we are so easily deceived... 9/30/2017 0 Comments   by E.L. Christianson Jr. We really are talking about 'snake oil salesmen'.  Those claiming that the proposed tremendous tax cuts for the wealthy will 'trickle down' and will somehow benefit the American worker, are simply lying to the public.  Oregon's senator Ron Wyden accurately called Trump's tax plan a "scam".  In the mythical fantasy, those who rise to the top do so because of strong moral character among other desirable traits.  And yet, those at the top of the system in the United States demonstrate repeatedly that they are among the very lowest of moral and ethical standards.  They lie without any hint of discomfort or remorse.  They lie so consistently that everything they say must be taken as untrue. We seem to be enthralled by complicated measures that are crafted into complicated laws to solve simple issues.  The math is easy enough that junior high students could provide viable solutions.  The ability of the nation to pay for meaningful social services versus the ability to reduce government income by granting huge tax breaks is extremely easy to understand. When the choice is between infrastructure, healthcare, education and support for the general population of the country or, reducing the tax burden of the wealthiest Americans while maintaining ridiculous amounts of fraudulent and unnecessary military spending, anyone with a pencil and paper can do the math involved.  It is just addition and subtraction of some basic numbers. To believe the sales pitch of those pushing tax cuts for the rich, one must suspend rational thinking and give up on common sense... and that's the truth !!! Trump’s Tax Plan Is An Act Of Political Domination By The Rich  But at least we don’t have to pretend it isn’t. from Common Dreams by Zach Carter "We can have a political system that respects its citizens as political equals, or we can have a society dominated by the arbitrary interests of unaccountable wealth. Trump, like Obama before him, has chosen the latter."(Photo: AP/J. Scott Applewhite) Most Americans suffer from the unfortunate delusion that economic problems are violations of some mathematical order. When recession, severe inflation or other hard times engulf society, it is because the sacred equations have been angered. If we adjust the right variable just so, a set of very important numbers will respond appropriately, and a process of mystical, self-sustaining prosperity will begin. Knowledge of these secret statistical potions is closely guarded, and its practitioners deploy sophisticated abstractions to explain away common-sense calls for reform. Why do so many people work 60-hour weeks for poverty wages while a few luxuriate in the fabulous returns of interest-bearing assets? Why are the citizens of Puerto Rico threatened by a deadly social collapse while the fruit of the island’s labor is shipped to Wall Street bondholders? The answer surely cannot be that some wealthy members of our society are exercising political power over the lives and incomes of others. We must consider growth, productivity, liquidity, gross domestic product and the debt-to-GDP ratio. But at the heart of every important economic issue are simple and straightforward power relationships. When you are in debt, someone else has financial power over the ordering of your affairs. Wealth enables rich people to buy their way out of troubles that overwhelm the lives of the poor. For much of our history, the American government granted some people the right to own other people. Economic problems are political problems. They have always been so; they can never be otherwise. And so in a perverse sense, President Donald Trump’s most recent tax proposal is a great gift to society. It clears away much of the obfuscating hocus-pocus that leaders of both political parties have been busy constructing around our politics over the past 40 years. Trump wants a massive tax cut for the very wealthy. He doesn’t really care how much it costs, or what it will do to the federal budget deficit, or to economic growth or to worker productivity. He isn’t even very picky about how, exactly, taxes for the rich are reduced, so long as they are diminished by a very large amount. His framework suggests eliminating the estate tax, dramatically slashing corporate taxes, reducing the top rate on individual income taxes, and limiting the levies on special “pass through” accounts ― all perks that generate terrific sums for CEOs and hedge fund managers. If you want to tack on a few hundred dollars for middle-class families, Trump will not raise a fuss. We could describe this as a complex, disembodied economic idea ― the mathematical inelegance of extreme inequality or the fearful ratios implied by a ballooning deficit. But it is really a simple expression of power. The Trump tax plan is a public demonstration of the political priority the American government has decided to grant to the wealthiest members of our society. It is a clear, unequivocal statement that in America, some citizens are more equal than others. Everything else we can say about the plan with statistics is window-dressing. The billionaire donors cheering it on don’t need the money. It will not make them wealthier in any meaningful sense. They will buy the same Hermès scarves and Tom Ford sunnies they would have purchased without it. Their yachts will continue to be elegantly contoured and divinely upholstered. Many quite literally cannot use the money Trump wants to offer them. One of the biggest perks in Trump’s proposed framework is the elimination of the estate tax ― a levy that falls not on the millionaires of today, but on the inheritances of their heirs and heiresses. A wealthy individual needs to leave behind over $5 million to trigger the estate tax. For a married couple, the figure is nearly $11 million. So Trump loves the rich so much he will cut their taxes even when they are dead. And the ultra-rich love Trump’s plan because it is a formal political recognition of their social prestige, an acknowledgement that they carry more weight than others in the political system we still optimistically refer to as a democracy. This is, as they see it, how it should be. It has, after all, been the way of things for decades. In 2010, billionaire Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman was enraged by President Barack Obama’s suggestion that taxes on private equity and hedge fund managers be increased from 15 percent to 35 percent ― the level that other wealthy people have to pay on their salaries. It was “war,” according to Schwartzman, who likened the plan to “when Hitler invaded Poland.” Obama settled for 23.8 percent. “I believe one of the major things people want from politicians is psychic income,” former House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) told HuffPost in 2014. “They want to be told that they are wonderful people, that their jobs are important for the human race, that they contribute greatly. Lloyd Blankfein was not really kidding when he said that, ‘We are doing God’s work.’ That’s his inner feeling. I don’t think that the [Dodd-Frank financial reform] legislation really hurt them much, and I think a lot of them, frankly, some of them welcome it because they’re not under competitive pressure to do stupid things — now, nobody can do them. But we really hurt their feelings mightily, particularly the president. You’ve seen that with these ridiculous statements from Steve Schwarzman going on about Nazis.” Frank was close, but not quite right. Many Wall Streeters did have their feelings hurt when Obama told CBS that he didn’t run for president to protect the paychecks of “fat cat bankers.” But this was because the president’s words implied a political demotion. After years of being celebrated as “Masters of the Universe,” bankers were suddenly threatened with the prospect of becoming ordinary, humdrum members of a democracy; people whose actions might be subject to democratic forms of accountability. It must have been terrifying. Wall Street’s very public freakout ― a fellow named Anthony Scaramucci implored Obama to stop bashing the “Wall Street piñata,” and JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon declared he could now barely tolerate calling himself a Democrat ― obscured the profound degree to which Obama was protecting Wall Street interests. Obama named a top lobbyist from JPMorgan Chase as his chief of staff. He and his attorney general, Eric Holder, steadfastly refused to prosecute what everyone knew to be widespread criminality on Wall Street during the 2008 financial crisis. The Obama foreclosure relief plan became a vehicle for big banks to harvest funds from desperate families through illegal foreclosures. Obama even protected the bonuses at AIG and big banks that received taxpayer bailouts. When vulture fund investors descended on Puerto Rico, forcing the closure of schools and hospitals in the name of debt payments, Obama waved through a half-hearted reform plan that preserved the political priority of bondholders over basic social services. These bailouts and bonuses and other protections were not only infuriating because bankers were rich. They divorced socially destructive activity from political accountability. You could enrich yourself by destroying entire communities ― you could even break the law to do it ― and face no meaningful consequences. Members of a democracy, it seemed to many people, ought to be able to protect themselves from such abuses. And yet studies by respected academics from Princeton, Northwestern University and the University of Connecticut concluded that the concerns of the wealthy dominate the congressional agenda. Some reporters on Capitol Hill noticed the same trend. But the idea has generally been dismissed by Washington officialdom, which prides itself on interpreting the mathematical codes and metaphors that show why simple problems of power are in fact very thorny economic matters. Paul Ryan, in particular, hypnotized D.C. journalists in the days before he became House speaker with pronouncements about debt and deficits. Ryan’s story conveniently excluded credit default swaps, proprietary trading and other high-risk activity on Wall Street. He warned of an inevitable “debt crisis” just around the corner if America didn’t cut its spending ― particularly on social programs for the poor and elderly. This wasn’t because he hated the indigent, mind you ― he merely recognized that we now had too many “takers” and not enough “makers” and were nearing a “tipping point.” He even found the magic number: If America’s public debt reached 90 percent of its gross domestic product, we were headed for another 2008, only worse. The figure, based on research from two prominent conservative economists, was eventually discredited by a lowly graduate student who discovered it was the result of a very simple Microsoft Excel error. Today, as Trump proposes massive tax benefits for the super-rich, the deficit hawks and austerity mongers have fallen strangely silent. The profound ratios and disequilibria that once threatened to dissolve society itself have disappeared now that they are being fueled by tax cuts rather than spending programs. We can have a political system that respects its citizens as political equals, or we can have a society dominated by the arbitrary interests of unaccountable wealth. Trump, like Obama before him, has chosen the latter. In the not-so-distant past, polities ruled by unaccountable wealth have demonstrated a marked tendency to generate less accountability and an astonishing capacity for statistical deception and logical absurdity. In 1929, the global economy was in terrible shape. There was a tremendous amount of work to be done ― highways to be built, telephone lines to be wired, electrical grids to be constructed ― yet millions of people were out of work. The British economist John Maynard Keynes co-authored a political pamphlet with a simple solution: The government could hire the unemployed people to do the work. Financiers in the city of London were aghast at the idea, and told the public that it was all much more complicated than Keynes suggested. If the government hired people, after all, it would deprive future generations of the chance to get a job. All of the work would already have been done. Keynes knew he wasn’t proposing anything particularly clever, just trying to knock down silly ideas that people only took seriously because they were delivered by very prestigious people. “Our main task,” he wrote, “will be to confirm the reader’s instinct that what seems sensible is sensible, and what seems nonsense is nonsense.” No one in power listened to him then, and there will probably be plenty of Democrats and Republicans in Congress who shrug off critics of the Trump tax plan now. Our government, like those of the Gilded Age, likes to give the wealthy what they want. At least with Trump, we will not mistake a simple act of political domination for the music of the spheres. © 2017 Huffington Post Zach Carter is The Huffington Post's Senior Political Economy Reporter. and, let's be especially careful not to say anything that might be interpreted as 'unpatriotic'...

