Daily Archives: February 13, 2020

The Belief That Everything Will Be Fine Once Trump’s Gone Is More Dangerous Than Trump

by

By Caitlin Johnstone

February 13, 2020 “Information Clearing House” –  The New Hampshire primary election, much like the Iowa caucuses, saw Bernie Sanders doing worse than polls anticipated and establishment favorite Pete Buttigieg doing much better than polls anticipated.

Buttigieg closed at a tight second place behind Sanders and both were awarded the same number of delegates, which with the bizarre Iowa shenanigans means the former South Bend mayor is now leading the pack in total delegates despite receiving fewer votes than Sanders in both states.

So of course “Buttigieg leads” is the information that the mainstream media is placing special emphasis on today.

It is entirely possible that we’ll continue seeing strange electoral results combined with mass media manipulation result in Buttigieg riding a contested convention into a superdelegate-boosted nomination, even if Sanders has more votes overall. We have at this point in time seen no reason to believe that Sanders will be able to secure the number of delegates needed to prevent such an occurrence.

Then you’ve got racist Republican oligarch Mike Bloomberg jumping on the ballot come Super Tuesday, with his $300 million+ ad campaign throwing more chaos into the mix. Billionaire Bloomberg’s unprecedented campaign spending power has enabled him to push up just shy of second place in a recent Quinnipiac national poll despite having no redeeming characteristics and no real goal agenda apart from stopping Sanders, which is as clear an illustration as you’ll ever see of the power of money in US politics.

Are You Tired Of The Lies And Non-Stop Propaganda?

Get Your FREE Daily Newsletter

No Advertising – No Government Grants – This Is Independent Media

Whether it winds up being Buttigieg, Bloomberg, or one of their ideological alt-centrist clones like Amy Klobuchar or the floundering Joe Biden, the mainstream narrative will soon converge around one candidate in a very positive way, with the only important qualification being that they aren’t Bernie Sanders. Many powerful people will do everything they can to prevent a Sanders nomination, whose presidency they oppose more than Trump’s. As journalist Matt Taibbi recently pointed out, the Democratic establishment has “every incentive to play every conceivable card. Trillions at stake.”

The primary argument used will be that defeating Trump is all that matters, even if it’s with another racist Republican plutocrat. If they succeed in sabotaging Sanders’ candidacy, he will help advance the same argument, as will a majority of his supporters. This argument will click perfectly in to a foundational assumption that establishment narrative managers have spent the last three plus years reinforcing, namely that once Trump is out of office, everything will be okay.

The premise that everything will be fine once Trump is gone isn’t one people generally say out loud. They don’t even usually think it. But the fact that so many Democrats who were fine with the way their nation was being run on January 19 2017 suddenly became furiously critical of it on January 20th tells you that this assumption is at play. And the relentlessly Trump-centric liberal news media has only reinforced this unexamined assumption.

Things are not going to be okay once Trump is out of office. Do you know how I know this? Because things weren’t okay before Trump got into office. America was a murderous imperialist force whose citizenry were suffering under crushing austerity and steadily mounting authoritarianism on January 19 2017, and it remains so today. Certainly the current administration has added its own levels of nefariousness to this dynamic, but the same is true of its predecessors.

By this stage in his administration Bush had launched two full-scale ground invasions and implemented unprecedented levels of global militarism and Orwellian surveillance, while at the same stage Obama had already overtly destroyed Libya and was working on covertly doing the same to Syria. Trump has continued and expanded all of the most evil agendas of those two administrations and added immensely depraved warmongering elements of his own, but you can’t even rightly argue that he’s done anything quite so evil as what Bush did to Iraq or what Obama did to Libya and Syria. Trump is not the unprecedented presidential horror that the Democratic Party-aligned media spin him as.

Imperialist elites dislike Trump not because he’s a uniquely dangerous president, but because he puts an ugly face on the things they were already doing before he took office and plan to continue doing once he leaves. The reason many rank-and-file Democrats dislike him is similar: he forces them to think about the evil things their nation does.

They don’t actually want to fix any of these problems, they just want to stop thinking about them. They’re not interested in waking up, they just want to get an uncomfortable wrinkle out of their bedsheets so that they can go back to sleep.

