In Open Letter to Joseph Stiglitz, Time to Start “Re-writing the Rules,” Instead of “Playing the Old Game!” - Part 1, I exposed my concerns about the Trump victory, and how the systemic negligence and violation of rights of citizens in courts across the board is feeding into a much greater problem. Trump has no qualifications or experience to be the President of the USA, and DID NOT win the popular vote (which Clinton would have won by a landslide, everyone had not been trying to silence me for the past year). If journalists, lawyers, economists, policy-makers, and every other “expert” I have encountered in the past decade, were NOT guided by the same misogynistic, xenophobic, and racist rhetoric of Trump, and had opened their eyes and ears to the problems of the world, and their societies, then the world would not be facing a Trump Dictatorship.
My ex-husband told me in 2007 “You’re screwed, because, No One Cares!” and he was Right. Absolutely NO ONE in the system cares. And, the worst are those within the development community, who behind a façade of “concern and empathy” are exploiting the populations they pretend to be assisting. As I keep on telling my constituency, “If you just change the race, gender, nationalities, etc. of the people playing the “Game,” rather than the “Rules” of the “Game,” NOTHING changes.” My family tree goes back 500 years to the early Puritan movement, which provided the Genesis for the modern human rights movement. Human rights issues, and standards, in my daily life, as well as within the communities in which I interact, is for me, a life of a “Fish-in-Water.” But a “Fish-in-Water” looking out from a “Fish-Bowl” into a VERY dysfunctional society, and paradigm. See the violation of rights of women and children in Spain below, which EVERYONE contends is “normal” under “habitual custom.” I have yet to meet with a lawyer who understands the Law under human rights standards within their own legal systems! And, why I am so desperately concerned about the Future of the USA, and World, under a Trump Administration. In 6-months or less, the USA will be under a Trump Dictatorship.
The faulty rhetoric which is guiding the ‘American Dream’ (which in reality, is a NIGHTMARE) found its Genesis under Nancy Reagan, with a very telling tweet by Reagan’s eldest son, Michael Reagan, that his father would have NEVER endorsed, or supported the rhetoric of Trump, see Fox News report and tweet below. The conservatism started under, and by the Reagan Era has become as extremist as any extremism found in the Middle East, or any other area of “conflict” in the world.
Susan Faludi, in her book Backlash: The Undeclared War on Women, exposes to what extent the present misogynistic and hate rhetoric espoused by Donald Trump in his campaign was implanted into the American political system during the Reagan Administration’s placement of high-level officials, like Phyllis Schlafly and other right-wing conservatists. The social conservatism started under Nancy Reagan has not been effectively challenged by the Democrats or the feminists, both whose ranks have been filled by women more interested in advancing their careers than “the cause.” I cover the issues extensively in my report FfD: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, posted on my activism website, www.warondomesticterrorism.com.
Not only in the past 5 decades have the feminists failed to push forward an agenda and rhetoric that represents Women everywhere (not just those women looking to grapple up the corporate/political Power structures), but they have also been woefully negligent in combating the injection of misogynistic and hate-speech (so espoused by Trump during his campaign) into societies, courts, and government administrations. The anti-racism rhetoric perpetuated in the USA since the early ‘80s, has resulted in the New Jim Crow; while the denigratory and sexist rhetoric since then exposed by journalist Megyn Kelly, in her new book, Settle for More, and Trump’s promises during his campaign to “lock her up,” should be taken very, very seriously. Locking up victims is THE #1 tactic of bullies everywhere.
In my blog, Cost of Corruption: Open Letter to Ban Ki-Moon, Secretary General of the United Nations, Desperate Times Calls for Desperate Measures, I quote Fareed Zakaria’s Washington Post article, The Two Sins that Defined this Election, in which he exposes to what extent the US Presidential Elections have exposed the great divide of the rural working class and the white urban class, and I quote,
For those of us who opposed Donald Trump, the response to Tuesday’s vote could be anger or honest reflection. I’m not by nature an angry person, so I will try the latter.
Trump remade the political map with a huge surge of support from working-class whites, particularly in rural communities. Let me be honest, this is a world I don’t know — and many people probably don’t know very well — and that’s part of the problem. We have all managed to ignore the pain of rural America…. “To those ignored, suffering people, Donald Trump is a brick chucked through the window of the elites. ‘Are you a------- listening now?’”…
…Over the past three or four decades, the United States has sorted itself into a highly efficient meritocracy, where people from all economic walks of life can move up the ladder of achievement and income (usually ending up in cities). It is better than using race, gender or bloodlines as the key to wealth and power, but it does create its own problems. As in any system, some people won’t ascend to the top, and because it is a meritocracy, it is easy to believe that that’s justified.
