My heartfelt thanks to you all. I am delighted to find myself here in the most politically compatible on-line companionship I’ve yet encountered. (I've also posted a comment on Jim's 19 February "Stop Being Shocked.") Meanwhile thanks again.
Every cabinet nomination person that are now in position as head of their departments were chosen for the ability to be loyal to the 47-Git', the fascism playbook project 2025, and the ability to willingly destroy & cause chaos and kill by their purposeful incompetence.
And at the top of these ' Death Makers' is Elon Musk & Trump.
Remember Musk is no Republican- he is a fully dedicated Nazi - placed by his ability to pay for his position : of the Nazi wrecker of our Country.
To a narcissistic sociopath, the life of a child in Sudan or Texas or a poor senior doesn't matter, because they can't really grasp that people other than themselves are real. To them, we're just props in their show, especially if we're different from them by age, ethnicity, gender, nationality, or socioeconomic status. They also tend to lack curiosity, and sociopaths don't learn much from experience (I worked for years as a psychotherapist in my state's prison system, so I spent a lot of time trying to get through to people like this), so they can't really grasp the ideas that they're wrong or that other people matter.
Unfortunately, somewhere between 35% and 40% of people - all people, everywhere, throughout history - are, for some reason, psychologically inclined to authoritarianism. They value obedience over principle - they're biased toward being slaves, in other words - and would rather let someone else make their decisions for them than have to take responsibility for those decisions and for possible mistakes. They choose to abdicate adulthood.
People like Trump, Musk, Vance, and their second-tier gang members may not understand empathy, but they have a nose for this kind of vulnerability and a knack for exploiting it via gaslighting and thuggery.
The only defense is institutions and laws strong enough to frustrate them. The U.S. has (usually) gotten by with norms standing in for formal institutions and laws, but norms only work on people who give a damn about norms. Each time those in power have steamrolled norms in the past, America has eventually come to our senses and strengthened the institutions and norms enough to keep that specific abuse from recurring. If we make it through this tsunami of autocracy, we're going to need to do a whole lot of that strengthening.
I have 25 suggestions:
1. No insurrectionists or convicted felons are allowed to run for office, period (hint: if they can't vote in an election, they shouldn't be a candidate in that election);
2. No presidential immunity, during or after time in office;
3. No presidential self-pardons (duh);
4. Candidates for president and VP, Congress, and state gubernatorial and legislative offices must dispose of assets or put them into blind trusts until after they either lose the election or finish their terms if elected (if this is too big a hardship, don't run for office!) - same for nominees for the federal or state bench;
5. No "acting" evasions of Senate confirmation for important offices;
6. Term limits, age limits, and binding ethical codes for the Supreme Court, the federal bench in general, and both chambers of Congress;
7. Elimination of the Electoral College and national elections by national popular vote with paper ballots;
8. No rules against judicial nominations for any set period before an election;
9. No letting the Senate majority leader or the Speaker of the House just refuse to let bills come up for votes;
10. No filibusters and no 60-vote threshold for a Senate vote;
11. A FISA Court-like institution to eliminate "executive privilege";
12. No unaccountable "advisors" or their employees having any authority over Federal staffing or funding;
13. Elimination of seizure or forfeiture of assets unless and until the subject is convicted, with all appeals exhausted, of a crime of which those assets are the ill-gotten gains;
14. Corporate "personhood" is permanently barred, by Constitutional amendment if needed;
15. Any presidential interference in Congressionally mandated funding is not only blocked but results in prompt and mandatory impeachment.;
16. No presidential abrogations of Congressionally ratified treaties;
17. Any presidential "emergency" declarations must be ratified by 2/3 majorities in both chambers of Congress within one week and are not grounds for impoundment of previously legislated funding;
18. Any cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, or VA benefits must be approved by at least 2/3 vote in both chambers of Congress;
19. No artificial debt limit used to stop mandated federal functions or default on national debts;
20. Former convicts' voting rights restored once they've done their time;
21. Any increases in Congressional salaries must be matched by equal-percentage increases in the national minimum wage;
22. Pre-1980 progressive income tax rates will be restored, and any future tax cuts for corporations or people with incomes over $250K/year will be barred unless (a) they are matched by equal-percentage cuts for lower tax brackets and (b) they can be carried out without cutting staffing or funding for any federal program;
23. The Social Security tax ceiling will be eliminated, so that the wealthy will pay into the program at the same rates as Americans who aren't rich;
24. Constitutional protections against either discrimination or favoritism will be expanded to cover not only religion, ethnicity, national origin, gender, sexual identity, disabilities, but also language fluency, and literacy; and
25. Strengthening the First Amendment's Establishment Clause to absolutely bar public funding of religious or other private education.