John Mulaney does an under-appreciated bit at the end of his famous “There’s a horse in the hospital” routine comparing Trump to a horse running rampant in a medical facility, where he admits he just wasn’t paying attention to what was going on during the previous administration:

Or sometimes they go, “If you’re so mad at the horse, how come you weren’t mad when the last guy did this three and a half years ago? You’re beating up on the horse when the last guy essentially did the same thing five years ago.” First off, get out of here with your facts. You’re like the kid at the sleepover who, after midnight, is like, “It’s tomorrow now!” Get the fuck out of here with your technicalities. Just ’cause you’re accurate does not mean you’re interesting…

But when people say, “How come you were never mad at the last guy?” I say, “Because I wasn’t paying attention.” I used to pay less attention before it was a horse. Also, I thought the last guy was pretty smart, and he seemed good at his job, and I’m lazy by nature. I’m lazy by nature too. So I don’t check up on people when they seem okay at their job. You may think that’s an ignorant answer but it’s not, it’s a great answer. If you left your baby with your mother tonight, you’re not going to race home and check the nanny cam. But if you leave your baby with Gary Busey…

I think this is how most mainstream liberals feel, if they’re honest with themselves. They felt like they didn’t have to pay attention to the things Obama was doing, and they want to go back to that. Even though the distance between a truly healthy society and what America was like under Obama is many orders of magnitude greater than the distance between what America was like under Obama and what America is like under Trump.

Wanting things to go back to how they were before Trump is wanting things to go back to the conditions which gave rise to Trump. The belief that everything will be peachy keen once Trump is out of office is therefore more dangerous than Trump himself, because it guarantees more Trumps, and it guarantees that the underlying disease of which Trump is a symptom will remain uncured.

Treating a symptom doesn’t cure the disease. Believing that getting rid of Trump will fix America’s problems is like believing cough syrup cures tuberculosis.

The disease is the oligarchic imperialist dystopia which is tormenting millions and controlling billions all around the world. A movement toward health doesn’t look like not having to pay attention anymore, it looks like the exact opposite: becoming fully conscious of all the ugliest and most unpleasant to look at aspects of the thing that America has become. It looks like turning and facing all the bloodshed, genocide, white supremacy, oppression, exploitation, corruption and degradation which form the fibers from which that nation has been woven, deeply ingesting and grokking into their reality, and then healing them completely.

If the narrative managers succeed in installing Pete Buttigieg or one of his ideological clones, the temptation for millions of Americans will be to go back to sleep. But America won’t be any healthier. The coughing will have stopped, but the tuberculosis will remain. The sociopathic imperialist oligarchy will continue along the exact same trajectory, but the symptom of an oafish, incompetent and ham-fisted president will have been eliminated.

And that’s all any narrative manager ever wants. Their job is to normalize the empire’s depravity and keep its highly profitable murder and exploitation from awakening the masses. That’s why propaganda is so toxic.

I’m not interested in telling Americans whether they should have Trump or some centrist Democrat in office; the odds of four more years of Trump being more disastrous than under President Pete are a toss-up as far as I can tell. But I do wish the malignant belief that eliminating Trump will solve America’s main problems could be expunged from human consciousness forever.

Caitlin’s articles are entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking her on Facebook, following her antics on Twitter, checking out her podcast, throwing some money into her hat on Patreon or Paypal, or buying her book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers. https://caitlinjohnstone.com

DNC Completely Loses Public Trust In Its Primary Process On Very First Day

by

The DNC loses trust again.

Right from the start in the 2020 US presidential elections. After a 2016 presidential primary race riddled with scandals, all of which worked against Bernie Sanders to the advantage of anointed establishment favorite Hillary Clinton, the 2020 Democratic presidential primary elections officially began with a massive scandal working against Bernie Sanders to the advantage of an establishment favorite.

The 2020 Iowa caucuses turned out to have been designed to depend on the use of a new, untested app with extensive ties to establishment insiders and to the Pete Buttigeig campaign, and because of problems using this app as of this writing we are still waiting on the full results of the election. The Iowa Democratic Party has bizarrely released a partial result with 62 percent of 99 counties reporting, which just so happens to have favored the campaign of a Mr Peter Buttigeig, who in the sample came out on top in delegates despite coming in second in votes.

