I caught a portion of a Trump performance at a recent rally that was unusually disturbing. Trump was regaling his followers with his version of the ubermensch pitch:
"We have more money and more brains and better houses and apartments and nicer boats. We are smarter than they are. They say the elite. We are the elite. You are the elite. "That could have come from Nietzsche 150 years ago if Friedrich had lousy grammar and a grade school vocabulary.
The Gullibillies roared in approval at their fuhrer's words. 'Yes, we are smarter than they are.'
Trump has been running his mouth long enough that we know this: he may be lying but he says what he means regardless of whether it's true.
There is no jarring disconnect in logic when Trump moves on to instill an abiding sense of victimization in his followers. They're all ripping us off. They're all taking advantage of America. They're stealing your jobs. Bad China. Bad Europe. Bad Canada. Bad Mexico. And the frothing crowd hump-danced as Trump played on.
Trump never lingers on just who was behind the theft of those jobs. Did China come over and steal them or was it an "inside job"? Was it Wall Street and America's plutocracy that chose to send those jobs offshore in pursuit of cheap labour? And aren't those the very same people, America's new aristocracy, the few (including Clan Trump) who bagged more than 80 % of the latest round of Republican tax cuts? Golly gee, I guess it was, it is.
This was and has always been an inside job but the Gullibillies don't need to know that. They haven't spotted it yet so why bother telling them when you can blame it on "the other."
America is still by far the wealthiest nation on Earth. It has the highest per capita GDP. It consumes the lion's share of the planet's resources, especially per capita. The US dollar is the dominant world currency. The rest of the world props up America, reliably buying up its debt, year after year.
America is not a victim. It's f#@king spoiled.
MAGA - Make America Great Again. Many Americans, Trump's Gullibillies, see their country as sort of emaciated but they're only looking at their America. They don't realize there's another America that's prosperous as hell. Another America that has sucked the greatness out of their now impoverished remnant America. Another America that has sapped their economic strength and systematically dissolved their once formidable middle class, taking their former political power to boot. Another America that has fleeced them silly and for endless reasons has also destroyed the ladder of social mobility.
Trump is of that other America, the one that has robbed them blind. Look at his cabinet picks, current and former. They're all of that exclusive America. They don't break bread with the Gullibillies' America.
Hey numbnuts, wake up. Yes, your safety deposit box is empty, cleaned out. But the money is still there. It's still in the vault. Your money is now in someone else's safety deposit box and you're not getting it back. You've been MAGA'd. Oh look, the Chinese stole your money. No they didn't. It's those damned Mexicans. No, it isn't. That's not where your money went, dummy. That is where they want you to believe your money went, to the Chinese or the Mexicans, not where it actually went.
Until the Gullibillies realize that the predators they have to confront are home grown they will remain the lawful prey of people like Trump, people who can relentlessly play on their fears, their anger and their paranoia. Until they wise up, America will remain the most obnoxious nation on Earth.
Trump may tell them they're "the elite." He may even convince them they're the elite. Only he will never see them cross the foyer of Merde-a-Lardo.
"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."
President Lyndon B. Johnson, 1964.
21 comments:
Don't let American liberals off the hook. Trump is indeed America--all of America. Liberals didn't care about hideous war crimes and crimes against humanity such as drone assassinations, the Gulag in Guantanamo, bombing hospitals, destroying Libya, invading Syria, starving Yemen to death, occupying Iraq and Afghanistan, caging illegal immigrant children, etc., when it was OBAMA doing it. An American liberal would also never give up their McMansion, Lexus SUV, twice a year luxury vacations or elite educations for their little snot noses who are never asked to perform ANY kind of service for their country in order to combat climate change--let someone ELSE make that sacrifice.
Americans are spoiled and selfish, but it isn't just Trump supporters.
That's not what I was trying to convey, Karl. There are now two Americas. One is the elite, Republican and Democrat. The other could be called "Have Not America."
