear in a book and from then on be a Valhalla for historians. She will be acknowledged as being true to her mission. But will she gently be chided for a mission that is too limited? I don’t know.
I believe that when the calendar turns to 2024 we will see the beginnings of the real battle for America’s soul. The stakes are incredibly high. - the chips are all in. Obviously we have primary season ahead of us and then conventions and then the run up to the myriad of elections in November. The temperature always rises slowly but steadily during a Presidential year. But this year is different. The forces of irrationality are loose upon the land. The stakes are of the “all or nothing” ilk. There will be violence - how much is hard to say. There will be cheating and it may not be limited to one side. As for Election Day, I’m not sure it will even be held successfully. November 2020 will ok like a child’s three-legged race. Election Day may dissolve into chaos never witnessed in America.
I will read you every day, Heather. Your calm reporting (and unearthing) of realities that a lot of media find too boring to report, or qualify until they’ve crippled it, is welcome. The connections you draw or peerless.
But I would love you to be the voice of reason as to how great this challenge is. I would accept it unequivocally because my trust in you is implicit. But we need an accounting of our losses, our mistakes, the pitfalls in our path. You may not feel it your calling, but I for one beg you for it.
I was going to be short with the above point and then talk about America’s role after the Second World War and then after the fall of the USSR. But I have worn out my welcome by being too garrulous and so you will be blessed with a “one-parter” only today.
Not garrulous, eloquent.
Readers, cut this out, read and reread it. Share.
The situation's more desperate with every passing day, yet distractions and diversions hold the people's attention.
Why no clamor, why no noisy pots-and-pans demos outside media corporation offices demanding real info and nothing but real info? And the heads of those who publish daily lies and statistical lies...
We need HCR to get US to the polls. I need HCR to keep me writing GOTV postcards. At 89, I hear all the bad news, but reported by lawyers, ex-federal prosecutors, Luttig, Tribe, etc. Everyone is worried, but all seem to believe that the possibility of defeating Trump and having a substantive aftermath is doable if Biden is re-elected. The age “thing” may have come from Russia and may be ignored as propaganda. The “crew” is doing well. And if Americans can get over gas and egg prices long enough to think about their relationship to climate change, there is indeed hope. r
Eric O’Donnell- yes!
Paul and Paul, that’s an oversimplification of a complexity of decades long developments that brought the biggest war in Europe since WW2 and that almost destroyed the European Union, and threatens our democracy at home.
It’s a paragraph Ted, not a book. Peter is a fanciful writer and paints a bleak world full of confusion, lies, downfall, drug induced dreams. If I’ve learned anything from Heather it’s that our history is full of trying times. It just doesn’t feel that bleak to me. Challenging but not bleak.
Fanciful?
Born one month into the second world war in an island under attack. Bombs, rockets. Not being in Germany, in Poland, in Russia, in Italy, little by comparison with what people suffered in continental Europe. But quite enough for a child.
I've spent a lifetime sitting, fence-sitting close to the political arena, taking it in.
Especially since the mid-1980s, I have seen too much.
And looking back, I see that I have often developed and shown the foresight that comes of alertness and long attentiveness.
A German friend recounted his stay in Communist East Germany in 1986. When he'd finished telling I said if the Germans can't make this system work, the Russians certainly can't and concluded that the Soviet empire must die like a very old man, worn out but all organs still just functioning, as soon as one failed.
We then forgot that until it happened.
In the mid-90's I made a loud public remark in the political environment where I worked, declaring that democracy might not last longer than another generation. Fanciful? Surely, looking at the world at that time. I was labeled "a philosopher" and it was not meant as a compliment. Now? We have only to consider the worldwide movement against representative government, the dictators and would-be dictators everywhere -- even in the United States of America.
In late August 2001, I remarked that our world was sleepwalking on the edge of the abyss. Fanciful? Sure. The friend to whom I made the remark was politically very savvy, far more than most people, but her response was that I was "exaggerating, as usual".
