US Presidential Elections 2016: The Revolt of the Masses

US Presidential Elections 2016: The Revolt of the Masses

The presidential elections of 2016 have several unique characteristics that defy common wisdom about political practices in 21^st century America.
Clearly the established political machinery – party elites and their corporate backers -have (in part) lost control of the nomination process and confront ‘unwanted’ candidates who are campaigning with programs and pronouncements that polarize the electorate.

But there are other more specific factors, which have energized the electorate and speak to recent US history.  These portend and reflect a realignment of US politics.

In this essay, we will outline these changes and their larger consequences for the future of American politics.

We will examine how these factors affect each of the two major parties.

Democratic Party Politics:  The Context of Realignment

 The ‘rise and decline’ of President Obama has seriously dented the appeal of ‘identity politics’ – the idea that ethnic, race and gender-rooted ‘identities’ can modify the power of finance capital (Wall Street), the militarists, the Zionists and ‘police-state’ officials.  Clearly manifest voter disenchantment with ‘identity politics’ has opened the door for class politics, of a specific kind.

 Candidate Bernie Sanders appeals directly to the class interests of workers and salaried employees. But the ‘class issue’arises within the context of an electoral polarization and, as such, it does not reflect a true ‘class polarization’, or rising class struggle in the streets, factories or offices.

In fact, the electoral ‘class’ polarization is a reflection of the recent major trade union defeats in Michigan, Wisconsin and Ohio.  The trade union confederation (AFL-CIO) has almost disappeared as a social and political factor, representing only 7% of private sector workers.  Working class voters are well aware that top trade union leaders, who receive an average of $500,000-a-year in salaries and benefits, are deeply ensconced in the Democratic Party elite.  While individual workers and local unions are active supporters of the Sanders campaign, they do so as members of an amorphous multi-class electoral movement and not as a unified ‘workers bloc’.
The Sanders electoral movement has not grown out of a national social movement:  The peace movement is virtually moribund; the civil rights movements are weak, fragmented and localized; the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement has peaked and declined while the ‘Occupy Wall Street Movement’ is a distant memory.

In other words, these recent movements, at best, provide some activists and some impetus for the Sanders electoral campaign.  Their presence highlights a few of the issues that the Sanders electoral movement promotes in its campaign.
In fact, the Sanders electoral movement does not ‘grow out’ of existing, ongoing mass movements as much as it fills the political vacuum resulting from their demise.  The electoral insurgency reflects the defeats of trade union officials allied with incumbent Democratic politicians as well as the limitation of the ‘direct action’ tactics of the ‘Black Lives Matter’ and ‘Occupy’ movements.

Since the Sanders electoral movement does not directly and immediately challenge capitalist profits and public budget allocations it has not been subject to state repression.  Repressive authorities calculate that this ‘buzz’ of electoral activity will last only a few months and then recede into the Democratic Party or voter apathy. Moreover, they are constrained by the fact that tens of millions of Sanders supporters are involved in all the states and not concentrated in any region.

The Sanders electoral movement aggregates hundreds of thousands of micro-local struggles and allows expression of the disaffection of millions with class grievances, at no risk or cost (as in loss of job or police repression) to the participants.  This is in stark contrast to repression at the workplace or in the urban streets.
The electoral polarization reflects horizontal (class) and vertical (intra-capitalist) social polarizations.

Below the elite 10% and especially among the young middle class, political polarization favors the Sanders electoral movement. Trade union bosses, the Black Congressional Caucus members and the Latino establishment  all embrace the anointed choice of the political elite of the Democratic Party: Hilary Clinton.  Whereas, young Latinos, working women and rank and file trade unionists support the insurgent electoral movement. Significant sectors of the African American population, who have failed to advance (and have actually regressed) under Democratic President Obama or have seen police repression expand under the ‘First Black President’, are turning to the insurgent Sanders campaign.  Millions of Latinos, disenchanted with their leaders who are tied to the Democratic elite and have done nothing to prevent the massive deportations under Obama, are a potential base of support for ‘Bernie’.

However, the most dynamic social sector in the Sanders electoral movement are students, who are excited by his program of free higher education and the end of post-graduation debt peonage.
The malaise of these sectors finds its expression in the ‘respectable revolt of the middle class’:  a voters’ rebellion, which has temporarily shifted the axis of political debate within the Democratic Party to the left.

The Sanders electoral movement raises fundamental issues of class inequality and racial injustice in the legal, police and economic system.  It highlights the oligarchical nature of the political system – even as the Sanders-led movement attempts to use the rules of the system against its owners.  These attempts have not been very successful within the Democratic Party apparatus, where the Party bosses have already allocated hundreds of ‘non-elected’ so-called ‘mega-delegates’ to Clinton – despite Sander’s successes in the early primaries.

The very strength of the electoral movement has a strategic weakness:  it is in the nature of electoral movements to coalesce for elections and to dissolve after the vote.

The Sanders leadership has made no effort to build a mass national social movement that can continue the class and social struggles during and after the elections.  In fact,  Sanders’ pledge to support the established leadership of the Democratic Party if he losses the nomination to Clinton will lead to a profound disillusionment of his supporters and break-up of the electoral movement.  The post-convention scenario, especially in the event of ‘super-delegates’ crowning Clinton despite a Sanders popular victory at the individual primaries, will be very disruptive.

Trump and ‘Revolt on the Right’

The Trump electoral campaign has many of the features of a Latin American nationalist-populist movement.  Like the Argentine Peronist movement, it combines protectionist, nationalist economic measures that appeal to small and medium size manufacturers and displaced industrial workers with populist right-wing ‘great nation chauvinism’.

This is reflected in Trumps’ attacks on ‘globalization’ - a proxy for Peronist ‘anti-imperialism’.
Trump’s attack on the Muslim minority in the US is a thinly veiled embrace of rightwing clerical fascism.

Where Peron campaigned against ‘financial oligarchies’ and the invasion of ‘foreign ideologies’, Trump scorns the ‘elites’and denounces the ‘invasion’ of Mexican immigrants.
Trump’s appeal is rooted in the deep amorphous anger of the downwardly mobile middle class, which has no ideology . . . but plenty of resentment at its declining status, crumbling stability and drug-afflicted families (Witness the overtly expressed concerns of white voters in the recent New Hampshire primary).

