Anti-Trump Pundits, Lying About What Their True Aim, Use Methods Which Should Be Illegal: Censoring Comments….
Machiavellianism is doing something for all to see, to get what one is truly looking for, the opposite effect.
Everybody asks me: who do you think will win the presidential election? The answer should be: which ideas do you think should win the next presidential election? Trump’s answer is: America First and MAGA. That will win the election… Except if better ideas can be imposed… Say America First and MEGA (Make Earth Great Again).
The reason Brexit is such a mess, is that British media lied for so long, that the British public can’t even feel, let alone think, right anymore.
Brits are now a bit like those Germans who believed all their problems came from the Jews and the French. 2019: Boris Johnson, the future PM, said ‘I’m wrenching Britain out of Europe, I think the French are turd…”
The point of view that all what ailed Germany were the French and the Jews (and the Poles, etc.) was so prevalent before 1888, that Friedrich Nietzsche wrote dozens of pages about it… to harshly criticize it and declared prophetically it would bring the greatest wars… As it did: 1914, 1939, and the Holocaust. Nietzsche didn’t write that much, so this is all the more striking… He dined himself as a “good European” rather than a “good German” (there couldn’t be such a thing according to him, pointing out his family came from Poland…).
I will consider a small and telling example of the attention plutocratic propaganda pays to detail: an article of the New York Times from Roger Cohen raged against Trump, after identifying The Donald to Boris Johnson. Silly: Just 0.3% of registered voters will pick the next UK’s Prime Minister. They are mostly white, aging and male – the Conservative Party’s grass roots members. Boris Johnson is all about Brexit, something grotesque… [3]
Whereas many issues tackled by Trump have value as serious problems. Obama wrestled with many issues presently handled by Trump: North Korea, Iran, Immigration, space colonization. A specific Trump issue is crucial: globalization, and the Chinese invasion of intellectual property (an issue I have seen close at hand)…
Trump was voted in by nearly half of voters, not .3%. The core of Cohen’s editorial closely embraced critiques I made more than ten years ago. Thus my comment pointed out that the mistakes were made ten years ago, not by Trump the Dismal, but by Obama the Great.
My comment was censored. The intolerable mood I tried to convey? That many things plutocratic didn’t originate with Trump, but with Obama the great, of before. This is of import as the Democrats try to fight what ails the US and the World. The disease, and why it was left untreated, better be defined correctly first.
Media pundits, are very well paid, very influential individuals working to please the plutocrats who own the media they work for. Just from their very definition, they are not working for We The People… But for the world’s wealthiest, or most powerful, people (from Gates to Putin).
Censoring my comment violated the new comment policy of the NYT (which supposedly checks only for “civility” of comments, not whether the ideas therein are pleasing to editorialists).
Censoring, or massively delaying critical comments matters, because, by putting our collective heads in the sand, loudly anti-Trump pundits are actually preparing for Trump’s victory. How does that make sense? As I said in the beginning of this essay, Machiavellianism is doing something for all to see, while arranging for the opposite effect to triumph.
Harris demolishing Biden by throwing buses at him, while Sanders, looking aghast, caught in the crossfire, wished he would die peacefully, in a galaxy far far away…
Willie Brown was the Democratic Mayor of San Francisco, for years… When he was 60 years old, his girlfriend was… Kamala Harris. [1] I agree with his opinion below.
Willie Brown June 29, 2019:
Bad news for Democrats — none of these candidates can beat Trump.
The first Democratic debates proved one thing: We still don’t have a candidate who can beat Donald Trump.
California Sen. Kamala Harris got all the attention for playing prosecutor in chief, but her case against former Vice President Joe Biden boiled down in some ways to a ringing call for forced school busing. It won’t be too hard for Trump to knock that one out of the park in 2020.
Biden did himself zero favors by telling Harris that he opposed only busing that was ordered by the federal government. It was a weird endorsement of states’ rights and local jurisdictions’ right to segregate schools. That’s the best argument he could marshal against busing little kids miles across town?
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders came across as Rip Van Bernie, looking and sounding as if it were still 2016.”
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In response to “Trump, Johnson and the Hole in the Doughnut. Will two charlatans and narcissists with hollow centers lead the free world?”