Ditto on September 10th, when I wrote to the same friend that "our democracies are like a dog asleep in the middle of the highway. One doubts our survival mechanisms".
We saw what happened on the next day.
We also saw the unbelievable mess the then administration made of the situation and the damage they -- yes, they -- inflicted on the whole world, in particular the Middle East. It should have been obvious that the attack on New York was designed as a trigger mechanism, designed to set off a chain reaction bomb. It was not. The Bush Administration must, with the invasion of Iraq, have gone beyond the wildest hopes and dreams of Al-Qaida.
If even that direct assault on America could not awaken Americans to reality, what could? And now, on October 7th, an infernal machine from which there was and is no escaping, setting off multiple chain reactions and, by the horrible look of things, succeeding in doing what it was intended to.
Such deep cynicism is very hard to contemplate.
I refuse discouragement, yet, the past decades have been discouraging to one who came of age at a time of high hopes, and the current situation could not be more challenging. The challenge is indeed without precedent.
I may be uncomfortably sensitive to the situation -- and that to a degree that is unhealthy for me and those close to me. One must needs stay calm; but complacency is out of the question. Given the vast material power of America and the ambitions of nuclear-armed States, the dangers we now face are greater even than those that confronted the world on September 1st 1939 or December 7th 1941.
*
Prove me wrong. Reassure me if you can. I'd rather be mistaken.
Noted. Bleak to me, I guess would be to lose the war in Ukraine, lose democracy in the US 2024 elections from an apathetic misinformed not voting majority, and then EU falls apart. Russian and Oil exporting countries expand. The Arctic ceases to freeze and the northwest passage is secured/controlled by Putin and his Oligarchs. Corruption rules. What then?
Paul, I've posted further down this thread a word about the Morgenthau Plan for Germany -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgenthau_Plan -- explaining that the brilliant Marshall Plan was adopted only in March 1948, superseding this plan to, in the words of Goebbels, "make Germany into a giant potato patch".
Readers really should read information about the Morgenthau Plan and how it played into the hands of Dr Goebbels and his formidable propaganda machine when it came to fighting the last battles of the war. "Worth thirty divisions to the Germans"...
I’m sorry I don’t share some of what you expressed about post WWII. We learned from the previous war to not punish but assist and that worked beautifully. As to the rest of your mini diatribe, I simply don’t understand what you are expressing. You might want to simply your thoughts, well… in my opinion.
Bill, the Marshall Plan did not follow Allied victory immediately. Initial intentions were contained in the Morgenthau Plan, which it superseded. And, if you and Christopher L Groesbeck consult https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgenthau_Plan, you will see America's original plans for Germany.
I understand that Churchill did much to persuade the US to drop this approach, but I am simply speaking from memory here.
As for simplifying my thoughts, they are a good deal simpler than the complexities of the situation, but those are such that further simplification might be over-simplification. Let's leave that to the likes of tfg.
Da Cordo
Welllllll, let's not forget who was president for, basically, the first decade of that period--and that foreign policy is first and foremost the domain of the executive branch. If we're gonna color ourselves "arrogant," and with "lack of foresight," it is not wholly a GOP thing, not at all.
Robert, excellent point.
Harry S. Truman. 1945-1953. A Democrat.
I am more than OK saying that the modern decline and corruption of America is bipartisan.
Because it is and was.
Having said that, Trump is a new level of corruption not before seen. Trump laundered money for the Russians and his son even openly bragged that one of the big golf courses Trump purchased in Scotland was bought with laundered Russian money and his comment was actually published in a newspaper.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/07/as-trump-visits-his-scottish-golf-course-a-mystery-remains/
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/05/eric-trump-russia-investment-golf-course
https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/court-says-fight-probe-trumps-scottish-golf-courses-can-go-ahead-2021-08-11/
Of course, we all know why there were no arrests and no jail time for admitting in public to money laundering. So, I won't add that obvious bit of information here again.
Re-electing Trump is == re-electing a patsy of the Russian Oligarchy.
