alias Bruce.

The real reason why so many Americans don’t vote.

It’s not ignorance or apathy. It’s bitter awareness.

On November 5, the day before the midterm elections central to the continued power and influence of dictator-in-progress President Donald Trump, a Washington Post story went against the dominant narrative about American nonvoters. Instead of offering yet another bewildered eulogy to the lost civic conscience of the more than half of Americans who don’t vote, the Post story let nonvoters from across the country explain, in their own words and in detail, why they chose to refuse their ostensible civic duty in one of the most momentous elections in the nation’s history. For instance:

Charlotte Greenleaf won’t be voting on Tuesday. Neither will anyone else in her family. Never have, never will, she says. It’s not that she’s too busy. Greenleaf, 60, is unemployed and trying to make it on disability benefits, plus the pigs and chickens she raises on a small farm near this scruffy town in central West Virginia. And it’s not that she’s satisfied with how things are. Unhappy with President Trump, she quoted her mother: “If you don’t got nothing nice to say, say nothing at all.” No, this is why she’s not voting: She figures the country’s leaders are chosen by rich and powerful people far from any place she’s ever been. “My favorite subject in school was history, and I learned that’s how it’s always been,” Greenleaf said. “Politicians just think about themselves.” So she tunes them out: Doesn’t read the news, doesn’t watch it on TV. And most certainly does not vote.

Read the entire Post story. Its importance is not that it blows the cover off some national secret about why people don’t vote, but that it says out loud what is literally a matter of common knowledge to most of we Americans. A good number of the more than half of Americans who elect to not vote — many for their entire lifetimes — do so because they choose to not insult themselves with the sorry pretense of having participatory power over the country’s policy decisions. They may possess or lack formal education; they may have enough money to get by or they may not; they may live in a hamlet in eastern Idaho or on the west side of Manhattan. But what these boycotters all have in common is a deep and often bitter clarity about the fact that the United States, with its flood of corporate campaign money propelling public policy from top to bottom, is not a democracy. So why would they vote when the one shred of civic power many would-be voters feel they possess is to tell big money, in effect, “You can’t fire me. I quit.” This is not a position to mock or to dismiss. It reflects a serious and fierce understanding by which millions of competent adult American nonvoters reach a cogent decision to abstain from the charade.

I am not one of those people. I vote — despite my rage at the corrupt moneyed machinery that runs the nation and controls its major decisions — because the outcomes of voting can mean life or death in people’s real lives and because voting is not incompatible with my determination as a progressive to lay waste to the structural monarchy of money on which modern capitalism rests. The two coexist, and electoral casualties are real and present. Donald Trump’s 2016 victory — courtesy of the Electoral College but theoretically preventable had more nonvoters turned out and made it harder for digital interference to ensure a Trump win — has already killed people and will kill and devastate more. In Florida, Ron DeSantis’s gubernatorial win, if it holds, will embolden racial murders and deadly statewide policies on health care, guns, and policing, while Andrew Gillum’s victory there, if it happens, will mollify some of these and lend strength to those who resist them. Ted Cruz’s victory in Texas will buoy racist and fascist attacks, economic savagery, and suffering and death for women denied reproductive rights in that state. Alexandria Ocasio-Ortez’s New York victory has put the fear of progressive outrage into the hearts of cowardly Democrats locally and nationally.

But we betray a huge number of outraged and aware people who refuse to vote — and we weaken our shared clout as a force for overturning this corrupt corporate-funded system of governance — if we trivialize or demonize nonvoters instead of recognizing that many of them are simply expressing, in a different way, the very same things that we want in a society.

This is not about whether or how someone voted in this filtered popularity contest that we call a democracy. This is about voters’ core sense of what serves their interest. Never, ever forget that most Americans, no matter how they act out, ultimately want the same things we progressives want: an end to corporate money in government, a citizen-driven system of single-payer universal health care, and policy that serves the public will rather than private wealth.

That is our greatest strength, and it is our way to ultimately win.

When white people say “don’t panic” about Trump’s autocratic potential, don’t listen.

Image: Getty - Foreign Policy

“Don’t panic. Organize,” are the final words of Joe Scarborough’s July 2 Washington Post missive to Democratic voters horrified by the Trump presidency’s actions to date and its autocratic potential. Scarborough’s well-intentioned message is true as far as it goes. But what’s worth remarking is how his attitude epitomizes the white, privileged, short-sighted arrogance by which the Democratic Party blew the presidency in 2016 – and may lose again in 2020 if it doesn’t pop out of its bubble.

