He’s a former MMA fighter which is considered”highly qualified” for the US Senate in Oklahoma. Of course he thinks appointing LGBTQ people is equivalent to appointing a lunatic weirdo like RFK Jr. He is a very, very stupid person.
There have always been a fair number of fools in Senate. But MAGA has really upped the numbers. This fellow is a perfect example. And for some reason he’s all over television lately. I guess they figure he’s one of their new poste boys.
They’re really going after the military. I suspect a lot of this is an intimidation tactic to keep the brass in line and possibly push some into retirement. But you never know. This psycho administration is clearly high as a kite right now and areliable to do anything:
The Trump transition team is compiling a list of senior current and former U.S. military officers who were directly involved in the withdrawal from Afghanistan and exploring whether they could be court-martialed for their involvement, according to a U.S. official and a person familiar with the plan.Officials working on the transition are considering creating a commission to investigate the 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan, including gathering information about who was directly involved in the decision-making for the military, how it was carried out, and whether the military leaders could be eligible for charges as serious as treason, the U.S. official and person with knowledge of the plan said.
“They’re taking it very seriously,” the person with knowledge of the plan said.
The Trump transition team did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Matt Flynn, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for counternarcotics and global threats, is helping lead the effort, the sources said. It is being framed as a review of how the U.S. first got into the war in Afghanistan and how the U.S. ultimately withdrew.
This is weird:
“Matt Flynn has nothing to do with the Trump transition team, much less leading any review concerning military justice matters,” said Mark S. Zaid, Flynn’s attorney. In a statement Zaid said that “no one has sought out Mr. Flynn’s views on this hypothetical legal scenario.”
I wonder if that little nugget was passed on to the source as a way of rooting out leaks? I dunno. But it’s odd.
Trump sure knows how to keep the cultist thrilled:
To his detractors, President-elect Donald J. Trump’s cabinet looks like a rogues’ gallery of people with dubious credentials and questionable judgment.
His supporters see something different.
“It’s a masterpiece,’’ Eileen Margolis, 58, who lives in Weston, Fla., and owns a tattoo business, said of Mr. Trump’s cabinet picks unveiled over the past week. “If it was a painting, it would be a Picasso.”
A “brilliant alliance,’’ is how Joanne Warwick, 60, a former Democrat from Detroit, described many of the nominees.
“It’s pretty much a star cast,’’ said Judy Kanoui of Flat Rock, N.C., a retiree and lifelong Democrat who voted for Mr. Trump for the first time this month.
{…]
In Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nominee for health and human services secretary, Mr. Trump’s supporters see a crusader searching for new solutions to chronic illnesses, not a conspiracy theorist promoting questionable and debunked ideas about vaccines and fluoride.
In Matt Gaetz, the nominee for attorney general, many Trump supporters look past the ethical investigation into allegations that he had a relationship with a 17-year-old girl and possibly violated federal sex trafficking laws, and see a provocateur who is willing to punish the Democrats who unjustly prosecuted the president-elect.
“I think it’s so crazy, and I love it,’’ Merrill McCollum, 60, of Bozeman, Mont., said of the nominees.
I we get austerity and civilizational collapse all these celebs will no doubt be blamed as “low IQ”, “dumb as rocks” etc. And they will love him even more.
Love these billionaire tech bros. But hey, at least Elon has the heart to warn us that it’s going to cause us all hardship — but it’s for our own good.
“We have to reduce spending to live within our means,” Musk said. “And, you know, that necessarily involves some temporary hardship, but it will ensure long-term prosperity.”
Many economists agree that Trump’s economic and fiscal proposals could spark an economic calamity, though it is not clear whether they have considered, or given credence, to Musk’s calls for austerity.
Is austerity what people voted for? I’m going to guess no. But if these miscreants have their way, they’re going to get it:
We sat down with RFK Jr. back in May 2023, when he was still challenging President Biden for the Democratic nomination.
