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@narcoticmeadow
“Come dress with us.” 🎃 ✂️ Thank you Benjamin Seidler for this amazing collage of Rodarte SS19 and the Shining twins (who were based on Diane Arbus’ Identical Twins, Roselle, New Jersey, 1967). The Shining is one of Kate and Laura Mulleavy’s favorite films!
real madrid celebrations are not complete without at least one awkward toni moment
Vale, Anthony
(with thanks to obsfood)
American school #PosterNobodycorp
Kushner’s Unconscionable Conflicts
Before I turn to Jared Kushner, let me ask: Do you believe the U.S. government does the right thing all or most of the time?
The Gallup organization started asking this question in 1963, when over 70 percent of Americans said they did. Since then, the percent has steadily declined. By 2016, before Trump became president, only 16 percent of Americans agreed.
Why the decline? Surely various disappointments and scandals played a part – Vietnam, Watergate, Iran-Contra, “weapons of mass destruction,” the Wall Street bailout.
But the largest factor by far has been the rise of big money in politics. Most people no longer believe their voices count.
That view is backed by solid research. Princeton professor Martin Gilens and Professor Benjamin Page of Northwestern University analyzed 1,799 policy issues that came before Congress, and found “the preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”
Instead, Gilens and Page concluded, lawmakers respond to the policy demands of wealthy individuals and moneyed business interests – those with the most lobbying prowess and deepest pockets to bankroll campaigns.
It’s likely far worse now. Gilens and Page’s data came from 1981 to 2002, before the Supreme Court opened the floodgates to big money in its Citizens United and McCutcheon decisions.
Trump and Bernie Sanders – authoritarian populist and progressive populist, respectively – based their shockingly successful campaigns on the public’s outrage at the corruption of our democracy by big money. Sanders called for a “political revolution.” Trump promised to “drain the swamp.”
Trump hasn’t drained it, of course. He’s turned the entire government into a giant bog of lobbyists, real estate moguls, Wall Streeters, and billionaires.
Which brings us to Jared Kushner, the putative swamp-drainer’s son-in-law, and major advisor.
Kushner may yet be indicted in Robert Mueller’s investigation. But it could turn out that Kushner’s most significant contribution to the stench of this administration will come from his financial conflicts of interest.
When he took the White House job, Kushner chose not to follow the usual practice of wealthy people when they join administrations – putting their assets into blind trusts managed by outside experts.
Instead, Kushner retained control over the vast majority of his interest in Kushner Companies, worth as much as $761 million, according to government ethics filings.
So how has Kushner separated his business dealings from his dealings on behalf of the United States? He hasn’t.
The Times reported last week that after the CEOs of Citigroup and Apollo Global Management attended White House meetings set up by Kushner, the two firms loaned the Kushner family business more than $500 million.
Furthermore, once the loan was received, the Securities and Exchange Commission dropped an inquiry of Apollo Global Management.
Last spring, Kushner’s real-estate firm sought hundreds of millions of dollars directly from the Qatar government, for its distressed property on Fifth Avenue, reports the Intercept. Soon after Qatar turned down the request, Kushner supported a diplomatic assault on Qatar that sparked a crisis continuing today.
Kushner is such an easy mark that officials in at least four countries have privately discussed ways to manipulate him with financial deals, according to U.S. intelligence.
Kushner insists that he’s done nothing wrong, and there’s no direct evidence he has profited off his position in White House or put personal financial interests ahead of the interests of the American public.
But that’s not the point. Conflicts of interest are always difficult to prove, which is why we have ethics rules to avoid even the appearance of such conflicts.
And it sure looks as if Kushner is using his White House perch to make money for himself, just as is his father-in-law.
It’s as bad for a government official to look as if he’s lining his pockets as for him to actually do so, because the appearance of corruption undermines public trust just as readily as the real thing. And trust is what distinguishes an advanced democracy from a banana republic.
But Trump and the members of his family he’s brought into his White House don’t give a hoot about public trust. They have utter contempt for the common good. Government ethics officials have compared Trump’s administration to a game of whack-a-mole – go after one potential violation, and others pop up.
Perhaps Kushner tells himself that the American public is already so cynical about big money’s takeover of our democracy that his own apparent, or real, conflicts are chicken feed by comparison.
