Wednesday, November 6, 2024

David Sirota ― Election 2024: How Billionaire Avengers Destroyed Democracy

An excellent article from David Sirota, who once was a key supporter within the Bernie Sanders campaign. And please remember that Bernie was on the precipice of fighting to bring actual true change to our nation, something that was not to be tolerated by the corporate elites in the Democratic Party ― who in kicking Bernie out and placing Clinton in his place then doomed us to the first Trump presidency. And now a second. If you're seeking to understand more of how and why the American dream has turned into the American nightmare, please read on... ― Molly

Credit: AP Images
By David Sirota

If you’re reading this, congratulations: You made it to the conclusion of the 2024 election. Even if you’re understandably upset about Donald Trump’s victory, just arriving at this point with your cognition intact is a genuine achievement that you should be proud of. 

Your eyes are probably burning and your brain is foggy, but don’t fret: that’s natural after forced Clockwork Orange-style exposure to television ads, mailers, texts, emails, phone calls, tweets, door knocks, and other assorted nags from friends, family, and celebrity influencers — all selling you on the idea that this phantasmagoria was about the survival of democracy. 

For those who still sense that it may have been a scammy sales pitch from both parties, that’s because some part of your brain withstood the agitprop and noticed that the 2024 campaign torched much of what was still left of the actual democracy. 

Even as all of your screens told you otherwise, your remaining synapses detected that the parties, candidates, and donors used a mushroom cloud of money to convert an election into an auction, with almost nobody in the press or electorate asking what exactly was being sold. And when that happens — when one side’s billionaires outbid the other side’s billionaires in a clearance sale of a political contest — that’s not a defense of democracy. That’s burning the democracy village down while pretending you’re trying to save it.

This campaign certainly involved very real stakes. The Democrats offered voters vague promises to shield our few remaining rights and democratic institutions from the flames, plus an agenda of mildly progressive economic reforms. The Republicans offered an opportunity to ignite a new blaze of deregulation and authoritarianism to demolish the remnants of a government many see as unable — or unwilling — to address social problems. 

An America dissatisfied with the economic status quo rejected the flimsy firewall and chose the blowtorch.

But even before the country selected its new White House occupant, the era of big-money politics was already enshrined by the transformation of this election into Billionaire: Endgame — a Marvel-esque battleground that was open only to billionaires, and that rendered the rest of us nearly powerless. It was a cinematic spectacle with an objective: limiting the horizon of policy possibility mostly to initiatives that either enhance — or at least do not fundamentally threaten — the financial and political power of the donor class that’s fleecing everyone else.

This is no accident: We’re living through the controlled, targeted burn envisioned by a 50-year scheme that you can learn about in our new award-winning audio series Master Plan. It was a plot sparked by a future Supreme Court justice’s corporate call-to-arms, and then flamethrowered into a bonfire through court rulings vaporizing campaign finance laws, incinerating anti-bribery statutes, and baking corruption into day-to-day politics. 

The result: No matter what the public wants and no matter the outcome of elections, the oligarchs almost always win. They get a government that does little or nothing to address the crises those same oligarchs are profiting off of — a government in which “the preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy,” as summarized by Princeton researchers.

It doesn’t have to be this way. It is not a predetermined destiny. If enough of us decide that we no longer accept being the dog in the “This Is Fine” meme, things could change for the better, as they have in the past.

But if after the 2024 race, we do the opposite — if Republican voters take their victory as proof that it’s perfectly fine for billionaires to buy elections, and if Democratic voters take their loss as evidence that they merely have to find more billionaires for the next fight — then we’re sealing our fate. 

If we celebrate the Billionaire: Endgame that we just lived through as the new acceptable normal for our elections, then regardless of who is in the White House, we will be making democracy’s death an inevitability.

