Shi’ite Militias Enter Mosul Battle, But Eyes Are on Joining Syria War

Deployment Meant to Block ISIS Escape

by Jason Ditz,

As the Iraqi invasion of Mosul continues, the Shi’ite militia groups who have proven so controversial in previous attacks have begun to deploy west of the city, aiming to block the escape of any ISIS forces into Syria. The militias see this as the last real fight against ISIS inside Iraq, and are openly talking about heading into Syria next.

While the militias’ involvement in previous captures of major Sunni Arab cities around Iraq has seen them looting, torturing, and killing with reckless abandon, the militias’ ambition to get into Syria once this is wrapped up may mean less are left behind around Mosul to harass the locals.

The sectarian nature of the wars in Iraq and Syria have both led to a spike in recruitment for the Shi’ite militias, with many being deployed around significant religious sites in both countries to protect them from groups like ISIS. For many of them, this has also meant a blurring of the lines between the two wars.

There remains considerable concern about the impact on the Mosul population of the militias’ presence. This is doubly true because, in “blocking” ISIS escape, they may also end up blocking the escape of the civilian population,. which is unlikely to be welcomed if they flee into Kurdish territory.

That’s also a recurring reality in Iraq’s war, that the Sunni Arab civilians aren’t welcomed into Kurdish or Shi’ite territory, and generally end up having to flee into other ISIS territory for lack of alternatives. With little ISIS territory left, it is unclear where they’ll go.

http://news.antiwar.com/2016/10/30/shiite-militias-enter-mosul-battle-but-eyes-are-on-joining-syria-war/

Chances of Yemen Partition Grow as Pro-Saudi Faction Spurns UN Peace Deal

Hadi: UN Deal Would Reward 'Putschists'

by Jason Ditz,

The UN offered a glimmer of hope for a peace process 19 months in Yemen’s war last week, offering a peace deal which would see the installation of an interim government made of mostly technocrats, and in which former President Hadi would be a figurehead.

Hadi, on whose behalf Saudi invaded Yemen, was quick to spurn the deal, insisting it would “reward the putschists” and punish his legitimate government. Hadi was “elected” to a two-year term in office in early 2012, and resigned in 2015, but insists he remains the rightful ruler of the nation.

The Shi’ite Houthis, who had previously ruled out any deal in which Hadi was returned to power, expressed support for the UN plan as a “basis for discussion.” The deal would force Hadi’s main deputy to resign, and give Hadi little to no real power.

Hadi’s rejection, assuming it is upheld by his Saudi backers, means a continuation of the war, and greatly increases the likelihood that Yemen as a unified nation is over. The nation is already in a state of de facto split, and roughly on the same borders as before the 1990 unification.

This may ultimately make more sense for Yemen at any rate, resolving long-standing secessionist ambitions in the south, and leaving Hadi with control of South Yemen, where he is from, and where his limited political support is centered.

The Saudis are unlikely to accept such a solution, however, as it would leave a North Yemen dominated by the Houthis and former president Ali Abdullah Saleh’s political allies with a substantial border with Saudi Arabia after a bloody Saudi-instigated war against them.

While a unity deal in which Hadi gets only token power would allow the Saudis to claim some measure of “victory” in their war, a formal separation would be much harder to spin, and would leave them with a very resentful neighbor on their southern border.

http://news.antiwar.com/2016/10/30/chances-of-yemen-partition-grow-as-pro-saudi-faction-spurns-un-peace-deal/

Elections Have Always Been Rigged, But Not Like Trump Says

• AUTHOR: ISSIE LAPOWSKY.ISSIE LAPOWSKY
• 
  

DESPITE DONALD TRUMP’S recent claims, it’s pretty impossible to rig an election via voter fraud. To have any impact, you’d need a labyrinthine network of local election officials to collude against a candidate and then bamboozle the bipartisan poll watchers tasked with keeping them honest.