Trump projects personal power to workers who bridle under impotent trade unions, disorganized civic groups, and marginalized local business associations, all unable to counter the pillage, power and large-scale corruption of the financial swindlers who rotate between Washington and Wall Street with total impunity.
These ‘populist’ classes get vicarious thrills from the spectacle of Trump snapping and slapping career politicians and economic elites alike, even as he parades his capitalist success.
They prize his symbolic defiance of the political elite as he flaunts his own capitalist elite credentials.

For many of his suburban backers he is the ‘Great Moralizer’, who in his excess zeal, occasionally, commits ‘pardonable’ gaffes out of zealous exuberance – a crude ‘Oliver Cromwell’ for the 21^st Century.

Indeed, there also may be a less overt ethno-religious appeal to Trump’s campaign:  His white-Anglo-Saxon Protestant identity appeals to these same voters in the face of their apparent marginalization.  These ‘Trumpistas’ are not blind to the fact that not a single WASP judge sits on the Supreme Court and there are few, if any, WASPs among the top economic officials in Treasury, Commerce, or the Fed  (Lew, Fischer, Yellen, Greenspan, Bernacke, Cohen, Pritzker etc.).  While Trump is not up-front about his identity – it eases his voter appeal.

Among WASP voters, who quietly resent the ‘Wall Street’ bailouts and the perceived privileged position of Catholics, Jews and African-Americans in the Obama Administration, Trump’s direct, public condemnation of President Bush for deliberately misleading the nation into invading Iraq (and the implication of treason), has been a big plus.

Trump’s national-populist appeal is matched by his bellicose militarism and thuggish authoritarianism.  His public embrace of torture and police state controls (to ‘fight terrorism’) appeals to the pro- military right.  On the other hand, his friendly overtures to Russian President Putin (‘one tough guy willing to face another’) and his support to end the Cuban embargo appeals to trade-minded business elites.  His calls to withdraw US troops from Europe and Asia appeals to ‘fortress America’ voters, while his calls to ‘carpet bomb’ ISIS appeals to the nuclear extremists.  Interestingly, Trump’s support for Social Security and Medicare, as well as his call for medical coverage for the indigent and his open acknowledgement of Planned Parenthood’s vital services to poor women, appeals to older citizens, compassionate conservatives and independents.

Trump’s left-right amalgam: Protectionist and pro-business appeals, his anti-Wall Street and pro-industrial capitalism proposals, his defense of US workers and attacks on Latino workers and Muslim immigrants have broken the traditional boundaries between popular and rightwing politics of the Republican Party.
‘Trumpism’ is not a coherent ideology, but a volatile mix of ‘improvised positions’, adapted to appeal to marginalized workers, resentful middle classes (marginalized WASPs) and, above all, to those who feel unrepresented by Wall Street Republicans and liberal Democratic politicians based on identity politics (black, Hispanic, women and Jews).

Trump’s movement is based on a cult of the personality:  it has enormous capacity to convoke mass meetings without mass organization or a coherent social ideology.
Its fundamental strength is its spontaneity, novelty and hostile focus on strategic elites.

Its strategic weakness is the lack of an organization that can be sustained after the electoral process.  There are few ‘Trumpista’ cadres and militants among his adoring fans.  If Trump loses (or is cheated out of the nomination by a ‘unity’ candidate’ trotted out by the Party elite) his organization will dissipate and fragment.  If Trump wins the Republican nomination he will draw support from Wall Street, especially if faced with a Sanders Democratic candidacy.  If he wins the general election and becomes President, he will seek to strengthen executive power and move toward a ‘Bonapartist’ presidency.

Conclusion

The rise of a social democratic movement within the Democratic Party and the rise of a sui generis national-populist rightist movement in the Republican Party reflect the fragmented electorate and deep vertical and horizontal fissures characterizing the US ethno-class structure.  Commentators grossly oversimplify when they reduce the revolt to incoherent expressions of ‘anger’.

The shattering of the established elite’s control is a product of deeply experienced class and ethnic resentments, of former privileged groups experiencing declining mobility, of local businesspeople experiencing  bankruptcy  due to ‘globalization’(imperialism) and of citizens resentment at the power of finance capital (the banks) and its overwhelming control of Washington.

The electoral revolts on the left and right may dissipate but they will have planted the seeds of a democratic transformation or of a nationalist-reactionary revival.

James Petras is a Bartle Professor (Emeritus) of Sociology at Binghamton University, New York. http://petras.lahaine.org

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America's Addiction to Terrorism

America's Addiction to Terrorism
The National Insecurity State

The following excerpt, "The National Insecurity State," is from America's Addiction to Terrorism:

 I think it is fair to say, following Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem, that each country ravaged by neoliberalism and its attack on the social state will develop its own form of authoritarianism rooted in the historical, pedagogical, and cultural traditions that enable it to reproduce itself. In the United States, a "soft war" is being waged on the cultural front aided by the new electronic technologies of consumerism and surveillance. There is a full-fledged effort to conscript the pedagogical influence of various cultural apparatuses, extending from schools and older forms of media, on the one hand, to new media and digital modes of communication, on the other. These educational tools are being used to produce elements of the authoritarian personality, while crushing as much as possible any form of collective dissent and struggle. With the continuation of such conditions, state sovereignty will be permanently replaced by corporate sovereignty, giving substance to the specter of totalitarianism that Michael Halberstam described in Totalitarianism and the Modern Conception of Politics as a specter that "haunts the modern ideal of political emancipation."What is more, there is ample evidence that any failure of this soft war to enthrall the citizenry is liable to provoke a "hard war" that deploys unremitting state violence against the American people. There has been an increase in military-style repression in order to deal with the inevitable economic, ecological, and political crises that will only intensify under the new authoritarianism. In this instance, justifications will continue to be issued regarding the need for state security and control, reinforced by a virulent culture of fear and an intensified appeal to overtly racist forms of nationalism. This has become particularly evident in the overt racism displayed by Donald Trump and his fellow Republican Party candidates in the 2016 presidential primaries. The racist anti-immigrant discourse spewed forth in this campaign is as ruthless and cruel as it is politically reactionary. Mexican immigrants are now labeled as rapists, criminals, and moochers while their children born in the United States are derisively called anchor babies."

Chris Hedges crystalizes this premise in arguing that Americans now live in a society in which "violence is the habitual response by the state to every dilemma."War is increasingly legitimized as a permanent feature of society and violence embraced as the organizing principle of politics. Under such circumstances, malevolent modes of rationality now impose the values of a militarized neoliberal regime on everyone, shattering what remains of any democratic modes of agency, solidarity, and hope. Amid the bleakness and despair, the discourses of militarism, danger, and aggression now fuel a war on terrorism that, asTzvetan Todorov writes in Torture and the War on Terror, "represents the negation of politics - since all interaction is reduced to a test of military strength, war brings death and destruction, not only to the adversary but also to one's side, and without distinguishing between guilty and innocent."Human barbarity is no longer invisible, or hidden under the bureaucratic language of Orwellian doublespeak. Its conspicuousness, if not celebration, emerged with the new editions of American exceptionalism ushered in by the post-9/11 war on terror.