war against working people...

9/29/2017

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by E.L. Christianson Jr.

The battle to destroy the healthcare system upon which so many American citizens depend is apparently over, at least for the moment.  There can be little doubt that the battle will be resurrected with a vengeance.  But, for now, the leaders of 'that' war have selected another arena in which to inflict grievous injury to the working people, tax law.

In both of these battlefields, healthcare and taxes, 'they', corporate and government officials regard the working people as complete idiots.  'They' utter stupid transparent lies as arguments to support their plan as if working people couldn't even understand the English language.  They are obsessed with claiming that the plan they are pushing through the legislative process will be advantageous for the working person.  They insist on repeating the lie even when anyone can easily see that the opposite is true.  It appears as if they are living in a fantasy, make-believe world.  It is almost as if they themselves believe that just because 'they say it', everyone will believe that it is true.   And, they believe, by repeating it more and more, it is transformed into being true... delusional, for sure - but, they are the ones with full power... completely in control of virtually everything that happens in this country.  

Americans must wake up to the realities of our democratic form of government and learn their roles and their duties.  The crooks are in charge because we allow them to be in charge.  And, because we allow them to be in charge, America is a land of inequities in very sphere. 

The richest 10 percent of our population owns nearly 80 percent of our wealth.  Nearly 40 percent of our population has a net worth of zero... they don't own anything at all.  Those in the bottom 10 percent of our population are in debt - literally "working to pay the man".

The new tax laws are being proposed against a background of recent financial thievery of epic proportions.  The crooks running the system robbed the country of tremendous wealth.  It was the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.  The crooks started by manipulating the subprime mortgage market and elevated their thievery into a complete banking crisis including the demise of Lehman Brothers in 2008.

Working Americans were hit the worst as the housing market went into serious decline, resulting in evictions and foreclosures.  Unemployment was a natural consequence.  The loss of consumer wealth has been estimated in the trillions of dollars.  We still haven't recovered.  Nobody believes recovery is imminent. 

The banksters did it.   The crisis was engineered by the central banks.  We all know the slogan, "Too big to Fail" which was used to sell the idea of giving whatever amount of tax-payer money was needed to save the investments of the wealthy elite.  And we all know the companion slogan, "Too big to Jail" which is used to explain why no banker has been prosecuted for the well  documented series of crimes they committed.