Which may be true. But by adding to the distrust, Kushner is doing his own bit to destroy American democracy – actions almost as treasonous as if he colluded with Russians to make his father-in-law president.
WHY WE SHOULD ABOLISH THE DEBT CEILING
Congressional Democrats have pulled a fast one on Republicans by striking a deal with Trump to raise the federal debt ceiling only until the end of the year. This will give them bargaining leverage in December to strike a bigger bargain with Republicans: Democrats will agree to raise the debt ceiling then in return for Republican cooperation on legalizing Dreamers (unauthorized immigrants brought into the U.S. as children), making small but necessary fixes in the Affordable Care act, and other things Democrats seek.
Raising the debt ceiling is always a political football, used by whichever party is in the minority to extract concessions from the majority party or from the majority party’s president.
The debt ceiling is how much the government is allowed to borrow. It shouldn’t be a political football. It should be abolished. It serves absolutely no purpose.
When the debt ceiling was first adopted in 1917, it might have been a useful way to prevent a president from spending however much he wanted. But since 1974, Congress has had a formal budget process to control spending and the taxes needed to finance it.
There’s no reason for Congress to authorize borrowing for spending that Congress has already approved, especially when a failure to lift the debt ceiling would be so horrific.
Having a debt ceiling doesn’t discipline government, anyway. The national debt is obligations government has already made to those who lent it money. Discipline has to do with setting spending limits and legislating tax increases, not penalizing the lenders.
Which is why most modern democracies don’t have debt ceilings. Britain, France, Germany, Canada, Australia – they do just fine without explicit borrowing limits.
Even more basically, the nation’s debt is a meaningless figure without reference to the size of the overall economy and the pace of economic growth.
After World War II, America’s debt was larger than our entire Gross Domestic Product, but we grew so much so fast in the 1950s and 1960s that the debt kept shrinking in proportion.
Today’s debt is about 77 percent of our total national product. The reason it’s a problem is it’s growing faster than the economy is growing, so it’s on the way to becoming larger and larger in proportion.
This is what we ought to be focusing on. Fighting over whether or not to raise the debt ceiling is a meaningless and dangerous distraction. So abolish it.
How to Remove Trump
With Republicans controlling both houses of Congress, it’s unlikely Trump will be impeached or thrown out of office on grounds of mental impairment. At least any time soon.
Yet there’s another way Trump can be effectively removed. He can be made irrelevant.
It’s already starting to happen. The howling manchild who occupies the Oval Office is being cut off and contained.
Trump no longer has a working majority in the Senate because several Senate Republicans have decided the hell with him.
Three Republican Senators voted against repealing the Affordable Care Act, dooming his effort. Almost all voted to restrict his authority over Russian sanctions.
They’re also pushing forward with their own inquiry into Trump’s Russian connections. Republican senators Thom Tillis and Lindsay Graham have even joined Democrats in introducing legislation to protect Special Counsel Robert Mueller from being fired.
Republicans in the House won’t fund his wall. Many refuse to increase the national debt in order to pay for his promised tax cuts.
After Charlottesville, many more are willing to criticize him publicly. Last week Tennessee’s Bob Corker, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, even questioned Trump’s “stability” and “competence,” saying Trump hasn’t shown he understands “the character of this nation” and that without that understanding, “Our nation is going to go through great peril.”
The Washington Post’s Dan Balz reports that GOP leaders are “personally wrestling with the trade-offs of making a cleaner separation with the president.”
It helps that Republican patrons in big business are deserting Trump in droves. Last week, CEOs bolted his advisory councils. Many issued sharp rebukes of Trump.
These are the people who raise big bucks for the GOP. Their dumping Trump makes it easier for elected Republicans to do so, too.
Even James Murdoch, the 21st Century Fox CEO whose media outlets include Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, and The New York Post – among the loudest mouthpieces for Trump – is ditching him.
Last Thursday Murdoch wrote “what we watched last week in Charlottesville and the reaction to it by the president of the United States concern all of us as Americans and free people,” and pledged $1 million to the Anti-Defamation League.
This doesn’t mean Fox News or the Wall Street Jounal will call for Trump’s ouster. It does mean their commentators and editorial writers now have clear license to criticize him.