Excellent ideas, Jim! I suspect that #13 (seizure of assets) comes from some personal experience?
Yours is a list of at least some of the changes needed to the U.S. Constitution. The only way we’ll get these done is essentially a new Revolution. Just restoring the Democratic Party to power will likely mean NO CHANGES AT ALL. Not one of your ideas would make it through. But revolutions are hard things to do.
Our task now is to survive the current authoritarian onslaught, fight to keep the ideas of freedom of speech, thought, and existence alive, and to help a younger generation learn that “2+2=5” is a lie (a reference to ‘1984’s doublespeak).
The fight will continue as long as we keep it alive.
#13 hasn't happened to me, but a friend was on a cross-country road trip with a buddy of his and some local plainclothes types approached them and started very aggressively and persistently trying to entice them into a sketchy drug deal (friend and his buddy were both tattooed longhaired types riding Harleys.) Luckily, my friend was an ex-cop as well as a biker, and he immediately realized that the end goal was forfeiture of their bikes, so he told them he knew what they were doing and ran them off.
Yes, Americans' most pressing need is to survive and overcome this, as you said, authoritarian onslaught.
In other countries in similar situations the populations have been unable to do that - I'm thinking of interwar Germany and Spain, post-USSR Russia, Argentina, Chile, etc.
But none of those places had the long-standing cultural expectations of civil liberties that exists here, or as strong a "you're not the boss of me" streak in the national personality.
Also, none of them had a federalized mix of national, regional, and local governments that we have, making it harder to concentrate power in an imperial executive; none of them had as large and widely distributed population, period.
I'm not complacent, though - no "it can't happen here" illusions.
I don't have a lot of hope for the Democratic party, and the GOP is a lost cause and an active threat. We need to somehow end the death grip on the electoral system those parties share (the only thing that brings them together is the threat of a third party becoming strong enough to be relevant.) Personally, I think we'd be better off with a real multi-party system - I have no use for the Greens, though; they're elitists who apparently think it's beneath them to run for offices lower than the level of governor or president - no city councils or school boards for them. And the Libertarians are just self-centered social Darwinists and don't grasp the ideas of the social contract, mutual obligation, or fundamental human rights (SF author Kim Stanley Robinson succinctly summed them up as "anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.")
We need to overcome our tendency to expect some powerful figure(s) to rescue us - however good their intentions, special prosecutors and candidates for high office can't do it for us. We need people to realize that we're all participants. Gandhi did it in India when he organized civil disobedience on a massive scale.
My wife and I are both disabled seniors. I'm a retired Marine; I served for twenty years, went in as a healthy teenager and came out with PTSD and a body that an orthopedic surgeon said had fifty years worth of wear and tear rather than twenty. We have to depend on Social Security disability, Medicare, my military retirement, and in my case the VA for nearly all our health care and income (I get a few thousand bucks a year in royalties from some books I have in print, but everything else comes from the federal government.
Contrary to what Trump's Treasury secretary says, a missed Social Security payment would not be something we could just wait on without complaining, and we aren't fraudsters. It would mean defaulting on our mortgage and being unable to buy groceries. Talk about "let them eat cake . . . "
And someone who can read needs to explain to Trump what that Article II he can't read actually says about the extent and limits of his powers and responsibilities, breaking it down into one-syllable words and lots of pictures.
And we need to cut off all Elon Musk's contracts with the government, as an enemy of the state, and deport him back to South Africa. The only reason he left in the first place was to dodge the draft there (no wonder Trump relates to him!) and he has made himself a clear enemy of our Constitution.
Aaargh . . . . my kids are in their forties now, my oldest grandchild is in his twenties, and I have a four-year-old great grandson. They're the ones I really worry about.
