Ugly Gerry font of voting districts

SUBHEAD: A computer font made out of the shapes of gerrymandered voting districts.

By Rusty Blazenhoff on 2 August 20129 for Boing Boing -
(https://boingboing.net/2019/08/02/gerry-is-an-ugly-font-made-fro.html)


Image above: A message to Republicans on gerrymandering by someone using the UglyGerry type font. Of course Democrats have played their pert in this as well. From (https://pbs.twimg.com/card_img/1157070040816128006/gEPX-685?format=jpg&name=600x314).

Ooh, this is awesome. Activists have made a free font called Gerry that is made from the shapes of gerrymandered congressional districts. They encourage you to use it to write your representative.

The font’s creators, Ben Doessel and James Lee, made it to raise awareness and provide a method for disenfranchised voters to protest partisan gerrymandering. The duo, in a press release provided to the media, stated:

"After seeing how janky our Illinois 4th district had become, we became interested in this issue. We noticed our district’s vague, but shaky U-shape, then after seeing other letters on the map, the idea hit us, let’s create a typeface so our districts can become digital graffiti that voters and politicians can’t ignore."

For those unfamiliar with gerrymandering, it’s the process by which US voting districts use increasingly nonsensical borders to disenfranchise voters and limit who they can vote for by party lines instead of geography.

Congressional districts have a reputation for being downright ridiculous.

"North Carolina's 12th district resembled a severely broken snake until it was revamped in 2017. Pretty much all of Maryland's districts defy comparison to anything but abstract art. And then there are a few dozen districts that look like letters in the alphabet — so much so that an anonymous gerrymandering fighter turned them into a font.

A few of the letters in the Ugly Gerry typeface are a combination of side-by-side districts, while New York's 8th District is turned on its head to be both the "M" and "W" in the alphabet. But most of the districts don't even require much squinting to resemble letters, which are all downloadable in one file on UglyGerry.com."
From (https://theweek.com/speedreads/856423/someone-made-font-gerrymandered-congressional-districts)

Image above: The alphabet made of gerrymandered US voting districts. From (https://www.uglygerry.com/) (https://twitter.com/UglyGerry). Click to enlarge.





.https://www.uglygerry.com/

Getting Past Trump

SUBHEAD: Instead of spreading democracy, we were more concerned with protecting our global oil supplies.

By Richard Heinberg on 7 March 2017 in Resilience - 
(http://www.resilience.org/stories/2018-03-07/getting-past-trump-this-is-how-democracies-die-part-1/)


Image above: "Democracy Now!.. Later" illustration. From original article.

Donald Trump’s 13-month tenure (so far) as president of the United States has been an exhausting sprint for onlookers concerned about the state of the global ecosystem and the fate of industrial civilization.

Nearly every day begins with a new outrage — whether Trump’s gutting of the Environmental Protection Agency, his announcement of the US exit from the Paris climate accord, his selling off of national parks, his opening of coastal waters for offshore drilling, his easing of regulations on fracking, or his seeking subsidies for coal mining and coal power plants.

 Among my environmentalist friends and colleagues, “Trump fatigue” is a real and common ailment.

But much the same could be said for millions of citizens who are only peripherally interested in environmental issues.

They awake each morning to read about the Stormy Daniels scandal, the Rob Porter scandal, the Anthony Scaramucci hiring/firing scandal, the Mike Flynn scandal, the James Comey firing scandal, the Tom Price scandal, the White House nepotism and security clearance scandal. The list could go on and on; who can possibly keep up?

The Tweeter-in-chief is monopolizing attention at a moment in history when there are plenty of other things we really should be attending to, including climate change, resource depletion, plastic pollution in the oceans, mass species extinction, the fate of US labor unions, racial and social injustice, and worsening economic inequality.

These are the sorts of unaddressed problems that could cause even history’s “greatest” civilization to crack up.

But the conversation never seems to get past Trump, who obdurately obstructs action on these issues while commanding everyone’s constant adoring or horrified attention through divisive words and actions.

Naturally, many people are speculating about how the Trump nightmare might end. Two possibilities include Democrats obtaining majorities in Congress in the 2018 elections and initiating impeachment proceedings, or a presidential resignation following indictments of staff and family.

But Trump may not be dislodged so easily: A war or terrorist incident could give him the pretext to at least partly shut down the apparatus of democracy (including the Mueller investigation).

An Italian friend reminds me that Trump shares many characteristics with Silvio Berlusconi — who, despite frequent scandals, has managed to dominate national politics in Italy for nearly 20 years.

While I’m not prepared to make a prediction about Trump’s fate (there are just too many variables and unknowns), I have come to an unpleasant conclusion: While Trump will certainly be gone at some point — whether next month or years from now — we’re never going to return to the pre-Trump status quo.

The system is irremediably broken. Trump is both a symptom and an agent of that brokenness. What we can do is begin to reconnoiter and assess our new, unstable, still-emerging reality.

To even begin to understand this new reality, it is first essential to recognize its context. The United States, and industrial societies generally, are approaching the end of a decades-long fiesta of rapid economic and population growth founded upon cheap fossil energy.

I’ve discussed this grand trajectory in several books, notably The Party’s Over and The End of Growth, so it’s unnecessary to go into much detail here, except to note that absolute production figures for oil, coal and natural gas (which have been rising in recent years) are less crucial than the accelerating decline in the amount of energy that society receives in return for each unit of energy it invests in procuring more energy.

This erosion of energy return on energy investment is unavoidable, given the method by which fossil fuels are harvested, with low-hanging fruit always being picked first.

Energy is the prime mover of civilization; therefore, as net energy declines, so does society’s capacity to build complex infrastructure, and increase production and consumption.

Everyone feels this diminishing systemic dynamism, but — since surprisingly few people pay attention to slow but decisive shifts in our energy economy — almost nobody understands it, including the most exalted economists.

So, feeling symptoms of malaise but unable to diagnose the cause, most people are driven simply to find someone to blame — whether Wall Street bankers, immigrants, international competitors (for the US, that would include China), “lazy” poor people, entrenched Washington lobbyists and bureaucrats, or “socialists” in the mainstream media.

The waning of the world’s energy return on investment isn’t a sudden development. Our energy regime grew, matured and weakened in stages. Back in the years when it was “great,” the US was the engine of the global fossil fuel power train.

Prior to World War II, it was the world’s top producer and exporter of petroleum; it was also the foremost producer of coal and natural gas. But that gradually changed.

In the 1970s, US oil and gas production began to decline (this was decades before the fracking boom — a subject to which we’ll return shortly); the nation was already importing more and more of its energy supplies.

In the 1980s, globalization began, and the amount of debt in the US economy started growing much faster than the economy itself. Real (inflation-adjusted) incomes of most US workers stagnated or declined.

Debt was effectively being used to purchase the services that energy provides, with the understanding that payment would be made later with interest.

The use of debt to mask flagging economic momentum is an old trick, and — as economists and historians have discovered — it works for only a relatively short time before precipitating financial collapse.

Parenthetically, some readers may be wondering whether renewable energy might shift the curve of falling energy profitability. Unfortunately, the energy return on energy invested for solar and wind energy systems, once energy storage to make up for intermittency is included, is probably no higher than that of shale gas or tight oil:

The energy return from commercial photovoltaic panels is estimated at 10:1 in most US locations (without factoring the energy cost of batteries), whereas during much of the 20th century, oil provided a 50:1 energy payback or better.

Further, according to one recent study, installation rates for renewable energy would need to be roughly 10-times current rates in order to accomplish the transition to solar and wind before fossil fuel depletion and climate change undermine the current global industrial system.

By the first decade of the new millennium, it was clear to quickly growing ideological groups on the further ends of the political spectrum that the US was headed off the rails.

An insulated and arrogant foreign policy establishment in Washington was initiating costly, disastrous, illegal and unwinnable wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (with later detours to Libya and Syria).

Government and private debt was accumulating to truly frightening levels, with entitlements like Social Security and Medicare on track to boost government deficits exponentially in decades ahead. Rates of annual GDP growth were slowly but surely dwindling.

Levels of economic inequality were approaching those of the fabled Gilded Age, when Marxists and anarchists riled the disgruntled masses. The nation’s manufacturing base continued to erode due to globalization.