Hey, America as a whole is abandoning him. Trump’s approval hit an all-time low of 34 percent last week.
Even parts of his base are dropping him. A new News/Marist poll shows his approvals have fallen below 40 percent in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – three states that were key to his election, which he won by a whisker.
Inside the administration, there are moves to contain and isolate the manchild.
On foreign policy, the Axis of Adults – Chief of staff General John Kelly, national security advisor General H.R. McMaster, and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson – are asserting tighter control, especially after Trump’s tweetstorm over North Korea.
Reportedly, daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner are stepping up attempts to constrain him as well.
“You have no idea how much crazy stuff we kill,” another White House aide told Axios’s Mike Allen.
Plus, Stephen Bannon is gone.
All this means that, although Trump will still hold the title of President, he’s on the way to being effectively removed from the presidency. Neutered. Defanged.
We’re not out of danger. Trump will continue to rant and fume. He’ll insult. He’ll stoke racial tensions. He could still start a nuclear war.
But, hopefully, he won’t be able to exercise much presidential power from here on. He’s being ostracized like a obnoxious adolescent who’s been grounded.
When the media stop reporting his tweets, his isolation and irrelevance will be complete.
Noam Chomsky - "10 strategies of manipulation" by the media
Renowned critic and always MIT linguist Noam Chomsky, one of the classic voices of intellectual dissent in the last decade, has compiled a list of the ten most common and effective strategies resorted to by the agendas “hidden” to establish a manipulation of the population through the media.Historically the media have proven highly efficient to mold public opinion. Thanks to the media paraphernalia and propaganda, have been created or destroyed social movements, justified wars, tempered financial crisis, spurred on some other ideological currents, and even given the phenomenon of media as producers of reality within the collective psyche. But how to detect the most common strategies for understanding these psychosocial tools which, surely, we participate? Fortunately Chomsky has been given the task of synthesizing and expose these practices, some more obvious and more sophisticated, but apparently all equally effective and, from a certain point of view, demeaning. Encourage stupidity, promote a sense of guilt, promote distraction, or construct artificial problems and then magically, solve them, are just some of these tactics.
1. The strategy of distraction
The primary element of social control is the strategy of distraction which is to divert public attention from important issues and changes determined by the political and economic elites, by the technique of flood or flooding continuous distractions and insignificant information. distraction strategy is also essential to prevent the public interest in the essential knowledge in the area of the science, economics, psychology, neurobiology and cybernetics. “Maintaining public attention diverted away from the real social problems, captivated by matters of no real importance. Keep the public busy, busy, busy, no time to think, back to farm and other animals (quote from text Silent Weapons for Quiet War ).”
2. Create problems, then offer solutions
This method is also called “problem -reaction- solution. “It creates a problem, a “situation” referred to cause some reaction in the audience, so this is the principal of the steps that you want to accept. For example: let it unfold and intensify urban violence, or arrange for bloody attacks in order that the public is the applicant‟s security laws and policies to the detriment of freedom. Or: create an economic crisis to accept as a necessary evil retreat of social rights and the dismantling of public services.
3. The gradual strategy
acceptance to an unacceptable degree, just apply it gradually, dropper, for consecutive years. That is how they radically new socioeconomic conditions ( neoliberalism ) were imposed during the 1980s and 1990s: the minimal state, privatization, precariousness, flexibility, massive unemployment, wages, and do not guarantee a decent income, so many changes that have brought about a revolution if they had been applied once.
4. The strategy of deferring
Another way to accept an unpopular decision is to present it as “painful and necessary”, gaining public acceptance, at the time for future application. It is easier to accept that a future sacrifice of immediate slaughter. First, because the effort is not used immediately. Then, because the public, masses, is always the tendency to expect naively that “everything will be better tomorrow” and that the sacrifice required may be avoided. This gives the public more time to get used to the idea of change and accept it with resignation when the time comes.
5. Go to the public as a little child
Most of the advertising to the general public uses speech, argument, people and particularly children‟s intonation, often close to the weakness, as if the viewer were a little child or a mentally deficient. The harder one tries to deceive the viewer look, the more it tends to adopt a tone infantilising. Why? “If one goes to a person as if she had the age of 12 years or less, then, because of suggestion, she tends with a certain probability that a response or reaction also devoid of a critical sense as a person 12 years or younger (see Silent Weapons for Quiet War ).”