Here is Scarborough:

“Instead of viewing this accidental president, who lost the popular vote by almost 3 million votes, as the apocalypse du jour, Trump skeptics should treat him more like [an anomaly]. The danger created by Trump’s presidency is real. But it is not the sign of a coming Armageddon. Instead, these electoral aftershocks are more political proof that Democrats must face the ugly truth that their cataclysmic losses in 2016 were not caused by Fox News, Susan Sarandon, Vladimir Putin, the New York Times’ email stories or the sudden spread of racism in Midwestern states carried twice by Barack Obama. Rather, their shellacking was the result of a lackluster presidential campaign that had no coherent message, ignored warnings from Democratic leaders and forgot to visit Wisconsin.”

Okay. Reality check number one: Trump is not an “accidental” president, nor was the 2016 outcome an inaccurate reflection of the state of the nation. With blue-suited red-necktied senatorial and congressional zombies proffering corporate-purchased public policy (thanks in part to Citizens United) that drowned out the legislative voices of non-rich Americans, and with nearly 50 percent of voters bailing on voting altogether, it was perfectly logical that a candidate who picked up on both long-boiling voter rage and bitter racism enjoyed the results. Despite the abominable Electoral College and mind-boggling Russian interference, the Dems shouldn’t have even been within cruise missile range of a Trump victory. The collusion of the DNC with the Hillary Clinton campaign to sideline Bernie Sanders’ defiant presence and platform created a crucial political vacuum that never should have existed. Trump, the consummate bullshit artist, seized that available space to con a credulous base. Accident? More like neglectful calculus. It was the Democrats themselves who flunked that test.

Reality check number two: Trump is an “apocalypse du jour” only to insulated whites like Scarborough who have never been first in line as targets for America’s genocide, discrimination, state-sponsored brutality, and incarceration. To use the flip term “apocalypse du jour” for the presidency of a man who has dehumanized Native Americans for decades, demonized and created prison camps to tear apart refugee families at the Mexican border, and made anti-Muslim discrimination a national immigration policy, is an obscenity made possible for Scarborough by America’s centuries of bloody white immunity. Only an American white person – who has never seen themselves in a lynching photo, has never had to live with ceaseless inexplicable stops by cops asking them why they are in this neighborhood or boarding this train, has never heard the click of a car door lock at a red light when a driver sees them standing on the corner, has never had a white person clutch a purse or knapsack in their presence, has never routinely been the last person on a subway car to have someone sit beside them, and has never been at the front of the line of those chosen by the state for routine or “emergency” incarceration – can so cavalierly dismiss a white supremacist autocrat as an “apocalypse du jour.” With this, Joe Scarborough has unintentionally indicted himself and the Democratic leadership for being complicit in the casual acceptance of America’s loathsome economic and racial regime. This is the real reason why Clinton’s vapid “stronger together” campaign theme rang hollow to voters. The kinds of profound economic changes that voters of all colors would have full-throatedly supported are disallowed by the bankrollers who finance the Democratic Party – not to mention the Republican Party, which in its modern incarnation has been auctioning off its soul since Richard Nixon if you start with race-baiting, or Ronald Reagan if you start with supply-side trickonomics.

Reality check number three: Notice how Scarborough, even in his withering criticism of the Clinton campaign, stops short of defining what a “coherent message” for a Democratic presidential candidate would actually be. We hear that same deafening silence from the Democratic Party as we enter the mid-terms and as we approach 2020. That’s because the narrative necessary to galvanize a large chunk of the non-rich electorate, of all races, is one that Scarborough and the corporate Democratic Party cannot embrace: today’s plutocratic capitalism, with its fiscal chokehold on who runs for federal office and what messages air to voters, is incompatible with democracy. A policy plank that would excite voters would include, just for starters, mandatory public financing of all political campaigns and the prohibition of private contributions to all electoral runs for public office. It’s a no-brainer: public office is public property, and access to it must not, in any true democracy, be purchased by private wealth. The sole obstacle to this elemental truth is the absurd but accustomed dominance of private electoral money itself.