So now, the crooks want to get even more.  They propose to repeal the 'Estate Tax' or as many like to put it, the 'Death Tax' which sounds more onerous and sounds like it effects working Americans.  The truth is it only effects a very small group of very rich people - approximately 5,000 families total and it only applies to fortunes greater than $5.5 million.

With a part-time service job that has no 'benefits', it is difficult for workers to accumulate an estate of that size.  But Trump is lying to Americans when he says, "It's a disaster for so many small businesses and farmers, and we're getting rid of it".  That is a big lie.  Small businesses and small farmers are not slightly effected by the estate tax.

Of course, a big giveaway to the rich is the reduction in the top individual rate to 35 percent.  Plus the cut in the top corporate rate to 20 percent is nothing more than an additional tax cut to the rich - working Americans are not corporate owners.

As a nation, we are broke.  Depending on what one reads, the United States is 20 Billion dollars in debt.  But, the wealthy elite still have plans to 'rip off' working Americans through 'improvements in the tax code'.

For one example, our roads are in deplorable condition and need $2 trillion over the next 10 years to make necessary upgrades.  But, that money is being wasted on 'tax breaks for the rich' instead of fixing roads.  Being consistent, the wealthy plan to build toll roads that 'pay for themselves' by charging working Americans a 'toll'.

Every aspect of every law that passes congress is in one way or another an advantage for those who already have all of the advantages.  For anyone to believe that the currently proposed changes to tax law will be aimed at benefiting the working American family is purely demented thinking.  The rich are in charge and they are looking after the best interests of the rich... and that's the truth !!!

history records...

9/28/2017

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Colin Kaepernick launched the Colin Kaepernick Foundation in 2016 "to fight oppression of all kinds globally, through education and social activism." (Kaepernick7.com)

by E.L. Christianson Jr.

The news media and the president of the United States are doing everything possible to 'get the word out', so to speak.  Publicity is what is important.  When Colin first knelt before an NFL game, almost nobody noticed.  Thanks largely to Trump and the media, everyone in the country is now aware of Colin's kneeling and the reasons behind it.  Trump has promoted Kaepernick to 'hero' status.  Thanks to Trump,  #TakeAKnee was the top trend on Twitter in the United States and being used to show solidarity with players who have decided to kneel.

One important lesson is how the owning class relies on patriotism to help protect and secure its position in society. The notion of patriotism is one that tells the American working class that they have a deep, common bond with the American capitalist class. This, of course, couldn’t be further from the truth. As being consistent with capitalism, the owning-class minority has driven the working-class majority into widespread deprivation

Colin Kaepernick took a courageous and principled stand last season by kneeling during the national anthem before NFL games. This was done in response to a society that continues to systematically, culturally, and institutionally devalue black lives. This devaluation is played out in many areas, including politics, economics, housing, employment, and perhaps most notably, within the criminal punishment system. Black lives are routinely extinguished by police in the streets without recourse, in the courts without pause, and in the prisons without hesitation. Entire generations of black Americans have essentially been destroyed through the “school-to-prison pipeline” and a system of mass incarceration, for which author Michelle Alexander has properly deemed, The New Jim Crow.

​Kaepernick recognized this and felt compelled to bring attention to it. He openly protested the national anthem.

He is now a free agent, in the prime of his career, and without a job. By all “measurables” (and the NFL is big on “measurables”), Kaepernick should have a starting job somewhere.  His career numbers, in what amounts to just over three full seasons, are very impressive.  When considering these measurables, it is unimaginable that he is without a job in the NFL. The only reasonable explanation for Kaepernick’s newfound unemployment status is that he’s being blackballed by billionaire NFL owners.

We're all gonna do it now... Buffalo Bills players kneel during the national anthem before their NFL football game against the Denver Broncos on Sunday in Orchard Park, N.Y. (Jeffrey T. Barnes/Associated Press)

The Abuses of History
"History is what the present chooses to remember about the past."

from Common Dreams by Chris Hedges
​
Historians, like journalists, are in the business of manipulating facts. Some use facts to tell truths, however unpleasant. But many more omit, highlight and at times distort them in ways that sustain national myths and buttress dominant narratives. The failure by most of the United States' popular historians and the press to tell stories of oppression and the struggles against it, especially by women, people of color, the working class and the poor, has contributed to the sickening triumphalism and chauvinism that are poisoning our society. The historian James W. Loewen, in his book Lies Across America: What Our Historic Markers and Monuments Get Wrong, calls the monuments that celebrate our highly selective and distorted history a "landscape of denial."

The historian Carl Becker wrote, "History is what the present chooses to remember about the past." And as a nation founded on the pillars of genocide, slavery, patriarchy, violent repression of popular movements, savage war crimes committed to expand the empire, and capitalist exploitation, we choose to remember very little. This historical amnesia, as James Baldwin never tired of pointing out, is very dangerous. It feeds self-delusion. It severs us from recognition of our propensity for violence. It sees us project on others—almost always the vulnerable—the unacknowledged evil that lies in our past and our hearts. It shuts down the voices of the oppressed, those who can tell us who we are and enable us through self-reflection and self-criticism to become a better people. "History does not merely refer to the past … history is literally present in all we do," Baldwin wrote.

If we understood our real past we would see as lunacy Donald Trump’s bombastic assertions that the removal of Confederate statues is an attack on "our history." Whose history is being attacked? And is it history that is being attacked or the myth disguised as history and perpetuated by white supremacy and capitalism? As the historian Eric Foner points out, "Public monuments are built by those with sufficient power to determine which parts of history are worth commemorating and what vision of history ought to be conveyed."

The clash between historical myth and historical reality is being played out in the president’s disparaging of black athletes who protest indiscriminate police violence against people of color. "Maybe he should find a country that works better for him," candidate Trump said of professional quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who knelt during the national anthem at National Football League games to protest police violence. Other NFL players later emulated his protest.

Friday at a political rally in Alabama, Trump bellowed: "Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, 'Get that son of a bitch off the field right now. Out! He’s fired. He’s fired!'" That comment and a Saturday morning tweet by Trump that criticized professional basketball star Stephen Curry, another athlete of African-American descent, prompted a number of prominent sports figures to respond angrily. One addressed the president as "U bum" on Twitter.