Massive industrial and transport infrastructure, built mostly during the high-energy decades of the mid-to-late 20th century, was aging and rusting. Following the Vietnam War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, it became harder to feel pride in being an American.

Instead of bringing democracy to the world, we were more concerned with protecting our access to global oil supplies, distracting ourselves with comic book hero movies and exporting a culture of celebrity worship.

An empire, built on the extraction of nonrenewable energy resources and on domination of world trade, was losing its grip.

Understandably, blame for unmet expectations fell largely upon elites — whether in government, the media, academia, the financial sector, science or the arts. But resentment toward immigrants and other easily scapegoated minority groups was also increasing in some quarters.

Enter Donald J. Trump, real estate developer and reality-television star. According to later reporting by Michael Wolff and others, Trump — who lacked experience in electoral politics — had no realistic expectation of winning the presidential race of 2016; he mainly hoped to increase his visibility and the value of his brand.

This meant he was free to say anything, however politically incorrect or factually erroneous, to rouse his audiences.

Trump, with help from self-styled political theorist Steve Bannon, promised to destroy the “administrative state” — the human bureaucracy and mass of regulations that propped up the failing status quo.

• He would “shake things up” by shredding global trade agreements and renegotiating bilateral trade treaties to the US’s advantage.
• He would radically reduce taxes.
• He would rebuild the nation’s fraying infrastructure.
• He would reduce both undocumented and documented immigration.
• He would prevent the US from getting involved in more needless, costly wars.
• He would “drain the swamp” in Washington, DC. And by doing these things, he would “Make America Great Again.”

When, to nearly everyone’s surprise (reportedly including his own), Trump won the presidency, he found himself in a tough spot: His team did not include enough competent people to fill newly emptied positions in the various agencies of the executive branch of government.

The few available personnel consisted mostly of ideologues, hangers-on and fellow grifters — often evincing as little relevant job experience as Trump himself — as well as people avowedly dedicated to the destruction of the agencies to which they would be appointed.

Over time, the new president and his team generated more and more dysfunction, resulting in a string of firings and resignations. As government, it was a trainwreck; but as reality TV, it was as riveting.

Meanwhile, the status of the nation’s all-important energy economy was more hidden from view than ever due to the temporary spectacle of soaring US oil and gas production from fracking. Rates of domestic shale gas and tight oil production were soaring, leading the new president to speak of US “energy dominance.”

But companies specializing in producing these fuels were — and are — doing so at an overall financial loss, propped up by cheap debt and investor hype. Their inability to turn a profit is a clear symptom of eroding energy return on investment, but is rarely understood as such.

Inevitably, as interest rates rise and investors start demanding returns, the fracking bubble will pop even more quickly than it inflated.

What Trump has done politically is somewhat analogous to the country’s fracking frenzy. He spoke a politically forbidden truth — that the United States is headed toward the graveyard of empires; he then promised a return to “greatness.”

But just as fracking has failed to reverse the nation’s slide toward energy bankruptcy, Trump’s means of reviving its greatness (a budget-busting tax cut and divisive rhetoric) have only accelerated the US’s nosedive into economic, moral, social and political ruin.

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The New Socialism

SUBHEAD: Moving beyond concentrated state power to owner operated co-operatives.

By Richard D. Wolf on 27 May 2017 for Truth Out -
(http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/40656-the-new-socialism-moving-beyond-concentrated-state-power)


Image above: New Socialism will mean, at least in part, the state's dependence on masses of workers who democratically control worker co-ops. Photo by  Susannah Kay. From original article.

Capitalism as a system is now increasingly challenged. Critics proliferate and steadily deepen their opposition (alongside, of course, the persistence of capitalism's defenders).

Yet capitalism's traditional "other" -- namely, socialism -- has also been widely devalued. It has lost its position as the goal (however variously interpreted) for anti-capitalist social movements. When not simply ignored, socialism (and even more its derivative "communism") is often treated as utterly passé.

When taken seriously, it is mostly a vague rhetorical gesture expressing criticism of the capitalist status quo, not advocacy of a concrete alternative. Socialist parties now mainly support capitalism but with a human face -- i.e. with the social supports and safety nets that their "conservative" counterparts disdain.

Sometimes the advocacy of socialism expresses a systemic rejection of, or opposition to, capitalism.

But even then, the current use of the term "socialism" lacks a clear, concrete definition of what genuinely new economic system it entails.

What exactly differentiates it from and renders it superior both to capitalism and to what "old" socialism used to mean?

To enrich and strengthen anti-capitalism by giving it such a new, definitive goal, we need to revision socialism. On the one hand that means shedding accumulated historical baggage that now undermines and prevents socialism from being a prominent goal of social change.

On the other hand, a revised socialism requires new content that can inspire and motivate. That is now available.

Old socialism's drawn-out demise since the 1970s helped give birth to a new 21st century socialism whose basic contours we can now contrast with old socialism.

The old socialism that evolved across the 19th and 20th centuries eventually settled its many, rich debates by largely agreeing on two basic ways to distinguish itself from capitalism.

Capitalism entailed;

1. private enterprises to produce goods and services and 
2. markets as the means to distribute resources and products among enterprises and individuals (workers and consumers).

In contrast, socialism entailed government-owned-and-operated enterprises and government central planning as the distribution system. Both devotees of capitalism and socialism accepted this set of differentiating definitions.

Debates and struggles over capitalism versus socialism then swirled around the relative virtues and flaws of private versus state enterprises and of markets versus planning. The practice of socialism combined criticism of private enterprise and markets with celebration of state enterprise and central planning.

Once socialists had captured state power in the USSR, the People's Republic of China (PRC) and elsewhere, the demands of managing actual economies tilted socialism's focus ever further toward state enterprises and central planning mechanisms.

In perfectly parallel fashion, attacks upon socialism from devotees of capitalism stressed the failures and excesses of state enterprises and planning.

Many of those debates and struggles seemed to be resolved by the collapse of the USSR in 1989 and subsequent changes in Eastern Europe, the PRC and elsewhere. History, the devotees of capitalism crowed, had "proven" the non-viability of socialism, the superiority of capitalism.

They rarely grasped that what had failed was one version of socialism, an early experiment in what it might mean to construct a system beyond capitalism.

Their eagerness to claim that "socialism/communism had failed" conveniently forgot the many similarly "failed" efforts, centuries earlier, to construct capitalism out of a declining European feudalism.

Only after many such failures did changed social conditions enable a general system change to modern capitalism. Why would the same not apply to socialism qua successor to capitalism?

A major task for socialists has been honestly to admit and contend with the limits and failures of the old 19th and 20th century socialism: chiefly, excesses of over-concentrated state power and inadequately transformed production systems.

Old socialism's achievements -- especially rapid industrial development and the remarkable provision of social safety nets -- might be preserved and built upon if its limits and failures were also recognized and overcome.

One emerging and promising new socialism for the 21st century focuses on worker co-ops. Socialism becomes the campaign to establish and build a sizable worker co-op sector within contemporary capitalism.

In worker co-op enterprises, all workers are equal members of a democratically run production operation. They debate and decide what, how and where to produce and how to utilize the net revenues.

Worker co-op enterprises exist alongside traditional capitalist enterprises. They are eligible for and must obtain tax considerations, subsidies and state supports comparable to what capitalist enterprises received throughout capitalism's history. Indeed, in their initial, emergent phase, worker co-ops deserve extra government support so that the worker co-op sector quickly achieves a significant role in the economy.

Until that role is established, people will remain unable to evaluate, compare and weigh in on what mix of capitalist and worker co-op enterprises they wish for their society.

The worker co-op sector of an economy will have to decide what mix of market and planning mechanisms to utilize for the distribution of its resources and products (much as capitalist enterprises always did).

The relationships -- both competitive and cooperative -- between the two sectors of each economy (capitalist and worker co-op) will have to be determined by negotiations between them.

The third member of those negotiations will be the populace as a whole weighing in on what kind of economic system it wants as the partner for its political system.

With a significant worker co-op sector, the state's dependence on enterprises will no longer mean a dependence on a small minority: shareholders and boards of directors who control capitalist enterprises.

Instead it will mean, at least in part, the state's dependence on masses of workers who democratically control worker co-ops. Under such a system, the prospects for genuine (as opposed to merely formal) political democracy are much enhanced over their sorry state today.