The good news is that, amid the Democratic Party’s willful spurning of its base, Democratic candidates themselves are forcing the party’s hand. The most recent and remarkable success is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who spectacularly dethroned longtime Democratic mainstay Joseph Crowley and his posse of corporate backers by bringing a straight-up version of what Trump faked and what Dem officials have ducked: an in-your-face progressive populist message about reversing corporate rule. Mainstream American journalists breathlessly report that she is a Democratic Socialist, which, when you strip away reporters’ exclamation points, simply means that she, like most Americans (including many Trump voters), favors a capitalist economy with sane state guarantees of things like health care, wage security, and retirement. Voters across party lines have long hungered for such authentic courage in candidates. In 2016 Michael Moore famously and correctly predicted that Trump would win if the Dems didn’t show more nerve. In 2015 some, including me, felt a queasy sense of possibility about Trump’s dishonest populism while mainstream media dismissed him. Observers have been saying for years, amid the moneyed, amoral monologue of American politics, that we progressives need passionately principled candidates who aren’t afraid to lose. It remains to be seen how much the Democratic Party will heed the success of candidates like Ocasio-Cortez and face up to the flagrant contradiction between the needs of its entrenched bankrollers and those of its long-term political base. The party can’t satisfy both.

Meanwhile, no one should confuse values-based revulsion at Trump’s agenda with “panic.” For many of us, be we survivors of early American genocide or slavery or holocaust or internment camps, the horrors that Trump makes possible are not new. We have fought and died and collectively survived them before. We will again. There is nothing “panicked” about our resolve to see these threats for what they are and to defeat them.

The only people panicking are those who are too privileged or too afraid to face the reality of what is at stake.

- Thanks to Allie.

Trump for the Nobel Prize? Another Joe McCarthy moment.

You may have heard: 18 Republican politicians have nominated President Donald Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize for his interplay with North Korea.

To quote a Twitter reply to journalist Andrea Mitchell’s call for Michelle Wolf to apologize for having publicly insulted Trump’s surrogate liar Sarah Huckabee Sanders, “Are you fucking kidding me?”

In 1950, the venerable Republican Senator Margaret Chase Smith – no liberal, she – had some choice words for cowards in her party who folded to the reign of another demagogic GOP fear-mongerer, Senator Joe McCarthy:

Certain elements of the Republican Party have materially added to this confusion in the hopes of riding the Republican party to victory through the selfish political exploitation of fear, bigotry, ignorance, and intolerance.

Chase’s stand helped to eventually undo McCarthy’s reign of political terror. It’s another reminder that political cowardice in the face of a national bully is nothing new in America – and that blood-eyed resistance isn’t, either.

I’ve written about this on Truthout regarding Wolf’s April 28 scandalizing of the more timid among American corporate journalists with her ruthless skewering of Trump’s enablers, some of whom were in the room during her monologue.

We are now in a McCarthy moment, but what's worse is that the dominant demagogue is the president, not a senator. Cowards – like Paul Ryan, who kowtowed to the vile Trump for the sake of a policy win for the rich and who now scampers out of the game to duck the longer-term consequences – suck up to the momentary boss man and then dive for the sidelines when they see an opening.

Nobel Prize for Donald Trump? It will of course never happen. Scandinavia faced its own awful reckoning of cowardice versus courage 80 years ago under the rise of Nazism, and has not forgotten it. But for cowards the point isn’t in fulfilling a full agenda, it’s in cashing in on political expediency in order to buy themselves five more minutes or months of personal survival under the rule of a momentary despot.

That’s today’s Republican Party leadership: mice dragging fresh corpses to the cat.

Fascism happens one agonized personal concession at a time.

This is the mistake we make: We think that the troops and the tanks and the ovens appear all at once, a firestorm of evil that we can track from a distance and wall out of our towns and our jobs and our decisions.

But these are the ways it actually happens:

• Your boss tells you to do what is ordered or lose the paycheck that keeps your kid out of jail or keeps your sick loved one out of the morgue.

• As an employee, you simply know, you are certain beyond all doubt, that a national leader this horrific cannot possibly last in a society like ours. So you keep your head down and you do what you are told. And you wait for it to end. And you wait. And wait.

• The incredible days of incredulous journalists reporting impossible things begin to blur together until it feels less and less unusual for the president to talk not just like a cynic or a crook, but like a madman.