The war of words between the president and black athletes is about competing historical narratives.

Historians are rewarded for buttressing the ruling social structure, producing heavy tomes on the ruling elites—usually powerful white men such as John D. Rockefeller or Theodore Roosevelt—and ignoring the underlying social movements and radicals that have been the true engines of cultural and political change in the United States. Or they retreat into arcane and irrelevant subjects of minor significance, becoming self-appointed specialists of the banal or the trivial. They ignore or minimize inconvenient facts and actions that tarnish the myth, including lethal suppression of groups, classes and civilizations and the plethora of lies told by the ruling elites, the mass media and powerful institutions to justify their grip on power. They eschew transcendental and moral issues, including class conflict, in the name of neutrality and objectivity. The mantra of disinterested scholarship and the obsession with data collection add up, as the historian Howard Zinn wrote, "to the fear that using our intelligence to further our moral ends is somehow improper."

"Objectivity is an interesting and often misunderstood word," Foner said. "I tell my students what objectivity means is you have an open mind, not an empty mind. There is no person who doesn't have preconceptions, values, assumptions. And you bring those to the study of history. What it means to be objective is if you begin encountering evidence, research, that questions some of your assumptions, you may have to change your mind.

protesting certainly gets the government's attention...

You have to have an open mind in your encounters with the evidence. But that doesn't mean you don't take a stance. You have an obligation. If you've done all this studying, done all this research, if you understand key issues in American history better than most people, just because you've done the research and they haven't, you have an obligation as a citizen to speak up about it. …We should not be bystanders. We should be active citizens. Being a historian and an active citizen is not mutually contradictory."

Historians who apologize for the power elites, who in essence shun complexity and minimize inconvenient truths, are rewarded and promoted. They receive tenure, large book contracts, generous research grants, lucrative speaking engagements and prizes. Truth tellers, such as Zinn, are marginalized. Friedrich Nietzsche calls this process "creative forgetfulness."

Protesting can be dangerous... and attempts at control reflect attitudes of the wealthy elite, "That was not a clash between protesters and police, that was a clash between criminals and police,”

"In high school," Foner said, "I got a history textbook that said 'Story of American History,' which was very one-dimensional. It was all about the rise of freedom and liberty. Slavery was omitted almost entirely. The general plight of African-Americans and other non-whites was pretty much omitted from this story. It was very partial. It was very limited. That[s the same thing with all these statues and [the debate about them]. I'm not saying we should tear down every single statue of every Confederate all over the place. But if we step back and look at the public presentation of history, particularly in the South, through these monuments, where are the black people of the South? Where are the monuments to the victims of slavery? To the victims of lynching? The monuments of the black leaders of Reconstruction? The first black senators and members of Congress? My view is, as well as taking down some statues, we need to put up others. If we want to have a public commemoration of history, it ought to be diverse enough to include the whole history, not just the history that those in power want us to remember."

"Civil War monuments glorify soldiers and generals who fought for Southern independence," Foner writes in "Battles for Freedom: The Use and Abuse of American History," "explaining their motivation by reference to the ideals of freedom, states’ rights and individual autonomy—everything, that is but slavery, the 'cornerstone of the Confederacy,' according to its vice president, Alexander Stephens. Fort Mill, South Carolina, has a marker honoring the 'faithful slaves' of the Confederate states, but one would be hard pressed to find monuments anywhere in the country to slave rebels like Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner, to the 200,000 black soldiers and sailors who fought for the Union (or, for that matter, the thousands of white Southerners who remained loyal to the nation)."

The United Daughters of the Confederacy, as Loewen points out, erected most of the South's Confederate monuments between 1890 and 1920. This campaign of commemoration was part of what Foner calls "a conscious effort to glorify and sanitize the Confederate cause and legitimize the newly installed Jim Crow system."

Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, who Loewen writes was "one of the most vicious racists in American history," was one of the South's biggest slave traders, commander of the forces that massacred black Union troops after they surrendered at Fort Pillow and the founder of the Ku Klux Klan. Yet, as Foner notes, "there are more statues, markers and busts of Forrest in Tennessee than of any other figure in the state's history, including President Andrew Jackson."

"Only one transgression was sufficiently outrageous to disqualify Confederate leaders from the pantheon of heroes," Foner writes. "No statue of James Longstreet, a far abler commander than Forrest, graces the Southern countryside, and Gen. James Fleming Fagan is omitted from the portrait gallery of famous figures of Arkansas history in Little Rock. Their crime? Both supported black rights during Reconstruction."

The American myth also relies heavily on a distorted history of the westward expansion.

“The mythology of the West is deeply rooted in our culture,” Foner said, “whether it’s in Western movies or the idea of the lone pioneer, the individual roughing it out in the West, and of course, the main lie is that the West was kind of empty before white settlers and hunters and trappers and farmers came from the East to settle it. In fact, the West has been populated since forever. The real story of the West is the clash of all these different peoples, Native Americans, Asians in California, settlers coming in from the East, Mexicans. The West was a very multicultural place. There are a lot of histories there. Many of those histories are ignored or subordinated in this one story of the westward movement.”

"Racism is certainly a part of Western history," Foner said. "But you're not going to get that from a John Wayne movie [or] the paintings by [Frederic] Remington and others. It’' a history that doesn't help you understand the present."

Remington's racism, displayed in paintings of noble white settlers and cowboys battling "savages," was pronounced. "Jews—inguns—chinamen—Italians—Huns," he wrote, were "the rubbish of the earth I hate." In the same letter he added, "I've got some Winchesters and when the massacreing begins … I can get my share of ’em and whats more I will."

Nietzsche identified three approaches to history: monumental, antiquarian and critical, the last being "the history that judges and condemns."

"The monumental is the history that glorifies the nation-state that is represented in monuments that do not question anything about the society," Foner said. "A lot of history is like that. The rise of history as a discipline coincided with the rise of the nation-state. Every nation needs a set of myths to justify its own existence. Another one of my favorite writers, Ernest Renan, the French historian, wrote, 'The historian is the enemy of the nation.' It’s an interesting thing to say. He doesn't mean they're spies or anything. The historian comes along and takes apart the mythologies that are helping to underpin the legitimacy of the nation. That's why people don't like them very often. They don't want to hear these things.