Thank you, Jim, for daring say aloud the ecogenocidal purpose that is perhaps the best-kept secret both of U.S. policy and of neoliberalism's modification of Original Nazi eugenics. In either instance, the intended result is the deliberate extermination of unwanted people at home and abroad, not with (currently unfashionable) death camps, but by deliberately murderous termination of the socioeconomic and medical services vital to modern-day survival. Thus too are the racist triumphs inflicted by the mass deaths -- the literally millions of non-whites slain -- in the allegedly "lost" wars in Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East.
How did this come about? Circumstantial evidence traces it back to the congressional immunity given in 1934 to the (bipartisan), "too-rich-to-jail" perpe-traitors of the 1933 Bankers' Plot, who but for the heroism of retired U.S. Marine Corps General Smedley Butler and the support of the U.S. Communist Party would have made the nation a satellite of Hitler's Greater Reich.
But the associated race hatred and its ethos of white Christian male supremacy dates at least back to antebellum times if not all the way to 1492. However, the nazification of the nation did not acquire its triumphant boost until after Germany lost the battle of Stalingrad in 1943, which proved the Original Nazis would lose the war, and which convinced their supporters in the financial aristocracy that owns all U.S. politicians (and thus controls all governance at every level) to begin adopting Original Nazi war criminals as advisors and comrades-at-arms. Thus granted strategic, tactical and technological omnipotence by these minions of Absolute Evil, the U.S. aristocrats' multi-generation scheming has given them the final, globally apocalyptic victory implicit in the Elon/Trump/Schumer triumvirate.
And until we awaken to the magnitude of our defeat and to the corollary horror we are beset by the most dangerous, most powerfully cunning manifestation of Absolute Evil in our planet's history, we will remain unable to build an effective resistance.
If/when the USA goes full blown nazi apartheid, the problem will be maintaining it, when the population are constantly reminded of the ‘old republic’ in movies and music.
An example in “The man in the high castle”, the resistance sees the alternative utopian reality, and they can’t let go.
No doubt the (real) reason for both the (fiercely bipartisan) refusal to update Medicare and the savage escalation of the war against Social Security and all other domestic socioeconomic safety-net programs is the fact we elders -- I turn 85 in a few more days -- dangerously remember when the United States was, at least for its white-supremacist majority, a genuinely democratic republic. That's why -- from the perspective of the Elon/Trump/Schumer triumvirate -- we're near the top of the target list.
If the resistance doesn’t make an ad with Ludnick talking about his mother-in-law missing her social security check and not complaining because she’s not a “fraudster,” it will be political malpractice. Pure gold for someone like Rick Wilson. How I love the repulsive Ludnick’s comment and delivery, because it can SO be used against this clueless, heartless, lying billionaire and the thieving regime he’s a part of.
Jim, your Substack articles are absolutely spot-on every single article. They inform beyond measure, and in my opinion, they are not hyperbole. Was not aware of the impact that measles had on the immune system. I did not receive the measles vaccine and contracted an extreme case at 9 years old. Two years later, I contracted a deadly kidney disease that nearly killed me; now, I know why. In fact, there was a large epidemic of the measles, and there were many of the kids in our county that contracted the same kidney disease, and sadly, they died. Your outstanding reporting has connected the dots to a longtime mystery — remarkable! Thank you...
Glad you survived, Bonnie. Measles is indeed grave illness. No vaccine existed when I had it -- June-July 1951 (damn neared killed me; delirious with 105 degree fever for two days; fever broke just as family doctor was about to hospitalize me; abed for six weeks; ruined my eyesight; knocked me out of a two-week Boy-Scout-camp stay for which I'd been saving earnings for a year). In any other world but this one, the entire Elon/Trump/Schumer regime would already be on trial for crimes against humanity.
Hi Bonnie, I don't know if you are aware of this, and I'm trying to educate people who had measles, mumps & rubella pre-vax availability. As far as measles go, the truth is opposite what RFK preaches; immunity wanes with time from measles infection while the vax seems to be forever. I had all 3 diseases & just had my antibody titers done. I have no evidence of immunity (no antibodies) to all 3. The polio vaccine is still effective.
