The secretive, but extremely well-funded Dark Money groups are very good at what they do: creating visceral fears in potential voters. They know what works, and it creates doubt and even support for their chosen nominees. The nominee goes along in the belief that winning is worth degradation of the political process into a climate of fear and distrust on behalf of people who have an even larger stake in the political process. These groups, for all that I can tell, seek to transform America into the sort of country in which survival is a privilege to be earned through undemanding, uncritical obedience to some Master Class. See also "slavery" and "serfdom".
I may tire of pounding this message, but those who contribute the toxic ads (they are offered so late in the campaign that no refutation is easy) have a barely-hidden agenda: transformation of the political process into a two-tiered debate in which the nominal candidate of the Dark Money interest gets to pose as a nice family person while the Democrat becomes a dangerous radical for failing to believe that the best situation possible for the common man is to be a helpless serf on behalf of people who believe that economic power rightly decides politics, and that nothing rightly gets in its way. In effect,
Profit, profit over everything!
Damn the public, give 'em the shaft!
We don't want any Commie unions
Our profit to annoy!
Send the liberals and their pinko friends
All on one-way journeys to Hanoi!
(to the tune of the German national anthem).
These interests would delight in reducing Humanity into desperate automatons at a very low level on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. easy to control due to economic insecurity. Their ideology is nearly fascist, although they dare not admit that their dream is something so alien and horrible as Mussolini's Italy (if eventually a warmongering power) or Pinochet's Chile (if cautious about military adventures, the most likely things to bring down an oppressive regime). The debate on wars for profit is not yet ready, but if there is any pattern about who starts wars (dictatorial and despotic regimes are most likely to start them due to the callousness of the cliques in power) and who most likely loses them (if the war isn't over fast, then leaders able to frame the struggle as one between transcendent Good and Evil) get a partial win through survival and win by winning smart. Think of Churchill and FDR in the last completed Crisis.
Twist Good and Evil around in World War II, and the Axis Powers (which include a once-shaky Weimar Republic that solves its political problems without Hitler and a "Showa Democracy" defeat a Klan-ruled USA, and expose bodies stacked like cordwood in "Kloncentration Kamps", to fit KKK nomenclature.
People who believe that their economic power gives them the right to put workers in thrall are -- let's not sugar-coat this judgment --
EVIL!
We have come excessively to rely upon Big Business and Big Government to solve our problems for us; by doing so we make ourselves dependents upon people who consider us expendable. They will ravage the environment for quick bucks because nothing gets in the way. They drive wages to bare survival. They make education, housing, and medical care fiendishly-expensive luxuries. They basically impose a feudal stratification upon "free enterprise" in which the "free" part of "free enterprise" is that the owners and administrators are free to do anything to a prole. This is like saying that the master on a plantation deserves the freedom to wield the lash upon his slaves.
I look at the labor-management relations of Nazi Germany as an evil in itself. Even without the genocide and warmongering, Nazi Germany was a workers' Hell in which workers endured the lowest industrial wages in Europe (such was a reality before the Nazis. but it intensified). Remember well that whatever Christian upbringing the tycoons, executives, and big rural landowners had about the semi-pagan culture of the Nazis they got what they wanted in economics from the Nazis. They got super-cheap labor that could be consigned to labor camps if they slacked off, griped, or asserted natural rights. They got easy profits from military contracts. They got the suppression of labor unions. They got the Communist party outlawed. They got to profiteer from labor camps. They got privatization of public assets on the cheap. They got education reduced to, after very basic education for raw literacy and numeracy, reduced to propaganda and limited training. They got economic competition from Jews obliterated. They got what they wanted until the British and Americans bombed the Hell out of their war-profiteering industries and the Red Army set up regimes that confiscated their estates and giant sweat-shop factories.
Our political institutions were designed for the absence of bloated, monopolistic, bureaucratized organizations capable of buying the political process. We tame those or we break them up, or we lose our democracy. We separate political and economic power lest most of us become thralls of those elites. We end up with the worst combination of plantation-style inequity and Commie-style bureaucracy as an economic norm; we could end up with a system that has the repression of Commies with the regimentation of a military service and the inequity of a Junker-Zaibatsu order.
Maybe we need giant enterprises to process oil and make automobiles. Given the choice between K-Mart and boutique-like shops. many of us chose K-Mart to the detriment of the community behind the small shopkeepers. We got "everyday low prices" instead of manufacturer's suggested list price, and lost the small shopkeepers. We let the regional banks devour local banks, and then such entities as Bank of America, Chase, Wells Fargo, Huntington, and Citibank devour those. We let Exxon and Mobil merge (why!). We have let media giants devour city newspapers and local broadcasters, and cable and internet suppliers. Lose your choice as a customer and you also lose choice in employment.
At least with those small shops you got something better suited to your needs, and you kept it not only because it was expensive to replace, but also because you got something that you thought precious. Instead we rely more heavily upon Wal-Mart and some even shadier big companies to sell us huge amounts of consumer schlock in a conduit from sweatshops in China to landfills in the USA.
Freedom depends upon intellectual sophistication. I'm not saying that people can avoid tyranny by loving Beethoven's Ninth Symphony (ironically a Nazi favorite) or Russian operatic masterpieces. People who learn to apply rational thought are less gullible when facing propaganda whether Communist or corporatist. Rational thought eviscerates insane ideologies and destructive cults.