​Antiquarian is what a lot of people are. That's fine. They're looking for their personal roots, their family history. They're going on ancestry.com to find out where their DNA came from. That’s not really history exactly. They don’t have much of a historical context. But it stimulates people to think about the past.

​Then there's what Nietzsche calls critical history—the history that judges and condemns. It takes a moral stance. It doesn’t just relate the facts. It tells you what is good and what is evil. A lot of historians don’t like to do that. But to me, it’s important. It’s important for the historian, having done the research, having presented the history, to say here’s where I stand in relation to all these important issues in our history.”

"Whether it’s Frederick Douglass, Eugene Debs, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Martin Luther King Jr., those are the people who were trying to make America a better place," Foner said. "King, in particular, was a very radical guy."

Yet, as Foner points out, King is effectively "frozen in one speech, one sentence: I want my children to be judged by the content of their character, not just the color of their skin. [But] that’s not what the whole civil rights movement was about. People forget, he died leading a poor people's march, leading a strike of sanitation workers. He wasn't just out there talking about civil rights. He had moved to economic equality as a fundamental issue."

Max Weber wrote, "What is possible would never have been achieved if, in this world, people had not repeatedly reached for the impossible."

Foner, like Weber, argues that it is the visionaries and utopian reformers such as Debs and the abolitionists who brought about real social change, not the "practical" politicians. The abolitionists destroyed what Foner calls the "conspiracy of silence by which political parties, churches and other institutions sought to exclude slavery from public debate." He writes:

For much of the 1850s and the first two years of the Civil War, Lincoln—widely considered the model of a pragmatic politician—advocated a plan to end slavery that involved gradual emancipation, monetary compensation for slaver owners, and setting up colonies of freed blacks outside the United States. The harebrained scheme had no possibility of enactment. It was the abolitionists, still viewed by some historians as irresponsible fanatics, who put forward the program—an immediate and uncompensated end to slavery, with black people becoming US citizens—that came to pass (with Lincoln's eventual help, of course).

The political squabbles that dominate public discourse almost never question the sanctity of private property, individualism, capitalism or imperialism. They hold as sacrosanct American "virtues." They insist that Americans are a "good" people steadily overcoming any prejudices and injustices that may have occurred in the past. The debates between the Democrats and the Whigs, or today’s Republicans and Democrats, have roots in the same allegiance to the dominant structures of power, myth of American exceptionalism and white supremacy.

"It's all a family quarrel without any genuine, serious disagreements," Foner said.

Those who challenge these structures, who reach for the impossible, who dare to speak the truth, have been, throughout American history, dismissed as "fanatics." But, as Foner points out, it is often the "fanatics" who make history.

© 2017 TruthDig
Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.  His most recent book isEmpire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.

The Dallas Cowboys and owner Jerry Jones added a distinctive wrinkle to the NFL’s national anthem demonstrations Monday night, with Jones, Coach Jason Garrett and other coaches and front office executives taking a knee in unison before the anthem, then rising and locking arms as it was being performed. (Matt York/AP)