Fourteen years after September 11, 2001, the historical rupture produced by the events of that day has transformed a terrorist attack into a war on terror that mimics the very crimes it pledged to eliminate. The script is now familiar: security trumped civil liberties as shared fears replaced any sense of shared responsibilities. Under Bush and Cheney, the government lied to the American public about the war in Iraq and manipulated the justice system in order to impose anti-terrorist laws that violate civil liberties. The Bush administration used a state of emergency to turn the United States into a torture state, rolling out a range of terrorist practices around the globe, including extraordinary rendition and state torture.But it is Obama who has become the master of permanent war, seeking to increase the bloated military budget - close to a trillion dollars - while "turning to lawless violence…translated into unrestrained violent interventions from Libya to Syria and back to Iraq," including an attempt "to expand the war on ISIS in Syria and possibly send more heavy weapons to its client government in Ukraine."Obama has not only expanded the reach of the militarized state, but has colluded with Democratic and Republican Party extremists in preaching a notion of security rooted in personal fears rather than rallying collective strengths against the deprivations and suffering produced by war, poverty, racism, and injustice.United in their efforts to wage war abroad, both political parties have made it easier at home to undermine those basic civil liberties that protect individuals against invasive and potentially repressive government actions.

Under the burgeoning of what James Risen, in his book Pay at Any Price, has called the "homeland security-industrial complex," state secrecy and organized corporate corruption have filled the coffers of the defense industry along with the corporate-owned security industries - especially those providing drones - who benefit the most from the war on terror.48 This is not to suggest that security is not an important consideration for the United States. Clearly, the legitimate need to defend itself should not serve, as it has, as a pretext for American exceptionalism and the imperialist, expansionist goals of political elites. No more should security serve as an excuse for abandoning civil liberties, democratic values, and any semblance of justice, morality, and political responsibility.
The war on terrorism has extended the discourse, space, location, and time of war in ways that have made it unbounded and ubiquitous, turning everyone into a potential terrorist and bringing the battle home to be fought in domestic sites as well as foreign ones. The philosopher Giorgio Agamben, cited in an essay for the London Review of Books, has rightly warned that under the war on terrorism, the political landscape has utterly changed in the United States: "We are no longer citizens but detainees, distinguishable from the inmates of Guantanamo not by an indifference in legal status, but only by the fact that we have not yet had the misfortune to be incarcerated - or unexpectedly executed by a missile from an unmanned aircraft."The war on terror has come home. Fear has taken on a totalizing presence, as enemies of the state now include not only those enemy combatants abroad who endure bombing, abduction, and torture, but also citizens of the United States who have seen a growing imposition of punitive measures at home through the use of the police and federal troops for interventions ranging from drug interdictions to the enforcement of zero tolerance standards in public schools to the arrest and criminalization of homeless people.

That the war on terror now manifests as state terrorism is made clear as poor neighborhoods are transformed into war zones with the police resembling an occupying army. Of course, terrorism is part of US history, and its homegrown dimensions include the 1ynchings of thousands of black men and women in the first half of the twentieth century, the 1963 church bombing in Birmingham, and the more recent torture of black men by the Chicago police force in the 1960s - a practice that still continues. Not only has this legacy been forgotten, but its most poisonous effects have returned with a vengeance. Racism is now normalized, even as it is being loudly proclaimed across the country that we live in a post-racial society, a statement that suggests both a tragic state of self-delusion and mass psychosis. The most lethal expressions of racism have become commonplace. In 2014, Eric Garner was brutalized and choked to death by a white policeman who believed he was selling cigarettes illegally. In 2015, unarmed black men such as Walter Scott and Eric Harris were both shot in the back by poorly trained cops. Racist violence has also touched the lives of black youth such as twelve-year-old Tamir Rice who was shot for holding a toy gun and Freddie Gray who died after his spine was broken while in police custody.51 The prevalence of African American youth and adults being victimized by police violence has rightly provoked moral outrage and social protest. Such occurrences are shocking because they expose civility and color-neutrality as merely thin veneers that overlay the racism and barbarism that infuses American culture both past and present. Oliver Laughland, Jon Swaine, and Jamiles Larteyreport in The Guardian that:

Police in the United States are killing people at a rate that would result in 1,100 fatalities by the end of [2015], according to a Guardian investigation, which recorded an average of three people killed per day during the first half of 2015. . . . When adjusted to accurately reflect the US population, the totals indicate that black people are being killed by police at more than twice the rate of white and Hispanic or Latino people. Black people killed by police were also significantly more likely to have been unarmed.

What is also shocking is the apparent willingness of most of the general population to accept lethal violence in everyday life as a common event - indicative of the widespread desensitization that has occurred within the context of rising state terrorism and lawlessness. As Jeffrey St. Clair has pointed out, one indicator of how state-sanctioned violence has become normalized is the fact that the majority of Americans support torture, even though they know "it is totally ineffective as a means of intelligence gathering." This suggests more than simple indifference; it implies an endorsement of cruelty that is mirrored in the American public's growing appetite for violence, whether it parades as entertainment or manifests itself in the growing demonization and incarceration of poor minority youth, Muslims, immigrants, and others deemed as disposable.