Mass working class support made 19th and 20th century socialism -- with its programs of revolutionary or evolutionary/parliamentary seizures of state power -- historically important.

We cannot now expect to mobilize again any equivalent support for a revival of the old socialism. That is because of its limits and failures and also because of the massive, sustained campaigns against it by capitalism's supporters.

However, a new socialism built upon the best achievements of the old plus a new focus on the democratic transformation of the workplace can mobilize mass support now. It is already doing so.

A new socialism for the 21st century would address as well all those in the population who are not in the workforce because of family, age, education, illness, disability or other comparable causes. Systematic supports for them -- qua relatives, friends and neighbors of workforce members -- are as central to a new and better society as is the democratization of the workplace. Indeed, the latter and the former can and would be mutually supportive.

Old socialist parties are mostly fading or imploding, yet at the same time capitalism's deepening difficulties, especially since the global crash of 2008, are everywhere increasing mass opposition to capitalism. What that opposition needs is a new socialism with attractive, basic transformative goals.

What is not wanted is social change that gives power to some far-away government apparatus. The point is rather and finally to transfer power into the hands of the change-making workers themselves.

Power here refers to more than politics. It refers to the social power at the economic base of society, in the workplaces producing the goods and services upon which social life depends.

The French Revolution's slogan -- liberty, equality, fraternity -- was linked to its economic project of displacing feudalism in favor of capitalism. While its economic project succeeded, it failed to realize that slogan.

It turned out, as Marx noted, that capitalism's class division (between employer and employee) blocked that realization. Overcoming such class divisions -- something a worker co-op can do -- is required to take the next great historical step toward liberty, equality and fraternity.   

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Combating Trump's Neo-Fascism

SUBHEAD: The great collective power of resistance has ignited. Hope and a sense of humanity are in the air.

By Henry Giroux on 7 February 2017 inTruth Out -
(http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/39378-combating-trump-s-neo-fascism-and-the-ghost-of-1984)


Image above: Illustration by Jared Rodriguez of Donald Trump with his tie slightly lengthened and his hair tinted closer to his orange mane. From original article.

"Ignorance is Strength."
-- George Orwell

In a strange but revealing way, popular culture and politics intersected soon after Trump first assumed the presidency of the United States.

On the side of popular culture, George Orwell's dystopian novel, "1984", surged as the number one best seller on Amazon both in the United States and Canada. This followed two significant political events.

First, Kellyanne Conway, Trump's advisor, echoing the linguistic inventions of Orwell's Ministry of Truth, coined the term "alternative facts" to justify why press secretary Sean Spicer lied in advancing disproved claims about the size of Trump's inauguration crowd.

Second, almost within hours of his presidency, Trump penned a series of executive orders that compelled Adam Gopnik, a writer for The New Yorker, to rethink the relevance of 1984.

He had to go back to Orwell's book, he writes, "Because the single most striking thing about [Trump's] matchlessly strange first week is how primitive, atavistic and uncomplicatedly brutal Trump's brand of authoritarianism is turning out to be."

In this amalgam of Trump's blatant contempt for the truth, his willingness to embrace a blend of taunts and threats in his inaugural address, and his eagerness to enact a surge of regressive executive orders, the ghost of fascism reasserts itself with a familiar blend of fear and revenge.

Unleashing promises he had made to his angry, die-hard ultranationalist and white supremacist supporters, Trump targeted a range of groups whom he believes have no place in American society.

These include Muslims, Syrian refugees and undocumented immigrants, whom he has targeted with a number of harsh discriminatory policies.

The underlying cruelty, ignorance and punishing, if not criminogenic, intent behind such policies was made all the clearer when Trump suggested that he intended to roll back a wide range of environmental protections.

He asserted his willingness to resume the practice of state-sponsored torture and deny funding to those cities willing to provide sanctuary to undocumented immigrants.

Trump reaffirmed his promise to lift the US ban on torture by appointing Gina Haspel as the new CIA deputy director. Haspel not only played a direct role in overseeing the torture of detainees at a black site in Thailand, she also participated in the destruction of videotapes documenting their brutal interrogations.

Trump's enthusiasm for committing war crimes was matched by his willingness to roll back many of the regulatory restrictions put in place by the Obama administration in order to prevent the financial industries from repeating the economic crisis of 2008.

In Trump's worldview, there exists no contradiction between the principles and ideals of a democracy, on the one hand, and implementing state-sponsored torture, running "black sites" and waging an assault on poor people, immigrants, health care and the environment.

And this is just the beginning. The ruling elites, banks and other major financial institutions now find their savior in Trump as they will receive more tax cuts and happily embrace the loosening of government regulations, while their greed spins out of control. Should we be surprised?

The memory of totalitarianism, with its demand for simplistic answers, intoxication with spectacles of vulgarity, and a desire for strong leaders, has faded in a society beset by a culture of immediacy, sensations and civic illiteracy.

Under such circumstances, it is difficult to underestimate the depth and tragedy of the collapse of civic culture and democratic public spheres, especially given the profound influences of a permanent war culture that trades in fear, and the ever-present seductions of consumerism, which breeds depoliticization and infantilism.

Another shocking and revelatory indication of the repressive fist of neo-fascism in the Trump regime took place when Trump's chief White House right-wing strategist, Steve Bannon, stated in an interview that "the media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while....

You're the opposition party. Not the Democratic Party....

The media is the opposition party. They don't understand the country." This is more than an off-the-cuff angry comment. It is a blatant refusal to see the essential role of a robust and critical media in a democracy.

Such comments suggest not only a war on the press, but the very real threat of suppressing dissent, if not democracy itself. Unsurprisingly, Bannon referred to himself in the interview as "Darth Vader."

A more appropriate comparison would have been to Joseph Goebbels, the Reich Minister of Propaganda in the Third Reich.

What is clear is that the dire times that haunt the current age no longer appear as merely an impending threat. They have materialized with the election of Donald Trump to the presidency.

Trump and his administration of extremists epitomize the dire dangers posed by those who longed to rule American society without resistance, dominate its major political parties, and secure uncontested control of its commanding political, cultural and economic institutions.

The consolidation of power and wealth in the hands of the financial elite along with the savagery and misery that signifies their politics is no longer the stuff of Hollywood films, such as Wall Street and American Psycho.

If George W. Bush's reign of fearmongering, greed and war on terror embodied the values of a kind of militarized Gordon Gekko, Trump represents the metamorphosis of Gekko into the ethically neutered Patrick Bateman.

Yet, Trump's ascent to the highest office in America is already being normalized by numerous pundits and politicians who are asking the American public to give Trump a chance or are suggesting that the power and demands of the presidency will place some restraints on his unrestrained impetuousness and often unpredictable behavior.

Those members of Congress who railed against both Obama's alleged imperial use of executive orders and later, during the Republican primaries, denounced Trump as unfit for office now exhibit a level of passivity and lack of moral courage that testifies to their complicity with the dark shadow of authoritarianism.

Wrongheaded Calls to "Give Trump a Chance"
As might be expected, a range of supine politicians, media pundits and mainstream journalists are already tying themselves in what Tom Engelhardt calls "apologetic knots" while they "desperately look for signs that Donald Trump will be a pragmatic, recognizable American president once he takes the mantle of power."

As comedian John Oliver pointed out on his show, "Last Week Tonight," Trump is not ordinary and his politics forebode the storm clouds of an American version of authoritarianism.

Oliver brought his point home by shouting repeatedly "This is not normal," and, of course, he is right! It is even more surprising that Lesley Stahl's "60 Minutes" interview with Trump portrayed him less as a demagogue than as a transformed politician who was "subdued and serious."

In addition, NBC's Andrea Mitchell reported approvingly upon the transition, as if proposed White House counselor Steve Bannon and proposed attorney general Jeff Sessions, two men with racism in their pasts, were ordinary appointments.

High-profile celebrity, Oprah Winfrey, stated without irony, in an interview with "Entertainment Tonight" that "I just saw President-elect Trump with President Obama in the White House, and it gave me hope."

This is quite a stretch given Trump's history of racist practices, his racist remarks about Blacks, Muslims and Mexican immigrants during the primary and the presidential campaigns, and his appointment of a number of cabinet members who embrace a white nationalist ideology.