“Take It From An Actual Billionaire”

Elections have always been big-money affairs since the Supreme Court birthed its three horsemen of the billionaire apocalypse. Rulings turning cash into constitutionally protected speech (Buckley), extending those speech rights to corporations (Bellotti), and then pretending money is not a corrupting force (Citizens United) have made the electoral process a battle of super PACs and dark money groups using billions of dollars to hack our minds until we succumb to their voting demands.

But 2024 was something new. Just a few years after Bernie Sanders’ billionaire-bashing campaign almost won him the Democratic Party’s nomination, billionaires didn’t just quietly donate from the shadows. They dumped unprecedented amounts of cash into the election, and some of them deliberately jumped into the spotlight, turning billionaire status into a proud credential cheered on by both parties’ fans. 

In all, a record $16 billion will have been spent on the federal election, much of it dark money from donors influencing the discourse from anonymity — and that’s just the money that’s traceable. A billion dollars of dark money was spent by outside groups, a ten-fold increase since 2020. About a quarter billion dollars of the federal election spending we know about came directly from corporations — and half of that comes from the cryptocurrency donors demanding less regulatory scrutiny, even after the recent Sam Bankman-Fried crypto implosion seemed to foreshadow future crises and bailouts.

On the Republican side, a third of the money spent in support of the ticket came from billionaires, and Donald Trump openly solicited campaign cash with promises of legislative favors. This transactional politics was enshrined by Trump’s Supreme Court nominees, whose recent rulings immunized him from prosecution and legalized bribery. 

Into this bacchanal stormed the world’s richest man, Elon Musk. He not only bankrolled a Trump-boosting super PAC and paid random voters $1 million, he made himself the public mascot of the campaign. At the same time, he angled for a White House job of Shadow President — a perch that could give him the power to further enrich his corporate empire with more government contracts, fire government personnel scrutinizing his companies, and potentially provide him with the largest personalized tax gift in American history. 

Musk portrayed himself as a defender of free speech — all while his social media platform was weaponized to preference the particular political speech he supports and drown out everyone else.

On the Democratic side, after donors anointed Kamala Harris her party’s nominee with no primary competition, $1 billion of campaign cash flooded into Democratic coffers, and hundreds of millions of dollars more flowed into shadowy super PACs from billionaires whose tech and Wall Street firms are bridling under regulatory scrutiny. Harris ended up being the first presidential candidate in history whose biggest source of financial support was anonymous dark money.

At the Democratic convention festooned with corporate logos, the national television audience was introduced to the new ticket with prime-time speeches from a former credit card industry CEO promising that “Kamala Harris understands that government must work in partnership with the business community”; a top Uber executive declaring that “I know she will fight for you”; and billionaire Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker bragging about inheriting a multibillion-dollar Hyatt hotel fortune to raucous applause from an audience overjoyed to have found its newest billionaire idol.

Meanwhile, the final weeks of the campaign were marked by Harris deploying billionaire Mark Cuban as the campaign’s top television surrogate — one of a group of billionaire donors demanding Harris fire their toughest regulator, Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan — and Harris obediently promising that she will be friendlier to big corporations than the current White House occupant. 

The Unspeakable C-Word

Though the master planners spent 50 years securing the court rulings to make all of this graft and bribery legal, corruption this brazen still could have been a central topic of conversation in the election, considering how public it all was — and considering polls showing how rightly pissed off America is at the grifty state of our politics.

But that didn’t happen either. Since the last presidential election, talking about corruption too bluntly now runs the risk of reprisals. 

In the 2020 Democratic primary, anti-corruption crusader and Bernie Sanders supporter Zephyr Teachout published an op-ed labeling Joe Biden’s donor-coddling record a “corruption problem” —  and in response, the media portrayed her as a pariah, and then Sanders sunk his own campaign by repudiating Teachout and lauding Biden.

In 2022, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke criticized GOP Gov. Greg Abbott for accepting money from a fossil fuel billionaire whose company profited off a Texas power outage — and O’Rourke was dragged into court and sued by that same billionaire. 