When the history and range of the cultural and systemic forces that promote violence in the United States are considered, it should really come as no surprise that the only issue on which the top 2016 Republican Party presidential contenders agree on is that guns are the ultimate symbol of freedom in America, a "bellwether of individual liberty, a symbol of what big government wants and shouldn't have."Gun policies provide political theater for the new extremists, and are symptomatic less of some cockeyed defense of the Second Amendment than a willingness to capitalize on the pleasure of violence and a hyper-masculine aesthetic infused with patriotic fervor in order to buttress the case for using deadly force both at home and abroad. Far from deterring the growth of "big government," which is simply their code for the social state, they wish to arm and militarize society in order to justify the existence of a maximum security state and the authoritarian rule that is inevitably its corollary. When the campaign message of major political figures in the United States becomes "maximizing the pleasure of violence,"as Rustom Bharacuha and Susan Sontag have argued in different contexts, surely we are bearing witness to a moment in history that "dissolves politics into pathology."
Notions of democracy appear to be giving way to the discourse of revenge, domestic security, stupidity, and war. The political reality that has emerged since the shattering crisis of 9/11 increasingly points to a set of narrow choices that is being dictated by jingoistic right-wing extremists, the Defense Department, and neoconservative private foundations, all fueled by the dominant media. War and violence now function as an aphrodisiac for a public inundated with commodities and awash in celebrity culture idiocy. Capitalizing on the pent-up emotions of an angry, disillusioned, and grieving public, almost any reportage of a terrorist attack throughout the globe further amplifies the American media's hyped-up language of war, patriotism, surveillance, and retaliation - often infused by unchecked racism. Conservative talking heads write numerous op-eds and appear on endless talk shows fanning the fires of "patriotism" by calling upon the United States to expand the war against any one of a number of Arab countries that are considered terrorist states. For example, John Bolton, writing an op-ed for the New York Times, insisted that any attempt by the Obama administration to negotiate an arms deal with Iran would clearly be a sign of weakness. For Bolton, the only way to deal with Iran is to launch an attack on their nuclear infrastructure. The title of his op-ed sums up the organizing idea of the article: "To Stop Iran's Bomb, Bomb Iran."Indeed, the current extremists dominating Congress require no encouragement to go to war with Iran, bomb Syria into the twilight zone, and further extend the reach of the American empire through its bloated war machine to any country that questions the use of American power.

Against an endless onslaught of images of jets bombing countries extending from Syria and Iraq to Afghanistan and Gaza, amply supplied by the Defense Department, the dominant media use the war abroad to stoke fears at home by presenting numerous stories about the endless ways in which potential terrorists might use nuclear weapons, poison the food supply, or unleash biochemical agents on the American population. Innumerable examples of fear-based, warmongering rhetoric can be found in the militarized frothing and Islamophobia perpetrated by the Fox News Channel, which frequently reaches fever pitch as a result of the bellicosity that informs the majority of its commentaries and reactions to the war on terror.

It is worth recalling that not only the most fanatical outlets but all American mainstream media supported Bush's fabrications to justify the invasion of Iraq, and never apologized for such despicable actions. Missing from the endless calls for security, vengeance, and the use of state violence has been any account of the massive lawlessness produced by the United States government through targeted drone attacks on enemy combatants, the violation of civil liberties, and the almost unimaginable human suffering and hardship perpetrated through the American war machine in the Middle East, especially in Iraq. Also missing has been the history of lawlessness, imperialism, and torture that supported a host of authoritarian regimes propped up by the United States. Mainstream media have similarly remained silent about the pardoning of those who tortured as a matter of state policy, and even more so about supporting the heroic actions of whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Thomas Drake, John Kiriakou, Jeffrey Sterling, and others.

At the same time, American mainstream media do little to resist publicly the emergence of a surveillance state and a domestic war on terror that produces a dangerous "culture of shadows and subterfuge" in which there is a holding back of dissent, openness, and resistance for fear that such actions could cost one a job, initiate government harassment, or worse.To the contrary, glaring examples of support for increased securitization can be found in the constant and underanalyzed images and stories circulating in the media of the terrorists "in our midst" threatening to blow up malls, schools, and any other conceivable space where the public gathers. The fear and insecurity created by such stories simultaneously serve to support a militaristic foreign policy and legitimatize a host of anti-democratic practices at home - including "a concerted attack on civil liberties, freedom of expression, and freedom of the press,"and a growing sentiment on the part of the American public that people who suggest that terrorism is, in part, caused by American foreign policy should not be allowed to teach in the public schools or work in the government.

This legacy of suppression has a long history in the United States, and it has returned with a vengeance in academia, especially for those academics such as Norman Finkelstein and Steven G. Salaita who have condemned America's policies in the Middle East and the government's support of the Israeli government's policies toward Palestinians. The public's surrender to intimidation and fear is made all the more easy by the civic illiteracy now sweeping the United States. Climate change deniers, anti-intellectuals, religious fundamentalists, the "Love America" crowd, and others exhibit pride in displaying a kind of thoughtlessness bereft of historical consciousness. The consequence is that the people feel beset by a form of political and theoretical helplessness that opens the door to public acceptance of foreign and domestic violence.

The war on terror is the new normal. Its intensification of violence, militarization, and state terrorism now reaches into every aspect of American life. Americans complain over the economic deficit, but say little about the democratic and moral deficits that move the country ever closer to authoritarianism. The growing police presence in our major cities provides a visible sign of how the authoritarian state now flourishes. For example, with 34,000 uniformed police officers in its midst, New York City resembles an armed camp with a force that, as Thom Hartman points out, is "bigger than the active militaries of Austria, Bulgaria, Chad, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Kenya."At the same time, the Pentagon has given billions of dollars' worth of military equipment to local police forces all over America. Is it any wonder that minorities of color fear the police more than the gangs and criminals that haunt their neighborhoods? Militarism is one of the breeding grounds of violence in the United States and is visible in the ubiquitous gun culture, the modeling of schools after prisons, the exploding incarceration state, the paramilitarization of local police forces, the burgeoning military budget, and the ongoing attacks on protesters, dissidents, black and brown youth, and women.

Beyond these visible elements of an expanding culture of violence, identity and language itself have become militarized, fed by an onslaught of extreme violence that now floods Hollywood films and dominates American television. Hollywood blockbusters such as American Sniper glorify war crimes and reproduce demonizing views of Islam.Television programs such as Spartacus, The Following, Hannibal, True Detective, Justified, and Top of the Lake intensify the pleasure quotient for viewing extreme and graphic violence to an almost unimaginable degree. Graphic violence appears to provide one of the few outlets for Americans to express what has come to resemble something like a form of spiritual release. Consuming extreme violence, including accounts of state torture, may be one of the few practices left that allows the American people to feel alive, to mark what it means to be close to the register of death in a way that reminds them of the ability to feel within a culture that deadens every possibility of life. Under such circumstances, the representation of violence is transformed into something more than entertainment; it becomes akin to a sacred experience that ritualizes and legitimates a carnival of cruelty. The privatization of violence through media spectacles does more than maximize the pleasure quotient and heighten macho ebullience; it also gives violence a fascist edge by depoliticizing a culture in which the reality of violence often takes the form of state terrorism.