But just because Trump’s fever dream of an election day conspiracy is highly (did we mention highly?) unlikely, doesn’t mean that American elections are always—if ever—fair and equitable.

Consider this: In 2012, black voters waited in line twice as long as white voters to cast a ballot. In key swing states like Florida, the largest polling place delays occurred in districts with larger minority populations. Districts with more Spanish speakers also experienced longer lines. And research shows that in 2012, somewhere between 500,000 and 700,000 eligible voters decided not to vote because of problems at their polling places, including wait times.

“It has an economic cost,” says Charles Stewart, a professor of political science at MIT and one of the leading researchers on voting lines and voting technologies, who estimates that some $1 billion in productivity was lost in 2012 due to people waiting in lines. “But whatever the cost is, it lands disproportionately more on some people than others, and that’s unfair.”

So in a way, you could say elections have been rigged all along—just not in the way Trump envisions it and certainly not against the people who are most likely to vote for him this November.

The question is: Why does this kind of rigged system exist? Though much has been made about voter identification laws and the way they undermine the promise of the Voting Rights Act, there’s another insidious problem plaguing American elections, and that is the fact that the machines on which we vote are old and growing older, they’re allocated unevenly, and election officials lack both the funding and the data they need to update them.

A Systemic Imbalance

In his 2012 victory speech, President Obama famously pledged to “fix” the long lines that wound around polling places for hours in states like Florida. Since then researchers and election officials alike have begun probing the root cause of this issue.

Now, one of the leading theories behind why some voters wait minutes to vote and others wait hours is a basic imbalance in the number of voting machines available to different demographics of voters. One comprehensive 2014 study by the Brennan Center for Justice found that in Florida, Maryland, and South Carolina—three states that experienced the longest delays in 2012—districts that had more minority voters also had fewer voting machines per registered voter, and therefore, longer wait times.

Baltimore County, for instance, where 24 percent of the electorate was black in 2012, experienced some of the latest poll closings in Maryland on Election Day. More than 90 percent of its counties also failed to meet Maryland’s mandated minimum for voting machines per registered voter. But that failure wasn’t equally shared across Baltimore County. According to the Brennan Center’s report, only precincts with a higher percentage of black voting age citizens had long delays.

“We were really focused on identifying the issue and showing there was a systemic problem,” says Christopher Famighetti, a voting rights researcher and one of the authors of the study. Famighetti and his team stopped short of prescribing a reason for that imbalance, which would have required analyzing how each district allocated resources.

But Stewart says it’s not a huge leap to say that this gap is just another example of government providing services to black and white communities differently.

“In a neighborhood that has long lines chronically, they probably have parks that are poorly maintained. They probably have schools that are crowded. They probably have slow police response times,” says Stewart. “On average, African American communities and communities of color just don’t get the public services that white communities do.”

Two-Tiered System

What imperils this already vulnerable system even more, however, is the fact that so many of the country’s voting machines and electronic check-in tools are a decade or more old. That means not only are they becoming obsolete, but often, they’re so slow and clunky that they gum up the works.

The last time the federal government invested substantially in new voting technology was after the catastrophic screw up of the 2000 election. The Help America Vote Act, which passed in 2002, sent a $2 billion cash infusion into the states, enabling them to invest in new voting technology to avoid any more hanging chad debacles in the future. More than a decade later, many districts are still using those same replacement machines. As WIRED has written about at length, computers that old pose not just a problem for efficient voting, but also a huge security risk.

“The machines we’re using are computers,” says Famighetti, who also wrote a 2015 report on the country’s aging voting technology. “We don’t expect our laptops to last a decade.”

That study found that this year 43 states will use machines at least 10 years old. The states are aware that’s a problem, too, but in most cases, they lack funding to do anything about it. Of the 31 states who said they want to purchase new voting machines in the next five years, some 22 of them didn’t know where they’d get the money.

