Propaganda, dirty-tricks cheaters and "prodigal" Boehners

The  Honest Ads Act, introduced last week by Democratic senators Mark Warner of Virginia and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, would require online platforms with at least 50 million monthly users -- think Facebook, Google and Twitter -- to make a public record of advertisers who spend at least $500 on political ads regarding campaigns or significant legislative issues. The record would include information regarding the ad's content, its target audience and its cumulative views, as well as its cost. It would also list any candidate referred to in the ad and contact information for the entity that purchased it. 

“This is a cause that transcends both commercial and partisan concerns -- the bill has the support of Republican Senator John McCain. Congress should pass the Honest Ads Act. Then build on it.” Indeed, it is only a start on the needed reforms.

Yeah, there are two chances of this happening…”fat” and “slim.” In other words, zero under this Congress, whose GOP leaders are absolutely counting upon a tsunami of cheating to stay in power, in 2018.  

Note that they already dismantled the earlier measures we had in place, to help keep a calm and informed and balanced voting public -- e.g. the Fairness Doctrine and rebuttal rules in mass media, requiring that major outlets allow on-air replies to any stretch of biased opinion.  The "lamestream media" were fine with this, encouraging give and take and rebuttals, even sometimes retractions! It was Rupert Murdoch, Fox and Clear Channel ravers who fought like hell to get rebuttal requirements ended. Why? Because any five minutes of rebuttal on Fox, by someone using facts well, would leave that lie festival a smoldering ruin.

The use of billionaire bucks to consolidate mass media into biased houses was also constrained by old media dispersal of ownership rules.  Now the Koch Brothers own Time.  Stay tuned. We may have to up the boycott.

Ronald Reagan famously said:

 "I didn't leave the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party left me.” 

Whatever you think of Ronnie’s rationalization, he expressed perfectly what any sane or grownup Republican should be paraphrasing right now about the party that’s utterly betrayed them and their country and even honorable conservatism – along with science and every other fact-using profession. Alas, show me one of today's Republicans who has Reagan's cojones! One. Even Senators Flake, Corker and McCain, who found guts to denounce the Symptom-in-Chief (Trump) are too weak kneed to take on the diseas. Rupert Murdoch. And his overseas pals.

Ah, here’s a link to how you can boycott – even just a little – the confederate propaganda machines.

 == Gerrymandering & healthcare ==

Cheaters. They cannot win except by cheats that range from treasonous-foul gerrymandering to "losing" thousands of voter registrations, always a week or two before an election, to rigged voting machines, to voter suppression... and now this: "A computer server crucial to a lawsuit against Georgia election officials was quietly wiped clean by its custodians just after the suit was filed, The Associated Press has learned. The server’s data was destroyed July 7 by technicians at the Center for Elections Systems at Kennesaw State University, which runs the state’s election system."

Hey cheaters, be proud... but where do you think this will all lead, when we finally get fed up?

The recent election in Virginia showed popular revulsion by reducing GOP seats in the House of Delegates from 2/3 to 50%, But gerrymandering means that a 10% lead in votes nets 50% of the seats in Virginia. In other words, to get their statehouse back, Virginia voters have to reject the cheaters by super-majorities. Is there any way out of this cheat?

Based on the simple way that children divide a cake, the "I-cut-you-choose" solution to gerrymandering seems workable and plausible and avoids the inherent problems of independent commissions. It does entrench the two-party system and does not preserve state sovereignty and legislative privilege as well as my "Minimal Overlap" approach. Both should be presented to the Court, allowing Justice Kennedy no more waffling room. There are solutions that satisfy his every objection. Our descendants will look back at our inability to end this blatantly treasonous and criminal cheat and ask: "what kind of people were they?"

See my approach: The Minimal Overlap Solution.

== An ineffective Congress ==

Why the GOP tries and fails to do a thing in Congress. “The most surprising thing about last summer’s many attempts to repeal ObamaCare wasn’t that they failed. It was the peculiar way that the legislation proceeded in both houses of Congress: without meaningful committee hearings, with minimal debate on the floor of either the House or Senate, sometimes without analysis from the CBO, and often without a even draft of a bill until the last possible moment. Again and again, Republicans were urged to vote Yes, not because the plan in front of them was good for American healthcare, but to “keep the process moving”. 

LATE ADDENDUM: As of December 2, it seems that the GOP, which has owned every branch of government and lever of power, since January, will at last have an "accomplishment" in a Tax Bill that they admit will add a $trillion to the national debt, while spending not one red cent on infrastructure, which would have generated high Money Velocity and growth. 