The extreme visibility of both real and imagined violence in American culture represents a willful pedagogy of carnage and gore designed to normalize its presence and to legitimate its practice as a matter of common sense. Moreover, warmaking and the militarization of public discourse and public space also serve as an uncritical homage to a form of hypermasculinity that operates from the assumption that violence is not only the most effective practice for mediating most problems, but also central to identity formation itself. Agency is now militarized and almost completely removed from any notion of civic values. We get a glimpse of this form of violent hyper-masculinity not only in the highly publicized brutality against women dished out by professional football players, but also in the endless stories of sexual abuse and violence now taking place in frat houses across America, many in some of the most prestigious colleges and universities. Violence has become the nervous system of warmaking in the United States, escalating under Bush and Obama into a kind of war fever that embraces a death drive. As Robert J. Lifton points out in his article, "American Apocalypse," in The Nation:

Warmaking can quickly become associated with "war fever," the mobilization of public excitement to the point of a collective experience with transcendence. War then becomes heroic, even mythic, a task that must be carried out for the defense of one's nation, to sustain its special historical destiny and the immortality of its people. . . . War fever tends always to be sporadic and subject to disillusionment. Its underside is death anxiety, in this case related less to combat than to fears of new terrorist attacks at home or against Americans abroad - and later to growing casualties in occupied Iraq.

Under the war on terrorism, moral panic and a culture of fear have not only redefined public space as the "sinister abode of danger, death and infection" and fueled the collective rush to "patriotism on the cheap," they have also buttressed a "fear economy" and refigured the meaning of politics itself. Defined as "the complex of military and security firms rushing to exploit the national nervous breakdown,"the fear economy promises big financial gains for both the Defense Department and the anti-terrorist security sector now primed to terror-proof everything from trash cans and water systems to shopping malls and public restrooms. The war on terrorism has been transformed into a new market in which to pitch consumer goods for the fearful, while the hysterical warmongers and their acolytes in the media turn politics into an extension of war. Fear is no longer an attitude as much as it is a culture that functions as "the enemy of reason [while distorting] emotions and perceptions, and often leads to poor decisions." But the culture of fear does more than undermine critical judgment and suppress dissent. As Don Hazen observes, it also "breeds more violence, mental illness and trauma, social disintegration, job failure, loss of workers' rights, and much more. Pervasive fear ultimately paves the way for an accelerating authoritarian society with increased police power, legally codified oppression, invasion of privacy, social controls, social anxiety and PTSD. "Fear and repression reproduce, rather than address, the most fundamental antidemocratic elements of terrorism. Instead of promulgating a culture of fear, people need to recognize that the threat of terrorism cannot be understood apart from the crisis of democracy itself In the current historical moment, the language of indiscriminate revenge and lawlessness seems to be winning the day. This is a discourse unconscious of its own dangerous refusal to acknowledge the important role that democratic values and social justice must play to achieve a truly unified response and to prevent the further killing of innocent people, regardless of their religion, culture, and place of occupancy in the world. Authoritarianism in this context, observesFranco Bifo Berardi in his book Precarious Rhapsody, encounters little resistance in its efforts to turn politics "into a criminal system and keeps working toward the expansion of the realm of pure violence, where its advancement can proceed unhindered. "The greatest struggle faced by the American public is not terrorism, but a struggle on behalf of justice, freedom, and democracy for all of the citizens of the globe. This is not going to take place, as President Obama's policies will tragically affirm, by shutting down democracy, eliminating its most cherished rights and freedoms, and deriding communities of dissent.

American society is broken, corrupted by the financial elite, and addicted to violence and a culture of permanent war. The commanding institutions of American life have lost their sense of public mission, just as leadership at all levels of government is being stripped of any viable democratic vision. The United States is now governed by an economic and social orthodoxy informed by the dictates of religious and political extremists. Reform efforts that include the established political parties have resulted in nothing but regression, or forms of accommodation that serve to normalize the new authoritarianism and its war on terrorism. Politics has to be thought anew and must be informed by a powerful vision matched by durable organizations that include young people, unions, workers, diverse social movements, artists, intellectuals, and others. In part, this means reawakening the radical imagination so as to address the intensifying crisis of history and agency, and engage the emotional and ethical registers of fear and human suffering. To fight the neoliberal counterrevolution, social movements need to create new public spaces along with a new language for enabling people to relate the self to public life, social responsibility, and the demands of global citizenship.

Instead of viewing the current crisis as a total break with the past that has nothing to learn from history, it is crucial for the American public to begin to understand how the past might be useful in addressing what it means to live in a democracy at a time when democracy is viewed as nothing more than a hindrance to the wishes and interests of the new extremists who now control the American government. The anti-democratic forces that define American history cannot be forgotten in the fog of political and cultural amnesia. State violence and terrorism have a long history in the United States, both in its foreign and domestic policies, and ignoring this dark period of history means that nothing will be learned from the legacy of a politics that has indulged authoritarian ideologies and embraced violence as a central measure of power, national identity, and patriotism.

At stake here is the need to establish an alternative vision of a genuinely democratic society and a global order that prioritizes the safeguarding of basic civil liberties and human rights. Any struggle against terrorism must begin with the pledge on the part of the United States that it will work in conjunction with international organizations, especially the United Nations; that it will refuse to engage in any military operations that might target civilians; and that it will rethink those aspects of its foreign policy that have allied it with repressive nations in which democratic liberties and civilian lives are under siege. Once again, the United States has a long history of supporting terrorist groups, upholding authoritarian regimes, and imposing atrocities and barbarous acts of violence on others - the more recent and well-known being Abu Ghraib, the torture dungeons of CIA-controlled black sites, the Predator and Reaper drone strikes "on at least eight wedding parties," and the brutalizing murders committed by the twelve-member'kill team' that hunted Afghans 'for sport.'"Crimes overlooked will be repeated and intensified, just as public memory is rendered a liability in the discourse of revenge, demonization, and extreme violence.
The political left in the United States is too fractured and needs to develop a more comprehensive understanding of politics, oppression, and struggles as well as a discourse that rises to the level of ethical assessment and accountability. Against the new authoritarianism and its ever-evolving forms of terror, progressives of all stripes need an inspiring and energizing politics that embraces coalition building, rejects the notion that capitalism equals democracy, and challenges the stolid vocabulary of embodied incapacity stripped of any sense of risk, hope, and possibility. If the struggle against the war on terrorism, militarization, and neoliberalization is to have any chance of success, it is crucial for a loyal and dedicated left to embrace a commitment to economic and social justice, understanding the educative nature of politics, and the need to build a sustainable political formation outside of the established parties.