What’s more alarming—though not at all surprising—is that the districts that do have the money to invest in new voting technology often have richer citizens. In Virginia, for instance, the Brennan Center found that the median income of the 16 jurisdictions that had recently replaced their equipment was $69,800. In the rest, it was $50,100.

“This has the potential to create a two-tiered voting system,” Famighetti warns.

The older these machines get, the more likely they may be to have irregularities and calibration errors. That’s problematic on its own, it can be even more dangerous when voters are prone to believe the election is rigged. Every error can be used as a data point to prove the deck is stacked against the voter.

In early voting, some such reports are already popping up on social media. In Texas, for instance, voters in several counties reported having their votes “flipped” at the last minute. Some media outlets, including conservative commentator Sean Hannity’s website ran with the story. But election officials in those districts maintain that any issues have been the result of human error dealing with less than intuitive machines.

Famighetti predicts these types of stories could proliferate in the future. “The sort of irregularities that we see in elections, and may be more likely to see due to aging out equipment, will be viewed through this lens,” he says, “and that can undermine the public confidence in the election as a result.”

Where’s the Data?

Researchers have only just begun to look into these problems in earnest. Most of the research we’ve had in the past about wait times is based on imprecise data, cobbled together from county-level reports about what time polls actually close, compared with what time they were supposed to close. It’s a rough approximation, that still probably misses a lot of the precincts where lines pile up in the morning. And even that can’t account for what exactly caused the slowdown. Was it a lack of voting machines? Poll workers? Language barriers? Voter ID laws? Ballot length? Or something as simple as the fact that the polling place was physically smaller than others?

“If the question is what data’s available? The answer is: not very much,” says Michael Herron, a professor of government and quantitative social science at Dartmouth University.

But in recent years, as social media posts about wait times and outsized lines turn into front page headlines, Herron says, that’s starting to change. The onslaught of media attention is forcing election officials to at least acknowledge the problem. Meanwhile, in 2014, the Presidential Commission on Election Administration answered President Obama’s election night call with a list of recommendations about how districts could speed up the voting process, including collecting more data on election night operations.

Since 2008, Stewart has been conducting a national poll called the Survey of the Performance of American Elections, which includes information on voting experience from 200 voters per state. It has now become the basis of other election administration research like the studies conducted by the Brennan Center.

This year, however, Stewart, Herron, and about two dozen other university faculty members across the country are going even farther, deploying their own students to about 1,000 precincts to collect data on how long it takes voters to get from point A to point B, among other things. Herron and other Dartmouth researchers are also working on an app called PollTracker that voters could use to self-report their experiences at the polls.

None of this is easy. Voting is by definition supposed to be a private thing, and voters get mighty anxious about people poking around their precincts. Some states ban that kind of loitering altogether in hopes of eliminating the potential for voter intimidation. But before we start giving into fearmongering about the election being rigged, the country needs a lot more information on the parts of the electoral system that already are.

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https://www.wired.com/2016/10/elections-always-rigged-not-like-trump-says/

An Alternate Narrative on Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump

by MATT PEPPE

Elections in the United States are far and away the most expensive in the entire world. In 2012, the Federal Election Commission reported that $7 billion was spent on the presidential campaign. By the time the ink is dry on the 2016 election, the number will likely be even higher. American voters take for granted that political campaigns provide value that allows them to choose the candidate that best represents their ideology and policy positions. But, is this really the best system? Is it even a good one?

The astronomical cost of campaigns in the U.S. prohibits all but a small handful of individuals with the celebrity and access to obscene sums money the realistic opportunity to compete. It should be no surprise that the two finalists for president in 2016 are both multi-millionaire oligarchs. Even so, they are dependent on raising hundreds of millions of dollars from big business and other special interests.

Is it reasonable to expect that after such a process the winner of the election will be able to represent the interests of the average citizen rather than the super-wealthy elite individuals and corporations whose patronage allowed them achieve victory at the polls?