And just a few months ago, after crypto billionaires spent Democratic Rep. Katie Porter into the ground in her U.S. Senate bid, there was backlash not to that spending but instead to Porter declaring that “an onslaught of billionaires spending millions to rig this election.” Despite Porter making clear she wasn’t denying the election results and despite the indisputable truth that billionaire spending rigs the electoral process to favor pro-billionaire candidates, she was promptly cast as a deranged freak peddling Trumpish lies.

“No Democrat should be using that language,” said Porter’s Senate opponent Adam Schiff, in a scream-the-quiet-part-out-loud admission that this retaliatory psyop had a specific goal: censoring any vernacular that dares to link big money politics to the intensifying democracy crisis the Democratic #Resistance purports to stand against. 

And so with the election discourse successfully sanitized, 2024’s celebration of corruption ensued on both sides. There was barely a peep of the righteous anti-corruption criticism that had once turned John McCain and Bernie Sanders into household names. Instead, it was a fight-fire-with-fire war of attrition — the more money that was dropped into the election, the more each side celebrated a chance to firebomb the democracy into the voting outcome it wanted.

Of course, toward the end of the race, there was a fleeting chance for a wake-up call amid the thick fog of the money war. It came when the billionaire owners of the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post intervened to kill off their newspapers’ planned endorsements, and a film reviewing Trump’s problematic past was suppressed until just days before the election. 

These moves made the implicit explicit, showing how corporations and billionaires are at the center of the democracy problem, not merely in buying elections but also in buying the machine that frames the entire political conversation. The controversies could have been a chance to finally admit that this Citizen Kane media ecosystem is a democracy problem and to encourage support for independent, non-billionaire media outlets. Instead, elite media floated the idea of simply finding new, nicer billionaires to prop up the collapsing Fourth Estate. 

And then came the virtue-signaling psyop: the New York Times-backed #WhyISubscribe tweet hashtag to try to shame readers into continuing to give their subscription money to the billionaires. No doubt there were many solidarity high-fives at the Washington Post’s invitation-only election night gala sponsored by crypto lobbyists — an event that makes the newspaper’s “democracy dies in darkness” motto seem like a boast rather than a warning. 

Anticipatory Obedience

Some media observers cast newspapers’ decisions to avoid presidential endorsements as Trump-prompted “anticipatory obedience” — a phenomenon in fascist regimes in which institutions remain quiet to try to avoid retribution from the reigning strongman. There’s probably something to that — but such anticipatory obedience extends way beyond just newspaper opinion pages. It defines the entire political system’s silence in the era of legalized corruption.

Think about the world around us. 

Today, half of working-age Americans are struggling to afford health care, and nearly a third have medical debt. Nearly half of middle-aged Americans have zero retirement savings. More than a third of the country resides in locales with dangerous air pollution. Ten million kids live below the poverty line. Life expectancy in the United States trails other industrialized countries. Greenhouse gas emissions have hit their highest rate in history, as the livable ecosystem is showing signs of catastrophic collapse.

Taken together, we’re living through a whole new terrifying verse of We Didn’t Start The Fire, and yet none of these crises have been a significant theme in the election we just experienced. Indeed, as one New York Times headline put it: “The Campaign Issue That Isn’t: Health Care.”

Why such silence? Because every politician running for national office knows that to center these issues in a campaign is to prompt the ire of the billionaires and corporations who can — and will — spend them into the ground.

This reticence is the real anticipatory obedience and the real democracy crisis — the one you couldn’t hear in the Democratic convention applause for “an actual billionaire,” the one obscured by the MAGA rally cheers for Musk, and the one drowned out by endless super PAC ads blasting through every screen in your life.

There are differences between the parties, and who won the election matters. Though Harris has been vague about her agenda, it was a safe bet that her administration would defend reproductive rights, protect some of the Affordable Care Act’s restrictions on insurance industry predation, and recognize the existence of the climate crisis. 