I sent the following comment censored by New York Times, July 6, 2019. To fully appreciate the comment, one has to read the gist of Roger Cohen editorial… with which I agree. [2]
“Confusing Trump and Johnson has merits, but only so far. Boris Johnson helped cause Brexit: short of the dismal Cameron, and the perfidious British Parliament (which retrospectively made the Brexit poll legislating), Johnson was the most important actor in Brexit. Trump didn’t cause most of the surrounding disasters
Trump didn’t cause the rising inequality in the US and the West. Nor did Trump cause the decrease of life expectancy in the USA, which started under Obama the Great thanks to the excellent Obamacare he instituted (which prevented our family doctor we have had for 30 years: it would cost us $700 to do, for each visit). Nor did Trump cause the impunity of the bankers: here again you have to thank Obama the Great. And the destruction of the financial safeguards instituted by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1933 happened under Clinton, another “Democrat” well to the right of Reagan.
Reagan and Bush Senior nationalized more than 2,000 (two thousand) banks. Confronted to a more terrible financial crisis, how many banks did Obama the Great nationalize? Zero.
But Obama the Great saw that many plutocrats had lost all their money to smarter colleagues. How could the economy, and society still function? As Joe Biden said, billionaires are nice people. Promptly TARP (Transferring Assets to Rich People) send them trillions.
A lot of the destruction of the Roman republic, and the present West, was caused by globalization, which enables the wealthiest to evade the laws of Republics, and makes them accomplices of overseas dictators. This happened with Hitler.
Plutocratic globalization nowadays, just as 2,000 years ago, had the exact same effect. To wish to return to the state of globalization, as in the last year of Obama the Great, is not a progressive option.”
After he was done serving plutocrats as president, Obama the Great flew out of Palm Springs on the private jumbo jet of his friend plutocrat Richard Branson of “Virgin”, directly to the latter’s private island, a tax haven.
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One thing we know about plutocrats is that, as per their definition, they love to make, and, or, see common people suffer.So do their servants, and they work to make us suffer… Be it only by confusing us. It’s intriguing that the New York Times, although much of its commentariat is just made of pseudo-leftists on automatic, is so insure that its readership will realize how biased their propaganda is, that they still use dirty tricks against my comment (delaying them two days is another favorite… While checking with all secret plutocratic conspiracies?)
Patrice Ayme
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[1] Dirt California Politics; The Brown Connection:
Kamala Harris’ first significant political role was an appointment by her powerful then-boyfriend Willie Brown, three decades her senior, to a California medical board that has been criticized as a landing spot for patronage jobs and kickbacks.
Then 30, Harris was dating 60-year-old Willie Brown, at the time the Democratic speaker of the California State Assembly, when he placed her on the California Medical Assistance Commission in 1994. The position paid over $70,000 per year, $120,700 in current money, and Harris served on the board until 1998.
Harris (right) advancing her career, one cuddle at a time… With Brown as cuddly bear…
The medical commission met twice a month. Harris, now a United States senator for California since 2017 and Democratic presidential candidate, missed 20% of the meetings each year, according to commission records obtained by the Washington Examiner. The seven-member board was mostly composed of late-career semi-retired former state officials. At 30 years old, Harris was the youngest appointee by three decades.
Brown, in a letter to Harris, wrote that he was “pleased to appoint” her to the board, which oversaw the payment of insurance providers for state-subsidized MediCal recipients. “I am confident that your knowledge and experience will contribute significantly to the important work of the Commission,” he wrote.
Harris had no medical background, according to the resume she submitted to Brown at the time. Her experience consisted of four years as a deputy prosecutor.
Granlund, a former California Republican state assemblyman who worked with the commission while Harris was on the board said: “The boards are considered plumb appointments as they require no work, no policy credentials, and are paid the equivalent of a full-time [state] senator for arriving at a one- to two-hour meeting each month… crewing the speaker has its rewards.”
Brown recently acknowledged in the San Francisco Chronicle that “Sure, I dated Kamala Harris. So what?… I may have influenced” Harris’s career. “Yes, we dated. It was more than 20 years ago. Yes, I may have influenced her career by appointing her to two state commissions when I was Assembly speaker.” Money for nothing… Brown noted that he had helped other politicians throughout his career: And I certainly helped with her first race for district attorney in San Francisco. I have also helped the careers of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Gov. Gavin Newsom, Sen. Dianne Feinstein and a host of other politicians. Harris was the “only one, who after I helped her, sent word that I would be indicted if I so much as jaywalked’ while she was D.A.” He added: “That’s politics for ya.”
It gets better than that. Harris and Brown broke up after Brown met 32-year-old San Francisco socialite Carolyn Carpeneti, a woman with whom he would later have a daughter.