A recent Princeton University academic study disputes this notion. Martin Giles and Benjamin Page write that statistical measures demonstrate that elites and business interests have an impact on policy directly correlated to their wealth, while the average voter has no discernible impact on policy at all. The influence of regular citizens is so low, the authors argue, that it would be inaccurate to characterize the American political system as a democracy.

As greater economic power necessarily translates to greater political power, a reasonable remedy to the situation would be to decrease inequality in the United States. If inequality was drastically rolled back to a level closer to that found after the end of WWII – through massive taxes on wealth, income and capital gains, along with the abolition of inheritance – perhaps the conditions would exist for fair elections based on competitive campaigns.

But absent such a drastic realignment of the politico-economic system, are there better possibilities for American citizens to elect officials that represent their interests? The nation has seen that Barack Obama’s promises in 2008 to represent “hope and change,” to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, close Guantanamo, operate transparently, limit domestic surveillance and reform taxes were, in reality, little more than hot air.

What if instead of being allowed to create his own narrative, a summary of his undistinguished record as an lawyer from elite universities and corporate-friendly record state representative and politician was what voters had to guide their expectations of how he would govern?

Perhaps the U.S. could look to Cuba, where the Revolutionary government – facing unrelenting subversion and destabilization for decades by its imperial neighbor to the north –  has managed to eliminate money from politics entirely. At the municipal level, candidates spend no money and do not campaign at all. Instead, voters are presented with short biographies to reference in determining who they believe would better represent them.

As the U.S. prepares for its latest electoral spectacle in a few weeks, I offer sample bios for the two presidential candidates, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, based on what they may look like if they were running for office in Cuba.

***

Hillary Clinton

Age: 68

Education level: Advanced degree

Occupation: Unemployed

Organizations belonged to: Democratic Party

Biography

Born on October 26, 1947 in Chicago, Illinois of capitalist social origin.

Graduated from Maine South High School in Illinois in 1965. Attended Wellesley College from 1966-1969 and received a bachelor’s degree with a major in political science. In college, she was head of the Young Republicans Club from 1966-1967. In 1968, she was elected president of the Wellesley College Government Association. During a summer program in Washington, DC, she interned for Republican House Leader Gerald Ford.

After finishing her undergraduate studies, she enrolled at Yale Law School, where she was on the editorial board of the Yale Review of Law and Social Action. In 1972, she volunteered in Austin, Texas for Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern. She was awarded a Juris Doctor degree from Yale in 1973.

She helped found Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families in 1977. That same year, she joined the Rose Law Firm and specialized in patent infringement and intellectual property. She would become the first female partner at Rose Law.

While her husband William Jefferson Clinton served as governor of Arkansas, she held three corporate board seats. For six years, she was a member of the board of Wal-Mart, the world’s largest company. As the board aggressively fought unions, she “remained silent.” She was on the board of the yogurt manufacturing firm TCBY Enterprises, as well as LaFarge, a subsidiary of a French concrete company for two years from 1990-1992.  Additionally, she served on the boards of Arkansas Children’s Hospital, Legal Services, and Children’s Defense Fund.

As first Lady in 1992, her husband appointed her to head his President’s Task Force on Health Care Reform, an effort that did not result in any legislative accomplishments. Later in his presidency, she would convince her husband to bomb the sovereign nation of Yugoslavia, which set a precedent for later illegal U.S. wars.

Voters in New York elected her to serve as the state’s junior senator in November 2000, a position she held for eight years. While in office, she voted in favor of the Authorization for Use of Military Force in 2001; two illegal wars (Afghanistan, 2001 and Iraq, 2003); and the original USA Patriot Act as well as its reauthorization in 2005. She did not pass any major piece of progressive legislation as senator.

After losing the Democratic nomination for president in 2008, she was subsequently appointed as Secretary of State. During her four year tenure at State, she pressed President Obama to carry out an illegal regime change in Libya, as well as helping solidify governments in both Honduras and Ukraine that came to power through extra-legal coups.