Instead, the magical incantations of Supply Side - which have never once come true, ever, proclaim that this time the oligarchs will spend the windfall on R&D and productive capacity... unlike every single other time, when they spent it on passive asset bubbles that limit money velocity to levels down near zero... as Adam Smith predicted, back in 1776.

But pause and let's congratulate the victors. The same folks who howled that the dems passed the ACA in "just a year," holding open, public hearings in just five committees, are now passing the biggest tax bill in history with ZERO days of hearings, forging this trillion dollar raid for billionaires in top secret and passing it in the dead of night, amid a festival of lies.

== The real reason for the tax cut - an oligarch exit strategy ==

Those who piled their earlier tax largesse into asset bubbles know the great times always end.  They always plan an exit strategy, for when the bubble bursts.

Their dream used to be "privatize social security!"  Fill the equity markets with Greater Fools to sop up bloated assets. That scam was stopped, thank God, just before the last collapse.  

So what's the plan now?

Flood already profitable companies with tax cuts so they can accelerate their already absurdly massive stock buy-backs!  In-effect, break the US budget subsidizing companies to squander their futures giving money to current stockholders... buying up stock that the moguls know will soon plummet in value.

This time, they will get their way. Only they are counting on us never noticing. That could be a mistake.

== Too little, too late John ==

Oh, my. Says retired GOP Speaker John Boehner about Hannity and Limbaugh diving into the Dark Side: “I had a conversation with Hannity, probably about the beginning of 2015. I called him and said, ‘Listen, you’re nuts.’ We had this really blunt conversation. Things were better for a few months, and then it got back to being the same-old, same-old. Because I wasn’t going to be a right-wing idiot.”

Oh, oh, the cognitive dissonance! As Speaker of the House, John Boehner was a horrible villain who damaged our republic and our civilization, by helping to enforce the Hastert Rule against negotiation in the US Congress, effectively destroying the adult art of pragmatic politics that underlies so much of our success as a nation. The U.S. Congress - once the greatest deliberative body for agile, responsible, balanced and innovative governance in the history of our species - became, under Boehner, the most lazy, useless, corrupt and dogmatic in over a century, passing laws to benefit plutocrats and almost nothing else, holding fewer days in session, hearings etc but vastly more in “fund-raising.”

They were good at two things, passing legislation benefiting the party’s individual oligarch owners… and symbolism.  Example, see where I appraise their obsession with naming ships! Especially aircraft carriers.

There many sane-conservative wishes never seriously pursued. One example: there had been a deal to reform entitlements, negotiated in good faith between several Democratic and Republican Senators. It would have secured Social Security and cured inefficiencies, reduced deficits... and Boehner trashed it. Oh, and he knows that "Obamacare" is almost identical to the GOP Health Care Plan the he had pushed for! But will he say so?

Sure, this killer-of-American-politics was not as awful a human being as his predecessor leading the GOP -- Dennis “friend-to-boys” Hastert -- or the chain of perverts and multiple divorcés and gambling-subsidized shills who “moral” Republicans keep nominating and electing. Heck, I will even cheer if Boehner joins Flake, Corker, McCain, Collins, Romney and the lot, forming a Party of Sane Adult American Conservatives and calling quits with Rupert Traitor Murdoch. 

There is precedent for such a bold move!  See "The Miracle of 1947."

But while we may receive the repentant sinner back at the table as a prodigal son, if he later fights for righteousness and the Union he betrayed, we are not obliged to forget the role he played into guiding us into phase 8 of the American Civil War.

 == Looking to China ==

The Globalist’s Nathan Gardels warns: “While the West — including a Europe riven by populist and separatist movements — stalls in internal acrimony, China is boldly striding ahead. It has proactively set its sights on conquering the latest artificial intelligence technology, reviving the ancient Silk Road as “the next phase of globalization,” taking the lead on climate change and shaping the next world order in its image. If the West does not hear this wake-up call loud and clear, it is destined to somnambulate into second-class status on the world stage. Waiting for China to stumble is a foolish fallback.

“That is not to suggest, of course, that open societies ought to turn toward authoritarianism to unify the body politic. But it is to say that unless democracies look beyond the short-term horizon of the next election cycle and find a way to reach a governing consensus, they will be left in the dust by the oncoming future. If democracy has come to mean sanctifying the splintering of society into a plethora of special interests, partisan tribes and endless acronymic identities instead of seeking common ground, there is little hope of successfully competing with a unified juggernaut like China.”