Not just the Russians. Read Bill Browder's book. The Western money that poured into the former USSR became a breeding ground for a worldlevel cabal. Those that worshipped Milton Friedmans philosophy are willing to allow the world to burn as they have built their doomsday bunkers in far away places. They avoid all the security of airports and shipping terminals with their private planes and yachts. They have walled themselves away from "those people", which is the rest of is.
Milton Friedman was wrong.
I really am not sure why he became famous. I guess one liners are a path to being famous.
"The only responsibility of a corporation is to its shareholder".
Anyone living near a garbage dump, a mining operation, a chemical plant, a busy highway, or anyone able to think their way out of wet paper sack on hot summer day can see that Milton Friedman's statement that made him famous is wrong.
Maybe being wrong is the easy path to fame??
Being right is WAY more work, research, effort and time.
Maybe I should come up with a few dumb one-liners and see how it works out for me.
Generally, Mike S, being wrong is easier because it usually involves being simplistic, avoiding the hard choices embraced by devotion to the complexity of reality as far as one can see it. One suspects Milton Friedman became so famous not because of his accuracy but because of his simplicity to those who chose the most self-serving concepts available. Simple Self-Serving Statements gain long legs!
In my childhood, kids sometimes called each other selfish. They got from parents, religion, the culture, that selfish was not the way to be. Today’s parents are more likely to teach their kids how to get an advantage over other kids. Self-serving is the new morality.
He gave the well connected cover for their selfish nefarious strategies.
I’d argue that Friedman was wrong on almost everything, particularly his cheerleading for trickle-on economics. But he’s correct about corporations being responsible only to their shareholders.
What he and others leave out is that We the People are the ultimate shareholders of America, and should use the power of government to make corporate shareholders play by the rules WE demand.
So corporations are beholden only to their shareholders, yes. But they’re all beholden to us, the people of America.
Shane, I’d argue that the position from the right is that capitalism is inherently more moral than socialism, allowing capitalists to have it both ways. Meaning, they get to claim moral superiority while actually dodging moral responsibility through the actions of their corporations. It’s sort of a system of moral currency laundering.
And, if any of us have our retirement money in mutual funds and/or stocks, our shareholder status is even closer. The shareholder is us.
I can remember when we were “customers” and corporations needed us to buy their goods, back before planned-obsolesce days.
Yes, Rickey!
Everyone interested in what Russia is all about must read "Red Notice" by Bill Browder. It's simple. Putin is the godfather of a Russian mafia.
There was a hint of democracy in Russia as the USSR collapsed. But the Russian people succumbed to the attraction of a strong man instead. It's the same primitive vicious psychology that makes Trump so attractive to so many.
It baffles me that the US and the EU haven't established a powerful publicity campaign to inform the Russians of Putin and his oligarch's theft of the national treasure. They eat caviar on their yachts and in their dachas and the average Russian suffers. With enough info about this and the number of young Russians lost to a stupid war, Putin could be toppled just like Nicholas Romanov.
Not time to go into this, but I can assure you that you are greatly oversimplifying both recent Russian history and the current situation.
One current problem is that, for Putin, now that he has invested the country's all in war, he will never be able to leave off making war. If he were to do that, return of soldiers from the front would have the same effects as it had in 1917, when disgruntled soldiers did so much to overthrow the Tsar and his regime.
Stalin understood this kind of danger to himself, and took such actions as purging the entire Leningrad leadership for having successfully withstood the 900-day blockade... without his help or direct instructions. Worse still, from the dictator's point of view, Leningrad no longer feared anything, not even Stalin. They'd seen and survived the worst ordeal possible.
The Bush I administration actively allowed Russia to devolve into a state run by organized crime. If I recall correctly, Boris Yeltsin sought help from the US for guidance in setting up a democracy and was turned down. If I’m wrong about that I’d appreciate comments from anyone who knows better.