A popular “gold standard” poll by the Des Moines Register that is normally released shortly before the Iowa caucuses had Sanders comfortably in first place. The results of the poll were instead left unpublished this time until after elections were underway due to a complaint by the campaign of, you guessed it, Pete Buttigeig. This would be the same Pete Buttigeig who attended the infamous “Stop Sanders” meetings with Democratic Party insiders last year, by the way.

According to an Iowa precinct chair, the problems using the app (developed by the aptly named Shadow, Inc) included literally switching the numbers entered into it on the final step of reporting results.

“A precinct chair in Iowa said the app got stuck on the last step when reporting results,” CNN reports. “It was uploading a picture of the precinct’s results. The chair said they were finally able to upload, so they took a screenshot. The app then showed different numbers than what they had submitted as captured in their screenshot.”

It doesn’t actually matter anymore who really won Iowa at this point; the damage is already done. Iowa is a sparsely populated state with an insignificant number of delegates; nobody campaigns there for the delegates, they campaign to make headlines and generate excitement and favorable press for themselves in the first electoral contest of the presidential primary race. This has already happened, and with Buttigeig first declaring victory before any results were in, followed by his delegate count lead announced hours later, the favorable press has predominantly gone his way.

Even if Sanders turns out to have won the delegate count as well, this will already have happened. He will have already lost the opportunity to start off the primary contest with a win and a rousing victory speech. In every way that matters, he has already been robbed, by extremely shady establishment dealings, in the very first electoral contest of the race.

The very first. Berners are already as outraged as they were at the height of the 2016 DNC scandal, which was still months out from this point in the race. They’re already getting screwed over, and it’s just getting started.

I see many people blaming this on incompetence, some in bad faith and some in good, but in either case there is no legitimate reason to do that anymore. It has been my experience that if someone seems to be totally incompetent but every “oopsie” they make just happens to end up benefiting them, it’s manipulation you’re dealing with, not incompetence. Some people are happy to look dumb if they can get what they want. If you watch their actions and ignore their words, a very revealing pattern shows up immediately.

This is all extremely blatant, and the feelings it brings up in people are completely legitimate. Yet narrative managers like Neera Tanden and Shannon Watts are telling everyone they’re just like Trump if they suspect the Democratic establishment is again doing the thing it did just four years ago.

If such extremely shady shenanigans had occurred in Russia or Venezuela, within minutes Mike Pompeo would have been holding a press conference demanding a new election under UN supervision and an international coalition of sanctions. It’s hilarious how America is constantly staging coups, implementing sanctions and arming violent militias on the basis that their government has an illegitimate democratic process, yet its own most important electoral proceedings would make any third world tin pot dictator blush.

And don’t give me that crap about how Democratic Party primaries are separate from the US electoral system and therefore don’t undermine American democracy; of course they do. If your country has a rigidly enforced two-party system and one of those parties has bogus internal elections, then you do not have any degree of democracy in your country. Saying “Well if you don’t like our rigged primary process you can vote for the other corrupt warmongering pro-establishment party” is not democracy.

The difference between a true totalitarian dictatorship and America is that the totalitarian dictatorship enforces one political belief system which supports the status quo, whereas in America you get the freedom of choice between two political belief systems which support the status quo. The entire system is stacked to ensure the continued rule of the oligarchs, spooks and warmongers who really run things behind the two-handed sock puppet show of the official elected government. The US doesn’t attack and undermine nations when they lack “freedom” or “democracy”, they attack and undermine them when they refuse to bow to the demands of the power establishment which controls the US government and its allies.

The sooner people wake up to this, the better. In Iowa, things couldn’t have gone worse for those responsible for keeping people asleep.

  • Avatar
    Bill Sanders7 days ago

    This reminds me of the RNC efforts to stop Ron Paul for winning in 2008 and 2012. Instead, they chose RINO turds John McCain and Mitt Romney. The Russians are not rigging our elections, the RNC and DNC are…

     

 