As we noted then, he’s an independent thinker who sees through a lot of bull, an incisive critic of some of Biden’s worst policies, who saw that “the Democratic Party lost its way most acutely in reaction to” Donald Trump’s first election.
But the insights we were impressed with had nothing to do with health.
When it came to that topic his views were a head-scratching spaghetti of what we can only call warped conspiracy theories, and not just on vaccines.
“Neocons” are responsible for America’s policy ills. “Pesticides, cellphones, ultrasound” could be driving an upswing in Tourette syndrome and peanut allergies.
He told us with full conviction that all America’s chronic health problems began in one year in the 1980s when a dozen bad things happened.
Convincing to the gullible conspiracy-hungry crowd on Twitter, but not to the rest of us.
In fact, we came out thinking he’s nuts on a lot of fronts.
And even where he makes fair points as a critic, it’s hard to see how he’s the guy to lead HHS and its staff of 83,000 to practical solutions.
The relationship between Big Pharma and the feds is deeply dysfunctional, for example — but drug companies do a lot of good, and employ a lot of people.
Sending the industry — or even just its stocks — into a tailspin would be a disaster in its own right.
His views also put him at odds with Trump’s aim of supporting energy and farmers, as RFK Jr. wants to ban fracking and many pesticides and fertilizers.
Look: The HHS chief oversees over 100 programs across 11 operating divisions; keeping the trains running is a major job in its own right.
A radical, prolonged and confused transition ordered by a guy like RFK Jr., who will use his high office to spout his controversial beliefs, leaves a lot of room for things to go wrong — and for people to wind up harmed or even dead.2.6K
All that, of course, if the Senate actually confirms RFK Jr., which will be a challenge in its own right: Republicans only have three votes to spare.
Donald Trump won on promises to fix the economy, the border and soaring global disorder; his team needs to focus on delivering change on those fronts — not spend energy either having to defend crackpot theories or trying to control RFK Jr.’s mouth.
We fear the worm that he claims ate some of his brain some years ago is contagious and there’s been an outbreak at Mar-a-Lago.
This isn’t complicated. He’s batshit crazy.
“The more capitalism creates wealth, the more it sows the seeds of its own destruction,” writes David Prychitko on Karl Marx’s theories. “Ultimately, the proletariat will realize that it has the collective power to overthrow the few remaining capitalists and, with them, the whole system.” Think of it as a rosily optimistic Marxian corollary to Charles Darwin. Consider the centuries of properity for the peasantry after the sacking of Rome by Alaric I and the Visigoths in 410 CE.
Modern Visigoths under Trump I, plan to lay waste to Washington, D.C. starting January 20 (and even before). One of his chosen lieutenants, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., suffered cognitive damage after a suspected pork tapeworm larva ate part of his brain during a tour in South Asia. There are medications the World Health Organization recommends for treating neurocysticercosis, and preventative measures. But despite his own experience, Mr. Kennedy eschews many such interventions, including medications and vaccines.
If confirmed as the head of Trump I’s Department of Health and Human Services, Kennedy would involuntarily enlist the entire population of the United States in a clinical trial to see what happens if the most advanced country in the world rolls back its medical technology to the 1950s.
As it happens, we have data on what that world looked like. The Wall Street Journal provided a series of heat maps illustrating that in 2015 (the original is interactive):
Perhaps there’s a Darwin Award in it for Mr. Kennedy. If so, many of his neighbors won’t be around to see him receive it.
“One of the most maddening aspects of the 2024 election is the extent to which so many voters viewed Trump as a mostly normal political candidate,” writes David French in The New York Times. This is the same Times, a paper not celebrated for its headlines, which boasts several online examples this morning of the new Trump normal.
I’m resisting the urge here to substitute another D-word in that famous line from The Sixth Sense (1999):
Most Americans are not political geeks. They don’t have the time. They have other interests. They have other hobbies for when they are not tied up in jobs and bills. They ferry kids to soccer practice and dance classes. A shrinking number attend church, another demand on their time. They are not low-information voters. They are busy, some with multiple jobs. They are not interested in mastering the details of policy proposals. When they go to the polls, they contract out that work to politicians who, for whatever evanescent reasons, seem to reflect themselves back to them. Or else reflect back an image of themselves they’d rather see.