The New York Times's opinion writer, Nicholas Kristof, sabotaged his self-proclaimed liberal belief system by noting, in what appears to be acute lapse of judgment, that Americans should "Grit [their] teeth and give Trump a chance." Bill Gates made clear his own and often hidden reactionary worldview when speaking on CNBC's "Squawk Box."

The Microsoft cofounder slipped into a fog of self-delusion by stating that Trump had the potential to emulate JFK by establishing an upbeat and desirable mode of "leadership through innovation."

Such actions by the mainstream media and such highly visible pundits not only point to a retreat from responsible reporting and discourse, and a flight from any vestige of social responsibility, they also further the collapse of serious journalism and thoughtful reasoning into the corrupt world of a corporate-controlled media empire and an infantilizing celebrity culture.

Normalizing the Trump regime does more than sabotage the truth, moral responsibility and justice; it also diminishes and sidelines the democratic institutions necessary for a future of well-being and economic and political justice.

New York Times columnist Charles Blow observes insightfully that under a Trump administration:

The nation is soon to be under the aegis of an unstable, unqualified, undignified demagogue [who surrounds] himself with a rogue's gallery of white supremacy sympathizers, anti-Muslim extremists, devout conspiracy theorists, anti-science doctrinaires and climate change deniers.... This is not normal [and] I happen to believe that history will judge kindly those who continued to shout, from the rooftops, through own weariness and against the corrosive drift of conformity.

Blow is right. Any talk of working with a president who has surrounded himself with militarists, racists, neo-fascists, anti-intellectuals and neoliberal fundamentalists should be resisted at all cost. It is well worth remembering that Trump chose Steve Bannon, a notorious anti-Semite and white supremacist to occupy the center of power in the White House.

As Reuters reported, "White supremacists and neo-Nazis have rarely, if ever, in recent history been so enthusiastic about a presidential appointment as Donald Trump's choice of Steve Bannon to be his chief White House strategist."

Trump has also surrounded himself with militarists and corporate ideologues who fantasize about destroying all vestiges of the welfare state and the institutions that produce the public values that support the social contract. Neal Gabler argues that the normalizing of Trump by the mainstream media is about more than the dereliction of journalistic duty. In his piece "And So It Begins: Normalizing the Election," he writes:

Far more serious is their normalization not of Trump but of his voters. The former is typical cowardice under threat of reactionary populism. The latter is an endorsement of reactionary populism that may have far-reaching consequences for whether the country can ever be reunited after having been torn asunder.

Normalization is code for a retreat from any sense of moral and political responsibility, and it should be viewed as an act of political complicity with authoritarianism and condemned outright. What is being propagated by Trump's apologists is not only a reactionary popularism and some fundamental tenets of an American-style authoritarianism, but also a shameless whitewashing of the racism and authoritarianism at the center of Trump's politics.

In addition, little has been said about how Trump and his coterie of semi-delusional, if not heartless, advisors embrace a version of Ayn Rand's view that selfishness, war against all competition and unchecked self-interest are the highest human ideals.

In addition, arguments in defense of such normalization appear to overlook with facile indifference how the rhetoric of authoritarianism has become normalized in many parts of the world, to grave effect, and that the Trump administration has clearly demonstrated an affinity with that sort of hateful rhetoric.

How else to explain the support that Trump has received from a number of ruthless dictators who head reactionary governments, such as the Philippines, Turkey and Egypt, among others? Such a danger is all the more ominous given the current collapse of civic literacy and the general public's increasing inability to deal with complex issues on one hand, and the attempt, on the other hand, by those who maintain power to ruthlessly promote a depoliticizing discourse of lies, simplicity and  manufactured distortions.

Ominous Echoes of a Totalitarian Past
The United States has entered a new historical conjuncture that echoes elements of a totalitarian past. Hannah Arendt, Sheldon Wolin and Robert Paxton, the great theorists of totalitarianism, believed that the fluctuating elements of fascism are still with us and that as long as they are, they will crystalize in different forms.

Far from being fixed in a frozen moment of historical terror, these theorists believed that totalitarianism not only "heralds as a possible model for the future" but that its "protean origins are still with us."

Arendt, in particular, was keenly aware that a culture of fear, the dismantling of civil and political rights, the ongoing militarization of society, the attack on labor, an obsession with national security, human rights abuses, the emergence of a police state, a deeply rooted racism and the attempts by demagogues to undermine education as a foundation for producing critical citizenry were all at work in American society.

Historical conjunctures produce different forms of authoritarianism, though they all share a hatred for democracy, dissent and human rights.

More recently, Robert Paxton in his seminal work, The Anatomy of Fascism, provides a working definition of fascism that points to both its anti-democratic moments and those elements that link it to both the past and the present.

Paxton's point is not to provide a precise definition of fascism but to understand the conditions that enabled fascism to work and make possible its development in the future. Accordingly, he argues that fascism is:

A form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints, goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

It is too easy to believe in a simplistic binary logic that strictly categorizes a country as either authoritarian or democratic and leaves no room for entertaining the possibility of a mixture of both systems.

American politics today suggests a more updated if not different form of authoritarianism or what might be called the curse of totalitarianism. In Trump's America, there are strong echoes of the fascism that developed in Europe in the 1920s and 30s.

For instance, there are resemblances to a fascist script in Trump's scapegoating of the "other;"

• his claim that the United States is in a period of decline;  
• his call to "Make America Great Again;" 
• his blatant appeal to ultra-nationalism;  
• his portrayal of himself as a strongman who alone can save the country; 
• his appeal to aggression and violence aimed at those who disagree with him; 
• his appeal to xenophobia, national greatness and support for a politics of disposability; 
• his courting of anti-Semites and white supremacists; 
• his flirtation with the discourse of racial purity;
• his support for a white Christian public sphere; 
• his contempt for weakness and his enthusiasm for hyper-masculinity;
• his use of a kind of verbal waterboarding to denigrate Muslims, Blacks, undocumented immigrants and women's reproductive rights; 
• his contempt for dissent; his deep-rooted anti-intellectualism, or what Arendt called "thoughtlessness" (i.e., denial that climate change is produced by humans) coupled with 
• his  elevation of instinct and emotion over reason;

Trump's totalitarian mindset was on full display both during his inaugural speech and in his actions during his first few days in office. In the first instance, he presented a dystopian view of American society laced with racist stereotyping, xenophobia and the discourse of ultra- nationalism.

Frank Rich called the language of the speech "violent and angry -- 'This American carnage stops right here' -- reeking of animosity, if not outright hatred [and that] the tone was one of retribution and revenge."

As soon as the speech ended, the normalizing process began with the expected tortured clichés from various Fox News commentators calling it "muscular," "unifying," "very forceful," "just masterful," and Charles Krauthammer stating that it was "completely nonpartisan."

The fog of self-delusion and denial was in full swing at CNN when the historian Douglas Brinkley called Trump's inaugural address not only "presidential" but "solid and well-written" and the "best speech" Trump has made "in his life."

Once in the Oval Office, Trump not only enacted measures to facilitate building a wall on the Mexican border and prevent people from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States, he also cleared the way for resurrecting the construction of the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines.

Trump's broader assault on environmental protections is indicative of his disregard for the rights of the Native Americans who protested the building of a pipeline that both crossed their sacred burial lands and posed a risk to contaminating the Missouri River, which is the primary water source for the Standing Rock Sioux.

In response to Trump's inaugural address and early policy measures, Roger Cohen, a columnist for The New York Times, wrote a forceful commentary suggesting that Trump's neo-fascist tendencies were on full display and that his presence in American politics contains echoes of former dictators and augurs badly for American democracy. He argued:

But the first days of the Trump presidency ... pushed me over the top. The president is playing with fire. To say, as he did, that the elected representatives of American democracy are worthless and that the people are everything is to lay the foundations of totalitarianism. It is to say that democratic institutions are irrelevant and all that counts is the great leader and the masses he arouses.

To speak of "American carnage" is to deploy the dangerous lexicon of blood, soil and nation. To boast of "a historic movement, the likes of which the world has never seen before" is to demonstrate consuming megalomania.