A number of interesting articles follow up on this introduction, and they are cogent as far as they go… 

...but alas, the grand conclusion of the whole issue is dead wrong. It is based upon the fallacious assumption that the China Miracle of development was a Chinese accomplishment, alone.

Yes, a billion hardworking Chinese people did the hard work of building new cities and industries and power. But history will show that the capitalization of this revolution-miracle was funded by one thing and one thing above all else — vast flows of funds from the West and especially the U.S., via a counter-mercantilist system that was created deliberately by George Marshall, Dean Acheson, Truman and Eisenhower and others at the end of the Second World War, with one goal — the development of the world.  

No other “empire” ever did this, at their apex. Moreover, no endeavor in the history of humanity has ever worked so well.

Chinese leaders nurse the same illusion touted by the earlier Japanese — that they invented a new and cleverly predatory form of economics that sucked vitality from a decadent west without our awareness or sapient consent. But they did not invent predatory mercantilism. Every previous empire or rising nation practiced it, as did the Ming and Manchu, and all suffered from its ills, over the long run. Yes, in the short run, predatory mercantilism has led to fantastically rapid development, but let me ask: “who is sapient here?”

The “empire” of this era - the U.S. - could have shut down counter-mercantilist subsidy of the developing world at any time in the last 70 years. We can do it now, at any time. And in the event of a sudden trade war, who do you think will suffer more? WalMart customers, suddenly unable to buy cheap underwear anymore, and having to relearn how to darn socks? Or those whose utter livelihoods depend on making and selling hose and skivvies to Americans?

Asian mercantilists have always flattered themselves that we are helpless before our consumer appetites. And so it never occurs to them that the last 70 years were the result of deliberate design. Our design, not theirs.

Today, prodigiously, the U.S. economy is lifting both China’s and India’s, at the same time. Future historians will deem this to be the greatest American accomplishment of all. Those historians’ AI assisted models will not be biased by self-loathing or self-flattery, but clear and revelatory facts.  They will know what we did, and why.

Is it essential for the U.S. to snap out of its current funk? Its current “phase 8 of the American Civil War?” Sure. And many powers are investing heavily - both funds and manipulation - to keep us at each others’ throats. They rightfully dread how dynamic we will be, if we recover our national skill at fair-argumentation, negotiation and fact-based pragmatic politics. And yes, that can happen under the aegis of a democratic and diverse - not ‘disciplined’ - society.

== And finally ==

Here's something most of you saw, so hilarious you wind up sobbing: At Halloween The U.S. president’s son tweeted a picture of his three-year-old daughter with her Halloween candy haul, threatening “I’m going to take half of Chloe’s candy tonight & give it to some kid who sat at home. It’s never to early to teach her about socialism.”  

While mis-spelling “too,” he raised a storm of satire and derision, some reactions very clever. For a silver-spoon spoiled-heir to talk about anyone “earning” their candy is rich. 

Note: Ayn Rand, for all her faults, portrays her own scion characters taking ‘The Dare,’ dropping out, changing their names and starting over in a farm or factory, spending a decade earning a fresh fortune of their very own, before accepting a penny of inheritance. She was a loony, but capable of more honesty than most of these petty lordlings.  (OTOH, she disapproved of procreation and never once showed or implied any of her characters doing it; at least Don Jr. has a sweet face to love (and alas, exploit). Happy Thanksgiving, Trumps. I mean that! But then let’s all have a Merry Christmas and great 2018.

====

Addendum: I have many times called for a "year of the colonels." Not in the old sense of latin caudillos grabbing power by force, but retired U.S. officers stepping up to confront confederate treason at every level. Now that the mad right's war on all fact-using professions includes everyone from science, medicine and journalism to the "deep state" FBI and intel and military officer corps -- these are the only folks who can grab our neighbors by the lapel and insist: "this is not about sane-conservatism, anymore. It is about insanity."

We need such men and women running not only for Congress but in every single red state assembly district, in both the Republican primaries and as moderate or even slightly conservative Democrats, in the General. 

Now we have such a fellow stepping up in Alabama. "A retired Marine colonel and former top aide to White House Chief of Staff John Kelly -- Lee Busby -- has launched a write-in campaign in next month's Alabama Senate race, seeing an opening after multiple women accused Republican Roy Moore of sexual misconduct."  

And yes, if he wins, I'll be happy enough with a 'pro-life' moderate representing the deeply conservative folks down there, so long as he's a sane, pragmatic fact-user who can sniff the stink of betrayal from the current, Kremlin-run GOP and who's willing to sit down, negotiating like an adult.