6. Use the emotional side more than the reflection
Making use of the emotional aspect is a classic technique for causing a short circuit on rational analysis , and finally to the critical sense of the individual. Furthermore, the use of emotional register to open the door to the unconscious for implantation or grafting ideas , desires, fears and anxieties , compulsions, or induce behaviors …
7. Keep the public in ignorance and mediocrity
Making the public incapable of understanding the technologies and methods used to control and enslavement. “The quality of education given to the lower social classes must be the poor and mediocre as possible so that the gap of ignorance it plans among the lower classes and upper classes is and remains impossible to attain for the lower classes (See „ Silent Weapons for Quiet War ).”
8. To encourage the public to be complacent with mediocrity
Promote the public to believe that the fact is fashionable to be stupid, vulgar and uneducated…
9. Self-blame Strengthen
To let individual blame for their misfortune, because of the failure of their intelligence, their abilities, or their efforts. So, instead of rebelling against the economic system, the individual autodesvalida and guilt, which creates a depression, one of whose effects is to inhibit its action. And, without action, there is no revolution!
10. Getting to know the individuals better than they know themselves
Over the past 50 years, advances of accelerated science has generated a growing gap between public knowledge and those owned and operated by dominant elites. Thanks to biology, neurobiology and applied psychology, the “system” has enjoyed a sophisticated understanding of human beings, both physically and psychologically. The system has gotten better acquainted with the common man more than he knows himself. This means that, in most cases, the system exerts greater control and great power over individuals, greater than that of individuals about themselves.
Wife
Making America Hate Again
Two days late, Donald Trump has finally condemned violent white supremacists. He was pushed into it by a storm of outrage at his initial failure to do so in the wake of deadly violence to Charlottesville, Virginia.
But it’s too little, too late. Trump’s unwillingness to denounce hateful violence has been part of his political strategy from the start.
Weeks after he began his campaign by alleging that Mexican immigrants were criminals and rapists, two brothers in Boston beat up and urinated on a 58-year-old homeless Mexican national, subsequently telling police “Donald Trump was right, all these illegals need to be deported.”
Instead of condemning the brutality, Trump excused it by saying “people who are following me are very passionate. They love this country and they want this country to be great again.”
During campaign rallies Trump repeatedly excused brutality toward protesters. “You know what they used to do to guys like that when they were in a place like this? They’d be carried out on a stretcher, folks.”
After white supporters punched and attempted to choke a Black Lives Matter protester, Trump said “maybe he should have been roughed up.”
Trump was even reluctant to distance himself from David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan.
Since becoming president, Trump’s instigations have continued. As Representative Mark Sanford, a Republican from South Carolina, told the Washington Post, “the president has unearthed some demons.”
In May, Trump congratulated body-slamming businessman Greg Gianforte on his special election win in Montana, making no mention of the victor’s attack on a reporter the night before.
Weeks ago Trump even tweeted a video clip of himself in a WWE professional wrestling match slamming a CNN avatar to the ground and pounding him with punches and elbows to the head.
Hateful violence is hardly new to America. But never before has a president licensed it as a political strategy or considered haters part of his political base.
In his second week as president, Trump called Wayne LaPierre, CEO of the National Rifle Association to the White House.
Soon thereafter, LaPierre told gun owners they should fear “leftists” and the “national media machine” that were “an enemy utterly dedicated to destroy not just our country, but also Western civilization.”
Since then the NRA has run ads with the same theme, concluding “the only way we stop this, the only way we save our country and our freedom, is to fight this violence of lies with a clenched fist of truth.”
It’s almost as if someone had declared a new civil war. But who? And for what purpose?
One clue came earlier last week in a memo from Rich Higgins, who had been director for strategic planning in Trump’s National Security Council.
Entitled “POTUS & Political Warfare,” Higgins wrote the seven-page document in May, which was recently leaked to Foreign Policy Magazine.
In it Higgins charges that a cabal of leftist “deep state” government workers, “globalists,” bankers, adherents to Islamic fundamentalism and establishment Republicans want to impose cultural Marxism in the United States. “Recognizing in candidate Trump an existential threat to cultural Marxist memes that dominate the prevailing cultural narrative, those that benefit recognize the threat he poses and seek his destruction.”
There you have it. Trump’s goal has never been to promote guns or white supremacy or to fuel attacks on the press and the left. These may be means, but the goal has been to build and fortify his power. And keep him in power even if it’s found that he colluded with Russia to get power.
Trump and his consigliere Steve Bannon have been quietly encouraging a civil war between Trump’s base of support – mostly white and worried – and everyone who’s not.
It’s built on economic stresses and racial resentments. It’s fueled by paranoia. And it’s conveyed by Trump’s winks and nods haters, and his deafening silence in the face of their violence.
A smaller version of the civil war extends even into the White House, where Bannon and his protégés are doing battle with leveler heads.
National security advisor Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster fired Higgins. Reportedly, Trump was furious at the firing.
McMaster was quick to term the Charlottesville violence “terrorism.” Ivanka Trump denounced “racism, white supremacy and neo-nazis.” Reportedly, chief of staff John Kelly pushed Trump to condemn the haters who descended on Charlottesville.
Let’s hope the leveler heads win the civil war in the White House. Let’s pray the leveler heads in our society prevent the civil war Trump and Bannon want to instigate in America.
Beruit 1965 Raymond Depardon
Hill Republicans: Trump is Fritzing Out
This morning I phoned my friend, a former Republican member of Congress.
Me: What’s going on? Seems like the White House is imploding and Republicans are going down with the ship.
Him (chuckling): We’re officially a banana republic.
Me: Seriously, what are you hearing from your former colleagues on the Hill?
Him: They’re convinced Trump is out of his gourd.
Me: So what are they gonna do about it?
Him: Remember what I told you at the start of this circus? They planned to use Trump’s antics for cover, to get done what they most wanted – big tax cuts, rollbacks of regulations, especially financial. They’d work with Pence behind the scenes and forget the crazy uncle in the attic.
Me: Yeah.
Him: Well, I’m hearing a different story now. Stuff with Sessions is pissing them off. And now Trump’s hired that horse’s ass Scaramucci – a communications director who talks dirty on CNN! Plus Trump’s numbers are in freefall. They think he’s gonna hurt them in ’18 and ’20.
Me: So what’s the plan?
Him: They want him outa there.
Me: Really? Impeachment?
Him: Doubt it, unless Mueller comes up with a smoking gun.
Me: Or if he fires Mueller.
Him: Not gonna happen.
Me: So how do they get him out?
Him: Put someone else up in ’20. Lots of maneuvering already. Pence, obviously. Cruz thinks he has a shot.
Me: But that won’t help them in the midterms. What’s the plan before then?
Him: Lots think he’s fritzing out.
Me: Fritzing out?
Him: Going totally bananas. Paranoia. You want to know why he fired Priebus, wants Sessions out, and is now gunning for Tillerson?
Me: He wants to shake things up?
Him (chuckling): No. The way I hear it, he thinks they’ve been plotting against him.
Me: What do you mean?
Him: Twenty-fifth amendment! Read it! A Cabinet can get rid of a president who’s nuts. Trump thinks they’ve been preparing a palace coup. So one by one, he’s firing them.
Me: I find it hard to believe they’re plotting against him.
Him: Of course not! It’s ludicrous. Sessions is a loyal lapdog. Tillerson doesn’t know where the bathroom is. That’s my point. Trump is fritzing out. Having manic delusions. He’s actually going nuts.
Me: And?
Him: Well, it’s downright dangerous.
Me: Yeah, but that still doesn’t tell me what Republicans are planning to do about it.
Him: Look. How long do you think it will be before everyone in Washington knows he’s flipping out? I don’t mean just weird. I mean really off his rocker.
Me: I don’t know.
Him: No all that long.
Me: So what are you telling me?
Him: They don’t have to plot against him. It will be obvious to everyone that he’s got to go. That’s where the twenty-fifth amendment really does comes in.
Me: So you think…
Him: Who knows? But he’s losing it fast. My betting is he’s out of office before the midterms. And Pence is president.