While those two were dating, Carpeneti was paid (at least, and probably much more than) $2.33 million for campaign work from a network of nonprofit groups and committees run by Brown and his associates, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
“If this doesn’t cross the line, it comes awfully close,” Jim Knox, executive director of California Common Cause, told the San Francisco Chronicle at the time. “At the very least it seems questionable for [Carpeneti] to have free use of a public resource in her role as private campaign consultant.”
That wasn’t the first or last time Brown would steer benefits to women he was dating. In the 1980s, he reportedly hired his girlfriend Wendy Linka as a fundraiser, and she was later hired as a marketing director for city commissions after Brown became mayor.
Machiavellianism again: Brown also continued to aid Harris’s political career after their split, supporting her successful 2003 campaign for district attorney (powerful San Francisco mayor, Brown knew all the powers that be in California, from present and ex governors to assembly speakers).
An spectacularly ingrate Harris called Brown an “albatross hanging around my neck” in a 2003 San Francisco Weekly profile, in which she said that the “mere mention of their former liaison makes her shoulders tense, her hands clench, and her eyes narrow… His career is over; I will be alive and kicking for the next 40 years. I do not owe him a thing … Willie Brown is not going to be around. He’s gone — hello people, move on.”
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NYT Cohen on Trump-Johnson to which I responded in my censored comment:
“How did this happen? How did two nations of laws dedicated to individual liberty come around to the semiotics of Trump: It’s O.K. to stiff people; it’s O.K. to lie; it’s O.K. to wink at racism?
The answer lies in the Six I’s: Inequality, impunity, invisibility, immigration, inversion and the internet.
Inequality that has risen as workers in the bottom 60 percent of American society have seen no real wage increase since 1980 while the richest 1 percent now own more wealth than the bottom 90 percent.
Impunity that allowed the designers of the financial weapons of mass destruction that bankrupted many millions of people in 2008 to walk away. To conclude that the system was rigged was then only logical.
Invisibility that gave many citizens living far from the wired metropolises at the nexus of globalization the impression that they counted for nothing, as their hospitals died, public transport disappeared, their schools closed and their jobs went elsewhere.
Immigration that, in both Europe and the United States, brought millions of undocumented migrants to the borders without these societies showing the capacity to agree on a policy that was humane, firm and clear — and, in the American case, that reconciled the demands of a nation of immigrants and a nation of laws.
Inversion of the values of what had been white-male-dominated societies, giving rise to culture wars ranging across the charged questions of race, gender and identity, with cities and the hinterland often at violent odds.
The internet that, through social media, destroyed traditional mediators of society, like established political parties, and empowered politics of the mob. What counts today is not persuasion but mobilization.
Here was the grist for Trump’s populism — and that of his acolytes across the West. Here were the sources of anger and fear that could be exploited. Here’s “the American carnage” he could leverage. Here’s why, in the name of America First nationalism, he went about trashing the multilateral postwar order America had forged. Here’s why he tweets not only of a second term but of staying in power beyond that if the masses demand it. Trump’s inner despot is like Dr. Strangelove’s arm: He can’t keep it down.
Like Johnson, Trump is not an “aberration,” as Joe Biden has suggested. He’s a symptom. He won’t go away absent treatment of the symptoms. That won’t be easy, but it’s doable because Trump’s doughnut not only has a big hole in it; it’s rotten to the core.
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The preceding is indicating that Cohen is not all together well: if the situation is as bad as he describes, if Trump is a symptom, well, why not to focus on the disease, rather than the scratch, Trump which irks him so much?
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[3] The EU had already been on its knees, for decades, begging Great Britain to do as it pleased, and to get ever wealthier at the detriment of the rest of Europe. Great Britain had the best imaginable deal. (So did Switzerland, also now the object of an EU crackdown…)
The UK got a big rebate from the EU. The UK was not in the Schengen area… while profiting of an immigration which it didn’t stop, by refusing appropriate police controls (slaves for free). The UK was an exception to the Euro currency… while being allowed to become the main clearinghouse for EURO trades. The UK was an exception to the principle of ever closer Union and would continue to be so in the future, indefinitely.
Then the EU announced the coming of new, stricter tax avoidance regulations in 2016, and a crackdown on tax havens. Suddenly the glorious British leaders, and their global plutocrat friends, with their offshore, or ill-gained wealth, decide they would rather get the UK out of the European Union, rather than having them and their friends pay their fair share of tax. For a better idea, consider many Obama friends such as Richard Branson.
That’s all there is to know about Brexit.
Patrice Ayme's Thoughts 