So far as I can tell, neither the Moonies not $cientology kills. MAGA has killed.
We need be smart enough to recognize evil when it appears and wise enough to resist it as early as possible before the baby crocodile becomes a man-eater.
I may tire of pounding this message, but those who contribute the toxic ads (they are offered so late in the campaign that no refutation is easy) have a barely-hidden agenda: transformation of the political process into a two-tiered debate in which the nominal candidate of the Dark Money interest gets to pose as a nice family person while the Democrat becomes a dangerous radical for failing to believe that the best situation possible for the common man is to be a helpless serf on behalf of people who believe that economic power rightly decides politics, and that nothing rightly gets in its way. In effect,
Profit, profit over everything!
Damn the public, give 'em the shaft!
We don't want any Commie unions
Our profit to annoy!
Send the liberals and their pinko friends
All on one-way journeys to Hanoi!
(to the tune of the German national anthem).
These interests would delight in reducing Humanity into desperate automatons at a very low level on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. easy to control due to economic insecurity. Their ideology is nearly fascist, although they dare not admit that their dream is something so alien and horrible as Mussolini's Italy (if eventually a warmongering power) or Pinochet's Chile (if cautious about military adventures, the most likely things to bring down an oppressive regime). The debate on wars for profit is not yet ready, but if there is any pattern about who starts wars (dictatorial and despotic regimes are most likely to start them due to the callousness of the cliques in power) and who most likely loses them (if the war isn't over fast, then leaders able to frame the struggle as one between transcendent Good and Evil) get a partial win through survival and win by winning smart. Think of Churchill and FDR in the last completed Crisis.
Twist Good and Evil around in World War II, and the Axis Powers (which include a once-shaky Weimar Republic that solves its political problems without Hitler and a "Showa Democracy" defeat a Klan-ruled USA, and expose bodies stacked like cordwood in "Kloncentration Kamps", to fit KKK nomenclature.
People who believe that their economic power gives them the right to put workers in thrall are -- let's not sugar-coat this judgment --
EVIL!
We have come excessively to rely upon Big Business and Big Government to solve our problems for us; by doing so we make ourselves dependents upon people who consider us expendable. They will ravage the environment for quick bucks because nothing gets in the way. They drive wages to bare survival. They make education, housing, and medical care fiendishly-expensive luxuries. They basically impose a feudal stratification upon "free enterprise" in which the "free" part of "free enterprise" is that the owners and administrators are free to do anything to a prole. This is like saying that the master on a plantation deserves the freedom to wield the lash upon his slaves.
I look at the labor-management relations of Nazi Germany as an evil in itself. Even without the genocide and warmongering, Nazi Germany was a workers' Hell in which workers endured the lowest industrial wages in Europe (such was a reality before the Nazis. but it intensified). Remember well that whatever Christian upbringing the tycoons, executives, and big rural landowners had about the semi-pagan culture of the Nazis they got what they wanted in economics from the Nazis. They got super-cheap labor that could be consigned to labor camps if they slacked off, griped, or asserted natural rights. They got easy profits from military contracts. They got the suppression of labor unions. They got the Communist party outlawed. They got to profiteer from labor camps. They got privatization of public assets on the cheap. They got education reduced to, after very basic education for raw literacy and numeracy, reduced to propaganda and limited training. They got economic competition from Jews obliterated. They got what they wanted until the British and Americans bombed the Hell out of their war-profiteering industries and the Red Army set up regimes that confiscated their estates and giant sweat-shop factories.
Our political institutions were designed for the absence of bloated, monopolistic, bureaucratized organizations capable of buying the political process. We tame those or we break them up, or we lose our democracy. We separate political and economic power lest most of us become thralls of those elites. We end up with the worst combination of plantation-style inequity and Commie-style bureaucracy as an economic norm; we could end up with a system that has the repression of Commies with the regimentation of a military service and the inequity of a Junker-Zaibatsu order.
Maybe we need giant enterprises to process oil and make automobiles. Given the choice between K-Mart and boutique-like shops. many of us chose K-Mart to the detriment of the community behind the small shopkeepers. We got "everyday low prices" instead of manufacturer's suggested list price, and lost the small shopkeepers. We let the regional banks devour local banks, and then such entities as Bank of America, Chase, Wells Fargo, Huntington, and Citibank devour those. We let Exxon and Mobil merge (why!). We have let media giants devour city newspapers and local broadcasters, and cable and internet suppliers. Lose your choice as a customer and you also lose choice in employment.
At least with those small shops you got something better suited to your needs, and you kept it not only because it was expensive to replace, but also because you got something that you thought precious. Instead we rely more heavily upon Wal-Mart and some even shadier big companies to sell us huge amounts of consumer schlock in a conduit from sweatshops in China to landfills in the USA.
Freedom depends upon intellectual sophistication. I'm not saying that people can avoid tyranny by loving Beethoven's Ninth Symphony (ironically a Nazi favorite) or Russian operatic masterpieces. People who learn to apply rational thought are less gullible when facing propaganda whether Communist or corporatist. Rational thought eviscerates insane ideologies and destructive cults.
So far as I can tell, neither the Moonies not $cientology kills. MAGA has killed.
We need be smart enough to recognize evil when it appears and wise enough to resist it as early as possible before the baby crocodile becomes a man-eater.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.