• Police officers and soldiers, who swear to an oath that assumes that obedience to official authority in our society is a just cause, follow their oaths. For some uniformed recruits, the jackboots and shields of a bullying posse are irresistible perks.

• Politicians, who assume that the public deserves what it submits to, hold their noses and stow their valuables and follow their fortunes. Or they quit politics.

• Teachers teach what they are told to teach or, in growing numbers, they quit teaching.

• Health practitioners, including mental health specialists, make choices: they condemn and fight against the mad leadership and the physical and mental torture embraced by their freshly unleashed nation, or they calculate to aid and abet it, or they shut up about it.

• Reporters make choices, too: they defiantly report reality in the face of blacklisting by a regime of “alternative facts,” or they quit and denounce the amoral enterprise of filtered storytelling, or they smile and cooperate with the authorities.

We are all making these choices. Right now. So I am talking to myself as well as to you: Please. Do not confuse what is expedient with what is true.

Three Compelling Reasons for You to Leave Facebook Now.

1. If you believe in democracy, Facebook is increasingly incompatible with that desire. As you’ve likely seen in the revelations that continue to unfold, Facebook has created a model where very smart people use very smart machine intelligence to selectively filter the information it feeds to you, some of it false, so as to use what they know about you to influence your choices on, say, who should be the next president. Facebook has hidden this misuse of your data and the identities and agendas of those who misuse it. And they’ve done it for money – because the well-targeted lies generate traffic and the traffic boosts revenue. Enjoyers of Facebook – as I once was – shrug at this at our peril. But its reality rivals any nightmare George Orwell might have predicted – because Facebook’s silent commands about what is real feel to us like free choices as we click our way, personally monitored by algorithms at our every turn, through the filtered world it creates for each one of us.

2. CEO Mark Zuckerberg is betting that you’re too stuck on Facebook to leave, or that you’ll buy the “why bother? It won’t help” line. Zuckerberg and Facebook have been lackadaisical for years about urgent policy changes and improvements in how they handle the veracity and privacy of data. And Zuckerberg, with unbelievable arrogance, has repeatedly refused to testify before a committee of the British Parliament (he has offered instead to send underlings) in the momentous formal investigation into Facebook’s role in spreading disinformation in the run-up to the epic Brexit vote. Facebook could, if it chose to, do plenty to aggressively confront systems that reward false content, abuse user data, and impair transparency. But Zuckerberg seems to feel entitled to duck the unprecedented public crisis of information his company has created. True, this is what we get when we allow a private company to become, in effect, a public utility for our information. But now that we see the result – including its role in who now occupies the White House – are we willing to tolerate that? If you now remain on Facebook, you’re telling Zuckerberg, “Sure.”

3. You can always go back to Facebook if you decide to. Facebook makes it hard to quit and easy to return. Their only proof that you’re willing to leave is when you do. So the one way to ensure that Facebook gives a damn about you and your wishes is to remove yourself from their profit base and tell them why. That, you can bet – as Facebook’s value has fallen amid mistrust from investors and users – will get tech zillionaire Zuckerberg’s attention.

Given the stakes for your personal information and your society, are you really not willing to send Facebook that message?

 

 

America, welcome to the world’s illegitimate states.

For a nation so accustomed to congratulating itself as exceptional, it is bitter poetic justice for we as Americans to officially join the ranks of ridiculed autocracies ruled by cartoon dictators.

We now fit all the criteria: An elite whose exponentially absurd distribution of wealth makes a joke of the pretense of a civilized economy? Check. National media that avoid the actual issues of raw autocracy while dithering over distractive questions such as optics and intent? Check. A plurality electorate sufficiently brutalized to settle for abusing designated others as an acceptable form of solace? Check.

The United States of America has arrived. Welcome.

President Trump, Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, and a week of atrocities

Tom McCarthy's Jan 28 Guardian piece is a good peek into President Donald Trump's jealous-toddler view of the world and what drives his policy moves, which are best understood as tantrums. What's most terrifying is that his triggers for his despicable acts rest so trivially, and even randomly, on perceived personal slights and disrespect (does the trajectory of Trump's weeklong tear have anything to do with media having dissed his tiny little inauguration crowd?).