It’s what they see in Donald Trump that should scare you.
Trump’s most-aired ad from October, French writes, was
all about inflation, Medicare and Social Security — arguing that” Kamala Harris “will make seniors already struggling with high prices ‘pay more Social Security taxes,’ while unauthorized’ immigrants receive benefits.”
Trump was marketing more vodka he doesn’t drink and sneakers he doesn’t wear. But still standard political stuff, French observes. Except the headlines on the Times landing page are anything but. Americans will suffer another two or four years of Trumpism before contemplating (if ever they do) “whether politicians have taken care of prices, crime and peace, and then ruthlessly punishes failure.” In between, they disengage.
Because the majority votes and then checks back out, politicians hear almost exclusively from the most engaged minority. My colleague Ezra Klein, has written, for example, about the power that “the groups” — progressive activist organizations — exercise over Democratic policy. They demand that politicians focus on issues that might be important, but that are often not matters of majority concern. Or, even worse, they demand political fealty to positions that majorities reject.
In many administrations, this dynamic results in a kind of tug of war between the activists who demand attention to their pet causes and the political realists who grab the candidate’s arm and tap the sign that reads, “It’s the economy, stupid.”
In his first presidency, Trump hired aides that would restrain his impulse to pursue an agenda of all grievance, all the time. He fired most of them and won’t make that mistake again. Kitchen table issues are not what get him out of bed.
Throughout the campaign, Trump ran with two messages. On the airwaves, he convinced millions of Americans that they were electing the Trump of January 2019, when inflation was low, and the border was under reasonable control. At his rallies, he told MAGA that it was electing the Trump of January 2021, the man unleashed from establishment control and hellbent on burning it all down.
But here is his fundamental problem: The desires of his heart and the grievances of his base are ultimately incompatible with the demands of the majority, and the more he pursues his own priorities, the more he’ll revive his opposition. He’ll end his political career as an unpopular politician who ushered in a Democratic majority yet again.
French assumes here that Trump will survive another four years, that before dying in office he won’t succeed in centralizing power in an Executive branch he bequeaths to J.D. Vance and Elon Musk, already a shadow president.
French concludes:
Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas defended the Gaetz pick, saying, “Trump was elected to turn this place upside down.” That’s what Trump thinks. That’s what MAGA thinks. But MAGA should beware. If Trump’s cabinet picks help him usher in the chaos that is the water in which he swims, then the question won’t be whether voters rebuke MAGA again, but rather how much damage it does before it fails once more.
Perhaps the real question is not who next faces the voters’ wrath but whether voters will retain another chance to express theirs once Trump weaponizes his. Maybe voters usher in another Democratic majority. Or maybe the republic falls like the House of Usher with Roderick. That is, if world doesn’t face another Red Death worse than COVID-19 first.
Many Americans not of the MAGA persuasion focus on sustainability. What may matter to that more than clean energy is the sustainability of the American experiment run by an electorate that has no time for it.
History never repeats (I tell myself before I go to sleep)
– Split Enz
These past 10 days have felt like…a bad dream:
Last night with @realDonaldTrump & @JMilei pic.twitter.com/8AjQ8QMAIM
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 15, 2024
But alas, as Mia Farrow famously exclaimed in Rosemary’s Baby:
Speaking of bad dreams…in an excellent piece published this week titled “Alexander Hamilton’s Nightmare Realized: How the Billionaires Hijacked America”, Thom Hartmann writes:
Alexander Hamilton thought he (and the others who wrote the Constitution) had it all figured out.
He and his colleagues never imagined that a group of billionaires would spend 43 years and billions of dollars to seize the US Supreme Court, which would then legalize political bribery.
They never conceived of a foreign billionaire family coming to American and building a nationwide media ecosystem that was capable of convincing Americans that up was down, wrong was right, and a convicted fraudster and rapist would be a noble president.