A new Trump administration will almost certainly try to do the opposite. Crypto donors will get crypto deregulation, oil donors will get climate deregulation, Wall Street donors will get financial deregulation — and much of the radical Project 2025 initiatives that Trump’s former staffers assembled will be pursued. 

So yes, the outcome will be a hinge point in history — and if big-money politics is now normalized, the hinge will be more like a ratchet that moves only in one direction. Democrats will be pledge that the hinge merely is “not going back.” Republicans will promise another hinge swing to the hard right. 

Perhaps that limited range would be acceptable in a society that had already built the basic infrastructure to meet human needs. But this is America in 2024, a place where health care, housing, retirement, and climate crises require a much bigger range of policy solutions — the kind of far-reaching initiatives we once saw during the New Deal. Those might be possible if we repeal Citizens United, force the disclosure of dark money spending, and publicly finance elections so that candidates can run for office without the need for legalized bribes from corporations and billionaires seeking legislative favors.

But in lieu of those reforms — and without voters in both parties organizing their politics around ending systemic corruption within their midst — then the master planners’ money politics is about to get even more aggressive.

Already, Federalist Society leader Leonard Leo — who received the largest dark money transfer in American history — is promising to use that cash for “infiltrating the press, infiltrating entertainment” and for recruiting into his movement “the folks who have the greatest capability of entering into and helping to control the choke points of society.” Meanwhile, Musk is promising to deploy his Trump-boosting super PAC in future elections and further down the ballot.

In the immediate aftermath of Trump declaring victory, much of the media chatter is focused on one question: Will whatever’s still left of democracy be saved?

But there’s just as big a question that must be asked.

If the blockbuster season of Billionaire: Endgame that we just lived through is now what we call “democracy” — then what exactly are we saving, and for whom?

Please go here for the original article: https://www.levernews.com/election-2024-how-billionaire-avengers-destroyed-democracy/

Mary Oliver: Song For Autumn

Photo by Molly
Song for Autumn

In the deep fall
don’t you imagine the leaves think how
comfortable it will be to touch
the earth instead of the
nothingness of air and the endless
freshets of wind? And don’t you think
the trees themselves, especially those with mossy,
warm caves, begin to think
of the birds that will come – six, a dozen – to sleep
inside their bodies? And don’t you hear
the goldenrod whispering goodbye,
the everlasting being crowned with the first
tuffets of snow? The pond
vanishes, and the white field over which
the fox runs so quickly brings out
its blue shadows. And the wind pumps its
bellows. And at evening especially,
the piled firewood shifts a little,
longing to be on its way.

― Mary Oliver

EXCELLENT ― Jason Espada: Freedom of Mind – the Root of the Social Gospel

Tears. This deeply touches my heart. And I extend my gratitude and love to my friend Jason Espada, who I may never meet but experience such a deep heart-to-heart connection with. Illuminated here is something my heart and soul deeply resonates with and which is so clearly articulated in this beautiful piece and with these beautiful images. Reflected here also is why I return again and again to speaking and writing of the profound gift it is to be increasingly connected with our Self, our core Essence, our Buddha nature and Christ consciousness and however it is that we recognize and live out of the Sacred Heart of Love within ourselves and which connects us with all of life. Bless us all. 🙏💗Molly

____________

Taking the long view today. This is from A Buddhism for Progressives. 'Everything we see people doing has roots in their inner life...'
The complete book can be found here:


Freedom of Mind – the Root of the Social Gospel
By Jason Espada

For Dr. David Hilfiker, with photographs by Frank Espada

‘We belong to each other…’

I. The social gospel defined

The social gospel is the view that we are made to care for each other; that we are here to protect, support and encourage each other; to love, nurture and celebrate every one of our family, from birth, through all the stages of life, in struggle and difficulty, and in times of ease and success.