My heartfelt thanks to you all. I am delighted to find myself here in the most politically compatible on-line companionship I’ve yet encountered. (I've also posted a comment on Jim's 19 February "Stop Being Shocked.") Meanwhile thanks again.
Every cabinet nomination person that are now in position as head of their departments were chosen for the ability to be loyal to the 47-Git', the fascism playbook project 2025, and the ability to willingly destroy & cause chaos and kill by their purposeful incompetence.
And at the top of these ' Death Makers' is Elon Musk & Trump.
Remember Musk is no Republican- he is a fully dedicated Nazi - placed by his ability to pay for his position : of the Nazi wrecker of our Country.
To a narcissistic sociopath, the life of a child in Sudan or Texas or a poor senior doesn't matter, because they can't really grasp that people other than themselves are real. To them, we're just props in their show, especially if we're different from them by age, ethnicity, gender, nationality, or socioeconomic status. They also tend to lack curiosity, and sociopaths don't learn much from experience (I worked for years as a psychotherapist in my state's prison system, so I spent a lot of time trying to get through to people like this), so they can't really grasp the ideas that they're wrong or that other people matter.
Unfortunately, somewhere between 35% and 40% of people - all people, everywhere, throughout history - are, for some reason, psychologically inclined to authoritarianism. They value obedience over principle - they're biased toward being slaves, in other words - and would rather let someone else make their decisions for them than have to take responsibility for those decisions and for possible mistakes. They choose to abdicate adulthood.
People like Trump, Musk, Vance, and their second-tier gang members may not understand empathy, but they have a nose for this kind of vulnerability and a knack for exploiting it via gaslighting and thuggery.
The only defense is institutions and laws strong enough to frustrate them. The U.S. has (usually) gotten by with norms standing in for formal institutions and laws, but norms only work on people who give a damn about norms. Each time those in power have steamrolled norms in the past, America has eventually come to our senses and strengthened the institutions and norms enough to keep that specific abuse from recurring. If we make it through this tsunami of autocracy, we're going to need to do a whole lot of that strengthening.
I have 25 suggestions:
1. No insurrectionists or convicted felons are allowed to run for office, period (hint: if they can't vote in an election, they shouldn't be a candidate in that election);
2. No presidential immunity, during or after time in office;
3. No presidential self-pardons (duh);
4. Candidates for president and VP, Congress, and state gubernatorial and legislative offices must dispose of assets or put them into blind trusts until after they either lose the election or finish their terms if elected (if this is too big a hardship, don't run for office!) - same for nominees for the federal or state bench;
5. No "acting" evasions of Senate confirmation for important offices;
6. Term limits, age limits, and binding ethical codes for the Supreme Court, the federal bench in general, and both chambers of Congress;
7. Elimination of the Electoral College and national elections by national popular vote with paper ballots;
8. No rules against judicial nominations for any set period before an election;
9. No letting the Senate majority leader or the Speaker of the House just refuse to let bills come up for votes;
10. No filibusters and no 60-vote threshold for a Senate vote;
11. A FISA Court-like institution to eliminate "executive privilege";
12. No unaccountable "advisors" or their employees having any authority over Federal staffing or funding;
13. Elimination of seizure or forfeiture of assets unless and until the subject is convicted, with all appeals exhausted, of a crime of which those assets are the ill-gotten gains;
14. Corporate "personhood" is permanently barred, by Constitutional amendment if needed;
15. Any presidential interference in Congressionally mandated funding is not only blocked but results in prompt and mandatory impeachment.;
16. No presidential abrogations of Congressionally ratified treaties;
17. Any presidential "emergency" declarations must be ratified by 2/3 majorities in both chambers of Congress within one week and are not grounds for impoundment of previously legislated funding;
18. Any cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, or VA benefits must be approved by at least 2/3 vote in both chambers of Congress;
19. No artificial debt limit used to stop mandated federal functions or default on national debts;
20. Former convicts' voting rights restored once they've done their time;
21. Any increases in Congressional salaries must be matched by equal-percentage increases in the national minimum wage;
22. Pre-1980 progressive income tax rates will be restored, and any future tax cuts for corporations or people with incomes over $250K/year will be barred unless (a) they are matched by equal-percentage cuts for lower tax brackets and (b) they can be carried out without cutting staffing or funding for any federal program;
23. The Social Security tax ceiling will be eliminated, so that the wealthy will pay into the program at the same rates as Americans who aren't rich;
24. Constitutional protections against either discrimination or favoritism will be expanded to cover not only religion, ethnicity, national origin, gender, sexual identity, disabilities, but also language fluency, and literacy; and
25. Strengthening the First Amendment's Establishment Clause to absolutely bar public funding of religious or other private education.