After resigning from government, she joined the board of the Clinton Foundation, an enterprise organized as a charitable organization that has been accused of being “a vehicle to launder money and to enrich Clinton family friends.”

During the same period, she gave 92 speeches to corporations that paid her a total of $21.6 million.

***

Donald Trump

Age: 70

Education level: Bachelor’s degree

Occupation: Unemployed

Organizations belonged to: Republican Party

Biography

He was born on June 14, 1946 in Queens, New York of aristocratic social origin.

He attended an elite private school, before behavior problems led him to transfer to the New York Military Academy.

After finishing primary school, he attended Fordham University for two years before transferring to the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, from which he received a bachelor of arts degree in economics in 1968.

His father was an extremely wealthy real estate developer and one of the richest men in the country. In addition to providing him an executive position in the family business as a young man. When he started his real estate career with the construction of the Grand Hyatt hotel in New York City in 1978, his father provided a $1 million loan and acted as a “silent partner.”

Estimates of the fortune he inherited from his father are as high as $200 million.

In 1973, he was sued by the Justice Department for racial discrimination. The New York City Human Rights Division gathered evidence that his apartment buildings would not rent to African Americans and a superintendent claimed to be only acting on orders from management. The lawsuit was settled two years later.

He used debt leverage to build multiple hotels and casinos in Atlantic City and other locations. Many of the properties bore his name.

From 1991 to 2009, his companies filed four Chapter 11 bankruptcies.

Reportedly he has done business with mafia members and drug traffickers.

He was accused by hundreds of contractors, including plumbers, painters and carpet companies, of failing to pay for work done to build his casinos.

When journalists have published stories about him that he dislikes, he has threatened to sue them.

Starting in 2004, he became the host of a reality television show called The Apprentice. Later, this was spun off into another reality show, Celebrity Apprentice. Trump spent 13 seasons with the shows.

He was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award in both 2004 and 2005 (Outstanding Reality-Competition Program).

In 2013, he was inducted to the WWE Hall of Fame.

Unlike every candidate for the past 40 years, he has refused to release his tax returns. Some have suggested there is strong evidence he does not pay income taxes.

Presently, political campaigns are little more than billion-dollar public relations exercises that allow elite servants of the corporate class to deceive the public into mistakenly believing they will represent their best interests. As the above bios demonstrate, if the ability to control and shape their message is removed from the candidates, the voters are presented with a much different picture. Perhaps American voters will start demanding more than simply enacting a new version of campaign finance reform to fix their broken system.  Political campaigns, as they currently exist, arguably do more to obscure and distort the history and record of candidates than they do to provide transparency and allow a rational choice based on relevant information about how they will govern.

This piece first appeared at American Herald Tribune.

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Matt Peppe writes about politics, U.S. foreign policy and Latin America on his blog. You can follow him on twitter.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/10/28/an-alternate-narrative-on-hillary-clinton-and-donald-trump/

With Scrotox, men give wrinkly scrotums the sack

OPINION

By Ben Pobjie

Men who have spent their lives feeling ashamed of their saggy sperm satchel no longer need to suffer, writes Ben Pobjie. With Scrotox, we can finally give wrinkly scrotums the sack.

The printing press. The refrigerator. Those stickers you put on your door telling salespeople not to knock.

Human history has seen many inventions that come along and change everything, innovations that you can instantly recognise as something that is going to make life better for everyone.

And it looks like it's happened again, with the news that a new procedure called Scrotox is becoming increasingly popular with men who wish for a smoother, more youthful-looking scrotum.

GQ magazine reported this week that British blokes are paying as much as $5,000 for Scrotox, while men in the USA and Australia are having their ball sacks smoothed in increasing numbers.

You can see how we of the masculine persuasion view the arrival of Scrotox as a godsend.