The United States is in a new historical conjuncture, and as difficult as it is to admit, it is a conjuncture that shares more with the legacies of totalitarianism than with America's often misguided understanding of democracy. Under the merging of the surveillance state, warfare state, and the harsh regime of neoliberalism, we are witnessing the death of the old system of social welfare supports and the emergence of a new society marked by the heavy hand of the national security state. For the American public, this has meant not only the depoliticization of public discourse and a pervasive culture of fear, but extreme inequities in wealth, power, and income, and a new mode of governance now firmly controlled by the major corporations, banks, and financial elite. This is a politics in which there is no room for democracy, and no room for reformism. The time has come to name the current historical moment as representative of the "dark times" that Hannah Arendt warned us against. We must begin to transform politics at a systemic level through social movements in which the promise of a radical democracy can be reimagined in the midst of determined, collective struggles. The war on terrorism has morphed into a new form of authoritarianism that imposes its own brand of terror and whose real enemy is not terrorism at all, but democracy itself.

Elect Not to Fear

Tony Perkins ·

The GOP debate stage was remarkably less crowded at the 10th than it was at the first — but the drama certainly didn’t suffer for it. Less than a week before Super Tuesday — when voters in a dozen states will likely vote a couple more candidates off the island — the five men still standing did their best to make a lasting impression on voters. And they made an impression all right — as bitter antagonists so busy tearing each other down that they failed to focus on America’s future.

“I showed anger,” Donald Trump has said, “and the people of our country are very angry!” Obviously, anger has its place. In fact, it’s probably the single largest motivator in the record primary turnouts this year. But anger doesn’t govern a nation. Policies do. It’s time to get beyond the name-calling and playground antics and start talking about a vision of moving America forward. Not having a broader, civil discussion about the candidates' vision is doing a serious disservice to the process.

In the days since Trump’s surprising South Carolina victory, reporters have asked me why I think evangelicals are so divided in this race. Like most pundits, they’re baffled at the success that Donald Trump in particular is having with Christians. Why, they want to know, are so many supporting a man who doesn’t necessarily reflect their biblical values? Two words: fear and frustration. Fear of a country they hardly recognize — and frustration with a political class that over-promises and underperforms. But here’s the problem: you can’t be fearful and thoughtful at the same time. When we operate out of fear and frustration rather than faith and reason, the results are often disastrous.

Our good friend Ken Klukowski, now with First Liberty Institute, talked about how the feelings of betrayal may be driving this bloc to act so unpredictably. “Some voters demand to see a person’s record. They want consistency. Others, if they are hearing the right things, they feel so abused by some elected officials in the Republican Party they thought they could rely on, that they are cynical of politics in general.”

With a quarter of the delegates on the line for the nomination next week, here’s my message to Christian conservatives: stop fearing and start thinking. Just because a candidate shares your anger doesn’t mean he shares your values. The only way to know if these leaders can satisfy both is to take a long hard look at their records — which you can find right here in FRC Action’s Presidential Voter Guide. Do America a favor — do your homework before you vote. The future of this race, and so much more, depend on it.

Originally published here.

The Fifth’s Commandment

With pro-life successes sweeping the nation, the Left’s only hope to maintain their liberal grip on the culture seems to be the courts. Even that proved to be an unreliable avenue in Louisiana, where the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals just stepped aside and let the state’s abortion regulations take effect. Essentially, the law — much like Texas’s H.B. 2 — asked clinics to meet the basic safety standards of a normal medical facility. As ADF’s Steven Aden pointed out, “Abortionists shouldn’t be given a free pass to elude medical requirements that everyone else is required to follow.”

For an industry supposedly predicated on “women’s health,” you’d think the clinics would be supportive. Think again. The abortion industry flew into action, raising an army to try with unelected judges what it couldn’t do with the people’s representatives — kill these clinic laws. The legislature’s goal was simple: to protect more women from an unregulated Kermit Gosnell-type clinic, which tragically resulted in some mothers' deaths.

Under Louisiana’s new law (which complimented one that I authored in the state legislature back in 1999), abortionists would be required to have admitting privileges to a hospital within 30 miles of the clinic. It’s a common-sense idea that protects women in danger of losing their lives to medical complications. For various reasons, most abortionists have trouble getting this kind of access. As a result, abortion advocates say all but one of the state’s abortion clinics will close — not because the law or the courts are shutting them down, but because they refuse to take the necessary steps to comply and put the health of women first.

Of course, Planned Parenthood allies complained that leaders had created “reproductive health crisis,” but honestly, the only crisis is an abortion industry that continues to put profits above patients. Now, thanks to the 5th Circuit, and the legal team that defended the law, which included State Rep. Mike Johnson, Louisiana can enforce the law while the challenge continues moving through the courts. “We reversed the district court and permitted the law to go into effect because the plaintiffs had not demonstrated that the law placed an undue burden on a large fraction of women,” the three-judge panel ruled.

Not only is the court’s decision encouraging, but it shows the ground pro-lifers have gained in the last two decades. If we don’t lose heart, we will reap — eventually. Hopefully, this victory will serve as an important reminder that we need to act with immediacy but think eternally.

Originally published here.

‘He Must Increase, But I Must Decrease’

Dallas is a little too far north to see the debate fireworks in Houston. But politics were certainly on my mind as I spoke at the annual conference of the Pentecostal/Charismatic Churches of North America [Friday] morning. This year’s event didn’t need much more context than the contest down the road to put the church’s role in the culture in perspective. As Chuck Colson used to say, “Politics is downstream from the culture.” He’s right. And the culture is downstream from the church. America’s biggest problems aren’t political — they’re spiritual. And until we do something about them, the crisis in our country is only beginning.

As I told the PCCNA, a prominent political figure and friend asked me a few years ago, why do pastors and Christian leaders expect me to talk about issues on TV and in the political arena that they won’t preach about in their pulpits and churches? In my opinion, it’s because we’re afraid. Afraid to offend. Afraid to hurt our ministries. Afraid to hurt our standing in the community. Imagine what could happen if we adopted the mission statement of John the Baptist: “He must increase but I must decrease.” With such fierce attacks on our faith in the public square, we have a tendency to look back with a bit of nostalgia at political leaders who prayed and appealed to God. But these leaders weren’t speaking in a vacuum. Abraham Lincoln is one who is often mentioned when we talk about faith in the oval office — but consider who filled the pulpits of that day. Men like Charles Finney, who once said:

Brethren, our preaching will bear its legitimate fruits. If immorality prevails in the land, the fault is ours in a great degree. If there is a decay of conscience, the pulpit is responsible for it. If the public press lacks moral discrimination, the pulpit is responsible for it. If the church is degenerate and worldly, the pulpit is responsible for it. If the world loses its interest in religion, the pulpit is responsible for it. If Satan rules in our halls of legislation, the pulpit is responsible for it. If our politics become so corrupt that the very foundations of our government are ready to fall away, the pulpit is responsible for it. Let us not ignore this fact, my dear brethren; but let us lay it to heart, and be thoroughly awake to our responsibility in respect to the morals of this nation.