The wealth of America remains considerable but that wealth, and its associated political power, has been siphoned away from Have Not America. This much is clear from the post 2008 "recovery" that went into a few pockets while most of the people saw little to nothing.
Trump is not "all of America." That's preposterous. And it wasn't American liberals who launched the United States on the road to PermaWar. It wasn't liberals who introduced rendition, enhanced interrogation, waterboarding, and Guantanamo. It was the neoconservatives - people like Cheney and Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle and Feith. It grew out of the Project for the New American Century. You must not have read the PNAC manifesto. I did.
It wasn't some Liberal plot that put America back into "casino capitalism."
Trump supporters, for whom I coined the name Gullibillies, are not of Trump's America and never shall be. Team Trump did not throw those tax relief windfalls to his own kind by some sort of mistake. Here's the deal, Karl. When you're running huge deficits and hand out such a generous tax cut package, you have to go to the markets to borrow the money to pay for it. You're robbing future generations who'll be stuck with the debt liability to stuff your pockets with tax relief. Look at the Congressional vote on that scam, Karl. It speaks for itself.
The Gullibillies are victims, sure. They're victims of their own country or the small part of it that has dismembered American democracy.
Those are the legislators who attend ALEC conferences once or twice a year. You can find out who they are and most of them are Republicans. The American Legislative Exchange Council.
Sheldon Adelson, the Koch Brothers and their ilk are not funding Democrats to do their bidding, Karl. They own the Republicans and now they own you too.
Mound,
The Glibartarians have seized on Hot Takes BothSiderism and embraced it deep into their core.
So Occupy = Tea Party, even though one was a decentralized, organic Protest Movement against the structured asset looting of the poor and middle class by Casino Capitalism,
and the other was a Republican Party Astroturf organization to promote Casino Capitalism and prevent regulation by leveraging the 27%'s irrational fear and racism.
For them, Obama's "Catch and Release" program of arresting unaccompanied minors seeking refugee asylum in the US, then quickly releasing them to foster or family care,
is the same thing as Nazi Miller's program of closing the legal crossings, making legal refugee asylum seekers "illegal" through a technicality, ripping families apart and jailing them in concentration camps, and adopting policies to ensure the families will never be reunited, so that fear of what will happen to them will stop people seeking refugee asylum in the US.
The Glibartarians goal is the same as the Republican Party and many of their enablers. Convince the Low Information Voters that there is no difference between the Parties, suppress turn out, suppress the vote, and keep people from engaging in the process by depressing them.
While the Glibartarians have a variety of different motives behind their postings and commentariat, ranging from Russian Active Measures, through Full Ego Contrarians, the I Got Mine Crowd, to White Male Supremacists, nothing they do online or in media, has any healthy moral grounding.
They are one of they key reason's we, the great mass of people, can't have "nice things".
As for "gullabillies" and "deplorables", they were summed up a long time ago.
"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."
President Lyndon B. Johnson, 1964.
They have voted against their own economic future and the future of their children for a long, long time and will continue to do so, no matter what. Luckily, every year, theres less and less of them.
Hi, Jay. I'm going to embed that Johnson quote into the text of this piece. It's a perfect fit.
Thanks.
Speaking of …
A recent take on some same old business from the digestive tract at Merde-a-Lardo:
July 6, 2018
"According to applications filed this week with the U.S. Labor Department, Mar-a-Lago wants to hire 40 waiters and waitresses at $12.68 an hour and 21 cooks at $13.31. On the application, club managers attest they can't find enough Americans qualified, willing and available to do the work.
"Trump has criticized U.S. companies for employing foreign workers, but has defended Mar-a-Lago's hiring practices, saying there aren't enough local applicants."
Everybody could use some special help at hard times. I suppose it doesn't matter what you might say according to the necessity of the situation because you're really not being hypocritical as long as the audience understands and accepts that you're a pathological liar. That's the deal, isn't it?