 

Maybe it is ever thus with tyrants. But Trump does seem a wicked prototype for the pasty postindustrial piggycrat. He is eerily reminiscent of Dune's Baron Vladimir Harkonnen (below), right down to the first name and the iridescent hair. Call him King Twitter Thumbs. The tub of lard and lies whose tweets kill people.

 

 

Here is an excerpt from McCarthy's piece on this week of atrocities from His Grand Petulance:

 

Donald Trump's first week: carnage, both real and imagined

Tom McCarthy in New York

 

 

Saturday 28 January 2017 10.38 ESTLast modified on Saturday 28 January 201717.00 ES

What started with an ominous inauguration speech has ended with executive orders on everything from immigration to banning refugees and reigniting the fossil fuel industry. What does it mean for his presidency?

 

The crowd was small, the weather was bad and the speech, which described “American carnage”, was dire. For the tens of millions who voted against him and countless concerned others, Donald Trump’s inauguration as president of the United States felt ominous, no matter how widely Barack Obama smiled and no matter how gracefully he and Michelle Obama made the transition from hosts to departing guests.

 

The feeling of foreboding did not last. It was overtaken within hours by the realization, at the arrival of the first of the new president’s executive actions, that the most outrageous campaign promises Trump had made to the smallest core of his supporters were now official US policy, or about to be.

 

Within a week, the rally chant “build the wall!” had morphed into a phrase published on White House stationery: “impassable physical barrier”. A proposed ban on Muslim immigrants took shape as a suspension of visa programs from countries that, as Trump put it, “have tremendous terror”. Grumbling about excessive government regulation had become, in one document, an exhortation to bureaucrats to help an oil company skip the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.

 

“He’s delivering the goods to his core constituency in a really visible way,” said John T Woolley, head of the American presidency project at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “But there are a lot of things that he’s raising that may be above what he truly has the ability to do.”

 

Seven days into his presidency, the accumulation of Trump’s official actions, at the rate of as many as five a day, has created a new national reality on central policy concerns from the environment to voting rights to international commitments to immigration, healthcare and trade.

 

“You have to consider this a pretty aggressive use of executive power early on,” said Julian E Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. “Using it not only on one marquee issue, which presidents often do, but on a series of major campaign issues, all within just a few days.

 

“So it’s rapid-fire, but more importantly, each one is a pretty significant decision.”

 

More difficult to assess than the new president’s official actions, but for many Americans just as significant, has been the impact on the public of Trump’s simple presence in office – the finally inescapable fact, as it were, of Donald Trump as president.

 

During the campaign, Trump’s lies about the fake scourge of voter fraud, his vain obsession with the size of his crowds (and his hands), and his explosions of bile and irrelevance on Twitter could be semi-ignored as the faults of a mercurial political figure who was quite likely, at least, to lose.

 

Now Trump is in the Oval Office and his lies are voiced by a press secretary standing behind the White House seal in the Brady briefing room. It was there that Trump’s spokesman, Sean Spicer, falsely declared on the day after the swearing-in that “this was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period”. Trump’s audience was in fact significantly smaller than Obama’s 2009 crowd, but members of the media who tried to brandish evidence of the fact were shouted down.

 

Spicer rolled out another whopper days later, informing the country that the president still (wrongly) believed millions of votes had been illegally cast in November. As supporting evidence, he pointed to a 2012 research report on voter fraud, prompting the author of the report to categorically deny that the report said any such thing.

 

“Of those votes cast, none of them come to me,” Trump told ABC News a day later, embroidering his fantasy. “They would all be for the other side. None of them come to me.”

 

For Americans who doubt his leadership, just as disturbing as Trump’s new freedom to spout untruths with significantly inflated authority were early reports on his conduct behind the scenes, as he made his first decisions as the most powerful individual on Earth.

 

Repeatedly, Trump threw thunderbolts from his Twitter account – threatening to “send in the Feds!” to stop violence in Chicago and impugning Chelsea Manning – immediately following negative coverage of those topics on Fox News, which Trump told the New York Times he watches morning and night.

 

It was TV coverage of his small inauguration crowd that prompted Trump to trot out Spicer. The bad press had not allowed the president to “enjoy” his first weekend in the White House as he felt he deserved, the Associated Press quoted “one person who has spoken with him” as saying. Trump’s decision to act on voter fraud was inspired, Trump told members of Congress, by a conversation with a German golfer.