Leading by Soothing Lies

George Handlery 


Politics is the process for making collective choices. Democratic politics endeavor to involve the “common man” because of his “common sense”: He has a right and the qualification to determine his destiny. Crucial assumptions support that thought. What people identify with produces an association which expresses a collective identity.

Furthermore, the participants of the decision making process are not only sovereign — to determine their affairs- but also trusted that their judgments express a reason-driven process. In terms of what could be known at the time of the choice, the verdict is the best one available. For that to hold water, the process requires informed participants that are thereby enabled to make sound choices.


This informed electorate is the product of interacting components. One is the people’s mature will to be knowledgeable about what determines the welfare of its commonwealth. The other is that the “full-time executive” in charge of daily affairs, shall provide the data reasonable men need to fell rational decisions.
Regrettably, even in a democratic context, the risk exists that the functions of the governing class and that of the “led,” will cast them not only in different roles but that it will also endow them with divergent perceptions. From these clashing perceptions, the distance to conflicting interests is a short one.
Although only a limited power is conferred by the sovereign people upon its executive committee, the element manning it, might be tempted to expand its job description to enhance its power. If such self-conferred attributes emerge, the consequence is an unintended nexus between the rulers and the ruled.


We hold that power is legitimized by the systemic evaluation of its use by its original source. The fountain of legitimacy is the people, meaning the governed. The people-governor relationship is inherently unstable. It can happen that elites come to view the fact that they hold power to be the source that legitimizes their actions and their inherited function. With that the affected society makes a step toward a form of dictatorship that might be camouflaged in a formal democratic cloak.


Holding power, whether by election or through membership in a bureaucracy, creates an interest group. Family ties will bolster it because, informally, certain functions will become inherited. Such claims will be supported by formal education dispersed by the “right” schools. The gap to the “mass” will be enhanced by life-style, connections, and “class.” Among these are certain table manners, accents, a dress-code, as well as properly furnished homes in comme-il-faut locations. With that, the privileged access to political power will be cemented as outsiders will hardly meet the required profile for admission, retention and promotion. Tellingly, even the governing clans subscribing to equalitarian ideologies, are not immune to elitist transmutation. The Soviet “nomenclatura” and contemporary China make the point.


As possessing power legitimizes the might of its holder, political power is likely to develop a metastasis to economic entitlements. Political muscle converts into economic influence and into access to coveted goods. (The latter is critical in the scarcity-defined economies of socialist rule.) If politics decides who gets what, then it is only natural, that power translates into material privileges.


The described process supports Acton’s observation that power corrupts. Similarly, earlier observations made here, confirm his bit about how absolute power will spoil its holder. Elite power, especially if abused to cause mass poverty, leads to material privilege and that relationship creates the bridge to corruption. A related thought tells that the rule of dictators will become the rule of thieves.


As the mold that separates the rulers from the subordinate solidifies, to the former, the “people” appears as incompetent that disturbs the serious business of governing by the knowing. This contempt explains why, in the few systems that practice “direct democracy,” the intervention of the voters in governance is resented as a “people’s dictatorship.” From “democracy is when the government acts with the people’s consent” we move to “the people consents to what the government does for it.”


The elite’s dislike of the subordination to the “unwashed,” leads to the attempt to steer the people. Outright coups being problematic in modern times, this is best accomplished by the management of information to gain the consent of the sedated.
Part of that is to make the news “understandable” to the masses, and to adjust their content to what they can “digest.” Benign elites — some are openly contemptuous of the dumb crowd — assume having a tutorial mission to guide their wards. The good teachers sieve and select what is presented to fit the pupil’s maturity. This only limps because good teachers assume that their pupils will grow. Political elites, on the other hand, regard the relationship between the knowledgeable and therefore powerful, and the limited, and therefore dependent, as being permanent.


Our experience reveals that the resulting strategy consists of several tactics. One is to “feed them ‘Ersatz’.” The informational placebo supplies trivia to redirect attentions. The newest divorce of a celeb, a frivolous suit, an award for a trivial skill, is all part of the fare.


Second, feed distortions until a serious matter shrink to brain-spam that obfuscates the point. A classical case is the manhunt that withholds the suspect’s traits if he fits a protected victim category. Simplification is crucial, so report “enhanced benefits,” but withhold that the dues for all will also rise.


Third, claim to “combat populism” and retain information about matters that should not be: The dull ones should not be provoked with what might upset them as they are unable to evaluate it. Example: A treaty is concluded with a committed enemy. The agreement and the Leader’s statesmanship are applauded. Then evidence emerges of violations. Keep silent about that, or put it on a back page. Should the silent treatment fail, mention that “nagging critics are again showing their pathological deformation by underlining a trifle that… .”


It is common knowledge that “crying wolf” will be damaging when the real one decides to have you for lunch. The practice of selling an artificial construct to hide reality will work for some time. However, trying to “fool all the people all of a time” will make the nail of truth penetrate the thickest camouflage. Election results, new parties — good and bad ones — are an expression of not only the revolt of the hitherto silent ones, but also of the disillusion with the abuses of traditional politics and its engineers. The fact to communicate is: The trust is lost.


At this time, the distrust and disillusionment on account of the reality marketed and the one experienced, is growing and its fruits are ripening. Due to a web of lies created to continue to lead undisturbed, the unwillingness of the “common man” to follow, once forced to apply his “common sense,” has arrived. A conclusion demands that it be made: We are entering a new era of politics, methods and leadership. This change is, as it expresses a need to turn away from the past, truly revolutionary. About revolutions we may add that, they are easier to make than it is to manage their consequences.

Trump and the Rise of the Unprotected

Why political professionals are struggling to make sense of the world they created.

Peggy Noonan · 

   

We’re in a funny moment. Those who do politics for a living, some of them quite brilliant, are struggling to comprehend the central fact of the Republican primary race, while regular people have already absorbed what has happened and is happening. Journalists and politicos have been sharing schemes for how Marco parlays a victory out of winning nowhere, or Ted roars back, or Kasich has to finish second in Ohio. But in my experience any nonpolitical person on the street, when asked who will win, not only knows but gets a look as if you’re teasing him. Trump, they say.

