Running on empty

 

What we need is a compromise

You can't compromise with fascism.

 By Jesse Duquette

Fishies!

 By Matt Wuerker

Where're your spines

by Mike Luckovich

The GQP guard dog

 by Mike Luckovich

Lebensraum

Via Marc Wing

“Lebensraum” by Niels Bo Bojesen via Steve Brodner on Bluesky and on The Greater Quiet, his Substack. Please support the work of Editorial Cartoonists, whenever possible directly, whose work is shown on Bluesky. This #EditorialCartoon was found HERE on The Greater Quiet.

 

Drinking problem

 From Kevin Kallaugher

The Emperor's clothes

 By Steve Sack

So-called "freedom" under Republicans

 

The politics of cultural despair

I have been saying this for a long time. It's obvious that neo-liberalism has siphoned up income and wealth to the richest 10%, the richest 1% and the richest 0.1%. The bottom half of the population has had to endure the horrors of modern capitalism without any gains.  In the Anglophone countries, both sides of politics are supporters of neo-liberalism, are in hock to billionaires and corporations.  That leaves voters nowhere to go to get change.  No wonder that start believing in charlatans and demagogues.

 

The Mourning After, by Mr Fish

From The Chris Hedges Report

In the end, the election was about despair. Despair over futures that evaporated with deindustrialization. Despair over the loss of 30 million jobs in mass layoffs. Despair over austerity programs and the funneling of wealth upwards into the hands of rapacious oligarchs. Despair over a liberal class that refuses to acknowledge the suffering it orchestrated under neoliberalism or embrace New Deal type programs that will ameliorate this suffering. Despair over the futile, endless wars, as well as the genocide in Gaza, where generals and politicians are never held accountable. Despair over a democratic system that has been seized by corporate and oligarchic power.

This despair has been played out on the bodies of the disenfranchised through opioid and alcoholism addictions, gambling, mass shootings, suicides — especially among middle-aged white males — morbid obesity and the investment of our emotional and intellectual life in tawdry spectacles and the allure of magical thinking, from the absurd promises of the Christian right to the Oprah-like belief that reality is never an impediment to our desires. These are the pathologies of a deeply diseased culture, what Friedrich Nietzsche calls an aggressive despiritualized nihilism.

Donald Trump is a symptom of our diseased society. He is not its cause. He is what is vomited up out of decay. He expresses a childish yearning to be an omnipotent god. This yearning resonates with Americans who feel they have been treated like human refuse. But the impossibility of being a god, as Ernest Becker writes, leads to its dark alternative -- destroying like a god. This self-immolation is what comes next.

Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party, along with the establishment wing of the Republican Party, which allied itself with Harris, live in their own non-reality-based belief system. Harris, who was anointed by party elites and never received a single primary vote, proudly trumpeted her endorsement by Dick Cheney, a politician who left office with a 13 percent approval rating. The smug, self-righteous “moral” crusade against Trump stokes the national reality television show that has replaced journalism and politics. It reduces a social, economic and political crisis to the personality of Trump. It refuses to confront and name the corporate forces responsible for our failed democracy. It allows Democratic politicians to blithely ignore their base - 77 percent of Democrats and 62 percent of independents support an arms embargo against Israel. The open collusion with corporate oppression and refusal to heed the desires and needs of the electorate neuters the press and Trump critics. These corporate puppets stand for nothing, other than their own advancement. The lies they tell to working men and women, especially with programs such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), do far more damage than any of the lies uttered by Trump.

Oswald Spengler in “The Decline of the West” predicted that, as Western democracies calcified and died, a class of “monied thugs,” people such as Trump, would replace the traditional political elites. Democracy would become a sham. Hatred would be fostered and fed to the masses to encourage them to tear themselves apart.

The American dream has become an American nightmare.

The social bonds, including jobs that gave working Americans a sense of purpose and stability, that gave them meaning and hope, have been sundered. The stagnation of tens of millions of lives, the realization that it will not be better for their children, the predatory nature of our institutions, including education, health care and prisons, have engendered, along with despair, feelings of powerlessness and humiliation. It has bred loneliness, frustration, anger and a sense of worthlessness.

“When life is not worth living, everything becomes a pretext for ridding ourselves of it … ,” Émile Durkheim writes. “There is a collective mood, as there is an individual mood, that inclines nations to sadness. … For individuals are too closely involved in the life of society for it to be sick without their being affected. Its suffering inevitably becomes theirs.”