We've spent our whole lives dreaming of a sleek, aerodynamic scrotum, but never believing such a thing was truly possible.

Now, for a "reasonable" fee, we actually have the chance to turn our Shar Peis into Great Danes, and put an end to years of embarrassment and humiliation.

What a vast difference it will make. No more teasing. No more jeering onlookers. No more young women screaming and fainting and making sardonic references to Benjamin Button.

What exactly is Scrotox?

Scrotox is a simple procedure involving the injection of Botox — everyone's favourite neurotoxic protein — into the muscle under the skin of the scrotum in order to reduce wrinkling and increase its appearance of size.

According to Dr Jeremy Hunt from the Australian Society of Plastic Surgeons, this gives the scrotum "the effect of looking smoother, larger and often will cause the scrotum to hang lower".

"With 60 being the new 50 or 70 the new 60, these kind of procedures are requested by males who feels [sic] vital and youthful on the inside but may look a little more well worn on the outside," Dr Hunt told GQ.

It looks like all those centuries of medical research have finally paid off.

It's a relief that Botox, until now mainly used for frivolous cosmetic purposes, is at last being put to work for the actual benefit of humanity.

Of course, I recognise that some people — people who might loosely be called "women" — probably won't instantly realise what a big deal this is. So, let me paint you a picture.

Say you're a man. Say you go out on a Saturday night like any normal healthy young person, and as luck would have it, you manage to make a favourable impression on a young lady, so much so that she agrees to accompany you to a mutually-agreeable second location, where you initiate the timeless and sacred ritual of fluid exchange.

Proceedings have reached a crucial juncture, when all of a sudden, she bursts out laughing.

"I thought I'd be having fun with some attractive genitals," she giggles, "not a poorly-made bust of Keith Richards."

It's every man's worst nightmare. And that's the best-case scenario: if things are really bad she'll take one look at your testicles and just start vomiting.

And who can blame her? The scrotum is the most hideous naturally-occurring phenomenon known to science. It was specifically designed by our Creator to ensure that men never feel completely confident. And it just gets worse with age.

In fact, the scrotum is a kind of anatomical Picture of Dorian Gray: the more living you do, the worse it looks. And we don't even have the option of keeping it hidden in the attic.

It's time to tackle scrotum shaming

It is the shame that is the worst part of lugging around a creased gonad-purse.

Society has become more sensitive to those who are shamed for their sexuality, their weight or their income, but we remain sadly unenlightened when it comes to scrotum-shaming.

PHOTO: What an attractive... belt. Scrotox could boost men's confidence in the sack, says Ben Pobjie. (gratisography.com)

Every day, all over the globe, men are being made to feel unattractive and worthless because of their saggy baggy sperm-satchel.

How many times have you seen a proud man reduced to a quivering wreck, bawling his eyes out because some heartless soul looked between his legs and wondered who does his ironing?

How many men have you known whose lives were destroyed by relentless cries of "who left the tomatoes out in the sun?" Zero? That just proves how blind people can be to the worst injustices of the world — we are being subjected to this constantly.

Those of us whose nethers are more crinkle-cut than steak-fries put a brave face on it. But what good is a brave face when it's three feet above a dangling naked mole rat foetus?

There comes a time when a man can take no more, and decides that rather than struggle on in the face of society's cruelty, will simply stop showing his scrotum to people.

It's a drastic step and not one we take lightly, but eventually self-care must take priority.

Let's give wrinkly scrotums the sack

I can't tell you what a relief it will be, when I go in for my Scrotox and come out with a new sense of pride in my reproductive paraphernalia.

I had thought I would forever have to hide my scrotum away from judgmental eyes, never feeling free to bring my rumpled dice-shaker out into the light.

But now, thanks to the miracle of science and the tireless efforts of the medical fraternity to advance the state of humanity, I shall be able to display my newly-tightened gamete-pouch to all who express an interest, or even to the more reputable variety of women's magazine, without fear of a calamitous collapse in self-esteem.