 

If Trump’s character is immutable, however, his executive actions may not be. His orders have the power to guide the conduct of federal agencies and officials, but cannot contravene existing law.

 

Woolley said: “The question always is – and this is a real question for Trump – whether the president is going beyond the scope of the law, whether he’s infringing on congressional power, and whether he’s infringing on the divides between national, state and local power.

 

“There’s going to be a festival of lawsuits about almost every controversial action that he takes.”

 

Next week, Trump is scheduled to address a joint session of Congress and announce a nominee to fill the vacancy on the supreme court.

 

Here’s what he got done on week one.

 

(McCarthy's entire piece is here.)

This is how stupid Trump thinks his followers are:

- Trump thinks his followers are stupid enough to believe the easily-disproved “alternative fact” that Trump's inauguration crowd in DC was not dwarfed by Obama's in 2008 or by the Women's March in 2017.

- Trump thinks his followers are stupid enough to believe that giving brown people less will give struggling white people more – while the rich boldly suck up even more of virtually everything.

- Trump thinks his followers are stupid enough to believe that going back to giving more power to for-profit health insurance companies will somehow, for the first time ever, give people more generous choices at lower prices.

- Trump thinks his followers are stupid enough to believe that you can gut government (e.g., freeze federal hiring) and wildly expand it (e.g., build a wall, prosecute women for abortion, enforce a ban on Muslims) at the same time.

- Trump thinks his followers are stupid enough to believe that suicide bombers and shooters are a greater danger to each of us than more poisonous air, water, and food.

- Trump thinks his followers are stupid enough to believe that virtually all of the reputable climate scientists in the world are scammers and that the handful of climate denial scammers are telling the truth.

- Trump thinks his followers are stupid enough to believe that a white serial bankrupter who stiffed contractors and ran a phony college is a better ally than a black president who lowered unemployment and favored a higher minimum wage.

- Trump thinks his followers are stupid enough to trust a notoriously greedy billionaire because he repeats the obvious truth that “the system is rigged,” even after he fills his cabinet with greedy billionaires and brazenly pursues policies that favor CEOs over everyone else.

- Trump thinks his followers are stupid enough to continue to cheer on the Trump regime’s increasingly brutal scapegoating (e.g., of women, Muslims, blacks, brown immigrants, and LGBT people) while Trump’s billionaire policies lay waste to the lives of working white people.

None of this is new. Dictators thrive on telling bald-faced lies to desperate people.

But what we don't know is: How many Trump followers will see through the con? How many of we Americans as a whole will actively risk being targeted, fired, jailed, or worse to protect our futures and that of our kids? And how many journalists will actually fight – and by that I mean put their careers and possibly their physical safety at risk – for what is provably true and morally non-negotiable?

Red, blue, and rich: game over.

In the United States, as in most other non-democracies, national politics is a moral sport of the wealthy.

The wealthy players fielded by America’s Red Team feel varying amounts of actual heartfelt care, ranging from the frigidly mercenary to the heatedly passionate, but are for the most part selfishly negative in their agenda. The wealthy players who take the field for the Blue Team are generally more empathic and positive. But both teams’ players perform in a steel-shielded arena where winning or losing may be ecstatic or hurt like hell, may earn roars or ridicule, but won’t affect their personal comfort or lifestyle or that of almost anyone they know.

American presidential and congressional politics, like the NFL or NBA or any other corporate-sponsored contest, is a cage match among fiercely-driven elite gladiators who, regardless of who wins or loses, will all leave the ring rich and surrounded by validators.

That is why Hillary Clinton and the Democrats lost in 2016. That is why mainstream media reporters and pundits have become irrelevant to what Americans feel and believe. Insulated by corporate cash, with its gilded chokehold on who gets to compete for national leadership, the Blue Team has confidently hogged the mainstream “progressive” mic while growing ever more more clueless about what its voters have to say and need to hear. And the Red Team has increasingly cornered itself with the clash between its lunch-bucket rhetoric and its robber baron policy.

So, with the official political podium and official media closed off to angry and hungry voters who have known for decades (for people of color, make that centuries) that this nation and its economy have been broken by its masters, where could people go for attention?