Decayed societies, where a population is stripped of political, social and economic power, instinctively reach out for cult leaders. I watched this during the breakup of the former Yugoslavia. The cult leader promises a return to a mythical golden age and vows, as Trump does, to crush the forces embodied in demonized groups and individuals that are blamed for their misery. The more outrageous cult leaders become, the more cult leaders flout law and social conventions, the more they gain in popularity. Cult leaders are immune to the norms of established society. This is their appeal. Cult leaders seek total power. Those who follow them grant them this power in the desperate hope that the cult leaders will save them.

All cults are personality cults. Cult leaders are narcissists. They demand obsequious fawning and total obedience. They prize loyalty above competence. They wield absolute control. They do not tolerate criticism. They are deeply insecure, a trait they attempt to cover up with bombastic grandiosity. They are amoral and emotionally and physically abusive. They see those around them as objects to be manipulated for their own empowerment, enjoyment and often sadistic entertainment. All those outside the cult are branded as forces of evil, prompting an epic battle whose natural expression is violence.

We will not convince those who have surrendered their agency to a cult leader and embraced magical thinking through rational argument. We will not coerce them into submission. We will not find salvation for them or ourselves by supporting the Democratic Party. Whole segments of American society are now bent on self-immolation. They despise this world and what it has done to them. Their personal and political behavior is willfully suicidal. They seek to destroy, even if destruction leads to violence and death. They are no longer sustained by the comforting illusion of human progress, losing the only antidote to nihilism.

Pope John Paul II in 1981 issued an encyclical titled “Laborem exercens,” or “Through Work.” He attacked the idea, fundamental to capitalism, that work was merely an exchange of money for labor. Work, he wrote, should not be reduced to the commodification of human beings through wages. Workers were not impersonal instruments to be manipulated like inanimate objects to increase profit. Work was essential to human dignity and self-fulfillment. It gave us a sense of empowerment and identity. It allowed us to build a relationship with society in which we could feel we contributed to social harmony and social cohesion, a relationship in which we had purpose.

The pope castigated unemployment, underemployment, inadequate wages, automation and a lack of job security as violations of human dignity. These conditions, he wrote, were forces that negated self-esteem, personal satisfaction, responsibility and creativity. The exaltation of the machine, he warned, reduced human beings to the status of slaves. He called for full employment, a minimum wage large enough to support a family, the right of a parent to stay home with children, and jobs and a living wage for the disabled. He advocated, in order to sustain strong families, universal health insurance, pensions, accident insurance and work schedules that permitted free time and vacations. He wrote that all workers should have the right to form unions with the ability to strike.

We must invest our energy into organizing mass movements to overthrow the corporate state through sustained acts of mass civil disobedience. This includes the most powerful weapon we possess – the strike. By turning our ire on the corporate state, we name the true sources of power and abuse. We expose the absurdity of blaming our demise on demonized groups such as undocumented workers, Muslims or Blacks. We give people an alternative to a corporate-indentured Democratic Party that cannot be rehabilitated. We make possible the restoration of an open society, one that serves the common good rather than corporate profit. We must demand nothing less than full employment, guaranteed minimum incomes, universal health insurance, free education at all levels, robust protection of the natural world and an end to militarism and imperialism. We must create the possibility for a life of dignity, purpose and self-esteem. If we do not, it will ensure a Christianized fascism and ultimately, with the accelerating ecocide, our obliteration.

See also:

Shit-life syndrome    The basic income   Playing the race/Muslim/terrorist card

Most political unrest caused by soaring inequality

Marjorie is never wrong

 The background to this is that Marjorie Taylor Greene, a preternaturally dim far-right Republican, says that they (who?) are causing hurricanes with some mysterious machinery.  She was the bright spark who said that the California fires are caused by Jewish space lasers.  Another feebality is that she says "Q"  is a patriot, and has access to the great and the mighty.  Turned out he lives with his mum somewhere in the West.  He was the genius who said there was a paedophilia network run out of the basement of a Washington DC pizza joint, which, it turned out, didn't even have a basement.  But some true believer went and shot the resto up anyway.  Quite preternaturally stupid.  

By Mike Luckovich

Lifelong Battle for Democracy

 By Mike Luckovich

Project 2025

 By Ted Littleford

So much for freedom

A sign in an Idaho library.  The GQP, despite all its ranting about freedom, wants to control what we read, how we use our bodies, how we vote, how we work, etc.