  • Avatar
    Paul Barbara  6 days ago

    At least in the States it is so blatant that people are beginning to wake up.
    Here in Britain, the fact that a Tory Grandee (Peter Lilley) was a director of the private firm that controlled most of the vote work, with the obvious power to ‘fiddle the books’ including the postal votes, raised no MSM headlines, nor the BBC’s clear bias and shenanigans in favour of the Tories (no matter what Bliar BoJo says), like ‘accidentally’ replacing BoJo’s drunken (and Coked?) upside-down placing of the wreath with one filmed three years previously, and countless more, especially repeating endless lying smears against Jeremy Corbyn, as did the rest of the MSM.
    Then there were the Bliarite New Labour Fifth Column, planted to re-align the Labour Party to a more Right-Wing (and NWO-acceptable) form, and the foreign orchestrated ‘anti-Semitic’ smear allegations, yet the British public fail to see the election was clearly stolen by the Tory Liar and his backers, by foreign dirty-trick machinations (see Al Jazeera’s ‘The Lobby’), by lies, smears, vote-rigging, virtually all the powers available to the PTB short of armed intervention.
    And most Brits think JC lost because of his policies!

Mayor Pete: The CIA’s Choice for President

by

Mayor Pete is the CIA’s choice for president.

It should be obvious by now, even for the semi-attentive, that USG elections are fixed. This arrangement failed stupendously in 2016 and the establishment has spent the last three years trying to unseat an elected president they revile and want to be removed from office, even if the interloper must be assassinated. Now that the dysfunctional efforts by Democrats to remove Trump by way of impeachment have failed, the president may indeed have an unfortunate accident or be offed by a “lone wolf” patsy if it looks like he will be reelected.

The establishment desperately needs to insert one of its own into the White House. The Iowa Caucus, despite its hilarious malfunction blamed on a smartphone app, hoisted Mayor Pete Buttigieg to the top of the heap, although we know many ground-level Democrats prefer the socialist Bernie Sanders.

As The Grayzone documents, Mayor Pete appears to be a CIA asset. He worked with the agency in Afghanistan and the national security folks endorse his campaign.

In addition to assisting the illegal occupation and murder of tens of thousands in Afghanistan, CIA Pete teamed up with the DEA, the federal agency responsible for untold misery and murder in its failed war on (some) drugs.

There DEA has not stopped the record flow of heroin produced from Afghan opium into the United States. During the bankster engineered “subprime crisis,” illegal drugs floated the banks. This was pointed out by none other than Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, more than a decade ago.

“In 2004,  the proceeds of the Afghan heroin trade yielded an estimated global revenue of the order of 90 billion dollars. This estimate was based on retail sales corresponding to a total supply of the order of 340,000 kg of pure heroin (corresponding to Afghanistan’s 3400 tons of opium production).” Michel Chossudovsky wrote in 2005.

The Taliban—created whole fabric by Pakistani and USG intelligence—is routinely blamed by the propaganda media as the source of the world’s illicit heroin supply. Left out of this wild distortion of reality is the fact the Taliban worked with the United Nations to eradicate the cultivation of opium. The Bush neocon invasion reversed this trend.

The Afghan government’s drug eradication program was repealed.  The 2001 war on Afghanistan served to restore as well as boost the multibillion dollar drug trade. It has also contributed to the surge in heroin addiction in the US.

Opium production had declined by more than 90 per cent in 2001 as a result of the Taliban government’s drug eradication program.

Immediately following the invasion (October 7, 2001) and the occupation of Afghanistan by US-NATO troops, the production of opium regained its historical levels.

Mayor CIA, if the following tweet can be believed, has an interest in Afghanistan’s wealth of natural resources, the sort of minerals the neoliberals are addicted to stealing, never mind the staggering cost in human life.

I have long argued the CIA is by far the most subversive force at work in the USG and around the world. It has performed as a hitman and violent regime change facilitator for the national security state beginning with the presidency of Harry Truman. It captured the major news media in the 1950s—the “Mighty Wurlitzer” of propaganda—and influences Hollywood media productions and video games, thus thoroughly brainwashing the public with lies and disinformation (nobody beats the CIA at “fake news”).

The CIA vets governors and other politicians. This was substantiated by the former governor of Minnesota, Jesse Ventura, who was visited by CIA spooks shortly after taking office. “On occasion CIA officers meet with senior state government officials, as they did in this case, to discuss issues of mutual interest,” admitted CIA Spokesman George Little in 2008.

More accurately, no doubt, such visits—in this case by nearly two dozen agents—are designed to scare the hell out popularly elected politicians not vetted by the elite.