They would’ve laughed at you if you told them that the richest man in the world would come from apartheid South Africa to hook up with a grifter billionaire to become co-president.
In Federalist 68, Hamilton wrote:
“The process of election affords a moral certainty, that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.”
Indeed, while a knave or rogue or traitor may fool enough people to even ascend to the office of mayor of a major city or governor of a state, Hamilton told us, the people would ferret out such a con man or traitor and Congress and the Supreme Court would put a brake on such a man even if he were to slip past the voters and the Electoral College:
“Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity, may alone suffice to elevate a man to the first honors in a single State; but it will require other talents, and a different kind of merit, to establish him in the esteem and confidence of the whole Union, or of so considerable a portion of it as would be necessary to make him a successful candidate for the distinguished office of President of the United States.”
Hamilton’s pride in the system that he himself had helped create was hard for him to suppress.
He wrote, “It will not be too strong to say, that there will be a constant probability of seeing the station filled by characters preeminent for ability and virtue.”
He even bragged in Federalist 71 that presidents would be of such high character that they could easily avoid being seduced “by the wiles of parasites and sycophants, by the snares of the ambitious, the avaricious, the desperate, by the artifices of men who possess their confidence more than they deserve it, and of those who seek to possess rather than to deserve it.”
He also believed that good elected officials in Congress, dependent on the voters for their own political futures, would serve as a check against a corrupt president bent on exploiting his position for his own enrichment, the demands of special interest groups (like billionaires), or the interests of a hostile foreign government:
“But however inclined we might be to insist upon an unbounded complaisance in the Executive [President] to the inclinations of the people, we can with no propriety contend for a like complaisance to the humors of the legislature.”
Turns out, Hamilton was wrong. His nightmare scenario tracks back to five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court, starting with Lewis Powell authoring the 1978 Bellotti decision that says money is “free speech” and corporations are “persons.” It reached its fetid bottom with John Roberts’ and Clarence Thomas’ Citizens United blowing up almost all campaign contribution limits.
Without billionaire-controlled media (including billionaire-owned social media) and billions spent to carpet-bomb America with extraordinarily deceptive advertising, Donald Trump would never have had a chance. […]
This is America becoming a Mafia State; with Trump and the corrupt toadies he’s inserting into our government, we’re all now stuck living in Alexander Hamilton’s nightmare.
With that happy thought in mind (pleasant dreams!), I thought I’d revisit a “top 10 list” I originally posted on the eve of Inauguration Day 2017, which contains bellwethers that may need to be heeded once again (perhaps more now than the first time around). With my childlike grasp of investment strategies, the best tip I can give is: go long on Hope.
(The following was originally published on Hullabaloo on January 14, 2017)
“To assess the ‘personality’ of the corporate ‘person’ a checklist is employed, using diagnostic criteria of the World Health Organization and the standard diagnostic tool of psychiatrists and psychologists. The operational principles of the corporation give it a highly anti-social ‘personality’: it is self-interested, inherently amoral, callous and deceitful; it breaches social and legal standards to get its way; it does not suffer from guilt, yet it can mimic the human qualities of empathy, caring and altruism.”
– from the official website for the film, The Corporation
I don’t know about you, but my jaw is getting pretty sore from repeatedly dropping to the floor with each successive cabinet nomination by our incoming CEO-in-chief of the United States of Blind Trust. It seems that candidate Trump, who ran on an oft-bleated promise to “drain the swamp” in Washington D.C. bears little resemblance to President-elect Trump, who is currently hell-bent on loading the place up with even more alligators.
When I heard the name “Rex Tillerson” bandied about as Trump’s pick for Secretary of State, it rang a bell. I knew he was the former head of Exxon, so it wasn’t that. Then I remembered. Mr. Tillerson was one of the “stars” of a documentary I reviewed several years back, called Greedy Lying Bastards (conversely, if I hear the words “greedy lying bastards,” bandied about, “Trump’s cabinet picks” is the first phrase that comes to mind).