Interesting. What if Yeltsin had solicited help from several successful democracies - an advisory group, if you will. But Boris was too drunk to imagine such a thing. And there were already gangsters after him. He sought Putins protection and got it. Putin got the country in return. Democracy never had a shot. The Russians love a strong man.
Americans at least had the influence of centuries long development of shrinking the influence of a monarch and slowly gaining a government run by the people. We're still working on it, eh?
As others have mentioned above it really had a lot to do with Milton Friedman and his Chicago School of Economics. Friedman's ideology & insistence on how to implement the "free market" in these newly formed republics from the previous Communist regime's orbit and economic conditions was to completely remake the economy is these places. Which caused great suffering and chaos as Naomi Klein describes in much detail in 'The Shock Doctrine- the Rise of Disaster Capitalism'.
Yeltsin and his team of economists were to trying to establish some Chicago School economic program which was really some idealistic capitalist fantasy than a truly democratic republic. There were several shocks within these few first years of Yeltsin's rise to power and leadership.
First, the Soviet Union was the only country many Russians had ever known or been born into and a very powerful shock to their psyche.
The second shock was this drastic economic shock therapy program, including immediate privatization of Russia's nearly 225,000 state-owned companies. A third of the population fell below the poverty line. Millions of middle-class Russians had lost their life savings when the currency lost its value, drastic cuts in state funding for the jobs of millions of workers that didn't get paid was too much to take.
Up till then Yeltsin had been able to promote economic reform and democratic reform as the desired approach to the 'new' Russia. He became more dictatorial, thinking of him less as the president and more like a monarch. Russia's brief democracy was destroyed little by little. Eventually the oligarchs, mafia and old Communist party members would just retake the brutalized economy on their own terms like some allegorical bleak Russian winter...
Mike, Milton Friedman was a nightmare! Look at what his influence did in Chile in the 1970’s.
Adding: Mitt Romney warned who the enemy was and is. He was laughed out of the party. Mitt didn’t need a Russian infusion into his campaign coffers. Mitt already had all the cash he needed for his Senate seat. We are now at a point of oligarchy infused foreign Funded GOP doesn’t need regular American donors. They only need the votes ( for now), and they achieve that through demagoguery rhetoric. If they win 2024, it’s a new ball game with no rules, no election laws. Elections become ceremonial, like in Russia. And was attempted in Ukraine till Yankovich fled to Moscow.
And are we the people strong enough to fight for Democracy? We should be saying/doing/warning, more loudly. Here I sit, though, 83 and where do I get started? Hold a press conference? But it would help if there were a planned group that would have a million press conferences all at the same time/day.
Red Wine and Blue is an organization you might like.
Welcome to the "Herd" Elaine!
I don’t think it is about political bipartisanship as much as it is a sorting out of diverse cultures that are and always have been present in our countries history. Republicans grabbed the disaffected southern Dixiecrats, created the opportunity to draw in christian societies into politics around abortion in the 70s and made their false claim that they owned the moral high ground in the 80’s. No one can dispute that the repugs were much better than the Dems at identifying causes which attracted various segments of our society. The dems kind of lost their way and the 20th century New Deal progressivism got thrown under the bus in the 80s and 90s.
Are you talking about 1992 onward with Bill Clinton? I was busy in college and grad school during 1992-2002, and was still forming my political beliefs.
I recall Clinton suddenly getting a tear in his eye when marching in a funeral march and pointed out by an aid that the cameras were on him. That is what the press was pushing in circa 1992. I also recall Clinton working tirelessly on an accord between Israel and Palestine and despite the effort, failing and coming away exasperated. The latter I think defines the Best of Bill Clinton.
I don't know if you are blaming the Dems for the Yeltsin era, basically giving way to Putin. I don't think either party in the US should claim credit or blame for the fall of the Soviet Union and subsequent rise of Russia under Putin.
Sorry if my comment is totally off base. That is entirely possible as these are just comments and there is just a lot of reading between the lines as a consequence.
Matt,
People give Reagan credit for the demise of the USSR, but it was a decades long process that wore communism down, culminating in the actions of Gorbachev.