I urge all my fellow males who feel they could stand to be a bit smoother below the Plimsoll line to contact their local plastic surgeon and book themselves in for a quick Scrotoxing.

Like the saying goes: "Better to have botulism in your testes than to remind your sexual partner of evil alien Krang from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon".

Truer now than ever, but there's no longer any need to suffer. Let's all get to the doctor: together, we can give wrinkly scrotums the sack.

Topics: men, mens-health, sexual-health, offbeat, comedy-humour, australia

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-10-31/scrotox-helps-men-give-wrinkly-scrotums-the-sack/7970466

America at the Crossroads: Abrogation of Democracy

by NORMAN POLLACK

Election eve, one finds the nation itself to be more pathetically unaware than the leading candidates are evil (morally reprehensible, arising from actual or imputed bad character or conduct), although the margin of difference is negligible. The crowds gathered to hear Clinton and Trump, t-shirts and hoodies decorated with campaign slogans, are two sides of the same mindless fascistic adoration of power, righteousness, indignation, a voluntary submission betraying the same ideological convictions of American exceptionalism and psychodynamics of gut hatred for and fear of difference from themselves and image of ethnocentric superiority.

Study the faces as the news cameras pan the waiting lines or audiences, smugness, occasional contorted features, feigned innocence disguising certitude. The emptiness of the American public, obediently laying down before billionaire wealth and militaristic narcissism (here self-love engendered through capitalism and assisted by compulsive attachment to the hegemonic purposes of the State). Each side, contemptuous of the other, in reality, brothers/sisters-in-arms, raises to leadership the perfect expression of their own, and hence similar if not identical, needs for recognition to cover their inner nakedness of spirit and purpose.

Trump, a bottomless pit of mammon-worship, Clinton, a sinkhole of war and aggression, express the fusion of capitalism and militarism, each in America vital to the presence and fruition of the other, that typifies the national mission of unilateral global domination. It was not always thus, although historical-institutional development pointed the direction for at least a century, when America outstripped its earlier foundations, the normalization of advanced industrial capitalism, to claim world moral-political pre-eminence based on spurious privileged association with God in carrying out His/Her divine mission of promised economic salvation.

The formula has been a surefire winner because scrupulously backed by the real or implied threat (and use) of force, a silent militarism when not engaged in war to announce global financial-and-market penetration presumed to be uncontested (or when contested, the mark of the adversary). Exceptionalism is the ideological battering ram to knock down all opposition, and for those standing in line for the political bread-and-circuses of the two major parties, a validation of their distorted hatreds brought on by their own subordination in the great chain of capitalist being.

If deep-down, though not consciously admitted, there is recognition of systemic rottenness in misshaping their yearnings and thwarting their present wellbeing and future prospects, this throws them, again both sides of the supposed political divide, into the arms of the Leadership Structure not unlike the authoritarian submission characterizing fascism in the transition from Weimar to Nazi Germany. (To be still in the transition phase and not to have as yet crossed the line, holds little promise of reversion to democratic government; too much has happened to suggest drawing back from the brink.) Collective ego-loss, seen in the faces of the ecstatic political faithful, the now-worshippers of power, goes a long way to explaining the candidates and their visions on offer.

A closed system awaits the body politic. There is little room for turning left or right, when the center subsumes an already hard-bitten right and the near-ejection of the left from the political spectrum. The vanished center, however fictitious, is kept alive for purposes of self-deception and authoritative indoctrination, a useful cloak for democratic pretentions, as meanwhile the society is placed, willingly so, on a permanent footing of structural hierarchy at home, incessant intervention abroad. The interests of capitalism must be guarded (and celebrated) at all times, lest an alternative way of life become visible, founded on humane standards of international peace and societal betterment. To break out of the present imprisonment in invidious class debasement, is more painful, given long-term ideological habituation, than risking a future of freedom (of system, of conscience, of social solidarity).