A meritocracy can be blind to the fact that some people don’t make it because they have been unlucky in some way. More profoundly, it can be morally blind…
So, the great sin of the modern left is elitism. But another sin was also highlighted in this election: racism.
Trump won among whites without a college degree by a staggering 39 points, but he won those with a college education by four points as well. He won working-class whites but also middle-class whites. As Nick Confessore and Nate Cohn put it in the New York Times, “He electrified the country’s white majority and mustered its full strength against long-term demographic decay.”
In this respect, Trump is not unusual. Right-wing populism is on the rise across many Western countries. It is rising in countries in Northern Europe, where economic growth has been robust; in Germany, where manufacturing jobs have stayed strong; and in France, where the state provides many protections for the working class. The one common trait everywhere is that white majority populations have faced a recent influx of immigrants.
Perhaps the phenomenon might be better described as a cultural reaction to change, but it often expresses itself simply as hostility to people who are different, and usually brown and black…
An essay on the satirical website Cracked, by David Wong (who grew up in a small town in Illinois), gives voice to the rage of rural Americans. “The whole goddamned world revolves around [America’s cities],” he wrote. The vast majority of the country’s pop culture is all about city dwellers. Most new movies, shows, songs and games are about New York or Los Angeles or Chicago or some fantasy version of them. Nearly every trend comes from a metropolis. All the hot new industries are in hip cities. “If you live in [rural America], that f---ing sucks,” he wrote.
As you explain in the video below, the USA economy has been dominated by slow growth and income inequality for so long, it is have serious detrimental effects on the average American. However, bringing manufacturing and natural resource exploitation jobs back to the economy is NOT the answer—nor is the techy liberalism, with Silicon Valley, along with its cousin Wall Street, is promoting and, once again setting financial markets up for a crash, that will make the 2008 crash look like “small potatoes.”
It is imperative that policy-makers, “experts” and those in power start taking the plight of People in the daily lives, in inner-urban and rural areas, seriously and start examining issues with diligence, integrity; and holistically.
I quote you from Slate journalist, Isaac Chotiner’s article, Is Hillary Clinton More Liberal Than Barack Obama?,
How does the rise of more economically populist—at least in theory, since Trump wants a giant supply-side tax cut—conservatism here and abroad affected the economic debate? What do you make of it?
Well, my reaction is it does not address problems, but it responds to them. That is to say, it recognizes that there are a lot of disgruntled people. The Republican Party has had a peculiar kind of coalition between the establishment/corporate types, the libertarians, the Evangelicals, and the Tea Party. It is a coalition with very different views of the world. Until Trump came along, they were pushing an agenda that was serving the elite but not serving ordinary workers. They opposed trade assistance as they pushed for trade agreements. You would have thought that when people are hurt, they need trade assistance. And they opposed it. And I think what Trump has done is expose some of that hypocrisy. The difference between Hillary and Trump is that Hillary is working very hard costing out her programs and trying to make sure that the numbers add up. I think partly because she thinks that she is going to get elected.
She is not angling for a reality TV show?
She’s angling for the real job.
You’ve written about the connection between monopolies and inequality. How much do you worry about the rise of companies such as Amazon and Google? We tend to think of monopolies as being about steel.
I do worry about it a lot. I do not think there are any simple solutions. I do think, for instance, the Justice Department has made a mistake in not recognizing Amazon’s monopsony power.
Do you think people like Hillary Clinton and others in the Democratic Party recognize going forward how important these issues are?
I think so. The reason why I say that is even Obama, who was more conservative ...
More conservative than Hillary?
More conservative than Hillary, yes. I think his temperament is basically more conservative and he did not go as far on Dodd-Frank as many people wanted. He opposed some of the key provisions that eventually got in the bill.
What I was going to say was his Council of Economic Advisers has highlighted the increase in market power and he issued an executive order asking each agency to come up with initiatives to deal with it. That train has left the station, so I really think that this is going to be an issue going forward.
Additionally, I quote, another article by Isaac Chotiner, Journalists Failed in 2016: We Cannot Make the Same Mistakes in Covering the Trump Presidency, posted on 11/9.
Donald Trump’s catastrophic victory on Tuesday night poses the single greatest threat in generations to what we Americans quaintly call our way of life. Trump’s maniacal self-centeredness, his attraction to authoritarianism, and his blatant contempt for the truth combine to form a standing reproach to everything decent about American politics and culture.
The more liberal version of American exceptionalism has always rested on the belief that although the United States may not protect its most vulnerable citizens the way that many European countries do, it is at least insulated from the type of xenophobic populism which has plagued—and plagues—that continent. But those of us who assumed, before the presidential primaries, that our institutions would surely spare us from frothing rage and bigotry were proven to be dangerously naïve. We have now lived through the rise and victory of Trumpism; it can happen here, and it has.