I had such a conversation again Tuesday with a friend who repairs shoes in a shop on Lexington Avenue. Jimmy asked me, conversationally, what was going to happen. I deflected and asked who he thinks is going to win. “Troomp!” He’s a very nice man, an elderly, old-school Italian-American, but I saw impatience flick across his face: Aren’t you supposed to know these things?

In America now only normal people are capable of seeing the obvious.

But actually that’s been true for a while, and is how we got in the position we’re in.

Last October I wrote of the five stages of Trump, based on the Kübler-Ross stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Most of the professionals I know are stuck somewhere between four and five.

But I keep thinking of how Donald Trump got to be the very likely Republican nominee. There are many answers and reasons, but my thoughts keep revolving around the idea of protection. It is a theme that has been something of a preoccupation in this space over the years, but I think I am seeing it now grow into an overall political dynamic throughout the West.

There are the protected and the unprotected. The protected make public policy. The unprotected live in it. The unprotected are starting to push back, powerfully.

The protected are the accomplished, the secure, the successful — those who have power or access to it. They are protected from much of the roughness of the world. More to the point, they are protected from the world they have created. Again, they make public policy and have for some time.

I want to call them the elite to load the rhetorical dice, but let’s stick with the protected.

They are figures in government, politics and media. They live in nice neighborhoods, safe ones. Their families function, their kids go to good schools, they’ve got some money. All of these things tend to isolate them, or provide buffers. Some of them — in Washington it is important officials in the executive branch or on the Hill; in Brussels, significant figures in the European Union — literally have their own security details.

Because they are protected they feel they can do pretty much anything, impose any reality. They’re insulated from many of the effects of their own decisions.

One issue obviously roiling the U.S. and western Europe is immigration. It is THE issue of the moment, a real and concrete one but also a symbolic one: It stands for all the distance between governments and their citizens.

It is of course the issue that made Donald Trump.

Britain will probably leave the European Union over it. In truth immigration is one front in that battle, but it is the most salient because of the European refugee crisis and the failure of the protected class to address it realistically and in a way that offers safety to the unprotected.

If you are an unprotected American — one with limited resources and negligible access to power — you have absorbed some lessons from the past 20 years' experience of illegal immigration. You know the Democrats won’t protect you and the Republicans won’t help you. Both parties refused to control the border. The Republicans were afraid of being called illiberal, racist, of losing a demographic for a generation. The Democrats wanted to keep the issue alive to use it as a wedge against the Republicans and to establish themselves as owners of the Hispanic vote.

Many Americans suffered from illegal immigration — its impact on labor markets, financial costs, crime, the sense that the rule of law was collapsing. But the protected did fine — more workers at lower wages. No effect of illegal immigration was likely to hurt them personally.

It was good for the protected. But the unprotected watched and saw. They realized the protected were not looking out for them, and they inferred that they were not looking out for the country, either.

The unprotected came to think they owed the establishment — another word for the protected — nothing, no particular loyalty, no old allegiance.

Mr. Trump came from that.

Similarly in Europe, citizens on the ground in member nations came to see the EU apparatus as a racket — an elite that operated in splendid isolation, looking after its own while looking down on the people.

In Germany the incident that tipped public opinion against the Chancellor Angela Merkel’s liberal refugee policy happened on New Year’s Eve in the public square of Cologne. Packs of men said to be recent migrants groped and molested groups of young women. It was called a clash of cultures, and it was that, but it was also wholly predictable if any policy maker had cared to think about it. And it was not the protected who were the victims — not a daughter of EU officials or members of the Bundestag. It was middle- and working-class girls — the unprotected, who didn’t even immediately protest what had happened to them. They must have understood that in the general scheme of things they’re nobodies.

What marks this political moment, in Europe and the U.S., is the rise of the unprotected. It is the rise of people who don’t have all that much against those who’ve been given many blessings and seem to believe they have them not because they’re fortunate but because they’re better.

You see the dynamic in many spheres. In Hollywood, as we still call it, where they make our rough culture, they are careful to protect their own children from its ill effects. In places with failing schools, they choose not to help them through the school liberation movement — charter schools, choice, etc. — because they fear to go up against the most reactionary professional group in America, the teachers unions. They let the public schools flounder. But their children go to the best private schools.

This is a terrible feature of our age — that we are governed by protected people who don’t seem to care that much about their unprotected fellow citizens.

And a country really can’t continue this way.

In wise governments the top is attentive to the realities of the lives of normal people, and careful about their anxieties. That’s more or less how America used to be. There didn’t seem to be so much distance between the top and the bottom.

Now is seems the attitude of the top half is: You’re on your own. Get with the program, little racist.

Social philosophers are always saying the underclass must re-moralize. Maybe it is the overclass that must re-moralize.

I don’t know if the protected see how serious this moment is, or their role in it.

Wage Slave America:

Wage Slave America: NYC Offering 360 Sq Ft Apartments For $3,150 Per Month

When Agenda 21 is finally implemented in full, and tens of millions of Americans are crammed into the cities like cattle, where do you think they’re all going to live? How are we going to squeeze all these people into the already crowded urban cores? Don’t worry, there will be plenty of housing for the masses once the micro apartments are built.

Several cities are already trying this out. They’ve lifted building code restrictions to allow developers to build the tiniest apartments you can imagine. The most famous of these is the Carmel Place development in New York City, which contains 55 units that range in size from 265 to 360 square feet, and cost between $2,650 and $3,150 per month.

Homeless Women Veterans: It’s Worse than you Think http://josephfreedomoranarchy.blogspot.com/2016/02/homeless-women-veterans-its-worse-than.html

They make it look so classy, but in reality it’s a giant ripoff.  Like everything else in life, the bigger an apartment is, the cheaper it is per square foot. This is just an attempt by developers to milk every penny out of their tenants. Instead of saving money by sharing an apartment with other people, our corporate overlords want us to us pay exorbitant prices to live alone in tiny apartments.

They’re presented as chic and novel, because they’re currently catering to upper middle class singles. But once the impoverished masses and forced to migrate to the cities (as China has done in recent years) they’ll start to look more and more like prison cells.

Joshua Krause is a reporter, writer and researcher at The Daily Sheeple. He was born and raised in the Bay Area and is a freelance writer and author. You can follow Joshua’s reports at Facebook or on his personalTwitter. Joshua’s website is Strange Danger.