So with that in mind, and in keeping with my occasional unifying theme, “Hollywood saw this coming”, I was inspired to comb my review archives of the last 10 years to see if any bellwethers were emerging that may have been dropping hints that the planets were aligning in such a manner as to set up a path to the White House for an orange TV clown (the “self-interested, inherently amoral, callous and deceitful” kind of orange TV clown).
All 10 of these films were released within the last 10 years. I’ll let you be the judge:
The Big Short – Want the good news first? Writer-director Adam McKay and co-scripter Charles Randolph’s adaptation of Michael Lewis’ eponymous 2010 non-fiction book is an outstanding comedy-drama; an incisive parsing of what led to the crash of the global financial system in 2008. The bad news is…it made me pissed off about it all over again.
Yes, it’s a bitter pill to swallow, this ever-maddening tale of how we stood by, blissfully unaware, as unchecked colonies of greedy, lying Wall Street investment bankers were eventually able to morph into the parasitic gestalt monster journalist Matt Taibbi famously compared to a “…great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” Good times! (Full review)
Capitalism: A Love Story – Back in 2009, Digby and I did a double post on this film, which was Michael Moore’s reaction to the 2008 crash. Here’s how I viewed his intent:
So how did we arrive to this sorry state of our Union, where the number of banks being robbed by desperate people is running neck and neck with the number of desperate banks ostensibly robbing We The People? What paved the way for the near-total collapse of our financial system and its subsequent government bailout, which Moore provocatively refers to as nothing less than a “financial coup d’etat”? The enabler, Moore suggests, may very well be our sacred capitalist system itself-and proceeds to build a case (in his inimitable fashion) that results in his most engaging and thought-provoking film since Roger and Me […] at the end of the day I didn’t really find his message to be so much “down with capitalism” as it is “up with people”.
Digby gleaned something else from the film that did a flyover on me at the time:
But this movie, as Dennis notes, isn’t really about saviors or criminals, although it features some of both. It’s a call for citizens to focus their minds on what’s actually gone wrong and take to the streets or man the barricades or do whatever defines political engagement in this day and age and demand that the people who brought us to this place are identified and that the system is reformed. Indeed, I would guess that if it didn’t feature the stuff about capitalism being evil he could have shown this to audiences of all political stripes and most of the latent teabaggers would have given him a standing ovation.
If the film manages to focus the citizenry on the most important story of our time then it will be tremendously important. If it gets lost in a cacophony of commie bashing and primitive tribalism then it will probably not be recognized for what it is until sometime later. As with all of his films, he’s ahead of the zeitgeist, so I am hopeful that this epic call to leftwing populist engagement is at the very least a hopeful sign of things to come.
She called it. “Someone” did tap into that populist sentiment; but sadly, it wasn’t the Left. (Full review)
The Corporation – While it’s not news to any thinking person that corporate greed and manipulation affects everyone’s life on this planet, co-directors Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott deliver the message in a unique and engrossing fashion. By applying a psychological profile to the rudiments of corporate think, Achbar and Abbott build a solid case; proving that if the “corporation” were corporeal, then “he” would be Norman Bates.
Mixing archival footage with observations from some of the expected talking heads (Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky, etc.) the unexpected (CEOs actually sympathetic with the filmmakers’ point of view) along with the colorful (like a “corporate spy”), the film offers perspective not only from the watchdogs, but from the belly of the beast itself. Be warned: there are enough exposes trotted out here to keep conspiracy theorists, environmentalists and human rights activists tossing and turning in bed for nights on end.
The Forecaster – There’s a conspiracy nut axiom that “everything is rigged”. Turns out it’s not just paranoia…it’s a fact. At least that’s according to this absorbing documentary from German filmmaker Marcus Vetter, profiling economic “forecaster” Martin Armstrong. In the late 70s, Armstrong formulated a predictive algorithm (“The Economic Confidence Model”) that proved so accurate at prophesying global financial crashes and armed conflicts, that a shadowy cabal of everyone from his Wall Street competitors to the CIA made Wile E. Coyote-worthy attempts for years to get their hands on that formula.
