@boriscleto
We just can’t!!!!!

#4 The King of Israel.

@Big Al

to burn the planet and do their best to get us into a nuclear war with Russia. Why wouldn't we "allow" him to order American companies to leave China?

This seems an odd hill to die on. In a world where any one of us can be picked up, tossed into a jail with no due process, tortured, and be left there to rot, in a world where the U.S. can invade and destroy other people's countries with impunity, killing millions, in a world where I might not get to have an old age because human civilization will fall before I get to die, meaning that I'm going to have to start talking suicide plans with my family pretty soon--and NOT because I actually want to commit suicide, in a world with all this, and more, going on, the final straw for us is the sanctity of the U.S. private sector? The problem is that Trump is dictating to a bunch of multinational corporation heads where and how they can do business?

Even if we've decided that the most important thing in the world is the protection of private enterprise from authoritarian government, why are we starting to get angry now? Didn't the ACA dictate to the American people that we have to enter into contracts with a bunch of gouging shysters? Don't the sanctions on Venezuela, and the sanctions on Iraq before them, dictate to American businessmen where and how they can do business? Why is ordering a bunch of Sam-Walton-like bastards to get out of China, where they've made business deals with other bastards, disturb us so much that this is the final straw?

#8 The point is, we're allowing one person to do this? I don't know, seems like this should be a wakeup call, like, hey, it's real. I don't know how we can allow this, but it seems that people are just used to it or something. He just made it clear and simple.
It's like we can't do a thing about anything.

@WaterLily

estimable comment. may i quote a blurb on sheldon wolin's 'Democracy Incorporated Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism?

"Democracy is struggling in America--by now this statement is almost cliché. But what if the country is no longer a democracy at all? In Democracy Incorporated, Sheldon Wolin considers the unthinkable: has America unwittingly morphed into a new and strange kind of political hybrid, one where economic and state powers are conjoined and virtually unbridled? Can the nation check its descent into what the author terms "inverted totalitarianism"?

Wolin portrays a country where citizens are politically uninterested and submissive--and where elites are eager to keep them that way. At best the nation has become a "managed democracy" where the public is shepherded, not sovereign. At worst it is a place where corporate power no longer answers to state controls. Wolin makes clear that today's America is in no way morally or politically comparable to totalitarian states like Nazi Germany, yet he warns that unchecked economic power risks verging on total power and has its own unnerving pathologies. Wolin examines the myths and mythmaking that justify today's politics, the quest for an ever-expanding economy, and the perverse attractions of an endless war on terror. He argues passionately that democracy's best hope lies in citizens themselves learning anew to exercise power at the local level."

or at the nation magazine in 2003 re: Bush?

"The increasing power of the state and the declining power of institutions intended to control it has been in the making for some time. The party system is a notorious example. The Republicans have emerged as a unique phenomenon in American history of a fervently doctrinal party, zealous, ruthless, antidemocratic and boasting a near majority. As Republicans have become more ideologically intolerant, the Democrats have shrugged off the liberal label and their critical reform-minded constituencies to embrace centrism and footnote the end of ideology. In ceasing to be a genuine opposition party the Democrats have smoothed the road to power of a party more than eager to use it to promote empire abroad and corporate power at home. Bear in mind that a ruthless, ideologically driven party with a mass base was a crucial element in all of the twentieth-century regimes seeking total power.

Representative institutions no longer represent voters. Instead, they have been short-circuited, steadily corrupted by an institutionalized system of bribery that renders them responsive to powerful interest groups whose constituencies are the major corporations and wealthiest Americans. The courts, in turn, when they are not increasingly handmaidens of corporate power, are consistently deferential to the claims of national security. Elections have become heavily subsidized non-events that typically attract at best merely half of an electorate whose information about foreign and domestic politics is filtered through corporate-dominated media. Citizens are manipulated into a nervous state by the media’s reports of rampant crime and terrorist networks, by thinly veiled threats of the Attorney General and by their own fears about unemployment. What is crucially important here is not only the expansion of governmental power but the inevitable discrediting of constitutional limitations and institutional processes that discourages the citizenry and leaves them politically apathetic."

or Louis Lapham's 'Due Process: Lamenting the death of the rule of law in a country where it might have always been missing'.?