To declaim "America first" and again, "America first," is to recall the darkest clarion calls of nationalist dictators. To exalt protectionism is to risk a return to a world of barriers and confrontation. To utter falsehood after falsehood, directly or through a spokesman, is to foster the disorientation that makes crowds susceptible to the delusions of strongmen.

The grave period Americans are about to enter into under a Trump regime cannot be understood without an acknowledgement of the echoes of a totalitarian past.

With Trump's election, the crisis of politics is accompanied by a crisis of historical conscience, memory, ethics and agency exacerbated by an appeal to a notion of common sense in which facts are regarded with disdain, words reduced to slogans, and science confused with pseudo-science.

Under such circumstances, language is emptied of any meaning and constitutes a flight from ethics, justice and social responsibility. As language rapidly loses meaning, the American public is inundated with empty slogans such as "post-truth" and "fake news."

This culture is part of what Todd Gitlin calls "an interlocking ecology of falsification that has driven the country around the bend." Against the background of an infantilizing culture of immediacy, spectacle and sensationalism, Trump will govern as if he is running a reality TV show, endlessly performing for an increasingly depoliticized public.

But there are more dangers ahead than the toxic seduction of politics as theater and the transformation of the mainstream media as an adjunct of the entertainment industry or for that matter, a growing distrust of democracy itself.

The Complicity of the Media and Attacks on the Press
Under casino capital, the alleged celebration of the principle of a free press hides more than it promises.

Noam Chomsky, Bill Moyers and Robert McChesney, among others, have observed that the mainstream media now work in conjunction with the financial elite and the military-industrial-academic complex as an echo chamber while further indulging in the rituals of shock, celebrity culture and spectacularized violence in order to increase their ratings.

Earlier this year, CBS CEO Les Moonves stated that his network's inordinate and disastrous coverage of Trump "may not be good for America but it's damn good for CBS." Moonves openly gloated not only because the network was pumping up its ratings but was also getting rich by inordinately covering Trump's presidential campaign.

As he put it, [T]he money's rolling in ... [T]his is going to be a very good year for us.... It's a terrible thing to say, but bring it on, Donald. Go ahead. Keep going." Moonves made it clear that the power of mainstream media in general has little to do with either pursuing the truth or holding power accountable.

On the contrary, its real purpose was to normalize corruption, lies, misrepresentation, accumulate capital and allow the transformation of the press to become an adjunct of authoritarian ideologies, policies, interests and commodified values -- if that is what it takes to increase their profit margins.

Normalization is about more than dominant media outlets being complicit with corrupt power or willfully retreating from any sense of social responsibility; it is also about aiding and abetting power in order to increase the bottom line and accumulate other cowardly forms of power and recognition.

This is evident in the fact that some powerful elements of the mainstream press not only refused to take Trump seriously, they also concocted embarrassing rationales for not holding him to any viable sense of accountability.

For instance, Gerard Baker, the editor-in-chief of The Wall Street Journal, publicly announced that in the future he would not allow his reporters to use the word "lie" in their coverage.

NPR also issued a statement arguing that it would not use the word "lie" on the grounds that "the minute you start branding things with a word like 'lie,' you push people away from you."

In this truly Orwellian comment, NPR is suggesting that calling out lies on the part of governments and politicians should be avoided by the media on the grounds that people might be annoyed by having to face the contradiction between the truth and misinformation.

This is more than a retreat from journalism's goal of holding people, institutions and power to some measure of justice; it also legitimizes the kind of political and moral cowardice that undermines informed resistance, the first amendment and the truth.

While such actions may not rise to the level of book burning that was characteristic of various fascist and authoritarian regimes in the past, it does mark a distinctive retreat from historical memory and civic courage that serves to normalize such actions by making dissent appear, at best, unreasonable and at worst, an act of treason.

Such actions become apparent in efforts by the mainstream press to rage against the rise of "fake news," suggesting that by doing so, their integrity cannot be questioned.

Of course, the term "fake news" is slippery and can be deployed to political ends -- a maneuver which is on full display particularly when used by Trump and his merry band of liars to dismiss anyone or any organization that holds him accountable for his fabrications.

Hence, there were no surprises when Trump at his first president-elect press conference refused not only to take questions from a CNN reporter because his network had published material critical of Trump but also justified his refusal by labeling CNN as fake news -- reducing the term to a slogan used to silence the press.

Clearly, we will see more of this type of bullying repression and censorship, and traditional democratic public spheres, such as higher education, will also feel the brunt of such an attack.

Any analysis of the forces behind the normalization of the Trump administration and its assault on the truth, if not democracy itself, must include the powerful role of the conservative media in the United States.

Former conservative radio talk show host Charles Sykes recently published a remarkable op-ed arguing that over the last few decades, right-wing media played a major role in discrediting and delegitimizing the fact-based media. In doing so, it destroyed "much of the right's immunity to false information."

According to Sykes, conservatives, including himself, created a "new post-factual political culture" that has become so powerful that even when the Trump administration is caught lying, it does so with impunity because it believes that "the alternative-reality media will provide air cover" that allows it to pollute "political discourse" and discredit "independent sources of information."

Evidence of this major assault on truth can be measured in part by the magnitude of the lies the administration produces, which are truly Orwellian. For instance, Kellyanne Conway attempted recently to justify Trump's executive order banning people from seven majority-Muslim countries by referring to what she called the "Bowling Green Massacre", an alleged terrorist attack by Iraqi refugees that was to have taken place in 2011. According to Conway, Obama instituted a six-month ban on Iraqi resettlements.

The attack never happened, no Iraqis were involved and the Obama administration never instituted such a ban. It gets worse. White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer recently claimed that Iran had committed an act of war by attacking a US Naval vessel. That never happened. What did happen is that a Saudi ship off the coast of Yemen was attacked by Houthi rebels.

Normalization has many registers and one of the most important is the control by the financial elite over commanding cultural apparatuses that produce, legitimize and distribute highly selective media narratives that shore up the most reactionary ideologies and financial interests.

The mainstream press says little about how such actions serve as an apology for the egregiously reactionary nature of Trump's ideology and policies.

Moreover, they fail to note how distortions of the truth, the endless production of lies by governments, politicians and corporations, along with the media's flight from civic literacy, serve to bolster authoritarian societies willing to distort the truth while simultaneously suppressing dissent.

Under such circumstances, it should not be surprising that Trump's authoritarian and hateful discourse, threats of violence, loathing of dissent and racist attitudes toward Muslims, Blacks and Mexican immigrants are downplayed in the mainstream media.

These structured silences have become more and more apparent given the benign manner in which the supine press and its legion of enervated anti-public intellectuals and pundits treat Trump's endless nighttime Twitter outpourings and his incessant choreographed public fabrications.

For instance, The Wall Street Journal's refusal to address critically Trump's endless lies and insults is matched by the highbrow New Yorker's publishing of a piece on Trump that largely celebrates uncritically how he is viewed by conservative intellectuals, such as Hillsdale College president, Larry Arnn.

Arnn supports Trump because he shares his view that "the government has become dangerous." If Arnn were referring to the rise of the surveillance and permanent war state, it would be hard to disagree with him. Instead, he was referring to the government's enforcement of "runaway regulations."

What Arnn and Kelefa Sanneh, the author of the New Yorker article, ignore or conveniently forget is the fact that the real danger the government poses is the result of it being in the hands of demagogues, such as Trump, who are truly dangerous and threaten the planet, American society and the rest of the world.

When Kelefa Sanneh mentions Trump's connection to the "alt-right," he underplays the group's fascist ideology and refuses to use the term "white supremacist" in talking about such groups, reverting instead to the innocuous-sounding term, "white identity politics."

Trump's misogyny, racism, anti-intellectualism, Islamophobia and hatred of democracy are barely mentioned. Sanneh even goes so far as to suggest that since Trump has disavowed the "alt-right," his connection to neo-fascist groups is tenuous.

This is more than an apology dressed up in the discourse of ambiguity; such reporting is a shameful retreat from journalistic integrity -- an assault on the truth that constitutes an egregious act of normalization. This is only one example of what is surely to come in the future under Trump's rule.

The Hard Road Ahead        
Under Trump's regime of economic, religious, educational and political fundamentalism, compassion and respect for the other will almost certainly be viewed with contempt while society will increasingly become more militarized and financial capital will likely be deregulated in order to be free to engage in behaviors that put the American public and planet in danger.