And once Armstrong told the CIA to “fuck off”, he put himself on a path that culminated in serving a 12-year prison sentence for what the FBI called a “3 billion dollar Ponzi scheme”. Funny thing, no evidence was ever produced, nor was any judgement passed (most of the time he served was for “civil contempt”…for not giving up that coveted formula, which the FBI eventually snagged when they seized his assets). Another funny thing…Armstrong’s formula solidly backs up his contention that it’s the world’s governments running the biggest Ponzi schemes…again and again, all throughout history.
And something tells me that we ain’t seen nuthin’ yet…
Greedy Lying Bastards – I know it’s cliché to quote Joseph Goebbels, but: “If you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth.” That’s the theme of Craig Rosebraugh’s 2013 documentary. As one interviewee offers: “On one side you have all the facts. On the other side, you have none. But the folks without the facts are far more effective at convincing the public that this is not a problem, than scientists are about convincing them that we need to do something about this.” What is the debate in question here? Global warming.
Using simple but damning flow charts, Rosebraugh follows the money and connects dots between high-profile deniers (“career skeptics…in the business of selling doubt”) and their special interest sugar daddies. Shills range from media pundits (with no background in hard science) to members of Congress, presidential candidates and Supreme Court justices. Think tanks and other organizations are exposed as mouthpieces for Big Money.
Sadly, the villains outnumber the heroes-which is not reassuring. What does reassure are suggested action steps in the film’s coda…which might come in handy after January 20th. (Full review)
Inside Job – I have good news and bad news about documentary filmmaker Charles Ferguson’s incisive parsing of what led to the crash of the global financial system in 2008. The good news is that I believe I finally grok what “derivatives” and “toxic loans” are. The bad news is…that doesn’t make me feel any better about how fucked we are.
Ferguson starts where the seeds were sown-rampant financial deregulation during the Reagan administration (“morning in America”-remember?). The film illustrates, point by point, how every subsequent administration, Democratic and Republican alike, did their “part” to enable the 2008 crisis- through political cronyism and legislative manipulation. The result of this decades long circle jerk involving Wall Street, the mortgage industry, Congress, the White House and lobbyists (with Ivy League professors as pivot men) is what we are still living with today…and I suspect it is about to get unimaginably worse. (Full review)
The International – Get this. In the Bizarro World of Tom Tykwer’s conspiracy thriller, people don’t rob banks…. banks rob people. That’s crazy! And if you think that’s weird, check this out: at one point in the film, one of the characters puts forth the proposition that true power belongs to he who controls the debt. Are you swallowing this malarkey? The filmmakers even go so far as to suggest that some Third World military coups are seeded by powerful financial groups and directed from shadowy corporate boardrooms…
What a fantasy! (Not.)
The international bank in question is under investigation by an Interpol agent (Clive Owen), who is following a trail of shady arms deals all over Europe and the Near East that appear to be linked to the organization. Whenever anyone gets close to exposing the truth about the bank’s Machiavellian schemes, they die under mysterious circumstances. Once the agent teams up with an American D.A. (Naomi Watts), much more complexity ensues, with tastefully-attired assassins lurking behind every silver-tongued bank exec.
The timing of the film’s release (in 2010) was interesting, in light of the then-current banking crisis and plethora of financial scandals. Screenwriter Eric Singer (no relation to the KISS drummer) based certain elements of the story on the real-life B.C.C.I. scandal. (Full review)
The Queen of Versailles — In Lauren Greenfield’s 2012 doc, billionaire David Siegel shares an anecdote about his 52-story luxury timeshare complex in Vegas. In 2010, Donald Trump called him and said, “Congratulations on your new tower! I’ve got one problem with it. When I stay in my penthouse suite, I look out the window and all I see is ‘WESTGATE’. Could you turn your sign down a little bit?” (how he must have suffered).