Thus, only days remain in the exercise of meaningless choice. After that, one can expect few impedances to the downward cast of policy, with increasing risks of war, class division, false consciousness to grease the rails of additional discontents as context for resentments and hatreds poisoning the atmosphere. More environmental spoliation, more gun violence, as tokens of the wayward path to fascism.

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Norman Pollack Ph.D. Harvard, Guggenheim Fellow, early writings on American Populism as a radical movement, prof., activist.. His interests are social theory and the structural analysis of capitalism and fascism. He can be reached at pollackn@msu.edu.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/10/28/america-at-the-crossroads-abrogation-of-democracy/

Hillary, Trump and Sartre: How Existentialism Disrobes the Major Presidential Candidates

by ARSHAD KHAN

In the US, the political system has now disgorged two candidates the citizenry cannot be less enthusiastic about.  Driven by ambition more than a love of the people or a sincere desire to serve, one can be forgiven for wondering if they are just as trapped by their motivations as the public in its two-party myopia.  No authentic leader among the two …

These thoughts lead to the rage of my youth, existentialism, and to Jean-Paul Sartre, who died 36 years ago last April.  More than 50,000 mourners lined the streets and packed Montparnasse cemetery at his funeral, many quite young —  improbable they would exhibit a similar interest in the successor philosophies, notably the current preoccupation with deconstruction, a focus on whether the written or spoken word is successful (or not) in clarity of  meaning.

Difficult as existentialism may be to pin down, there are a few necessary elements:  the individual, free will as crucial to human existence, the subsequent responsibility for action that accompanies it, leading to an unavoidable anxiety as a consequence. The authentic life then is one chosen freely rather than imposed by society.  No wonder it appealed to the young.

What triggered this meandering into Sartre and his philosophy was Hillary Clinton’s two-minute summing up at the end of the last debate.  She attested to her lifelong concern (her latest claim) for improving the lives of children — a phrase bringing to mind a balancing scale.  One one side the improved lives of children in Arkansas and the benefits of subsidies to children in general, and on the other the deaths of hundreds of thousands in Iraq, Syria, Libya and elsewhere — the most vulnerable that is the old, the sick and the children bearing the brunt.  Politicians are a breed apart, unconcerned with ‘responsibility’ and undisturbed by Sartre’s ‘anxiety’.

Not so long ago there was another US Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, who, when asked about the 576,000 children who had died (according to a UN report) as a result of the Iraq embargo, simply dismissed the question as a price to be paid to be rid of Saddam Hussein.  The embargo failed in that regard, and when Saddam was removed by the successor US government’s military intervention, it resulted in chaos and the birth of ISIS.

The Republican candidate, Donald Trump, is unique, in that responsibility washes over him and into the shower drain like a layer of dirt; he is devoid of it even in personal interaction.  The only rational explanation of his behavior is the term ‘prolonged adolescence’ used by professionals.

His basic issue over several decades has been bad deals — bad deals in defending allies who he feels do not pay enough for their defense and bad trade deals.  Trying to peel off some voters, Hillary Clinton in the last debate pointed out that he took out an ad in The New York Times opposing the right’s iconic Ronald Reagan over it.  Like any business owner or high level executive, he intends to issue orders expecting them to be carried out.  Good luck!  It might explain the absence of concrete policy.

The American public has been short changed into picking either the lesser of two evils, casting a protest vote with the minor left or right party, or just sitting this election out.

Sartre offered personal bliss in the few post-war years of hope and promise before America’s fear of ideologies and overweening sense of power plunged us into successive wars punctuated with interludes of peace.  The wars continue, bleeding the country of an estimated $5 trillion in the present cycle … the death and destruction the worst since the Second World War.

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http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/10/28/hillary-trump-and-sartre-how-existentialism-disrobes-the-major-presidential-candidates/