There's nothing quite like the good old Harvest-of-Shame model of labour supply management. Let's apply it everywhere and see if we can't convert more jobs into ones that the locals won't do. Maybe the boys at Canada's IMP can show us a few innovative new wrinkles.
Maybe if Trump was offering a living wage he wouldn't be short of help, John.
Wow Mound of Sound -- you're right on with this!
Thank you for writing it so well.
Corporate Capture turned the Worker Visa program in the US, into one of the many tools for supressing wages and benifits,
long before it happened in Canada.
I know Jay. As I understand it, we didn't formalize the model until the mid-sixties with the SAWP. I think there might have been something limited to Ontario a bit earlier. That's what led us to the variants that now apply to other industries. Formalization in the US through their various worker visa programs began earlier and, while they've expanded them, they've never been able to let go of their older informal versions. Just ask a typical dairy farmer from Wisconsin when he stops whining about a lack of market for his surpluses.
I still think the Yanks could learn a thing or two from our boys including the amazing kids at Justice who guided Jason and Diane through the obstacles they encountered in bringing the Murray River project home.
LBJ knew his countrymen well. He would have seen through Trump from the minuite he took that trip down the escalator.
"Reading stuff like this in the paper makes me want to go to the country, eat a lot of peaches and try to find Jesus, on my own. It’s hard to identify all the ways in which it is appalling.
A resolution to encourage breast-feeding was expected to be approved quickly and easily by the hundreds of government delegates who gathered this spring in Geneva for the United Nations-affiliated World Health Assembly.
Based on decades of research, the resolution says that mother’s milk is healthiest for children and countries should strive to limit the inaccurate or misleading marketing of breast milk substitutes.
Then the United States delegation, embracing the interests of infant formula manufacturers, upended the deliberations.
American officials sought to water down the resolution by removing language that called on governments to “protect, promote and support breast-feeding” and another passage that called on policymakers to restrict the promotion of food products that many experts say can have deleterious effects on young children.
When that failed, they turned to threats, according to diplomats and government officials who took part in the discussions. Ecuador, which had planned to introduce the measure, was the first to find itself in the cross hairs.
The Americans were blunt: If Ecuador refused to drop the resolution, Washington would unleash punishing trade measures and withdraw crucial military aid. The Ecuadorean government quickly acquiesced.
The showdown over the issue was recounted by more than a dozen participants from several countries, many of whom requested anonymity because they feared retaliation from the United States.
Health advocates scrambled to find another sponsor for the resolution, but at least a dozen countries, most of them poor nations in Africa and Latin America, backed off, citing fears of retaliation, according to officials from Uruguay, Mexico and the United States.
“We were astonished, appalled and also saddened,” said Patti Rundall, the policy director of the British advocacy group Baby Milk Action, who has attended meetings of the assembly, the decision-making body of the World Health Organization, since the late 1980s.
“What happened was tantamount to blackmail, with the U.S. holding the world hostage and trying to overturn nearly 40 years of consensus on best way to protect infant and young child health,” she said.
In the end, the Americans’ efforts were mostly unsuccessful. It was the Russians who ultimately stepped in to introduce the measure — and the Americans did not threaten them.
The Trump administration demonstrated almost every flaw they have here. They put the interests of corporate lobbyists ahead of the health of babies. They showed a complete contempt for science and the consensus of the international community. They abused their power and threatened well-meaning and innocent nations simply because they could. They negotiated in bad faith and behaved like extortionists. And then their bullying act immediately stopped when confronted by Russia because this administration always seeks to please Russia and only confronts them when all other alternatives have been exhausted.
The message is clear. If you are a political leader of a small or medium sized country, America will strong-arm you and try to prevent you from doing things based on science if that will hurt some powerful corporations. The way to stand up to America is to go running into the arms of Vladimir Putin.