While Greenfield’s portrait of Siegal, his wife Jackie, their eight kids, nanny, cook, maids, chauffeur and (unknown) quantity of yippy, prolifically turd-laying teacup dogs is chock full of wacky “you couldn’t make this shit up” reality TV moments, there is an elephant in the room…the family’s unfinished Orlando, Florida mansion, the infamous “largest home in America”, a 90,000 square foot behemoth inspired by the palace at Versailles. Drama arises when the bank threatens to foreclose on it, along with the PH Towers Westgate. So does the family end up living in cardboard boxes? I’m not telling.
However, there is a more chilling message, buried near the end of the film. When Siegel boasts he was “personally responsible” for the election of George W. Bush in 2000, the director asks him to elaborate. “I’d rather not say,” he replies, “…because it may not necessarily have been legal.” Any further thoughts? “Had I not stuck my big nose into it, there probably would not have been an Iraqi War, and maybe we would have been better off…I don’t know.” Gosh, imagine a billionaire having the power to “buy” the POTUS of their choice. Worse yet, imagine a similarly odious billionaire becoming the POTUS. Oh. (Full review)
Welcome to New York — While it is not a “action thriller” per se, Abel Ferrara’s film is likewise “ripped from the headlines”, involves an evil banker, and agog with backroom deals and secret handshakes. More specifically, the film is based on the Dominique Strauss-Kahn scandal. In case you need a refresher, he was the fine fellow who was accused and indicted for an alleged sexual assault and attempted rape of a maid employed by the ritzy NYC hotel he was staying at during a 2011 business trip. The case was dismissed after the maid’s credibility was brought into question (Strauss-Kahn later admitted in a TV interview that a liaison did occur, but denied any criminal wrongdoing).
I’m sure that the fact that Strauss-Kahn was head of the International Monetary Fund at the time (and a front-runner in France’s 2012 presidential race) had absolutely nothing to do with him traipsing out from the sordid affair smelling like a rose (2024 sidebar: Umm…)
It is interesting watching the hulking Gerard Depardieu wrestle with the motivations (and what passes as the “conscience”) of his Dostoevskian character. It doesn’t make this creep any more sympathetic, but it is a fearless late-career performance, as naked (literally and emotionally) as Marlon Brando was playing a similarly loathsome study in Last Tango in Paris. Jacqueline Bisset gives a good supporting turn as the long-suffering wife. (Full review)
The Yes Men Fix the World – Anti-corporate activist/pranksters Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno (aka “The Yes Men”) and co-director Kurt Engfehr come out swinging, vowing to do a take-down of a powerful nemesis…an Idea. If money makes the world go ‘round, then this particular Idea is the one that oils the crank on the money-go-round, regardless of the human cost. It is the free market cosmology of economist Milton Friedman, which the Yes Men posit as the root of much evil in the world.
Once this springboard is established, the fun begins. Perhaps “fun” isn’t the right term, but there are hijinks afoot, and you’ll find yourself chuckling through most of the film (when you’re not crying). However, the filmmakers have a loftier goal than mining laughs: corporate accountability; and ideally, atonement. “Corporate accountability” is an oxymoron, but one has to admire the dogged determination (and boundless creativity) of the Yes Men and their co-conspirators, despite the odds. It’s a call to activism that is as timely as ever. (Full review)
Previous posts with related themes:
More reviews at Den of Cinema
Note: While I’m still on X (for now), I’ve set up shop over at Bluesky, if you want to follow me there: https://bsky.app/profile/denofcinema.bsky.social
— Dennis Hartley
The FBI issued a statement Friday saying racist and threatening text messages sent to Black communities after the presidential election are also circulating in Hispanic and LGBTQ+ communities and reaching high school students.
Federal and state authorities initially reported on texts containing disturbing references to slavery. That investigation has expanded to include reports of deportation threats.
The messages, sent in text and email, are not identical and vary in language, the FBI said.
- “But many say the recipient has been selected to pick cotton on a plantation,” per the agency’s statement Friday regarding the text messages sent to Black communities.