This isn’t just my opinion; it’s also the opinion of many of my colleagues at Slate and of journalists I know at other publications. For op-ed columnists and ideologically disinclined news reporters alike, Trump elicits a palpable disgust and a heretofore unknown variety of fear. This wasn’t initially obvious in the media’s coverage of Trump, however. Though many journalists recoiled from Trump, as an institution journalism failed to treat his rise with the seriousness it deserved. This is no longer an option...
The danger of Trump was and remains twofold: There is the man and there is the movement. There is the unstable narcissist who will head a federal government that possesses nuclear weapons (and the intelligence-gathering apparatus of the NSA), and there is the ugly ideology he espoused when he wasn’t busy contradicting it with his erratic pronouncements.
This division between Trump and Trumpism raises two questions going forward for the press. The first is how to cover the man. He can no longer be laughed off as a buffoon, an idiot savant, or a sideshow act. The absurd personality, the ridiculous ego, the titanic self-regard: All of it matters. The personal really is political—and this personality now commands massive power.
The media is of course multifaceted and hard to define. The reporters at the New York Times and Washington Post are members of the media; in 2016, thanks to CNN, so was Corey Lewandowski. Traditional print media handled Trump’s candidacy more ably than cable news, which relished the spectacle the candidate created and the ratings that came with covering it. But the first year of Trump’s candidacy was a disaster for the profession no matter how you define it. We treated Trump as the gloriously entertaining distraction and pop-culture figure that he admittedly once was. We occasionally stood up to defend democratic values from his encroachments, but we were unsurprisingly if indefensibly quicker to counter his attacks on freedom of the press than on other liberties…
The second question is how the media deals with Trumpism, which is now the reigning ideology of the country’s dominant political party. The press has been no better on this score, covering the Republican Party of recent years as if it were a normal political party in a Western democracy. It isn’t and hasn’t been for a long time. But the media had become so accustomed to the ideals of balance and parity in coverage of the two American parties that it continued covering the GOP as if it hadn’t descended into quackery and madness. Trump’s takeover of the party thus came as a shock when it might well have been contextualized earlier on, if not predicted.
Trump’s embrace of babbling nonsense on the subject of climate change, for example, is a direct outgrowth of the party’s long-standing disdain for intellectualism and for science. It is horrifically new for a modern major party nominee to express racism so openly, but virtually the entire GOP has been engaged in a dedicated effort to keep black people from voting for decades now. And when you spend years telling your voters that the media peddles nothing but lies and that the president is illegitimate, you are eventually going to be saddled with someone who simply raises the stakes: The media isn’t just dishonest; it’s part of a worldwide conspiracy. The president isn’t just illegitimate; he’s a Kenyan usurper.
The GOP’s pre-Trump Trumpism allowed a dangerous demagogue to take command of the party, and now the country. Republicans may not have willed Trump, but they established the conditions for a man like him, in all his grotesque incompetence and know-nothingness, to be born. And Trump didn’t merely overwhelm the party; he was first appeased, then welcomed by opportunists and the weak-willed. He was ultimately supported by the vast majority of Republican politicians.
In the wake of this bitter campaign, it might seem like common sense for the media to do its best to reach out to Republican voters—to earn their trust by showing respect for their voting preferences. CNN anchor Brian Stelter, who has been one of the network’s few bright spots this year, wrote in a column this week that the big question facing the media is how it can go about offering a hand to voters who feel their lives and concerns have gone uncovered by the mainstream outlets. But even if that were possible—something I have my doubts about—it’s not the solution. It may be true that too many reporters, cozy in their coastal cities, lost touch with the kinds of voters that fueled Trump’s rise. But many of those voters, while suffering legitimately, hold views that should not be countenanced in a liberal democracy and are not excused by economic hardship…
The GOP has become an extremist party without much of the media identifying it as such, and now it’s installed a volatile novice with disdain for our democracy in the White House. If we in the media return to pretending that we are not in the midst of a domestic and international crisis, we will be complicit in it.
If Trump enters the Office of President, with the present break-down in the rule of law, and lack of integrity in the press in covering the systemic human and civil rights violations in the courts, the USA will degrade into a Dictatorship within 6 months. In order to “Re-write the Rules,” it is imperative that those in Washington, and ALL government institutions, start assuring Governance, by assuring Transparency and Accountability within their own organizations.