In this case, Russia got to act as international Godfather and to do the right thing at the same time. That’s a horrible outcome for the United States, although it worked out well for the infants."
http://www.boomantribune.com
Jesus, Jay. That is a nation of thugs. Nikki Haley exemplifies a complete abandonment of any moral compass. Trump requires no less.
Auh....Mound .... Sorry to say but.....the origin of the word "Gullibility" was coined and originally presented in public by Professor Walter William Skeat in his annual address as president of the Philological Society in 1886. That word has often been used in Newfoundland & Labrador often hearing my Grandfather use it. Anyong.
Reading Jay's post makes me wonder what threats recent US governments have made to Canadian Prime Ministers. Was Justin simply told that he had to build the pipeline or else?
Εύρηκα!
"There are now two Americas. One is the elite, Republican and Democrat. The other could be called "Have Not America."
That is what I was trying to whisper in your ear Mound for the past couple of years. One elite controls&manipulates both Republicans and Democrats.
Trump's embrace of Putin would imply that Potus looks for support to counterbalance the said elite. The fact that Putin's motives for the assistance are not philanthropic is another kettle of fish.
Anyong, I know you've taught ESL. That should let you grasp the distinction between "gullibility" and "Gullibillies."
"Trump's roll is to ensure that the media and the public attention are always concentrated on him, so every time you turn on a televison set - Trump, open the front page of the newspaper - Trump. And in order to maintain,he's a conman, basically a showman , and in order to maintain public attention you have to do something crazy otherwise nobody's gonna pay attention to you.If you do normal things you'll be, you know , way back somewhere. So everyday there's one insane thing after another, and then you know he makes some crazy lie, you know,he had the biggest crowd in history , or something and the media looks at it and says " NO , that wasn't the biggest crowd".
But Meanwhile he's on to something else. And then you go to that one.And while this show is going on in public, in the background, the WRECKING CREW is working,Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell .. the guys in the cabinet who write his executive orders what they are doing is systematically dismantling every aspect of government that works for the benefit of the population.This goes from worker's rights, to pollution of the environment,rules for protecting consumers, I mean anything you can think of is being mantled.and all efforts are being devoted kind of almost with fanaticism to enrich and empower their actural constituency which is super wealth, and corporate power who are delighted.That's why the stock market goes up, stock market has not much to do with the economy but keeps booming because that's the rich people and they love being granted . now the worst policies that he's carried out the most dangerous are barely discussed............"
Chomsky
NPoV - it's hard to argue with Chomsky's view. They are dismantling every aspect of government that works for the population. And that population either supports Trump, thinks he's doing a terrific job for them, or is reticent to rise up and turn on the bastard.
10:59....A mind burp when typing....perhaps you have experienced a few? Cheers Anyong
Millions have taken to the streets.
They've shut down ICE Portland for over a week now.
They are publically shaming them,
Started a general shunning,
Stood up to the Nazi's in countless ways, daily:
https://www.google.ca/amp/s/hiplatina.com/woman-perfect-response-ice-boarded-greyhound-bus/amp/
Real political scientists, socioligists, historians, not fake ones like convicted felon D'Souza, are starting to write about how, when the State fails the Public, this is how it starts.
Shaming, shunning, acts of resistance, civil disobedience.
Where it ends, really depends.
Some think a Blue Wave and Meuller will be the start, with many more years of rooting out the evil,
Other's think it ends with tumbrels,.......
I think Chomsky's point was ... as long as we participate in he endless tRump hand-wringing, his masters will continue to have their way. I keep hearing Americans ('the resistance') apologize and deny that he represents them. This lets them off the hook (in their minds) for actually doing something radical. (I have the same beef with the Rick Mercer/Jon Stewart acts.)
No, the Americans ... all of them .. own tRump. Just like we owned Harper and now own Socks. (18 year old he said/she said is so much more fun than digging into the continued wrecking of our civic sphere.)
As long as we fall for the spectacle 'they' will win.
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