It is Gorbachaev who deserves all of the credit.
100.0%
Mike;
Yes but it was Reagan who jumped on the soapbox and said, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”
And that was performative nonsense.
YES Matt, the complexity of reality affects both sides of any conflict. Truly accurate statements tend to be more boring and harder to grasp or write on a banner or bumper sticker or even a billboard. There are far more nuances than many (most?) people have time or energy to contemplate. Give us a good slogan any day!
...makes me aware why I usually seek out the longer comments to HCR's posts (e.g.- Peter Burnett, Matt Fulkerson, George Polisner, S B Lewis, Linda Weide, Barbara Jo Krieger, Robert McTague, Fay Reid, etc) because they seem more likely to encompass more of the complexities of any given stance or add new information.
I think the Press was wallowing in the Lewinsky mess instead of distributing the news. Tabloid Journalism was just getting started and Fox took over from there. A lot of blame to spread around.
And... nothing has really changed, has it?
I am aware - now - how little attention I paid to any form of politics or the real issues of governing for far too long. Becoming a single mother & having to earn a living sort of requires focusing on providing for family! There tends to be quite an abrupt learning curve involved after a divorce. Life did get better.
That doesnt excuse me - but I wasnt alone in that respect.
It’s the Senate, not the President that writes and approves our treaties with foreign governments. However, both parties are complicit in their assertions that capitalism was/is a guarantee of democracy. Just another reminder that the role of government is to protect the rule of law, provide institutional oversite/regulate. The other is free, fair, and transparent elections.
“ Nothing was more to be desired than that every practical obstacle should be opposed to Cabal, intrigue, and corruption. These most deadly adversaries of republican government might have been expected to make their approaches from more than one "querter", but chiefly from the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant (DJT) in our councils. How could they better gratify this, than by raising a creature (Mr. Orange) of their own to the chief magistracy of the Union?” -Alexander Hamilton 1788
From The Road to Unfreedom, Dr. Tim Snyder
Federalist #68 link
https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed68.asp
It occurred to me re reading F # 68, that not only have the obstacles to cabal and corruption have been removed by the court and by the laws passed, and that has given way to encouraging corruption and cabal from every corner and quarter. The former chief magistrate, his orangeness a creature saved by Putin’s $ and raised because of a lame reality TV show. The most important election in history is the next one.
Civilizations rise, and civilizations fall. It's one of the arrhythmic heartbeats of human time. The US has passed its second centennial. On the long historical record, it's done pretty well, particularly for a democracy. Two decades ago, during the Bush/Cheney misrule, I predicted we would not see a third centennial as a functioning national democracy. I won't be alive in 2076 to see if I was right.
One of the things playing out now also started in 1980, along with the entire Reagan misrule, namely the doctrine of "originalism" in the courts. We now have a case -- the DC insurrection trial of a former president, Whiny Don -- in which the lawyers for the defense are arguing for absolute, lifelong Presidential immunity for crimes. It's not surprising that this would be fielded as a defense, since the defense has pretty much nothing else. What is surprising is that a) this hasn't already been thrown out as absurd, and b) there is no confidence on either side which way the Supreme Court might rule.
The Court has become arbitrary. That's never a good sign.
What an important thread has HCR laid out for us. No strategies in the present are simple or new. They have origins and core goals going all the way back, in this case, to the battle for the New Deal, which took a war to be effected and remained under attack these many decades. Where do evil, avarice, and greed originate if the great American experiment was the antidote to regencies and empires and autocracies? What forces must be in place to protect the ideals or aspirational foundations of an American government in service to esposed goals and the interests of the plurality of its people? What standing force must be in place when the greater threat is not the arms and soldiers of foreign powers or ideologies, but the extremism of a battle between ideologies we now (and will) fight against? When does desireable tension become unsustainable?
Yes. And it strikes me that we and our allies will need to rebuild the Gaza, Palestinian and Israeli lands once the current horrible war comes to a close.
And Vietnam!