To Twitter. And Facebook. Where, unlike the ruling American news operations and political parties, it is still permissible to truthfully say, “The system is rigged.”

Problem is, competent and decent potential Blue Team leaders were either self-silenced on this built-in function of economic inequality (Clinton), or blocked within the party (Sanders). And Red Team leaders were happy to exploit anger but incapable of blaming the rich for anything. So the field was left wide open for a celebrity demagogue named Donald Trump to declare, with veracity, “The system is rigged” – while lying about everything else and steering white rage toward people of color, women, and Muslims. All while he and his henchmen exploited Twitter’s and Facebook’s vulnerability to fake news and false accusations.

So the kinder corporate Blue Team lost this election because it convinced itself that it understood working people while having barred them from the actual field of play since at least the Reagan years. And the meaner corporate Red Team lost its stature and what was left of its self-respect in its cave-in to Trump’s white faux-populist scam, but in so doing it rode the coattails of his audacity.

And now, with fascism in the wings, the callow wealthy Reds and the outraged wealthy Blues regroup on the field, with as little to lose in their actual lives as before.

But for those who stand to lose everything, the Red and Blue game is over.

The Guardian’s Lindy West: Why say alt-right when you mean Nazi?

This from columnist Lindy West on why we stop at “alt-right” when we’re talking about ethnic-cleanser racial supremacists:

What does it take to call a Nazi a Nazi? In the interminable fortnight since the election of Donald Trump, the US press has been floundering in a gyre of panic over the internal taxonomy of racists.

For months, many (myself included) indulged Trump’s base in their euphemism of choice, the “alt-right”, an attempt to rebrand warmed-over Reconstruction-era white supremacy as a cool, new (and harmless!) internet fad. Despite the fact that Breitbart News (described by former honcho turned Trump adviser Stephen Bannon as “the platform for the alt-right”) had, at one point, a news tag labeled “black crime”, and was a driver of the racist conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was a secret Kenyan Muslim, the press contorted itself into labyrinthine knots to avoid applying the word “racist” to Bannon or Trump in any committed way. (In our post-meaning world, being called a racist is nearly as grievous as being a racist.

Public outcry has prompted some hemming and hawing over the finer distinctions between “white nationalists” and “white supremacists”, the mainstream media not allowing either term to get too close to Trump himself, even as antisemitic, anti-black, anti-gay and Islamophobic hate crimes (not to mention KKK victory parades) continued to proliferate in his name. The website Boing Boing published a “White Supremacy Euphemism Generator for journalists”, explaining: “even when people pander to the idea Western culture’s wellbeing is inseparable from European ethnicity, they somehow avoid being called white nationalists or supremacists by journalists”. One hang-up seemed to be a lack of self-identification. If a person doesn’t consider himself a white supremacist, can he still be one? (Answer: OF COURSE.)

Finally, though, at Richard B Spencer’s closing speech at Saturday’s alt-right conference just a few blocks from the White House, it became undeniable what we’re dealing with here (at least among this particular sect of Trump’s true believers): it’s a bunch of straight-up neo-Nazis.

According to the New York Times, Spencer – who claims to have coined the term “alt-right” – “railed against Jews and, with a smile, quoted Nazi propaganda in the original German. America, he said, belonged to white people … As he finished, several audience members had their arms outstretched in a Nazi salute.” The crowd joined Spencer in a cry of “Heil victory!”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Richard Spencer: ‘railed against Jews and quoted Nazi propaganda.’ Photograph: The Washington Post/Getty Images

And yet, still, headlines were tentative. The New York Times gesticulated wildly toward Nazism without actually using the word (“Alt-Right Exults in Donald Trump’s Election With a Salute: ‘Heil Victory’”), and a CNN panel managed to avoid saying “Nazi” entirely, despite discussing a chyron that read, “Alt-right founder questions if Jews are people.”

But if declaring the superiority of the white race, quoting Nazi propaganda, calling for “peaceful ethnic cleansing”, and provoking Nazi salutes from his audience isn’t enough to qualify one as a neo-Nazi, then where on earth is the bar? What is the hesitation? And, given the close ties between the “alt-right” and Trump’s cabinet, how is the top story on every front page not some version of “NEO-NAZIS ATTEMPTING TO SEIZE CONTROL OF AMERICAN GOVERNMENT”?

Read her entire column here.