regarding guns... sometimes... and then at other times... 9/27/2017 0 Comments   We have real fears, at least the concepts described in this cartoon are close... instead, that might be United States troops... and Sonny could be headed out to any public space... and we all end up being victims one way or the other... by E.L. Christianson Jr. The citizens of the Unites States of America are often indecisive or uncertain about which path to chose.  In a democracy it is important that the voting public has an accurate concept about the issues involved and can voice their choice regarding the subject matter at hand.  However, we are so far removed from the idea of democracy that it requires serious and deep thinking to recognize the truth about where we are in reality. Freedom Is a Myth: We Are All Prisoners of the Police State’s Panopticon Village On the subject of guns, and gun ownership, and gun possession, and the laws that effect guns in our society and our culture, it is extremely difficult to settle into a comfortable position on any particular side of the issue.  Sometimes, when seen from a certain perspective, it seems important to make certain that citizens are able to arm themselves.  On other occasions, the easy availability of guns in our midst seems to be the worse thing possible. The National Rifle Association is representative of one particular side of the issue.  Their position is extreme and irrational.  It carries one view point to an extreme position which can only be endorsed by an idiot. But, on the other hand, among the reasons the 'founding fathers' included the second amendment in the constitution was to allow citizens to protect themselves against government overreach.  Situations wherein the government attempts to exceed it's authority require citizens to correct the trajectory of government actions. Today, in the United States, no citizen has any idea of what the government is doing because everything is done in absolute and complete secrecy.  "National Security" is used as an excuse to hide each and every government action.  At the same time, the government and corporate snooping reveals each and every action and thought of each and every citizen. The imbalance is tremendous.  The citizens of a democracy are supposed to direct government.  The citizens of the United States have virtually no knowledge of government activities and therefore cannot make any valid decisions regarding government activity.  On the other hand, government and corporate entities know everything about the citizen and allowing 'officials' to lead/coerce/intimidate citizens in whatever direction is chosen. "Pre-Crime" is the new word.  It was recently reported that the Chicago Police Department has implemented an Orwellian new program that targets innocent citizens based on indicators that they might be a person who has the potential to carry out a crime. This disturbing program has quietly been in place for over three years, and in that time, government agents have visited the homes of more than 1,300 innocent people who had high numbers on the list.  According to the New York Times, Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson says that officials this year are stepping up those visits. If one follows this line of thinking to the logical conclusion, we can envision identifying potential 'problem citizens' while they are still in the womb.  It is no big leap to imagine surgical procedures for infants to 'correct' for 'unacceptable' behaviors before those behaviors occur.   The people may be in need of guns to keep evil governments at bay, including their own government.  But, allowing guns in the hands of the people results in human folly caused shootings among the people.  There is no easy solution.  The mass murder of groups of people elicits common sense reactions against gun ownership.   The real answer is for the people to take back the control of their government.  People need to pay attention to the issues that are important.  People need to learn how to use the vote to remove the crooks who operate the system.  Citizens must understand what is necessary to make democracy function for the good of the public, and that's the truth !!! We are simply 'pawns' manipulated by the power of corporations and government - The Human Chess Game - Patrick McGoohan in The Prisoner CREDIT: ITV / REX FEATURES / SHUTTERSTOCK Freedom Is a Myth: We Are All Prisoners of the Police State’s Panopticon Village Posted on September 18, 2017 from Washington's Blog by John Whitehead “We’re run by the Pentagon, we’re run by Madison Avenue, we’re run by television, and as long as we accept those things and don’t revolt we’ll have to go along with the stream to the eventual avalanche…. As long as we go out and buy stuff, we’re at their mercy… We all live in a little Village. Your Village may be different from other people’s Villages, but we are all prisoners.”— Patrick McGoohan First broadcast in Great Britain 50 years ago, The Prisoner—a dystopian television series described as “James Bond meets George Orwell filtered through Franz Kafka”—confronted societal themes that are still relevant today: the rise of a police state, the freedom of the individual, round-the-clock surveillance, the corruption of government, totalitarianism, weaponization, group think, mass marketing, and the tendency of humankind to meekly accept their lot in life as a prisoner in a prison of their own making. Perhaps the best visual debate ever on individuality and freedom, The Prisoner (17 episodes in all) centers around a British secret agent who abruptly resigns only to find himself imprisoned, monitored by militarized drones, and interrogated in a mysterious, self-contained, cosmopolitan, seemingly tranquil retirement community known only as the Village. The Village is an idyllic setting with parks and green fields, recreational activities and even a butler. While luxurious and resort-like, the Village is a virtual prison disguised as a seaside paradise: its inhabitants have no true freedom, they cannot leave the Village, they are under constant surveillance, their movements are tracked by surveillance drones, and they are stripped of their individuality and identified only by numbers. The series’ protagonist, played by Patrick McGoohan, is Number Six. Number Two, the Village administrator, acts as an agent for the unseen and all-powerful Number One, whose identity is not revealed until the final episode. “I am not a number. I am a free man,” was the mantra chanted on each episode of The Prisoner, which was largely written and directed by McGoohan. In the opening episode (“The Arrival”), Number Six meets Number Two, who explains to him that he is in The Village because information stored “inside” his head has made him too valuable to be allowed to roam free “outside.” Throughout the series, Number Six is subjected to interrogation tactics, torture, hallucinogenic drugs, identity theft, mind control, dream manipulation, and various forms of social indoctrination and physical coercion in order to “persuade” him to comply, give up, give in and subjugate himself to the will of the powers-that-be. Number Six refuses to comply. In every episode, Number Six resists the Village’s indoctrination methods, struggles to maintain his own identity, and attempts to escape his captors. “I will not make any deals with you,” he pointedly remarks to Number Two. “I’ve resigned. I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.” Yet no matter how far Number Six manages to get in his efforts to escape, it’s never far enough. Watched by surveillance cameras and other devices, Number Six’s getaways are continuously thwarted by ominous white balloon-like spheres known as “rovers.” Still, he refuses to give up. “Unlike me,” he says to his fellow prisoners, “many of you have accepted the situation of your imprisonment, and will die here like rotten cabbages.” Number Six’s escapes become a surreal exercise in futility, each episode an unfunny, unsettling Groundhog’s Day that builds to the same frustrating denouement: there is no escape. As journalist Scott Thill concludes for Wired, “Rebellion always comes at a price. During the acclaimed run of The Prisoner, Number Six is tortured, battered and even body-snatched: In the episode ‘Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling,’ his mind is transplanted to another man’s body. Number Six repeatedly escapes The Village only to be returned to it in the end, trapped like an animal, overcome by a restless energy he cannot expend, and betrayed by nearly everyone around him.” The series is a chilling lesson about how difficult it is to gain one’s freedom in a society in which prison walls are disguised within the trappings of technological and scientific progress, national security and so-called democracy. As Thill noted when McGoohan died in 2009, “The Prisoner was an allegory of the individual, aiming to find peace and freedom in a dystopia masquerading as a utopia.” The Prisoner’s Village is also an apt allegory for the American Police State: it gives the illusion of freedom while functioning all the while like a prison: controlled, watchful, inflexible, punitive, deadly and inescapable. The American Police State, much like The Prisoner’s Village, is a metaphorical panopticon, a circular prison in which the inmates are monitored by a single watchman situated in a central tower. Because the inmates cannot see the watchman, they are unable to tell whether or not they are being watched at any given time and must proceed under the assumption that they are always being watched. Eighteenth century social theorist Jeremy Bentham envisioned the panopticon prison to be a cheaper and more effective means of “obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example.” Bentham’s panopticon, in which the prisoners are used as a source of cheap, menial labor, has become a model for the modern surveillance state in which the populace is constantly being watched, controlled and managed by the powers-that-be and funding its existence. Nowhere to run and nowhere to hide: this is the new mantra of the architects of the police state and their corporate collaborators (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google, Instagram, etc.). Government eyes are watching you. They see your every move: what you read, how much you spend, where you go, with whom you interact, when you wake up in the morning, what you’re watching on television and reading on the internet. Every move you make is being monitored, mined for data, crunched, and tabulated in order to form a picture of who you are, what makes you tick, and how best to control you when and if it becomes necessary to bring you in line. When the government sees all and knows all and has an abundance of laws to render even the most seemingly upstanding citizen a criminal and lawbreaker, then the old adage that you’ve got nothing to worry about if you’ve got nothing to hide no longer applies. Apart from the obvious dangers posed by a government that feels justified and empowered to spy on its people and use its ever-expanding arsenal of weapons and technology to monitor and control them, we’re approaching a time in which we will be forced to choose between obeying the dictates of the government—i.e., the law, or whatever a government official deems the law to be—and maintaining our individuality, integrity and independence. When people talk about privacy, they mistakenly assume it protects only that which is hidden behind a wall or under one’s clothing. The courts have fostered this misunderstanding with their constantly shifting delineation of what constitutes an “expectation of privacy.” And technology has furthered muddied the waters. However, privacy is so much more than what you do or say behind locked doors. It is a way of living one’s life firm in the belief that you are the master of your life, and barring any immediate danger to another person (which is far different from the carefully crafted threats to national security the government uses to justify its actions), it’s no one’s business what you read, what you say, where you go, whom you spend your time with, and how you spend your money. Unfortunately, George Orwell’s 1984—where “you had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized”—has now become our reality. We now find ourselves in the unenviable position of being monitored, managed and controlled by our technology, which answers not to us but to our government and corporate rulers. Consider that on any given day, the average American going about his daily business will be monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways, by both government and corporate eyes and ears. A byproduct of this new age in which we live, whether you’re walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency, whether the NSA or some other entity, is listening in and tracking your behavior. This doesn’t even begin to touch on the corporate trackers that monitor your purchases, web browsing, Facebook posts and other activities taking place in the cyber sphere. Stingray devices mounted on police cars to warrantlessly track cell phones, Doppler radar devices that can detect human breathing and movement within in a home, license plate readers that can record up to 1800 license plates per minute, sidewalk and “public space” cameras coupled with facial recognition and behavior-sensing technology that lay the groundwork for police “pre-crime” programs, police body cameras that turn police officers into roving surveillance cameras, the internet of things: all of these technologies add up to a society in which there’s little room for indiscretions, imperfections, or acts of independence—especially not when the government can listen in on your phone calls, monitor your driving habits, track your movements, scrutinize your purchases and peer through the walls of your home. As French philosopher Michel Foucault concluded in his 1975 book Discipline and Punish, “Visibility is a trap.” This is the electronic concentration camp—the panopticon prison—the Village—in which we are now caged. It is a prison from which there will be no escape if the government gets it way. As Glenn Greenwald notes: “The way things are supposed to work is that we’re supposed to know virtually everything about what [government officials] do: that’s why they’re called public servants. They’re supposed to know virtually nothing about what we do: that’s why we’re called private individuals. This dynamic – the hallmark of a healthy and free society – has been radically reversed. Now, they know everything about what we do, and are constantly building systems to know more. Meanwhile, we know less and less about what they do, as they build walls of secrecy behind which they function. That’s the imbalance that needs to come to an end. No democracy can be healthy and functional if the most consequential acts of those who wield political power are completely unknown to those to whom they are supposed to be accountable.” Even now, the Trump Administration is working to make some of the National Security Agency’s vast spying powers permanent. In fact, Attorney General Jeff Sessions is pushing for Congress to permanently renew Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which allows government snoops to warrantlessly comb through and harvest vast quantities of our communications. And just like that, we’re back in the Village, our escape plans foiled, our future bleak. Except this is no surprise ending: for those who haven’t been taking the escapist blue pill, who haven’t fallen for the Deep State’s phony rhetoric, who haven’t been lured in by the promise of a political savior, we never stopped being prisoners. So how do we break out? For starters, wake up. Resist the urge to comply. The struggle to remain “oneself in a society increasingly obsessed with conformity to mass consumerism,” writes Steven Paul Davies, means that superficiality and image trump truth and the individual. The result is the group mind and the tyranny of mob-think. Think for yourself. Be an individual. As McGoohan commented in 1968, “At this moment individuals are being drained of their personalities and being brainwashed into slaves… As long as people feel something, that’s the great thing. It’s when they are walking around not thinking and not feeling, that’s tough. When you get a mob like that, you can turn them into the sort of gang that Hitler had.” In a media-dominated age in which the lines between entertainment, politics and news reporting are blurred, it is extremely difficult to distinguish fact from fiction. We are so bombarded with images, dictates, rules and punishments and stamped with numbers from the day we are born that it is a wonder we ever ponder a concept such as freedom. As McGoohan declared, “Freedom is a myth.” In the end, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we are all prisoners of our own mind. In fact, it is in the mind that prisons are created for us. And in the lockdown of political correctness, it becomes extremely difficult to speak or act individually without being ostracized. Thus, so often we are forced to retreat inwardly into our minds, a prison without bars from which we cannot escape, and into the world of video games and television and the Internet. We have come full circle from Bentham’s Panopticon to McGoohan’s Village to Huxley’s Brave New World. As cultural theorist Neil Postman observed: What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared we would become a captive audience. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared that we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate would ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us. You want to be free? Break out of the circle. in part, it all depends upon definitions - "the criminal code says thus and thus" and, when criminals write the code, we can expect a 'criminal' code...