Excellent ideas, Jim! I suspect that #13 (seizure of assets) comes from some personal experience?
Yours is a list of at least some of the changes needed to the U.S. Constitution. The only way we’ll get these done is essentially a new Revolution. Just restoring the Democratic Party to power will likely mean NO CHANGES AT ALL. Not one of your ideas would make it through. But revolutions are hard things to do.
Our task now is to survive the current authoritarian onslaught, fight to keep the ideas of freedom of speech, thought, and existence alive, and to help a younger generation learn that “2+2=5” is a lie (a reference to ‘1984’s doublespeak).
The fight will continue as long as we keep it alive.
Thanks!
#13 hasn't happened to me, but a friend was on a cross-country road trip with a buddy of his and some local plainclothes types approached them and started very aggressively and persistently trying to entice them into a sketchy drug deal (friend and his buddy were both tattooed longhaired types riding Harleys.) Luckily, my friend was an ex-cop as well as a biker, and he immediately realized that the end goal was forfeiture of their bikes, so he told them he knew what they were doing and ran them off.
Yes, Americans' most pressing need is to survive and overcome this, as you said, authoritarian onslaught.
In other countries in similar situations the populations have been unable to do that - I'm thinking of interwar Germany and Spain, post-USSR Russia, Argentina, Chile, etc.
But none of those places had the long-standing cultural expectations of civil liberties that exists here, or as strong a "you're not the boss of me" streak in the national personality.
Also, none of them had a federalized mix of national, regional, and local governments that we have, making it harder to concentrate power in an imperial executive; none of them had as large and widely distributed population, period.
I'm not complacent, though - no "it can't happen here" illusions.
I don't have a lot of hope for the Democratic party, and the GOP is a lost cause and an active threat. We need to somehow end the death grip on the electoral system those parties share (the only thing that brings them together is the threat of a third party becoming strong enough to be relevant.) Personally, I think we'd be better off with a real multi-party system - I have no use for the Greens, though; they're elitists who apparently think it's beneath them to run for offices lower than the level of governor or president - no city councils or school boards for them. And the Libertarians are just self-centered social Darwinists and don't grasp the ideas of the social contract, mutual obligation, or fundamental human rights (SF author Kim Stanley Robinson succinctly summed them up as "anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.")
We need to overcome our tendency to expect some powerful figure(s) to rescue us - however good their intentions, special prosecutors and candidates for high office can't do it for us. We need people to realize that we're all participants. Gandhi did it in India when he organized civil disobedience on a massive scale.
My wife and I are both disabled seniors. I'm a retired Marine; I served for twenty years, went in as a healthy teenager and came out with PTSD and a body that an orthopedic surgeon said had fifty years worth of wear and tear rather than twenty. We have to depend on Social Security disability, Medicare, my military retirement, and in my case the VA for nearly all our health care and income (I get a few thousand bucks a year in royalties from some books I have in print, but everything else comes from the federal government.
Contrary to what Trump's Treasury secretary says, a missed Social Security payment would not be something we could just wait on without complaining, and we aren't fraudsters. It would mean defaulting on our mortgage and being unable to buy groceries. Talk about "let them eat cake . . . "
And someone who can read needs to explain to Trump what that Article II he can't read actually says about the extent and limits of his powers and responsibilities, breaking it down into one-syllable words and lots of pictures.
And we need to cut off all Elon Musk's contracts with the government, as an enemy of the state, and deport him back to South Africa. The only reason he left in the first place was to dodge the draft there (no wonder Trump relates to him!) and he has made himself a clear enemy of our Constitution.
Aaargh . . . . my kids are in their forties now, my oldest grandchild is in his twenties, and I have a four-year-old great grandson. They're the ones I really worry about.