Mayor Pete the former CIA operative is a near-perfect candidate (although I am betting the full weight of DNC will fall behind the control freak billionaire Michael Bloomberg or a late entry Hillary Clinton). Pete is said to be a homosexual. He fully endorses the identity politics agenda, and he has stated repeatedly he will steal the firearms of law-abiding Americans, although he cannot beat Bloomberg on this count (former Mayor Mike also wants to dictate what you can eat and drink).

The CIA, of course, is not liberal, or conservative for that matter. It covertly supports whatever political ideology it believes will effectively bamboozle politically naive Americans. Identity politics fits the ticket.

Philip II of Macedon and later Niccolò Machiavelli understood the most effective way to undercut the threat posed by political opposition is divide and rule (divide et impera). This is precisely what we are now enduring—a wholly artificial war between statist factions that is rending the political and social fabric of America and distracting it from real issues.

The national security state and its master of subversion, lies, and murder must recapture the White House and Congress—sweeping away the unacceptable on both the right and left—and although Mayor CIA probably will not be nominated, a similar person will be selected and appointed. Bernie Sanders will be cheated out of the nomination for a second time and Elizabeth Warren’s promise to address crony corporate influence in government will be paved over with the insipidity of identity politics that completely ignores the locus of our rapidly approaching serfdom–the financial elite.

Meanwhile, the wars, wholesale theft of natural resources, and mass murder will continue.

Robert Reich’s View On Bloomberg

by

Kudos to Mr Reich, a most thorough presentation. I agree with Reich’s assessment of a Bloomberg presidency until the very end. Bloomberg has zero chance of winning against Trump, mainly b/c he has no grassroot support. Middle America will never fall for his city slicker shtick of saving America from Trump. Difference being, Trump and Sanders have real, substantial, cult-like grassroot support that would carry either one to victory. I’m hoping that would be Bernie, but clearly the DNC and Corporate Dems have other plans. We must somehow make our collective voices heard – the Presidency is not for sale!

Filosofa's Word

Yesterday, I shared Jeff’s post about the possibility of Michael Bloomberg becoming the democratic nominee for the office of president.  While he is not my first choice, I do accept that if he manages to buy the nomination, I will certainly do everything in my power to help him beat the megalomaniacal incumbent.  Robert Reich, whose views I greatly respect and whose work I have shared here before, rings in on Michael Bloomberg as a candidate, and I think there is value in hearing a variety of opinions, so I am sharing his latest.  It’s a bit longer than my usual, but well worth the time.

Michael Bloomberg is trying to buy the presidency – that should set off alarms
Robert Reich

Robert ReichWe haven’t seen his name on any of the ballots in the first four states, but that’s about to change. I’m talking, of course, about multibillionaire presidential hopeful Michael…

View original post 1,285 more words

US enters brutal ideological civil war as four-party system begins to take form

by

By Slavoj Zizek

February 12, 2020 “Information Clearing House” – Despite Trump’s impeachment victory, the US is entering into an ideological civil war, because the real conflict is not between the Democrats and the Republicans, but within each of those parties themselves.

Two weeks ago, while promoting his new film in Mexico City, Harrison Ford said that “America has lost its moral leadership and credibility.” 

Really? When did the US exert moral leadership over the world? Under Reagan or Bush? They lost what they never had, ie, they lost the illusion (the “credibility” made in Harrison’s claim) that they’ve had it. With Trump, what was already true merely became visible.

Back in 1948, at the outset of the Cold War, this truth was formulated with brutal candor by US diplomat and historian George Kennan: “[The US has] 50 percent of the world’s wealth but only 6.3 percent of its population. In this situation, our real job in the coming period…is to maintain this position of disparity. To do so, we have to dispense with all sentimentality…we should cease thinking about human rights, the raising of living standards and democratisation.”

In this we find an explanation of what Trump means by “America first!” in much clearer and more honest terms. So we should not be shocked when we read that “the Trump administration, which came into office pledging to end ‘endless wars,’ has now embraced weapons prohibited by more than 160 countries, and is readying them for future use. Cluster bombs and anti-personnel landmines, deadly explosives known to maim and kill civilians long after fighting has ended, have become integral to the Pentagon’s future war plans.”

Those who act  surprised by such news are simply hypocrites: in our upside-down world, Trump is innocent (not impeached) while Assange is guilty (for disclosing state crimes).

Are You Tired Of The Lies And Non-Stop Propaganda?