"the government wants to kill me"

9/26/2017

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Flanagan resisting arrest.... Photo by J. Scott Applewhite/AP

by E.L. Christianson Jr.

It is amazing how we handle 'things' in this country.  Peaceful protestors have difficulty protesting peacefully and demonstrating for their representatives in government to actually represent them.  Government was ready in advance with excessive numbers of people representing 'law enforcement' to arrest those who were 'breaking the law'.  The various demonstrators were charged with a variety of crimes including refusing to cease and desist with their unlawful demonstration and charged with crowding, obstructing, or incommoding (causing inconvenience)  and resisting arrest... all serious crimes.

In other circumstances some of them could have been shot by 'law enforcement' as is often the consequence of peaceful protests by citizens of this country.  Instead, because they weren't predominately black, they were dragged from their wheelchairs and arrested.

Even with the lack of gunfire the Daily Beast reported that custodians were cleaning blood off the floor.

One might speculate that medical treatment required after 'law enforcement' induced injury from participating in the protest will not be covered by the healthcare legislation being pushed forward at the hearing for which people traveled across the country to attend and to protest.

The capital is well guarded by well armed guards...

from Common Dreams - Chanting "Kill the Bill, Not Us," over a hundred furious activists, many in wheelchairs, halted Monday's only scheduled hearing on the travesty that is the Graham-Cassidy anti-health-care-bill. Before getting hauled out and arrested by a "staggering" number of Capitol Police, the protesters - many from the disability-rights group ADAPT who had gotten up at four that morning to join long lines for the hearing - were met with a response only the current cretins in power could conjure up. Senator and Chairman Orrin Hatch, who ordered the protesters forcibly removed, told them, "If you want a hearing, you'd better shut up," adding there was no reason for him to waste his time “if the hearing is going to devolve into a sideshow."
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Lindsey Graham, the disastrous bill's co-sponsor, watched stone-faced as police dragged shrieking protesters out of the room, in some cases lifting them out of their wheelchairs. The other sponsor, Bill Cassidy, did him one better in the relaxed indifference department: He literally yawned through the turmoil. Noted Huff Post's Matt Fuller, "A good time to reevaluate what you're doing in Congress is maybe when people are being dragged out of wheelchairs over your bill idk." The debacle likewise prompted Sen. Ron Wyden, the ranking Democrat on the committee, to charge, “The process that led to this is an abomination.” He might as well have been referencing the state of the Republic.