Thank you, Jim, for daring say aloud the ecogenocidal purpose that is perhaps the best-kept secret both of U.S. policy and of neoliberalism's modification of Original Nazi eugenics. In either instance, the intended result is the deliberate extermination of unwanted people at home and abroad, not with (currently unfashionable) death camps, but by deliberately murderous termination of the socioeconomic and medical services vital to modern-day survival. Thus too are the racist triumphs inflicted by the mass deaths -- the literally millions of non-whites slain -- in the allegedly "lost" wars in Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East.
How did this come about? Circumstantial evidence traces it back to the congressional immunity given in 1934 to the (bipartisan), "too-rich-to-jail" perpe-traitors of the 1933 Bankers' Plot, who but for the heroism of retired U.S. Marine Corps General Smedley Butler and the support of the U.S. Communist Party would have made the nation a satellite of Hitler's Greater Reich.
But the associated race hatred and its ethos of white Christian male supremacy dates at least back to antebellum times if not all the way to 1492. However, the nazification of the nation did not acquire its triumphant boost until after Germany lost the battle of Stalingrad in 1943, which proved the Original Nazis would lose the war, and which convinced their supporters in the financial aristocracy that owns all U.S. politicians (and thus controls all governance at every level) to begin adopting Original Nazi war criminals as advisors and comrades-at-arms. Thus granted strategic, tactical and technological omnipotence by these minions of Absolute Evil, the U.S. aristocrats' multi-generation scheming has given them the final, globally apocalyptic victory implicit in the Elon/Trump/Schumer triumvirate.
And until we awaken to the magnitude of our defeat and to the corollary horror we are beset by the most dangerous, most powerfully cunning manifestation of Absolute Evil in our planet's history, we will remain unable to build an effective resistance.
If/when the USA goes full blown nazi apartheid, the problem will be maintaining it, when the population are constantly reminded of the ‘old republic’ in movies and music.
An example in “The man in the high castle”, the resistance sees the alternative utopian reality, and they can’t let go.
No doubt the (real) reason for both the (fiercely bipartisan) refusal to update Medicare and the savage escalation of the war against Social Security and all other domestic socioeconomic safety-net programs is the fact we elders -- I turn 85 in a few more days -- dangerously remember when the United States was, at least for its white-supremacist majority, a genuinely democratic republic. That's why -- from the perspective of the Elon/Trump/Schumer triumvirate -- we're near the top of the target list.
If the resistance doesn’t make an ad with Ludnick talking about his mother-in-law missing her social security check and not complaining because she’s not a “fraudster,” it will be political malpractice. Pure gold for someone like Rick Wilson. How I love the repulsive Ludnick’s comment and delivery, because it can SO be used against this clueless, heartless, lying billionaire and the thieving regime he’s a part of.
If we have a problem, we are supposed to visit our local SS office in person. Except, Leon closed it.
Jim, your Substack articles are absolutely spot-on every single article. They inform beyond measure, and in my opinion, they are not hyperbole. Was not aware of the impact that measles had on the immune system. I did not receive the measles vaccine and contracted an extreme case at 9 years old. Two years later, I contracted a deadly kidney disease that nearly killed me; now, I know why. In fact, there was a large epidemic of the measles, and there were many of the kids in our county that contracted the same kidney disease, and sadly, they died. Your outstanding reporting has connected the dots to a longtime mystery — remarkable! Thank you...
Glad you survived, Bonnie. Measles is indeed grave illness. No vaccine existed when I had it -- June-July 1951 (damn neared killed me; delirious with 105 degree fever for two days; fever broke just as family doctor was about to hospitalize me; abed for six weeks; ruined my eyesight; knocked me out of a two-week Boy-Scout-camp stay for which I'd been saving earnings for a year). In any other world but this one, the entire Elon/Trump/Schumer regime would already be on trial for crimes against humanity.
Hi Bonnie, I don't know if you are aware of this, and I'm trying to educate people who had measles, mumps & rubella pre-vax availability. As far as measles go, the truth is opposite what RFK preaches; immunity wanes with time from measles infection while the vax seems to be forever. I had all 3 diseases & just had my antibody titers done. I have no evidence of immunity (no antibodies) to all 3. The polio vaccine is still effective.
I am so embarrassed. I read my lab report incorrectly. I have immunity to all 3, though RFK is still incorrect. I'm sorry.