A form of social and historical amnesia appears set to descend over American society.

A culture of civic illiteracy will likely be produced and legitimated along with a culture of fear that will enable a harsh law and order regime.

Policies will almost certainly be enacted in which public goods, such as schools, will be privatized, and a culture of greed and selfishness will be elevated to new heights of celebration. There will likely be a further retreat from civic literacy, civic courage and social responsibility, one matched by a growing abandonment by the state of any allegiance to the common good.

Fear and the threat of state violence are threatening to shape how problems are addressed, and a growing culture of dissent may soon be ruthlessly suppressed in all of the public spheres in which it has functioned in the past.

The free-market mentality that gained prominence under the presidency of Ronald Reagan will likely accelerate under the Trump administration and continue to drive politics, destroy many social protections, celebrate a hyper-competitiveness and deregulate economic activity.

Under Donald Trump's reign, almost all human activities, practices and institutions are at risk of becoming subject to market principles and militarized.

The only relations that matter will likely be defined in commercial terms, just as civil society will be organized for the production of violence.

It is most likely that the most dangerous powers of the state will be unleashed under Trump against protesters, Black people, Muslims and undocumented immigrants. They will also be unleashed against the environment and against public and higher education.

Surely, all the signs are in place given the coterie of billionaires, generals, warmongers, Islamophobes, neoliberal cheerleaders and anti-public demagogues Trump has appointed to high-ranking government positions.

Americans may be on the verge of witnessing how democracy ends and this is precisely why Trump's election as the president of the United States must not be normalized.

Trump's repressive and poisonous attitudes and authoritarian policies will not change his role as president. If his first two weeks in office are any indication, he plans to consolidate his power and will be more reckless than he was during the primaries and presidential campaigns.

 Trump's narcissism, indifference to the truth and intensive use of the spectacle will further increase his view of himself and his policies as unaccountable, especially as he institutes a mode of governance that suppresses the opposition and deals with his audience directly through the social media.

Fortunately, a number of diverse groups, including unions, immigrant rights groups, anti-fascist organizations, Black liberation groups, congregations and faith-based organizations, legal coalitions and reproductive rights groups, along with teachers, actors and artists are organizing to protest Trump's neo-fascist ideology and policies.

As George Yancy pointed out to me in a personal correspondence, such actions are unique in that they make the political more pedagogical by elevating protests, modes of resistance and criticism to the level of the cultural rather than allowing such criticism to reside in the voice and presence of isolated, prophetic intellectuals.

Moreover, a number of independent publications, along with various public intellectuals, such as Anthony DiMaggio, Robin Kelley and members of the Black Lives Matter Movement, are producing instructive articles on both the nature of resistance and what forms it might take.

The current onslaught of revenge and destruction produced by Trump's updated version of authoritarianism is glaringly visible and deeply brutal, and points to a bleak future in the most immediate sense.

We live at a time in which totalitarian forms are with us again. US society is no longer at the tipping point of authoritarianism; we are in the midst of what Hannah Arendt called "dark times." Individual and collective resistance is the only hope we have to move beyond this ominous moment in our history.

Fortunately, the arrogant presence of this neo-fascist regime is not going entirely unchecked.

The great collective power of resistance has ignited. Hope and a sense of humanity are in the air and the relevance of mass action has a renewed urgency. Demonstrations are taking place every day; some mayors are refusing to allow their cities to be placed under Nazi influence; and marginalized people and their co-strugglers are marching in record-breaking numbers to protect their rights.

This resistance will continue to grow until it becomes a movement whose power is on the side of justice not injustice, bridges not walls, dignity not disrespect, compassion not hate.

Let's hope this resistance will dispel Orwell's nightmarish vision of the future in our own time.

Note: This piece draws on some ideas that appeared first in "Normalizing Trump's Authoritarianism Is Not an Option," an article published by Tikkun Magazine on January 19, 2017.

• Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and dis the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. His most recent books are America's Addiction to Terrorism (Monthly Review Press, 2016) and America at War with Itself (City Lights, 2017). He is also a contributing editor to a number of journals, including Tikkun, the Journal of Wild Culture and Ragazine. Giroux is also a member of Truthout's Board of Directors. His website is www.henryagiroux.com.
To read more articles by Henry A. Giroux and other authors in the Public Intellectual Project, click here.

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Money should be for Common Good

SUBHEAD: Half the regions in Austria  support companies that implement the Common Goods Balance Sheet.

By Marcin Gerwin on 23 December 2016 for Resilience -
(http://www.resilience.org/stories/2016-12-23/all-money-should-be-used-for-public-good/)


Image above: Painting of an Amish Barn Bee where local families gather to frame out a new barn. From (https://www.catsmeow.com/products/amish-barn-raising-scene).

Let’s imagine that you were prime minister of Austria. What would you do to improve the economy? 
Christian Felber, the founder of  Economy for the Common Good, said he would invite people to gather in their communities and discuss the 20 most important cornerstones of the economy – what’s the goal, how do we measure success, what are the types of property, its limits and conditions, what are the models of social security?

So you would start with democracy?
Yes. It’s a kind of constitutional process where people get to participate. And because they know that their will is to be implemented, it is a true constitutional process run by the sovereign citizens.

What would be the outcome of such a process?
On the example of property, the result could be a mixed model of government. There would be public companies but only dealing with strategic resources. Then there would be private companies but they would have to fill in a Common Good Balance Sheet in order not to harm anybody.

A Common Good Balance Sheet?
The Common Good Balance Sheet is a tool to measure the degree to which the company adheres to the fundamental values of democratic society. These are usually anchored in the Constitution: solidarity, justice, sustainability, democracy and dignity.

In a Common Good Balance Sheet every stakeholder evaluates the company based on these principles. We also measure the dignity with which the company treats its suppliers, investors, employees, clients, future generations, the broader community and the planet. This instrument already exists. So far it has been implemented in around 400 companies on a voluntary basis. But the five fundamental values of democracy are identified by the people.

What if the people were given a fully democratic choice, would they create capitalism again?
Absolutely not, there is no chance of that happening.

Why not?
Because I would impose one thing: the procedure of decision-making. And according to this procedure there would be the space for many different proposals, not just one or two. Not capitalism or communism. It is pluralistic. Then we would measure the resistance towards every proposal.
We have empirical evidence that extreme options never win in this procedure. They always lose.

But capitalism is currently a mainstream economic model, not an extreme.
Not according to the people. They live in capitalism, but if they had a choice, they would vote against it. Always and everywhere. In its current form it would be rejected.

For example, in Germany there was a survey on whether the success and progress of economy should be measured by GDP, as it would be in capitalism, or by a Common Good Product. Only 18 per cent of people in Germany supported GDP. And in that same survey conducted by the government, 67 per cent answered: “No, we would like to replace GDP by a Good Life Index.”

Another example: people were asked in China, in the USA, and in Germany whether they were satisfied with the current degree of income inequality. The answer was a resounding “no”, scoring between 70 and 80 per cent in every country. So if the decision were up to them, they would decide to diminish the inequality.

Of course, they would not eliminate inequality completely, because that would be another extreme and there is strong resistance against total equality. It turns out that the highest income difference the people would tolerate is 1:10, from lowest income to the highest. That is the wisdom of the people. I trust them. Capitalism would mean no limit of inequality and I am sure that there isn’t a single part of the economy where people would vote for capitalism.

What is the alternative to capitalism, then?
The alternative is the economy for the common good, of social good and ecological good. Economy should be about the well being of all human beings and all living beings, including nature. Its success is not measured in financial returns, profits or GDP growth, but in the investments the companies contribute towards the common good. It is an alternative that already exists.

However, if your aim is not GDP growth anymore, where would the jobs come from?
Do you think it is possible to create job opportunities for all those who want them within the economy for the common good?

Companies in the private sector can be given incentive to create enough jobs. For example, they would not distribute profit to their owners but they would have to reinvest it within the company itself. And this means opening new positions and a better employment situation.

The state can create public employment as well, for between 10 and 30 per cent of the working population. It can give incentives to private sector to create jobs from public procurement, ranging from tax incentives to conscious technological, regional and industrial policy. Then there is also an informal economy, like subsistence; we can grow things on our own, make things with our own hands or make repairs. That is both fun and meaningful.