Get Your FREE Daily Newsletter

No Advertising – No Government Grants – This Is Independent Media

So what IS going on now?

It’s true that Trump exemplifies the new figure of an openly obscene political master in disdain of the basic rules of decency and democratic openness.

The logic that underlies Trump’s actions was spelled out by Alan Dershowitz (who is, among other things, an advocate of legalized torture). The Harvard Law professor stated that if a politician thinks his re-election is in the national interest, any actions he takes towards that end cannot by definition be impeachable. “And if a president did something that he believes will help him get elected, in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment,” Dershowitz argues.

The nature of power out of any serious democratic control is clearly spelled out here.

What was taking place in the ongoing debates about Trump’s impeachment was a case of the dissolution of the shared common ethical substance which makes argumentative polemical dialogue possible: the US is entering into an ideological civil war in which there is no shared ground to which both parties to the conflict can appeal – the more each side elaborates its position, the more it becomes clear that no dialogue, even a polemical one, is possible.

We shouldn’t be too fascinated by the theatrics of the impeachment process (Trump refusing Pelosi’s handshake, Pelosi tearing up a copy of his State of the Union address) because the true conflict is not between the Democrats and the Republicans but within each of the parties.

The US is now transforming itself from a two-party state into a four-party state: there are really four parties that fill in the political space – the establishment Republicans, establishment Democrats, alt-right populists and democratic socialists.

There are already offers of coalitions across party lines: Joe Biden hinted that he might nominate as his vice-president a moderate Republican, while Steve Bannon mentioned, a few times, his ideal of a coalition between Trump and Sanders.

The big difference is that, while Trump’s populism easily asserted its hegemony over the Republican establishment (a clear proof, if one was ever needed, that, in spite of all Bannon’s ranting against the “system,” Trump’s reference to ordinary workers is a lie), the split within the Democratic party is getting stronger and stronger – no wonder, since the struggle between the Democratic establishment and the Sanders wing is the only true political struggle going on.

To use a little bit of theoretical jargon, we are thus dealing with two antagonisms (“contradictions”), the one between Trump and the liberal establishment (this is what the impeachment was about), and the one between the Sanders wing of the Democratic Party and all the others.

Brutal battle ahead

The move to impeach Trump was a desperate attempt to regain the moral leadership and credibility of the US – a comic exercise in hypocrisy. This is why all the moral fervor of the Democratic establishment should not deceive us: Trump’s open obscenity just brought out what was always there. The Sanders camp sees this clearly: there is no way back, US political life has to be radically reinvented.

But is Sanders a true alternative or, as some “radical Leftists” claim, is he just a (rather moderate) social democrat who wants to save the system? The answer is that this dilemma is false: Democratic Socialists started a mass movement of radical re-awakening, and the fate of such movements is not predestined.

Only one thing is certain: the worst imaginable stance is the one of some Western “radical Leftists” who tend to write off the working class in developed countries as a “workers’ aristocracy” living off the exploitation of developing countries and caught in racist-chauvinist ideologies. In their view, the only radical change can come from “nomadic proletarians” (immigrants and the poor of the Third World) as a revolutionary agent (maybe linked to some impoverished middle-class intellectuals in developed countries) – but does this diagnosis hold?

True, today’s situation is global, but not in this simplistic Maoist sense of opposing bourgeois nations and proletarian nations. Immigrants are sub-proletarians, their position is very specific, they are not exploited in the Marxist sense and are as such not predestined to be the agents of radical change. Consequently, I consider this “radical” choice suicidal for the Left: Sanders is to be unconditionally supported.

The battle will be cruel, the campaign against Sanders will be much more brutal than the one against Corbyn in the UK. On the top of the usual card of anti-Semitism, there will be wide use of the race and gender cards – Sanders as on old white man… Just recall the brutality of Hillary Clinton’s latest attack on him.

And all these cards will be played on grounds of a fear of Socialism. Critics of Sanders repeat again and again that Trump cannot be beaten from his (Sanders’) all-too-leftist platform, and the main thing is to get rid of Trump. To this we should just answer that the true message hidden in this argument is: if the choice is between Trump and Sanders, we prefer Trump…

Slavoj Zizek, is a cultural philosopher. He’s a senior researcher at the Institute for Sociology and Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, Global Distinguished Professor of German at New York University, and international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities of the University of London.