Freedom for the sharks, not the minnows.

Why is the Texas grid is such bad shape?

Texas blacked out.  (Its grid is separated from the rest of the USA.)

From The Climate Brink

The Texas grid, run by ERCOT, has had a rough few years. In 2021, winter storm Uri blacked out much of the state for several days. About a week ago, Hurricane Beryl knocked out power to millions of Houstonians, and a week later, hundreds of thousands of Houstonians still hadn’t had their power restored.

It might seem that these two events are completely different — one was a winter storm that caused a blackout by knocking out the natural gas supply, while the other one is a hurricane that knocked out the power distribution system.

But the root cause of these two incidents is actually the same. To understand what’s going on, you need to realize that keeping the power on is incredibly valuable to society and, when the power goes out, the damages are enormous. The Uri blackout cost well north of $100 billion. I have yet to see an estimate of the cost of Hurricane Beryl, but I’m guessing it’s also going to be eye popping.

But here’s the key fact: these costs are not paid by energy companies. When the power went out during Uri and pipes froze and burst, the energy companies didn’t pay those costs. Homeowners and insurance companies did. When the power outage caused Texans to freeze to death, the energy company didn’t pay, society did. Energy companies aren’t paying the expenses from Beryl, either.

Thus, power outages actually cost energy corporations very little money — maybe a few days’ revenue. Hardening energy infrastructure, on the other hand, is very expensive and entirely paid for by the energy corporations. This cuts into their profits and stock price.

Put slightly differently: Energy corporations pay the full cost of hardening infrastructure but capture only a small fraction of the benefits. Most of the benefits flow to society in the form of avoided burst pipes, avoided loss of income, avoided health impacts.

So why in the world would a corporation spend money hardening the energy system? The answer is there’s no reason. The net result is that the rational thing for corporations is to underinvest in making the grid resilient to extreme weather.

This is a market failure just like the carbon dioxide problem: There’s no incentive for emitters to reduce emissions because they pay the full costs of the emissions reductions but capture only a small fraction of the benefits of avoiding the impacts of climate change. In such a case, the rational thing for a profit-seeker is to keep emitting carbon dioxide.

The only solution is for the Texas State government to come in and force companies to invest in hardening the grid. Texas politicians understand that people demand action, which is why we heard Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick say that the government will fix the grid after the Uri blackout:


"We’re going to get to the bottom of this and find out what the hell happened, and we’re going to fix it."

And Gov. Greg Abbott sent a letter to the Public Utility Commission of Texas ordering an investigation into CenterPoint and deliver a report on its findings by Dec. 1.


“Maybe they have too large of an area for them to be able to manage adequately,” Abbott said. “It’s time to reevaluate whether or not CenterPoint should have such a large territory.”

But this will promise of action is entirely performative. When the cameras are rolling, they express outrage and promise action. Once the cameras are off, the outrage fades, and nothing changes.

History confirms this. After a big December 1989 blackout caused by lack of winterization of the energy system, fixes were promised. Those were never implemented and another blackout occurred in Winter 2011. A subsequent report laid out steps to make the grid more robust. Those were never implemented, so we had another blackout in 2021.

After the 2021 blackout, a natural gas billionaire made huge campaign contributions to prominent politicians and, lo and behold, nothing was done to make natural gas providers harden their infrastructure. If we had another Uri tomorrow1, we could once again see widespread blackouts.

The same will happen over the next few months with respect to the Beryl blackout: After the outrage theater dies down, nothing will be done.

This is one of the reasons, by the way, why Texas is so popular with corporations. They are never held accountable for pushing their costs onto society, as long as the people who pay the costs are the poor and middle class.

Ultimately, the problem is that Texas politicians legislate on behalf of corporations and not the citizens of Texas. Until that changes, episodes like Uri and Beryl are certain to continue.

Update: It has been pointed out that CenterPoint could have asked for a rate increase to pay for hardening the electrical distribution system. It’s not clear why that did not do it — did they not recognize the risk? Or was there political pressure to not raise electricity costs?

See also: 

The next Texas grid collapse

 

Trump is an idiot

 By Rick McKee

Something must be done

 By Mike Luckovich

In my official capacity

 By Bill Bramhall

AI religious Trump

 

Covid death rates and the GQP

From a toot by Liam O'Mara

Seems there is a pretty clear correlation between support for #Trumpism and a lack of basic scientific literacy. Whodathunkit?