That this orientation to our whole life sometimes rises in a person, in different times and places and cultures, independent of religion, tells me that this capacity is something fundamental to us as human beings.  There’s something in us that can be tapped into that precedes organized religion.  Religions can foster a social gospel, or, remarkably, they can get in the way, but what’s happening when this ethic towards the whole of life arises in a person, whether it is facilitated by a Tradition, or not, I would suggest, is the same.

II. Its cause

Everything we see people doing has roots in their inner life – whether there’s anger or gentleness, greed or generosity, distorted views or wisdom and respect – it’s always the case that what we see reveals what’s in a person, or group of people.  This is true right up to what we call mass movements, such as militarism, or in economics.

The same holds true of the social gospel –   it comes to be, and is sustained in people by causes, the chief of these being inner freedom. By this I mean something more exact than a pleasant feeling, or being able do to as one pleases.  Inner freedom, as it’s understood by contemplatives everywhere, entails much more than that.  It refers to a mind, or a spirit free of greed, of aggression, and of delusion regarding ourselves, those we share this life with, and our world.  Such freedom, that has wisdom and virtue as its nature, is always what has  made it possible for a person to think of others and act to on their behalf.

III. What is then born

On a group level, when enough people together gain a clarity of vision and conscience, works are set in motion that make for real changes in society.  It can start with one, or a few people, but eventually many are brought into the work.  Witness the changes brought by the civil rights, labor, or women’s movements.  All these came about because there was an availability and an awakening in a number of people’s hearts, and that they in their turn awakened and empowered others, lifting them to higher levels.


IV. Inclusive compassion

Some people wonder out loud how Mahayana Buddhism came into being, historically, with its emphasis on all inclusive compassion.  I can tell you that I think it happened because the methods taught by Shakyamuni worked to free enough people from their afflictions and self preoccupation that empathy and active compassion were naturally born in them.

The Thai teacher Ajaan Lee said, ‘The mind at normalcy is the substance of virtue’.  This has been talked about by others over time in different ways: as an Edenic state, as our own original nature revealed, full of grace.

Our humanity, when it is healthy, sane, and flourishing, is naturally inclusive.  It reaches out.  As long as one person is still confused, and doesn’t know their own worth, they they will create suffering for themselves and for others, and so we have to take care of each other, to the fullest extent, including everyone.  And as s Dr. King expressed it, ‘No one is free until every last one of us is free’. This is only common sense – drawing out the ethic of love to its logical conclusion.



At the most basic level, as Shantideva taught, we should remove suffering simply because it is suffering, and care for others just because it’s the right thing to do.  Seeing this, teachers in the past encouraged us to know the great value of freedom of mind in terms of the whole group, of every life.

V. To know that Freedom of mind is attainable

That we don’t need to be caught in suffering and a narrow perspective is remarkable news.  For someone who hasn’t heard it before, it may be hard to believe, but right there is the proposition.   As for myself, my esteem for those who teach and vividly demonstrate that this is possible for us only increases as time goes on.  Without them, we’d only have a story someone told once in a book, that we would then need to argue over. And so I pay homage to Thich Nhat Hanh, the Dalai Lama, Bokar Rinpoche, Lama Yeshe, Ajaan Lee and the Thai Forest teachers, Thomas Merton, Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, Mother Teresa, and the sages who demonstrate by their good works in our world that they have found what has real meaning.



How do we know if the roots of a tree are in touch with living water?  We can see it in the broad shade of their branches, and in their fruits – which are abundant, rich, and life sustaining to us all.  And so it is with people in this world.

VI. What we all need

Whether or not we’re part of a tradition, what we all need is the same, and that is to meet and engage this world in a way that is not confused or afflicted, and, with that as the ground, with a natural heart full of love, to help one another as much as we can.

We may think it’s possible to engage the world and make a difference without much freedom of mind, but we can see where egotism and immaturity have gotten us, individually and collectively.  Look at how indifference, neglect, indulgence, exploitation, consumerism, boredom and despair manifest – these show our values, and the state of our inner life.  Clearly, something else entirely is needed.