- The agency’s evaluation of the messages has now expanded to include recipients who “reported being told they were selected for deportation or to report to a re-education camp,” the FBI added.
This grotesque action is happening all over the country and as far as I can tell nobody knows who’s doing it. I guess the point is to harrass and frighten kids. It’s working:
Several Santa Monica High School students also received the derogatory message; they immediately reported the situation to school administrators and their parents.
“I sent it to my family group chat and was like ‘Oh my god, someone sent me this message,’ and [my mom] was like ‘This is not okay’,” said Aubrielle Gomez. “I was shocked and I kind of started laughing because I thought it wasn’t real.”
Ericka Lesley, whose children attend Santa Monica High School and were sent the text, says that the hateful messaging underscores a much larger issue not only plaguing California but all of America.
“My son wants to leave the country; he doesn’t feel safe here,” Lesley told KTLA. “There are other people who say ‘Oh, we’re in California, we’re okay,’ — we’ve become too comfortable. We have to remain vigilant, we have to remain alert and we have to make sure our children pay attention.”
I guess this is just the way we’re going in America now. These are the people to whom Democrats are supposed to pander and “try to understand:”
She seems nice. I think I understand her quite well.
Before the election, Rolling Stone asked a number of experts on authoritarianism about what to do if Trump won. They all had good advice but, for me, this is at the top of the list:
Seeing the Threat Clearly
Experts in authoritarianism insist that Trump’s dictatorial threats need to be taken with gravity because he’s already done “things that autocrats do,” says Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a history professor at New York University who is an expert in Italian fascism and the author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present.
“He has been able to domesticate a very old, storied party, and truly make it his personal tool,” she tells Rolling Stone. “He instigated a violent coup attempt,” and — instead of “having to go into exile or going to prison, like in Peru” — he “managed to paint it as a positive thing” or to make “a lot of Americans shrug their shoulders at it.” These are “preconditions for autocracy,” she insists.
Trump may have a “highly problematic, decompensating personality,” Ben-Ghiat adds, “but the guy is a master propagandist,” who has used those skills in a campaign against the American system of checks and balances. “He’s taken people step by step … for almost a decade now to view democracy as an inferior system — a system of crime and anarchy, weak government … and to see versions of authoritarian rule, with him at the head, as preferable.”
Ben-Ghiat warns that Project 2025, the conservative policy and personnel program, is the road map “to finish the job” Trump started in his first term. The intent is to “destroy the governing structures and norms of liberal democracy through mass purges of civil servants who are not loyalists — and create something else. And that something else is autocracy.”
Jason Stanley is Yale professor and author of How Fascism Works. He says Trump is pursuing a well-worn playbook. “He’s going to replace the civil service with Trump loyalists.” The next thing “autocrats do is go after the courts, the press, and the universities.” Many of our compatriots have grown up with a false confidence that the United States is immune from this kind of democratic corrosion. “Americans have to grow up,” Stanley says. “A lot of people live under these situations.”
Project 2025 will take time to implement. Sen. Bernie Sanders warns Rolling Stone to watch out for Trump’s use of national “emergencies” to produce a power grab, emboldened by allied partisans in the judiciary: “He will create emergencies, state of emergencies. You know, ‘The world is falling apart. I have got to do A, B, and C.’ And the courts will say, ‘Yeah, of course you have the right to do it. You’ve defined an emergency.’” Sanders says. “There’s a real danger of us losing the rule of law.”
I would add that fighting amongst ourselves would be the dumbest thing we could do right now. It’s what happened in Germany as Hitler came to power — the left and the center left battled, the establishment tried to make common cause with him and we all know what happened next. The popular front must remain intact if we are to survive this onslaught and ultimately defeat it.
The first step is to lick our wounds and take what time we need to deal with the shock of having that orange monster back in power. But as the numbness wears off we’ll have to figure out how we’re going to deal with it and that cannot happen if we don’t clearly see what’s happening. It isn’t good.