Instead of rewarding the brightest and hardest-workers in society, the ‘American, Narcissistic Dream,’ exploits, belittle, berates, and marginalizes them. It is for this reason that Trump supporters came from so many diverse and extremist factions. The American Fractured Fairytale is destroying the country from within, with the marginalized and extremist the most effected by the fall-out, and therefore the most angry. In predictions of Nostradamus and Baba Vanga, posted on the Internet, I did see one prediction that gives me hope, and which claims “Obama will save the day.” If I could find political support within the Democratic Party for my contention that the US Elections were neither fair, nor transparent, and manipulated by the US press in favor of Trump, the Powers that Be, could reverse the sinking of the Titanic!
I have contacted the President of the Woman’s National Democratic Club (WNDC), Nuchhi Currier, in hopes she might use her contacts within the Democratic Party in challenging the legitimacy of the US Elections results in favor of Trump. But, it appears the WNDC is just another example of the ‘window-dressing’ NGOs and initiatives that permeate “This Town,” (particularly ‘Women’s Clubs’) and why Clinton lost to Trump. The appeasement towards Trump’s rise to power by Democrats and Republicans, who vehemently denounced Trump during the Elections, is reminiscent of Chamberlain’s appeasement of the Nazis during Hitler’s rise to Power.
My research in the past years has included some of the scriptures and prophecies during the past millenniums, and all show that humankind, and humanity is at a Cross-Roads—with two different possible outcomes that will determine our survival or demise. Mankind can continue to exploit the natural resources of the Planet, global warming will continue to escalate, and the planet will sink into decay beyond all reparations; with the Demise of the human-race assured. The other prediction (and possibility) indicates a complete paradigm shift, with salvation of the Planet and humankind. Time will only tell, which Road Mankind chooses.
As Eduardo Hughes Galeano stated, “there are those who believe destiny rests at the feet of the gods, but the truth is that it confronts the conscious of man with a burning challenge.” If men and women do not start thinking of the consequences of their actions, and be held accountable for those actions, under democratic, human rights standards, and “fair-play,” our Planet, and the human-race will not survive. These standards and rules need to apply to Everyone, at international, national, regional, and local levels—all the way into our homes and families. “Charity” begins within the home.
Susan Faludi, exposed in Backlash: Undeclared War on Women, whoever controls the rhetoric, controls the game—and she is Right. I have produced the rhetoric and political platform that all the feminists and women’s rights activist CLAIM they need to advance the Human Rights of Women, (see www.warondomesticterrorism.com and blogs on Womenalia, Linkedin, and HuffPost (when all the mediators of those platforms are not playing queen-for-a-day and silencing my DISSENT.) If EVERYONE in Washington in the past decade had not been so intent on exploiting and marginalizing me, and instead listened to me, Clinton would have won the elections by a landslide, and the world would not be faced with a future Civil War and blood-bath under Trump.
During the IMF/WB Annual Meetings (which I was unable to attend due to the “game-playing” of queen-for-a-day secretaries from the IMF’s Institute for Capacity Development (ICD), who should not only be fired for their illegal actions, but severely reprimanded, instead of “protected”), Managing Director of the IMF, Christine Lagarde, sat down for a One-on-One with Michael Lewis, best-selling author of Liar’s Poker, whose upcoming book is entitled The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed Our Minds. During the interview, Lewis told Lagarde that in his experience, women were put in places of Power in order to serve as the “fall-guy,” asking Lagarde if she was not afraid of being the “fall-guy,” at present; to which she responded “If I am to take the blame for something for which I am not responsible, I will call on you.” And, when Lewis pursues the question, Lagarde remains silent, but it is clear that the thought had crossed her mind and that she is concerned—as she should be. (But, when the House of Cards comes crashing down, she might want to come and see me, as I can cover the issues Lewis exposes, as well as many, many more). See video below.
Another financial collapse is eminent! Not only have the underlying principles of capital and financial markets not changed in the past decade, nor has anyone been held accountable, but “techy liberalism” (with Silicon Valley the motor), has joined decades of “manufacturing/consumer liberalism” (with Wall Street the motor), with the allocation of resources (financial and natural) by Corporate Greed, has just made the bubble bigger-n-better, this time around, see my report FfD: A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I pray every day that Baba Vanga’s prediction of the coming financial collapse, will occur in the coming weeks, before Trump’s Inauguration.
Just like is the “habitual custom” in ‘This Town” NO ONE in Power in Washington will start taking the ACTIONS NEEDED, until their House of Cards come crashing down on them—just like Hillary Clinton’s Glass-Ceiling came crashing down upon her on the 2nd worst day in America 11/9. And, it is preferable that the PhDs and MBAs (who are responsible for maintaining the House of Cards) lose their jobs, homes, and savings in the aftermath of another financial crash, rather than the Civil War and blood-bath that will ensue if Trump enters Office as the 45th President—a Presidency which will end in a Dictatorship under the extremism Administration Trump is putting together.