"To pick up on almost any story in the news these days—political, financial, sexual, or environmental—is to be informed in the opening monologue that the rule of law is vanished from the face of the American earth. So sayeth President Donald J. Trump, eight or nine times a day to his 47 million followers on Twitter. So sayeth also the plurality of expert witnesses in the court of principled opinion (media pundit, Never Trumper, think-tank sage, hashtag inspector of souls) testifying to the sad loss of America’s democracy, a once upon a time “government of laws and not of men.”

The funeral orations make a woeful noise unto the Lord, but it’s not clear the orators know what their words mean or how reliable are their powers of observation. The American earth groans under the weight of legal bureaucracy, the body politic so judiciously enwrapped and embalmed in rules, regulations, requirements, codes, and commandments that it bears comparison to the glorified mummy of a once upon a time great king in Egypt.

Senior statesmen and tenured Harvard professors say the rule of law has been missing for three generations, ever since President Richard Nixon’s bagmen removed it from a safe at the Watergate. If so, who can be expected to know what it looks like if and when it shows up with the ambulance at the scene of a crime? Does it come dressed as a man or a woman? Blue eyes and sweet smile riding a white horse? Black uniform, steel helmet, armed with assault rifle? Or maybe the rule of law isn’t lost but misplaced. Left under a chair on Capitol Hill, in a display case at the Smithsonian, scouting locations for Clint Eastwood’s next movie.

The confusion is in keeping with the trend of the times that elected Trump to the White House. In hope of clarification, this issue of Lapham’s Quarterly looks to the lessons of history. They are more hopeful than those available to the best of my own knowledge and recollection, which tend to recognize the rule of law as the politically correct term of art for the divine right of money.
.................................
Trump didn’t need briefing papers to refine the message. He embodied it live and in person, an unscripted and overweight canary flown from its gilded cage, telling it like it is when seen from the perch of the haves looking down on the birdseed of the have-nots. Had he time or patience for looking into books instead of mirrors, he could have sourced his wisdom to Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis, who presented the case for Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal: “We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”

Not that it would have occurred to Trump to want both, but he might have been glad to know the Supreme Court had excused him from any further study under the heading of politics. In the world according to Trump—as it was in the worlds according to Ronald Reagan, George Bush elder and younger, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama—the concentration of wealth is the good, the true, and the beautiful. Democracy is for losers."

wouldn't it be grand if one of the fine academics amerikans love so well steered us to vote third party? well, not chomsky, vote clinton, but still. and i'm cooling of so much on howie hawkins as his socialism and peace plans dwindle and this has become his latest missive is (close to): 'every candidate for prez must declare a climate emergency! (whatever that even means) (the 350.org pledge).

#11 I honestly don't understand.

You've consistently been our anti-duopoly, anti-warmonger, anti-climate-change-denier (and the related anti-barriers-to-meaningful progress), anti-incrementalism advocate ... and now you're "Anyone But Trump?"

How does this jibe?

Before JtC can say it, I'm not BAA. I just don't get it. Are you saying you'd vote for Biden if he were Trump's opponent? Harris? Warren? You've even openly and repeatedly renounced Bernie, and have very publicly expressed no love for Gabbard. So what's the deal? Why is this one ridiculous utterance from Twitler the last straw for you - the thing that will make you drop everything you've previously said and get in line to vote for a duopoly candidate? Even when you know that none of them has the 99 percent's interests at heart?

I mean, to each their own, but the dissonance here is deafening.

I guess I'm just sad this site seems to be falling victim to the same old, same old, political horse race (NOW! Even more protracted! TM) discussions that easily can be found elsewhere. I'm only speaking for myself, but after finding my way here in the wake of what happened with Bernie, and learning from people like you why things shook out the way they did, and further having my mind and perspectives expanded to understand that electoral politics haven't ever addressed the collective experiences, and hopes, and demands, and needs, of the 99 percent ... well, who's going to carry that mantle now? What's the ultimate lesson? That we're all supposed to subjugate our best collective interests just so that we can say we were in the "right" camp of those who didn't vote for Trump?

If that's the case, then we, the 99 percent, may as well just give up. Because while we fall on our righteous swords, we'll do so knowing that we've given up on our planet, and on our children's and grandchildren's futures.

Fuck that shit.

@Big Al

which is why so many Ds like to say 'look forward, not backward' (peggy noonan re: obomba>bush) as they don't want their own presidents' powers thwarted. what constitution? the rule of law was never really there.

the framers didn't want the constitution anywhere near 'democracy™'.

#12 kind of like the WMD thing, and they have the power the "constitution" grants them.
It should be a giant issue right about now imo, but as the article you linked shows (2014), times goes by and it's the same old shit.