Of course, this should not fill up the whole day but as a complementary option it has been proven that it makes us happier. We can also share and cooperate in collaborative networks based on exchange. This is neither the public nor the private sector. The rules of the economy for the common good say ‘let’s create all of these sectors’. And the whole mosaic does not work, and we don’t have full employment, which is the goal, then the last resort is the state.

Another option is, of course, the reduction of working hours. In Austria, the ecological footprint is 4.8 times above the limits of the planet. In the end, we have two options: we can either reduce the working hours by 75 percent or we can increase ecological productivity by 400 percent. Maybe we can meet in the middle.

Maybe it would not be 5 per cent of the population working on farms, but 10 per cent. Currently, farming is part of the private sector because farmers sell goods on the market but there is also space for subsistence.

Who would create money in this system?
We were quite clear about that, all money should be used for the public good. That means several things.

First, democratic society makes the rules of the game. Second, the sole creator of money is the central bank in order to stop the current practice of commercial banks creating 90 percent of the money. Then the profit made by creating money goes to the people rather than to private banks.

What about the interest rates on loans, then?
My personal preference is that loan interests should be principally zero. In order for banks to survive, they can have a margin of 2-3 per cent. Therefore, the interest on saving would have to be minus 2-3 per cent.

If you give it any thought, you will realize it benefits 90 per cent of the population. Today we have 10 per cent of the population being net interest winners and 90 per cent being net interest losers. That is because we have a positive interest system. If you switch to the negative interest system, this relation will be turned upside down. Companies will be free from the obligation to grow.

How much interest is there in creating the Economy for the Common Good?
Half of the regions in Austria now support companies that implement the Common Goods Balance Sheet using public money. There are also municipalities and towns that have decided to implement the Balance Sheet in the companies that they own, and some of them decided to prioritize dealing with companies that use the Balance Sheet.

The European Union is now implementing a directive on non-financial reporting that will be obligatory for companies with at least 500 employees. This is the first step towards the Common Goods Balance Sheet that we have created and that we propose.

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Mainstream Media loses election

SUBHEAD: The Mainstream Media bet the farm on Hillary - and lost American democracy.

By Charles Hugh Smith on 16 September 2015 for Of two Minds -
(http://www.oftwominds.com/blogsept16/voters9-16.html)


Image above: Montage of Dr. Drew Pinsky with Hillary and CNN logo. From (http://thefreethoughtproject.com/hillarys-health-drew-pinsky-cnn-mafia/).

The Mainstream Media (MSM) has forsaken its duty in a democracy and is a disgrace to investigative, unbiased journalism.

The mainstream media bet the farm on Hillary Clinton, confident that their dismissal of every skeptical inquiry as a "conspiracy" would guarantee her victory. It now appears they have lost their bet.

Let's do something radical and be honest for a moment: the mainstream media has smoothed the path to Hillary's coronation in countless often subtle ways.

MSM "Opinion" hacks have unleashed unrelenting attacks on legitimate inquiries with accusations of "conspiracy" and obsequious kow-towing headlines such as "Can we please stop talking about Hillary's health?"

Suggestions that the Clinton Foundation engaged in "pay to play" during Hillary's term as secretary of state are glossed over; yes, it looks bad, the MSM reluctantly admits, they they hurry to add that no impropriety can be proven in court.

Given the foundation is run by attorneys who obfuscate the meaning of the word "is," do you really think they're going to leave tracks that can make it to court?

The Democratic National Committee's corruption was downplayed, and the mainstream media's pathetic lack of inquiry was of a piece with old Soviet "news": a scapegoat or two is cut out of the leadership photo, and the DNC corruption machine moves on untouched.

This Is How Much It 'Costs' To Get An Ambassadorship: Guccifer 2.0 Leaks DNC 'Pay-To-Play' Donor List

Consider the subtle Orwellian play of The New York Times sidebar headline after Hillary's collapse on 9/11: "Hillary leaves 9/11 event early." Oh really? This was the substance of what happened, that the candidate "left early"?

All through the primaries, when Hillary won the NYT et al. splashed huge headlines declaring her victory. When Bernie won, headlines read "Hillary gains ground," not "Bernie wins another primary."

Rampant election fraud in the Democratic primaries was left uninvestigated, calling to mind the way Too Big To Fail banking fraud was left untouched by the mainstream media, which happily swallowed whole suspect official pronouncements that "subprime is contained" even as the financial system was veering into complete collapse in 2008.

There is an easy way to identify bias that we can all play at home: substitute "Sanders" or "Trump" for "Hillary" or "Clinton".

 If Donald Trump collapsed on the sidewalk and had to be tossed in the van like a sack of rice, do you think the mainstream media would be bleating, "can we please stop talking about Trump's health?" Please don't even try to claim that oh, yes, the MSM would rush to run that headline.

Do you honestly think CBS would edit out a reference to Bernie Sander's fainting "frequently"? Get real, people: the MSM only edits out negative stuff on Hillary.

Zero Hedge: CBS Caught Editing Clip - Bill Clinton Said Hillary Fainted "Frequently"
(http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-09-13/cbs-caught-editing-clip-transcript-which-bill-clinton-says-hillary-fainted-frequentl)

Do you honestly think a medical doctor with a TV program on CNN who questioned Donald Trump's health would find his show immediately taken off the air? Rather being dropped for questioning the MSM's scheduled coronation of their candidate, the doctor's show would have been pushed into prime-time and placed in rotation.

The mainstream media has failed:

• It has failed its sacred duty in a democracy to report the facts and let the voters decide what is or isn't important, it has engaged in orchestrated deception, refusing to report facts that cast a shadow over their chosen candidate,
  
• It has failed to cast a skeptical eye on its chosen candidate's actions and private accumulation of wealth,
  
• It has attempted to block legitimate inquiries into Hillary's wealth and health with crass, propagandistic attacks and smear campaigns against anyone who dares question Hillary's MSM-granted "right" to be coronated president in January 2017.

Look, we understand your fear of crossing the Clintons. Their "Enemies List" makes Richard Nixon's infamous list look like a squabble over seating at a church social. The body count of those who were in a position to rat-out the Clintons reminds observers of the way an astonishing number of eyewitnesses to JFK's assassination turned up dead under mysterious circumstances.

Once again, substitute names. Would the mainstream media be so incurious if Bernie Sanders had accumulated a $100 million fortune via foreign "donations" to his foundation while he was serving as Secretary of State?

If acquiring $100 million in "donations" from overseas dictators and corrupt officials is "normal" for the secretary of state, then where is John Kerry's $100 million in "donations"?

Look, if you love Hillary to death, that's your right. But we as a nation cannot afford to blind ourselves to blatant media bias and propagandistic suppression of legitimate inquiry, even on behalf of politicos we favor.

---

And Furthermore

SUBHEAD: How about presenting the facts and letting voters decide who's "Fit to Serve"?
By Charles Hugh Smith on 16 September 2016 for Of two Minds -
(http://www.oftwominds.com/blogsept16/voters9-16.html)

This simple two-step process would greatly diminish the Ministry of Propaganda's influence.

Here's a radical idea: how about presenting the facts and letting voters decide who is "fit to serve"? Consider the context of this presidential election and the judgment call as to who is "fit to serve":

1. Americans' Trust in Mass Media Sinks to New Low (Gallup"Americans' trust and confidence in the mass media 'to report the news fully, accurately and fairly' has dropped to its lowest level in Gallup polling history."
   
2. Both the Republican and Democratic candidates have highly unfavorable ratings; they may well be the most disliked nominees in American history.
   
3. The status quo in which voters are supposed to rubber-stamp the decisions made at the top of the wealth/power pyramid is falling out of favor.
   
4. Personal physicians are not disinterested parties; they serve the candidate, not the voting public. Their public claims of "fit to serve" suffer from irreconcilable conflicts of interest.

To best serve the interests of the nation and the voters, I propose that all candidates for the presidency submit to a thorough medical exam at an Army or Navy hospital that immediately releases the full results to the public. The attending physicians' names will be drawn from a pool of qualified staff at the start of the exam, making it impossible for anyone to threaten or buy off the attending physicians prior to the exam.

The exam will include chest x-rays, CT scans, neurological tests and the usual blood work.