A Culture of Cheating?

by

By Lawrence Davidson

February 12, 2020 “Information Clearing House” – Cheating, and the lying that always accompanies it, is probably as old as the human species. At the same time, that is probably how long we have known that they are harmful traits. The Eighth Commandment (out of the famous ten) tells us not to bear false witness, which means, don’t lie. Most older societies had someone assigned to monitor the marketplace for reliable weights and measures—because left to themselves, most capitalists, of all times and places, cheat. This reality was and still is confirmed by the Roman warning “caveat emptor,” let the buyer beware.

This perennial problem is still with us and can only be held at bay by education, regulation, and standards set by role models and other worthy authority figures. Alas, these standards are slipping in the case of the United States and thus, our tendency to cheat is witnessing a growth phase. Here are some recent examples:

(1) The Astros baseball team cheated to win the World Series in the 2017 season. Baseball is the “national sport” of the United States and as such it is supposed to hold an honorable place in our culture. But did that stop what must have been nearly the entire Astros team (every batter must have been in on the scheme) from involving themselves in the “game plan” to steal their opponents’ pitching signs? Not at all.

(2) Then we were shown how willing numerous well-to-do Americans were to suborn the college entrance process by buying their children into elite schools. The educational system in the United States is supposedly a mark of national pride, but so is the status of wealth. So why shouldn’t the latter assure entrance into the former? To make it so, all one has to do is cheat (in these cases bribery was the vehicle).

(3) And, by the way, students in colleges and universities, high-end schools or otherwise, can engage in the cheating process by plagiarizing. Term papers and other pre-prepared, and illicit, assignments are for sale online.

Here in the U.S., we are no longer sure that all of this is really so bad. Maybe, if you can get away with it, it is just smart. That is the message the public receives from an increasing number of traditional role models—those who now stand at the very highest levels of our society and publicly flaunt corruption.

Are You Tired Of The Lies And Non-Stop Propaganda?

Get Your FREE Daily Newsletter

No Advertising – No Government Grants – This Is Independent Media

I speak here of the behavior of President Donald Trump (and his entourage), who, in less than three years in office has managed to brandish his particular aptitude for mendacity (the man is a habitual liar by any standard), bribery, obstruction, incitement and just plain disdain for all manner of rules. And this behavior has given license to others to act out their own disregard for both honesty and truth.

All of this is very bad news. This cheating side of our behavior, having gained increased acceptance, has become a real threat to two basic pillars of our society: the integrity of science/technology and the practice of honest government.

Part II—Cheating as a Societal Threat: The Erosion of Science

Let’s begin with science/technology. Our society would be unrecognizable apart from the science and technology that underpins all material aspects of modern life. The scientific method is the surest way we know to establish the truth about aspects of the material world. Yet today, this foundation is in danger of being eroded by the lies and misrepresentations that plague our everyday lives.

How is this being done? According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Trump administration, in its rush to do away with all manner of regulations, appears to consider scientific facts as obstacles to be overcome. This is particularly the case when it comes to the “active dismantling science-based health and safety protections, sidelining scientific evidence, and undoing recent progress” based on scientific research. Here are just a few of dozens of examples:

(1) Trump appointed administrators at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have “forbidden SACC [that is, its own Scientific Advisory Committee on Chemicals] from commenting” on EPA decisions concerning such things as worker safety protections, cancer risks, and the (often suspect) quality of industry data.

(2) The Department of the Interior (DOI) “dismantled the role of science” when looking at protections for endangered and threatened species.

(3) The Department of Agriculture (USDA) prevented the release of a plan for how the agency can effectively respond to the impacts of climate change.

(4) President Trump issued an Executive Order to “rid federal agencies of one-third of their advisory committees,” many of which provide scientific advice to federal agencies.

Without proper scientific standards for review and regulation, we get what David Michaels, former Assistant Secretary of Labor for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, (OSHA), calls “mercenary science.” This is “science-for-hire, contracted out by chemical and pharmaceutical companies to prove that their harmful products aren’t harmful by giving them the quantitative imprimatur.” This is what happens given inadequately supervised capitalism, where science and truth are separated out for the sake of profit. Before proper regulation, this approach ended up killing and maiming a lot of consumers. It will do so again as Trump deregulates.