Mark Wilson/Getty Images News/Getty Images

On Thursday, protesters held a "die-in" outside Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s office as the GOP unveiled legislation to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. Some of the protesters were in wheelchairs as they blocked the hallway, while others were wearing medical devices, and as they protested health care measures that would potentially threaten their lives, police dragged the protesters away from McConnell's office.

Police Physically Remove Protesters With Disabilities From A Die-In Against The Health Care Bill

Capitol Police officers struggled to remove people, with some sliding out of their wheelchairs and onto the floor.   Eva Malecki, a spokesperson for Capitol Police, said in a statement 181 protesters were arrested Monday afternoon.

"Fifteen demonstrators were arrested and charged with disruption of Congress," Malecki said, adding, "143 individuals were arrested after refusing to cease and desist with their unlawful demonstration activities in the hallway. Twenty-three individuals were charged with crowding, obstructing, or incommoding and resisting arrest."

People from all over the country and all of walks of life lined up as early as 5 a.m. ET, to urge lawmakers to oppose the latest Republican health care bill, known as the Graham-Cassidy bill.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Capitol Police remove a protester in a wheel chair from a Senate Finance Committee hearing about the proposed Graham-Cassidy healthcare bill in the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill, Sept. 25, 2017, in Washington... see video...

The chambers of Finance Committee is set to consider health care legislation proposed by Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., Bill Cassidy, R-La., Dean Heller, R-Nev., and Ron Johnson, R-Wis.
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This is the one and only open hearing scheduled on the Graham-Cassidy bill, an unusual process that opponents of the bill, like Sen. John McCain, have objected to.

The Congressional Budget Office says the new Republican bill aimed at repealing President Barack Obama's health care overhaul would reduce health insurance coverage for "millions" of people.

The nonpartisan analysts say people would lose coverage in part because of $1 trillion in cuts through 2026 in Medicaid. That's the health insurance program for the poor and disabled.

Others would drop policies because the bill would halt federal subsidies Obama's law gives them. Still others would be uninsured because the measure drops the law's tax penalty on people who don't buy coverage.
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The GOP bill has been losing Republican support and seems unlikely to survive.
The budget office says it will take weeks to produce a more precise estimate of the bill's impact.

As soon as the last protester was removed, Hatch sat back down and gaveled the hearing back in. “Let’s have some order,” he said, as the chants continued to drift in from the hallway outside, where arrests continued. “If you can’t be in order, get the heck out of here.”
The U.S. Capitol Police announced later on Monday that they had arrested 181 protesters in total—15 in the hearing room were charged with “disruption of Congress” and more than 100 others were charged with blocking the hallway and resisting arrest.
“Several of the demonstrators, as part of their protest activities, removed themselves from their mobility devices and lay themselves on the floor, which resulted in USCP officers having to reunite demonstrators with their mobility devices,” said the Capitol Police.
Before the hearing began, one of the ADAPT demonstrators told TPM that he had traveled all the way from Kansas to show his dissent to the bill the Senate may vote on this week, particularly its cuts to traditional Medicaid.
“Medicaid pays for the home care services that people with disabilities need,” Mike Oxford said. “The money will shrink. Those block grants are going to go away. States will not replace that money. States have proven that they’re not as good at protecting, planning, and overseeing these programs. The states have been in charge and they suck at it. That’s why we want federal protections. That’s why I’m here.”

Protesters Storm Graham-Cassidy Health Care Hearing: ‘Kill the Bill, Don’t Kill Us’ ... see video...

With hours to go before a Monday Senate hearing on Republicans’ Graham-Cassidy health care bill, hundreds of protesters affiliated with a wide range of activist groups lined up in the halls of the Dirksen Senate Office Building to show the GOP they will not stand for a proposal that may kick millions off their health insurance.

At press time, the line of protesters forming outside the room where deliberations are scheduled to take place stretched across two separate Senate buildings.
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Protest organizers told Mic that at least 200 protesters — 80 of whom were using wheelchairs — showed up in the early hours of the morning to admonish Senate Republicans for their fifth attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act with a bill that one estimate warned may kick more Americans off their health insurance than the so-called “skinny repeal,” which the Congressional Budget Office said would lead to 32 million people losing their insurance.

"The government wants to kill me," this protester said as she was removed from the protest area

as a society, we need to learn how to 'rethink' certain concepts...

Disturbing images came out of protests at Monday’s Senate Finance Committee hearing on the Graham-Cassidy bill—a health-care reform measure that would dismantle the Affordable Care Act—as police officers made arrests, dragging some protesters from their wheelchairs. It was a hastily scheduled attempt to stick to legislative protocol, as Republican Senators Lindsey Graham and Bill Cassidy continue to try to rush the bill to a vote. (A September 30 deadline ensures that they could pass it with only a 51-vote majority.) Some disability activists, many of them members of the ADAPT group, had woken up as early as 2:30 a.m. in order to be in the hallway of the Dirksen Senate Office Building before the hearing began. One choice soundbite from today’s proceedings: Senator Orrin Hatch was caught telling the assembled citizenry that “if they wanted a hearing” they should “shut up.”
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It did not escape notice in the room or on social media that there were significantly more police officers on hand to quiet and remove the chanting protesters than were present at the scheduled right-wing neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, where activist Heather Heyer was mowed down by car. The scene came a day after Donald Trump sent a barrage of tweets telling NFL coaches to fire any players that take a knee during the national anthem in silent protest of police brutality. Which is to say that there is a pattern here, a longstanding pattern, of what kinds of organizations and actors get their speech protected by the state (corporations, politicians) and those who are derided and menaced (peaceful protestors, the differently abled, people of color, and consumers) in insisting on their First Amendment rights.

Protesters Lonnie Smith, left, and Dawn Russell are wheeled out from Republican Sen. Cory Gardner’s office after they were getting arrested in downtown Denver, Colo

Ten people were arrested Thursday night after staging a two-day sit-in at the Denver office of Republican Sen. Cory Gardner over the health care bill.