#truth-out

[melvillehouse]

Vilification and Revenge Are Key to Trump's Personal Values

''My motto is: Always get even. When someone screws you, get them back in spades.''

VILIFICATION AND REVENGE ARE KEY TO TRUMP’S PERSONAL VALUES

(an excerpt from The Making of Donald Trump)

[wayward-naiad]

Stalin Spreads Confusion Shortly after the 1917 Soviet revolution, Lenin described the Bolsheviks' achievement as having constructed "a state capitalism" that he applauded as a necessary step toward a transition to socialism. By the early 1930s, the subsequent leader, Stalin, made a pointedly different declaration: Socialism had been achieved in the USSR. Yet precisely what Lenin had named state capitalism remained the Soviet industrial reality; indeed, Stalin extended state capitalism into Soviet agriculture. Conceptual confusions set in about what exactly separated state-regulated private capitalism from state capitalism from socialism. In effect, Stalin had pronounced a new and daring definitional equation: State capitalism was socialism. Many other socialists, including those who otherwise denounced Stalin and reviled Stalinism, sooner or later agreed with this new definition. So too did most of socialism's enemies. In practice, when socialists achieved state power, they either could not or would not use that power to go beyond varying mixtures of regulated private and state capitalism. Yet socialists and their enemies increasingly defined those mixtures as socialism (although some socialists always disagreed and promoted other formulations of what the key terms meant). Conceptual confusions set in about what exactly, if anything, separated state-regulated private capitalism from state capitalism from socialism.

[saintexquisite]

Chris Hedges | Our Invisible Revolution

Until Americans stop putting their faith in systems that only harm them, we will continue to suffer from the pressures of capitalism.

[wayward-naiad]

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/23230-oligarchy-usa

Economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence. Our results provide substantial support for theories of Economic Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.

When a majority – even a very large majority – of the public favors change, it isnot likely to get what it wants. In our 1,779 policy cases, narrow pro-change majorities of the public got the policy changes they wanted only about 30% of the time. More strikingly, even overwhelmingly large pro-change majorities, with 80% of the public favoring a policy change, got that change only about 43% of the time.

When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.

[gabrieldunn]

A sickening but important summary of the state of our Civil Liberties.