Part III—Cheating as a Social Threat: The Erosion of Honest Government

A popular sense that those who run the U.S. government are not trustworthy, and do not run the government in the interests of the nation as a whole, is not new. According to multiple polls taken regularly since the end of World War II, this sentiment began to become prevalent in the 1960s, and has persisted ever since.

It is also interesting that this downturn in confidence in U.S. leadership coincides with the upturn of a culture war still being waged today. In the 1960s, it was the alienating and starkly immoral nature of the Vietnam War that gave impetus to a youth counterculture movement. It was also in the 1960s that the various aspects of an African-American power movement—ranging from the actions of Martin Luther King to those of the Black Panthers—began to promote politically effective equalitarianism. Therefore, one should not be surprised that a good part of Donald Trump’s “base” is a reactionary force in this war: white, racist and culturally traditionalist. As to the last of these positions, many of Trump’s backers are religious ideologues who wage a societal war against same-sex marriage and other LGBTQ civil rights protections. These are the same “Godly” folks who think evolution is wrong and science a suspect anti-religious enterprise. Simultaneously, they turn a blind eye to President Trump’s criminal inclinations. They will support him because they think he is a tool, albeit a lying and cheating one, in some genocidal divine plan.

However, the cheating culture we are now confronted with does not express itself through Trump and his supporters alone. As we have seen, it is wider ranging. So, while the actions of certain Democrats may not match Donald Trump’s venality, you can bet that these Democrats are also undermining honest, representative government.

Democratic Party cheating became notable in 2012. No doubt it goes back much further, but 2012 is when it literally showed itself on public media. Specifically, the telltale incident occurred on Wednesday, the 5th of September, 2012—in the middle of a broadcasted session of the Democratic Party convention, no less! Here is how it went:

—The Democratic platform committee had decided to keep all issues pertaining to a final treaty between Israelis and Palestinians out of the platform. After all, Israel and Palestine are foreign nations. Among these issues was the final status of the city of Jerusalem.

—However, the Republican platform of that year “envisioned” Israel with Jerusalem as its capital, and the Republicans were trying to make the status of Jerusalem a campaign issue.

—So, President Obama and his platform committee apparently decided that the politically savvy thing to do was to change the Democratic platform to match that of the Republicans.

—However, to amend the platform required a two-thirds majority vote from the convention floor. So Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who was chairing the Democratic convention, confidently called for a voice vote on the issue.

—Villaraigosa called for the vote three times. Each time the viewer could hear that he failed to get the desired result. Between the second and third vote a member of the platform committee went over and told Villaraigosa that he had to rule in favor of the change in wording. So, after the third vote, which again could be heard to fall short of the two-thirds required, Villaraigosa straight out lied and said the delegates had approved the change in wording, and that was that.

This brazen incident, taking place on national television, was not the last time the Democratic leadership cheated. They rigged the selection process in favor of Hillary Clinton in 2016 and may even now be rigging the selection process against Senators Sanders and Warren in 2020. Also, some Democratic “progressives” are showing signs of being vicious competitors in their own right.

Part IV—Conclusion

Cheating, along with its partner habitual lying, undermines both communities and institutions: everything from marriage to commerce, to science, to government. Nothing can stand firm before them once these vices become normative. That is what makes Donald Trump so unacceptable—he represents a social climate wherein honesty can never be assumed.

Once again, it should be emphasized that Trump, as dangerous as he certainly is, did not cause this present problem. He is just opportunistically exploiting it. In truth, these vices are always latent within society because, for human beings, cheating rather than honesty may be a default position. Thus, we must be taught or otherwise encouraged to be honest with both each other and ourselves.

This is not just a lesson for parents, schools, the courts, and the marketplace. It is also a necessary lesson for our politics. But we have not managed to come up with a way to vet our leaders so as to assure their long-term honesty and integrity—a process we have been searching for since the time of Plato. Nonetheless, we should try harder, because both history (of which most people are woefully ignorant) and our present circumstances offer us examples of what it means to fail in this regard. Cheating and the habitual lying that comes with it are the ultimate signs of systems failure.

Lawrence Davidson is professor of history emeritus at West Chester University in Pennsylvania. He has been publishing his analyses of topics in U.S. domestic and foreign policy, international and humanitarian law and Israel/Zionist practices and policies since 2010.

%d bloggers like this: