Just a damn rant about "democracy grief."

It's a bit confounding to watch as Americans like Ms. Goldberg mourn something that barely ever existed. I've no use whatever for Donald Trump, and yet Trump has done nothing "to" America apart from accurately divining the obliviousness of its occupants as to eager culpability in their own oppression, which has far more to do with refusing to follow the money than visiting a therapist.

Democracy Grief Is Real, by Michelle Goldberg (New York Times)

Seeing what Trump is doing to America, many find it hard to fight off despair.

Lately, I think I’m experiencing democracy grief. For anyone who was, like me, born after the civil rights movement finally made democracy in America real, liberal democracy has always been part of the climate, as easy to take for granted as clean air or the changing of the seasons. When I contemplate the sort of illiberal oligarchy that would await my children should Donald Trump win another term, the scale of the loss feels so vast that I can barely process it.

Trump grasps the efficacy of following institutional weakness and native American anti-intellectualism to their logical conclusions, because that's where the money is.

But what if those "universal ideals" were little more than a chimera to begin with, mere window dressing to keep the inmates passive as they buy more articles they don't need and worship the palpably untrue?

Obviously, this is hardly the first time that America has failed to live up to its ideals. But the ideals themselves used to be a nearly universal lodestar. The civil rights movement, and freedom movements that came after it, succeeded because the country could be shamed by the distance between its democratic promises and its reality. That is no longer true.

Was it true even then?

There is nothing more authoritarian and oligarchic than all-encompassing consumerism -- and this is our national religious. It's who we are and what we do.

We make choices as consumers every day that buttress capital accumulation and income inequality far more efficiently than Trump's ability (itself questionable) to enhance further injustice.

We do it to ourselves, don't we? It's the economic system, and the ability of some to position themselves within it to the exclusion of others. We keep paying them, and they keep getting more powerful ... and it's not trickling down, is it?

But Trump’s political movement is pro-authoritarian and pro-oligarch.

Look, if you want to repel the nasty bully, why are you handing the nasty bully most of your money every single day? It might be a better idea to take away the money from the oligarchs. Hit the oligarchs with your wallet for a change.

Since when are "democratic ideals" even measured by the amount of debt you've accumulated on your credit cards?

“The only other option is to quit and accept it, and I’m not ready to go there yet,” she said. Democracy grief isn’t like regular grief. Acceptance isn’t how you move on from it. Acceptance is itself a kind of death.

Generally speaking, didn't we accept it long before Trump became a factor? Conceding that to quote Thomas Jefferson puts one at great hazard, I persist in thinking that he had one indisputably great insight.

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

Yep; the Declaration of Independence (except for the enslaved).

Imperfect, but there it is. Move past this facile notion of "democracy grief" and ask yourself the pertinent questions: Are these evils sufferable? Are the forms to which you are accustomed still adequate?

If yes, then buy another car and head to the multiplex for another dose of Marvel comic movies.

If no, then you just might have some thinking to do. Lots of you keep talking about resisting the part of the iceberg that's visible. Maybe it's the system beneath the surface that needs alteration.

Bread, circuses and hard facts: "3 Billionaires Really Do Have More Wealth Than Half of America."

Part of it has to do with the "right" to 24/7/365 entertainment and dollar menus.

"Bread and circuses" (or bread and games; from Latin: panem et circenses) is a metonymic phrase critiquing superficial appeasement. It is attributed to Juvenal, a Roman poet active in the late first and early second century AD — and is used commonly in cultural, particularly political, contexts.

In a political context, the phrase means to generate public approval, not by excellence in public service or public policy, but by diversion, distraction or by satisfying the most immediate or base requirements of a populace — by offering a palliative: for example food (bread) or entertainment (circuses).

Juvenal, who originated the phrase, used it to decry the selfishness of common people and their neglect of wider concerns. The phrase implies a population's erosion or ignorance of civic duty as a priority.

Another part references the inability of a hamster to make sense of his confines while yoked to the wheel.

Then there's the capacity for humans to embrace self-delusion; historically this trait is best illustrated by religious belief. Our reward won't come HERE, but THERE, up in the sky.

Pitchforks, anyone?

Bernie Sanders Is Right: 3 Billionaires Really Do Have More Wealth Than Half of America, by Chuck Collins (Common Dreams)

And in addition to the 3 billionaires Bernie mentioned, we should also be worried about the expanding fortunes of multi-generational wealth dynasties

The wealthiest 3 billionaires in the U.S. – Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett — now have as much wealth as the bottom half of the U.S. population combined.

Those were the first words spoken at last week’s 2020 Democratic Debate, citing a wealth inequality study by the Institute for Policy Studies.

In fact, Sen. Bernie Sanders mentioned the study, Billionaire Bonanza, several times during the debate.

Fact checkers at The New York Times, the Washington Post and CNN verified Sen. Sanders’ claims.

These extreme levels of wealth inequality are possible, in part, because the bottom fifth of U.S. households are underwater, with zero or negative net worth. And the next fifth has so few assets to fall back on that they live in fear of destitution.

Local Democrats gear up for the talent show, except "you can’t fight Herrenvolk populism with weak-tea liberalism."

Earlier this week, Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi asked that Steve Bannon be fired, and a day later Bannon was gone. I was struck by this single passage in Taibbi's article.

... Prospect writer Robert Kuttner noted with surprise in his piece that Bannon seemed upbeat. He essentially told Kuttner he believed the Charlottesville mess and stories like it were a long-term political windfall for people like himself.

"The longer they talk about identity politics, I got 'em," he said. "I want them to talk about racism every day. If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats."

Speaking for myself, perhaps this lifelong atheist's revulsion at public displays of piety, when otherwise unaccompanied by private acts aimed at gaining the stated objective, explains why the past week's gestures have left me not so much cold as completely disinterested.

It isn't that I disagree with many of them, having been proudly "anti-fascist" since around 1978, so much as lament the left's ongoing inability to place the focus on the genuine economic evil perpetuating our divisions: capital accumulation, big money, robber barons, the One Percent-- call it what you wish.

Inequality results from more than one contributing factor, but really, don't we need to follow the wealth?

To me, Bannon's phrase "economic nationalism" reads as code for those who'll perpetuate divisions to keep the money where it rightfully belongs, and in this usage, Bannon might be detestable but at least he's honest. He knows his bosses' names, and makes sure their birthday cards always arrive on time.

Democrats imagining themselves as leftists or progressives in a Clintonesque mold are in thrall to an illusion. You can serve the interests of capital accumulation, or not. There isn't much of a middle ground, if any, and yet local "Democrats" avoid this introspection as though you were asking them to ban same sex marriage or reinstitute Jim Crow.

I cannot recall a local Democratic Party candidate speaking about anything of a genuine balls-out economic nature apart from Dan Canon, who hasn't yet even contested an election. But we're treated to a never-ending series of resolutions and gestures -- and faux Democrat Jeff Gahan's dog-whistling putsch against public housing, which by now should have been publicly condemned by every Democrat in the city.

But instead, everyone merrily plans events, concerts, talent shows and diversions, and while they're engaged in these wild goose chases, functionaries like 1Si's Wendy Dant Chesser ensure the worsening of the fundamental economic imbalance by serving our regional oligarchs first -- and maybe some of it will trickle down, eventually.

Presumed left-wingers, note that your omelette remains uncooked because almost no one among you is willing to break a few eggs. A member of Jacobin's editorial board explains why, and if you fancy yourself a progressive ...

Steve Bannon’s Autobahn, by Connor Kilpatrick (Jacobin)

You can’t fight Herrenvolk populism with weak-tea liberalism.

 ... So “far-right racist” doesn’t make Bannon particularly unique or worrying. It’s how devastatingly well he understands liberalism’s failures and how willing he is to craft a fraudulent and reactionary program for those who’ve only experienced decline during the Clinton and Obama years.

Like a mutant weed growing out of a shit-covered pile of compost, Bannon has cultivated his particular brand of reaction entirely within the decomposing corpse of American liberalism. In no other soil could it ever have blossomed.

And:

Bannon’s ambitions make gruesomely clear that liberalism and the Democratic Party in no way represents the left-wing obverse of conservatism and the GOP. And liberals, deep down in their hearts, understand this. They have no true ideological counterpoint — no real program and certainly no vision for changing society for the better. Michael Wolff correctly diagnosed Bannon as “embodying more than anyone the liberals’ awful existential pain and fury.” This doesn’t just refer to his disgusting comments — it includes his fiery ambition, something the Democratic Party has altogether lost. And even at its absolute best, liberalism’s aspirations were only a watered-down, cheap knockoff of the utopian dreams of communist and socialist activists.

Then:

But you can’t fight Herrenvolk populism with weak-tea liberalism. A paltry means-tested welfare state just flips white-supremacist programs and policies “for the deserving us not the undeserving them.” Both fit comfortably in the ruling-class politics of divide and conquer as opposed to the broad solidarity they fear. How can we expect the public to rally around something like Medicaid when huge portions of the working and lower-middle classes don’t qualify for it? Universal social democracy — a more transformative program than the one Sanders campaigned on — is called for. We’re in the midst of a reckoning with the neoliberal consensus. The Right has made their play, and now we have to make ours.

In closing, a suggestion to my councilman: if Team Gahan won't show you the results of its rental housing registration program, perhaps a new council resolution would do the trick. Just make sure to craft it in a manner emphasizing human rights rather than economic imperatives, or Adam will overrule you.

"Southern Indiana residents brace for impact of upcoming tolls," unless they're at Oligarch Shillworthy Pay Grade.

Source: IndyStar (2013).

“I think over the next couple years or so after we get through the opening and initial shock of the tolls, that tolls are going to receive very little discussion in that the economic benefits that we will be seeing will become the focus of the discussion.”
 -- Uric Dufrene, IU Southeast Vice Chancellor and Oligarch Fellatrix

Good work by Beilman, who opts for the deft touch in depicting tolling's impact on different income groups, and allows Dufrene's salaried (above) detachment to reveal itself.

Southern Indiana residents brace for impact of upcoming tolls, by Elizabeth Beilman (Hanson's Harley Folly) ... Staff Reporter Danielle Grady contributed to this story

 ... Uric Dufrene, executive vice chancellor for academic affairs and finance professor for Indiana University Southeast, said residents will need to make decisions about how to handle the cost of tolls based on their individual circumstances.

(The Clark Memorial Bridge ... along with the Sherman Minton, will remain untolled. The Kennedy, Lincoln, and Lewis and Clark bridges will have tolls)

“There, I think consumers or individual households can balance the cost of the tolls versus the benefits of time and distance,” Dufrene said.

Here's the inconvenient flip side, one you'll seldom hear Dufrene (or Kerry Stemler) address.

 ... people living in low-income areas, defined by one-person households with less than $10,830 in annual income in 2010, will bear a disproportionately high effect of tolls.

Phil Ellis, executive director of Community Action of Southern Indiana, hears from the low-income residents served by the nonprofit organization that tolls will hit them hard. CASI provides assistance to people for costs like utilities, but they won’t be able to help with tolls since no federal program provides funding for this cost.

“They’re going to have to sacrifice something in order to pay that toll,” Ellis said. “That might be a decrease in groceries, that could be not being able to pay their full utility bills ... Something’s going to be left unpaid, to be honest with you.”

Somewhere between $40 and $80 a month may not seem significant when weighed against the overall economic impact on the region in the years to come.

“But for the immediate need of individuals with low income, they’ll be the last to benefit from any type of economic boom or anything of that nature, because most of them don’t have the education or skills to be eligible or qualified to have one of those [new] jobs ...

“You’re talking a person where $80 could feed them for a week, could feed their family for a week,” Ellis said. “That’s major.”

Weekend MUST READ: "The Big Con: what is really at stake in this US election."

"The New Deal"

America, you really must get your shit together. I'm getting older, and tired of waiting. History, anyone?

The Big Con: what is really at stake in this US election, by Ben Fountain (The Guardian)

Big government helped make America great but it was so successful its effect has become invisible. Anti-Washington hatred helps only the super-rich and puts progress at risk for millions living with wage stagnation and rising inequality

The collective memory of America is short. During the 2010 midterm elections, it seemed like every other house in my north Dallas neighborhood sported a “Had Enough? Vote Republican!” yard sign. As if it had been two hundred years, instead of two, since the US economy was on the brink of collapse, with panicked credit markets, huge banks and insurance companies about to topple into the void, a flatlining auto industry, the Dow Jones plunging toward 6500, and job losses topping 700,000 a month, not to mention the wars that had turned the budget surpluses of the late Bill Clinton years into massive deficits, all courtesy of a two-term Republican president whose party controlled Congress for six of the last eight years. Yes, please! Take us back to the good old days of 2008!

Two years. The perpetual fog of American forgetting-gas had done its work. If two years are all it took to erase the memory of the worst economic meltdown since the Great Depression, then we shouldn’t hope for much awareness of that earlier crisis some 80 years ago, though there are a few old heads still around who lived it, and the experience of those times can be found readily enough in the archives and histories of the era ...

The Institute for Local Self-Reliance on building local equity through redistribution.

The Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR) discusses the release of its 2015 annual report. I refer to this fact primarily owing to the opportunity to emphasize a specific passage.

Building Local Equity: ILSR’s Impact in 2015

 ... Since our founding, building equity has been a core value and aim of our work. The word “equity” originally meant fairness or equality. Today the term has degenerated into a narrow reference to the ownership of property or stock. A growing movement is trying to recapture its original emphasis, and is shaping public discourse from the neighborhoods of Baltimore to the Vatican to the Presidential campaign trail. ILSR is part of that movement.

The conventional debate about economic inequality focuses on income redistribution. We believe a redistribution of power makes possible a redistribution of income. 

ILSR fights the centralization of economic and political power in pivotal sectors – energy, waste, telecommunications, retail, and banking – and argues for decentralized systems and rules that are just and fair ...

Campaign Diary, Chapter 4: Rental property registration, exclusionary zoning, ordinance enforcement and the SIRA luncheon.

At yesterday's Southern Indiana Realtors Association candidate luncheon, which predictably was boycotted by New Albany's hermetic and curtained Jeff Gahan, I was pleased that the general topic of "ordinance enforcement" formed part of one question to each  candidate.

There were two candidates present from Jeffersonville, Salem and New Albany. The incumbent Charlestown mayor's opponent had a prior commitment, as did Gahan: Oz was flossing, and couldn't be bothered.

Six of the seven mayoral candidates present yesterday expressed a preference for "small government," and as this construct might pertain to ordinances, they preferred to praise what's already on the books rather than contemplate disagreeing with Pat Harrison on rental property registrations in a room filled with real estate professionals, and dare be seen advocating a dreaded "new layer" of intrusive government.

But what if the layers we already have are actively exclusionary or simply outdated?

I was the only candidate present who chose to make this the basis of his answer. Yes, it's true that if New Albany enjoyed a long history of excellence in enforcing its own rule book, we might not be having a chat about rental property registration, but we have not, and because we have not, rental property abuses have become a full-blown concern embracing public health, safety and basic human rights.

Those must be addressed, and so I answered Harrison's question by saying that I'm completely in favor of rental property registration and inspection, with a fee structure to support the same.

Credit Kevin Zurschmiede for noting that tenants as well as owners must be aware of rights and responsibilities, though given the historic tendency of ownership to zealously protect its worse apples rather than be pro-active in weeding them out, how can these rights and responsibilities be applied and maintained without government participation?

Zurschmiede also mentioned that he moved from his Elm Street home because the state of the neighborhood precluded the enjoyment of his property, which is a right recognized by all realtors.

At least he was able to move. Those with lower incomes living nearby might well not be the cause of the problems -- and not be able to leave, either.

---

Reverence for existing laws becomes somewhat comical when one considers that New Albany still has a law on its books governing "cruising" behavior at the Frisch's on Spring Street, which has been gone so long that "cruising" now means something entirely different -- except when adopted by Harvest Homecoming as a parade theme.

Then there are topics like planning and zoning. Consider this, as buried in a newspaper account of city council budget hearings.

Scott Wood, director of the New Albany Planning Commission, said he’s hopeful the department can begin work on a new comprehensive plan this year. The current plan was approved in 1999.

Wood labeled it a “relic” in need of refreshing.

“Typically those are updated every five years, more like seven-and-a-half to 10, so we’re pretty far behind right now,” Wood said.

The candidate luncheon was held at Elk Run Golf Club, and the outdated nature of New Albany's comprehensive plan is par for the course. How archaic is 1999? As a point of comparison, mobile phone cameras came to America in 2002.

---

Finally, zoning. I was the only candidate in attendance yesterday who said the words "exclusionary zoning" aloud.

One of the best ways to fight inequality in cities: zoning, by Daniel Hertz (Washington Post)

... For years, activists and researchers have known that restrictive zoning is among the most powerful forces behind racial and economic segregation in the country.

This is for two reasons. First, in many neighborhoods, zoning laws prevent the construction of low-cost housing by, for example, allowing only single-family homes instead of apartments. Second, zoning laws restrict the total amount of housing that can exist in any given area, which means that wherever well-to-do people decide to move, they will bid up the price of housing until it’s out of range of everyone else. Imagine, for example, if there were a law that only 1,000 cars could be sold per year in all of New York. Those 1,000 cars would go to whoever could pay the most money for them, and chances are you and everyone you know would be out of luck.

I don't have a magic wand, and will not claim to know every answer. For instance, there is public housing, a perennial bugbear in New Albany politics.

People in New Albany who ask the question, "What are you going to do about The Project?" tend to be white, and want to see the problem solved by doing anything at all short of changing the fundamental paradigm from exclusionary warehousing of a segment of society, to perhaps advancing a level of opportunity borne of more egalitarian planning.

Meanwhile, people who live in The Project ask, "What are we going to do about affordable housing?" They tend to be African-American, and it's a very good question, isn't it?

If the overall gist of zoning laws already on the books is to keep The Project where it is, occupied by residents with few other options in a country already experiencing historic levels of income inequality, then it's likely they'll remain there. Isn't that how exclusionary zoning laws came into existence in the first place?

It is a mystery to me how an unregulated "free" market in slumlord rental properties addresses the affordable housing quandary, but this seems to have been New Albany's best answer during the past century.

That's inadequate, but even worse, throughout this and so many other discussions, New Albany never varies in the sense of refusing to have these discussions. Jeff Gahan's non-transparency is merely a malignant strain of what we've always been: Down Low on the Ohio.

While I'm at it, this article is instructive:

Where Black Lives Matter Began: Hurricane Katrina exposed our nation’s amazing tolerance for black pain, by Jamelle Bouie (Slate)

But there’s a problem with this capsule summary of Katrina and its place in national memory. It assumes a singular public of “Americans” who understand events in broadly similar ways. This public doesn’t exist. Instead, in the United States, we have multiple publics defined by a constellation of different boundaries: Geographic, religious, economic, ethnic, and racial. With regards to race, we have two dominant publics: A white one and a black one. Each of them saw Katrina in competing, mutually exclusive ways. And the disaster still haunts black political consciousness in ways that most white Americans have never been able to acknowledge.

White Americans saw the storm and its aftermath as a case of bad luck and unprecedented incompetence that spread its pain across the Gulf Coast regardless of race. This is the narrative you see in Landrieu’s words and, to some extent, Obama’s as well. To black Americans, however, this wasn’t an equal opportunity disaster. To them, it was confirmation of America’s indifference to black life. “We have an amazing tolerance for black pain,” said Rev. Jesse Jackson in an interview after the storm. Rev. Al Sharpton, also echoed the mood among many black Americans: “I feel that, if it was in another area, with another economic strata and racial makeup, that President Bush would have run out of Crawford a lot quicker and FEMA would have found its way in a lot sooner.” Even more blunt was rapper Kanye West, who famously told a live national television audience that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”

Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, concentrated poverty ... and New Albany?

No pulls, and as little verbiage as possible.

What do I propose to do?

Listen.

Three places to start reading ...

America's Biggest Problem Is Concentrated Poverty, Not Inequality ... Addressing income inequality is important, but worsening economic segregation has far more compounding effects, by Richard Florida (City Lab)

Black Lives Matter vs. Bernie Sanders, explained, by Dara Lind (Vox)

Bernie Sanders on Racial Justice (campaign web site)