The examinations will be overseen by healthcare/medical journalists to insure that the exams adhere to stardard practice and the results are posted immediately without any tampering.

The principles at work here are:

1. The public has a right to know the facts relating to each candidates' health.
   
2. Each candidate is given the exact same tests and treated exactly the same.
   
3. The public will decide who is "fit to serve" after reviewing the facts of the matter.
   
4. If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.

If any candidate prefers to keep the results of the health exam private, they can do so by exiting the race for the presidency.

In addition to the medical exam, each candidate will hold a two-hour press conference every week until election day. Representatives of the entire media, not just the handful of mainstream networks and newspapers, will be invited to attend. To secure the room, the public will not be admitted.

Candidates will be invited to sit in comfortable chairs and answer any and all questions on any subject. They will not be allowed to wear sunglasses or be attended by aides. Since the room will be secured (all media reps will be screened for weapons, all entrances properly sealed, etc.), there is no need for Secret Service personnel to hover over the candidates.

Why should any candidate object to these very transparent and uncontroversial demands? Why should any candidate object to a routine battery of medical tests and a weekly press conference?

If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.

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Iceland's Pirate Party

SUBHEAD: Radical democrats in favor of legalizing drugs and offering asylum to Edward Snowden running for office.

By Jon Henley on 12 August 2016 for the Guardian -
(https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/12/polls-suggests-icelands-pirate-party-form-next-government)


Image above: Gathering in June of 2015 in support of Pirate Party. From (https://talesfromtheloublog.wordpress.com/category/iceland/).

One of Europe’s most radical political parties is expected to gain its first taste of power after Iceland’s ruling coalition and opposition agreed to hold early elections caused by the Panama Papers scandal in October.

The Pirate party, whose platform includes direct democracy, greater government transparency, a new national constitution and asylum for US whistleblower Edward Snowden, will field candidates in every constituency and has been at or near the top of every opinion poll for over a year.

As befits a movement dedicated to reinventing democracy through new technology, it also aims to boost the youth vote by persuading the company developing Pokémon Go in Iceland to turn polling stations into Pokéstops.

“It’s gradually dawning on us, what’s happening,” Birgitta Jónsdóttir, leader of the Pirates’ parliamentary group, told the Guardian. “It’s strange and very exciting. But we are well prepared now. This is about change driven not by fear but by courage and hope. We are popular, not populist.”

The election, likely to be held on 29 October, follows the resignation of Iceland’s former prime minister Sigmundur Davið Gunnlaugsson, who became the first major victim of the Panama Papers in April after the leaked legal documents revealed he had millions of pounds of family money offshore.

In the face of some of the largest protests the small North Atlantic island nation had ever seen, the ruling Progressive and Independence parties replaced Gunnlaugsson with the agriculture and fisheries minister, Sigurður Ingi Jóhannsson, and promised elections before the end of the year.

Founded four years ago by a group of activists and hackers as part of an international anti-copyright movement, Iceland’s Pirates captured 5% of the vote in 2013 elections, winning three seats in the country’s 63-member parliament, the Althingi.

“Then, they were clearly a protest vote against the establishment,” said Eva Heida Önnudóttir, a political scientist at the University of Iceland who compares the party’s appeal to Icelandic voters to that of Spain’s Podemos, or Syriza in Greece.

“Three years later, they’ve distinguished themselves more clearly; it’s not just about protest. Even if they don’t have clear policies in many areas, people are genuinely drawn to their principles of transforming democracy and improving transparency.”

Propelled by public outrage at what is widely perceived as endemic cronyism in Icelandic politics and the seeming impunity of the country’s wealthy few, support for the party – which hangs a skull-and-crossbones flag in its parliamentary office – has rocketed.

A poll of polls for the online news outlet Kjarninn in late June had the Pirates comfortably the country’s largest party on 28.3%, four points clear of their closest rival, the conservative Independence party.

That lead has since narrowed slightly but most analysts are confident the Pirates will return between 18 and 20 MPs to the Althingi in October, putting them in a strong position to form Iceland’s next government.


Image above: Birgitta Jonsdottir, a co-founder of Iceland's Pirate Party. From (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/iceland-pirate-party-takes-big-lead-in-polls-ahead-of-election-next-year-a6834366.html).

Jónsdóttir said the party was willing to form a government with any coalition partner who subscribes to its agenda of “fundamental system change” – something the Independence party has already ruled out.

“I look at us and I think, we are equipped to do this,” she said. “Actually, the fact we haven’t done it before and that we won’t have any old-school people telling us how, means we’ll do it more carefully. We will be doing things very differently.”

Built on the belief that new technologies can help promote civic engagement and government transparency and accountability, the party believes in an “unlimited right” for citizens to be involved in the political decisions that affect them, with ordinary voters able to propose new legislation and decide on it in national referendums.

It also wants no limit on individuals’ rights to express their views and share information, unless doing so violates others’ rights, and proposes to decriminalise drugs, raise taxes on the rich, and pursue internet freedoms and copyright reform.

Önnudóttir said she could “very easily see” the party winning 20-25% of the vote. “After that, their success will depend on what they can really deliver, how much they make of their first term,” she said. “With numbers like those, you risk becoming a part of the establishment.”

This article was amended on Satuday 13 August 2016 to remove a reference to “Gunnlaugsson’s Independence party”. As pointed out in comments below, Gunnlaugsson is the chairman of the Progressive party.

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DNC Chair resigns after WikiLeaks

SUBHEAD: Debbie Wasserman Schultz steps down after DNC emails indicate bias towards Hillary Clinton.

By Tyler Durden on 25 July 2016 for Zero Hedge -
(http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-07-24/dnc-chair-wasserman-schultz-will-resign-end-partys-convention)


Image above: Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigns after DNC emails leaked.  From (http://www.politico.com/story/2016/05/the-democrats-wasserman-schultz-problem-223589).

The Democratic party was in turmoil on Sunday afternoon, when just hours ahead of the Democratic National Convention which begins on Monday on Philadelphia, the chair of the Party - DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz - resigned amid a furor over the humiliating Wikileaks email release, hoping to head off a growing rebellion by Bernie Sanders.

In a statement, DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz said the best way for the party to accomplish its goal of putting Clinton in the White House was for her to step down. Sanders had demanded earlier in the day that Wasserman Schultz resign.

"Going forward, the best way for me to accomplish those goals is to step down as Party Chair at the end of this convention," Wasserman Schultz said in a lengthy statement Sunday announcing her resignation. "I will open and close the Convention and I will address our delegates about the stakes involved in this election not only for Democrats, but for all Americans."

"We have planned a great and unified Convention this week and I hope and expect that the DNC team that has worked so hard to get us to this point will have the strong support of all Democrats in making sure this is the best convention we have ever had," she added.

Wasserman Schultz had became toxic to supporters of Bernie Sanders, who accused her rigging the Democratic presidential nominating process in favor of Clinton. But many Democrats had privately lost confidence in her leadership as well. 

 Emails posted online by Wikileaks and apparently stolen by hackers allegedly working for the Russian government (who as we noted earlier thoroughly denied such allegations) showed a plot by Democratic officials to damage Sanders.

The furor was a blow to a party keen on projecting stability in contrast to the volatility of the Republican National Convention. According to some, the DNC is now on pace to be far more scandalous than anything the republicans could have come up with, while the number of Bernie Sanders protesters overshadows the protesters that had attended the RNC in Celveland .
And in a shocking 'beyond caring what the average joe thinks' move, Hillary Clinton announced that Debbie Wasserman Schultz will serve as an honorary chair on Clinton's campaign, almost as if she is doing her best to provoke Bernie Sanders fans.
Hillary Clinton thanked her "longtime friend" Debbie Wasserman Schultz after the Florida congresswoman's decision to step down as chair of the Democratic National Committee.

"I am grateful to Debbie for getting the Democratic Party to this year's historic convention in Philadelphia, and I know that this week's events will be a success thanks to her hard work and leadership," she said.

"There's simply no one better at taking the fight to the Republicans than Debbie--which is why I am glad that she has agreed to serve as honorary chair of my campaign's 50-state program to gain ground and elect Democrats in every part of the country, and will continue to serve as a surrogate for my campaign nationally, in Florida, and in other key states."

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