Despite the fact that some measure of freedom of mind and humane values are within reach, what do we see when we look at how most people in this country spend their time and resources? So many Americans in the twenty first century eat, and over eat, drink, consume, use entertainments to escape, and rely on anti depressants like never before. So many of them are just focussed and closed in on themselves.

All these signs of narrow mindedness, to me, point to a widespread lack of inner freedom, and the acknowledgement and respect for others that it necessarily brings. As it is now, a lot of how we live in this country, in terms of the impact we are having as a consumer society, what we do and leave undone, has to do with people’s stresses, appetites, and attachments, but these can and do change.

What we need then for the social gospel to become a reality is more of a collective awakening, with more and more people becoming free of their lesser views and motivations. 

Is there any other way? We’re all in this together, and so one or two or a few dozen, or a few groups of people getting there is not enough.  The few more awakened and free people can be like leaven in bread, but it’s clear that the whole lot of us is what we need to influence.  We should aim to reach as many people as we can, for all our sake.

VII. Continuing the work

I look to anyone who is actively engaged in some form of peace, or social justice work, and I ask: what do they have that others don’t? – and I see, they have a vision;  and of those who continue the work, rather than fall away from it – what do they have?  They have maintained a connection with the view and power they’ve found, whatever name they give it, either with the help of traditions, or individually. Activists very often will leave this step out – they do their work until they have no more to give. Their mistake is in not knowing how to replenish their own sources of inspiration.

Out of people’s vision for what is possible here comes their action, and whenever there’s a sustained, useful involvement with others, it means that a person has been able to keep a powerful sense of what motivates them.

Whatever our methods, of prayer, or meditation, or solitude, then, we all need to foster that connection to our positive vision and source of strength.  There’s nothing selfish about this, in fact, this is for everyone’s sake.

VIII. The Great Clear Mirror

With the coming of the internet, what is in us as human beings, in terms of our values, is now even more clear.  I remember when computers first became a little more widely available.  There was the expression ‘garbage in, garbage out’, to point up the fact that the tools we use are only as powerful as we make them, that they are only as great as our motivation, they go just as far as our vision. The internet then, is a great clear mirror to our inner life.

Now, more than ever, we can become aware of, and engage with this world of ours.  It’s remarkable, really, and will only continue to evolve in new ways. Whether this interaction is meaningful, however, or negligent, or exploitive, all depends on who we are inside, on what is in us as a motivating force. No one would argue – great things are possible like never before, and because of our increased interdependence, now, more than ever, we are in need of a social gospel, a life giving vision.

IX. Teaching the choices we have


What if, then, from grade school on, boys and girls, young men, women, and adults were taught that anger and greed were something that can and should be lessened, and removed entirely?  This goes beyond what any one religion says – it’s stating something basic about who we are as human beings, and what we’re capable of, that we can choose this as a basis for our life here.

What if, more and more, people had living examples of freedom and virtue in their teachers, and were shown how becoming free of anger, greed, and egotism is possible by a person working with their own minds and hearts?

We can imagine, it would have far reaching effects.  It would birth a different world.  And nothing less than this is what is needed now, more than in any other time that’s come before.  We are in need of a wide-scale work.

X. With a view to our future together

I find inspiration in the idea of a culture having, or moving toward an ethic – such as that of respect and care of their elders.  This reaches beyond ethics – plural, to having a stable basis in a culture, that then expresses itself in a number of ways.

I would say that what we need in America, and in the world now, most of all, is an ethic of compassion, even if it takes some generations to bring into being.  This is different from advocating one or two, or a handful of causes, such as universal health care, affordable housing, and education. It is more the ground from which these are addressed.  And that ethic, in turn, has its unmistaken cause. When enough of us are liberated, naturally, a compassionate society will follow.  And this is where I find hope.

Photos 1, 2, 3, 4, and 9 by Frank Espada.


Please go here for the original piece by Jason Espada: https://jasonespada.com/freedom-of-mind-the-root-of-the-social-gospel/