Ice on the Moon

I have an interesting metaphor when considering the present political situation: Just as Sam Harris states our sense of self is actually something we manufacture, so to is our sense of country and all the bad that goes along with whatever good we derive from our nationalist identity. It may be the key to any real American Exceptionalism is the separation of church and state- and we have seen this divide compromised in recent decades. Trump pandering to the evangelicals and vice versa is a toxic relationship that is now seen for what it is with the nomination of a Christian fundamentalist replacement for RGB. There is little doubt Trump is hoping a conservative-packed Supreme Court will allow him to stay in office if he declares “the election was rigged.”

We have allowed the rich to convince us that money is all that matters despite the painfully obvious example of 1929 and the New Deal. That money is the god of this world is also a queer violation of the separation of church and state. White grievance and white nationalism has allowed this fool reality TV show host to become the most powerful man on Earth and now we just might allow him to destroy our democracy. Americans have been tricked into accepting individualism as the only good and anything collective as satanic communism. A queer reversal of equal rights and the rule of law as we finally lose the rights we have historically denied others and allow the king of red America to suspend any rule he wants. It is Orwellian that democracy is certainly a collective project while authoritarianism is definitely individual- and we have been brainwashed into thinking the opposite. What was left of democracy after the Reagan Revolution is almost gone. We landed on the Moon and now we cannot even run an election.

Is this the fall of the American Empire and the beginning of a new dark age?

Details were revealed today (27 September) concerning the tax audit on Trump that has been delayed 4 years. Trump may owe over 100 million dollars to the IRS. Not really surprising as he has gone bankrupt 6 times. “A stunning record of failure.” He owes 421 million dollars in personal loans. The President of the United States is in debt and likely will owe penalties totaling around a half a billion dollar dollars. The only business he has that makes a profit is his Florida Golf Club where foreign visitors and U.S. government employees now pay rates five times what they were previous to his election. Without his reality TV show earnings (ironically a “fake news” CNN executive, Jeff Zucker, is most responsible for this) Trump would have been out of money long before he ran for office. Trump says it is fake news.

In other words, Donald Trump the successful businessman was always the actual fake news. He is most accurately described as a failed rich boy and reality TV con man. This is particularly gut-wrenching to me because in one of the last conversations I had with my father he said he supported Trump- because he was a successful businessman. Now we all know it was simply lies promoting a chronic liar. Yet his cult still believes in him.

“Why is Trump so good to some countries and not to others?”

9 million dollars from a trade deal with the Philippines (where Duterte allows extrajudicial killings we do not criticize). At least a million from a licensing deal in Turkey (likely connected to our abandonment of the Kurds who had fought for our interests for decades- leading to the resignation of James Mattis). And…Russia, where an oligarch loses millions on the Miss Universe pageant, essentially paying money to Trump. In his first two years as president, Trump received $73m from foreign operations, including $3m from the Philippines, $2.3m from India and $1m from Turkey. In 2017 he paid $145,400 in taxes in India and $156,824 in the Philippines – but just $750 in the US.

How did Hillary lose to Donald Trump? How did the corporate democrats manage to lose to one of the biggest losers in America? Cenk seems to blame Jeff Zucker as one of the key factors and Maureen Dowd reported another media executive characterizing him as, “-a case study in the most destructive media executive ever to exist… You’d have to tell me who else has taken a once-great network (NBC) and literally destroyed it.”

From wiki: “During the 2016 presidential election campaign, a large focus was placed upon on-air debates between partisan pundits surrounding issues relating to the candidates (including, in particular, Republican candidate Donald Trump). In an interview with The New York Times, Zucker stated that aspects of its election coverage were influenced by sports channels (with the Times citing, specifically, debates between pundits reminiscent of shows such as ESPN‘s First Take, and large outdoor “pre-game” shows for the presidential debates), explaining that “the idea that politics is sport is undeniable, and we understood that and approached it that way.”^[37] In 2016, CNN reached a monthly average of 105 million unique visitors to its web and mobile properties.”

I think there is this illusion that celebrities and politicians are somehow not out for a dollar like the unwashed masses and above scrambling for some easy money here and there. And so it seems we have all these individual players trying to cash in on making politics a “sport” so as to gain some personal profit and by chance we end up with the worst possible situation and possible end of democracy in America.

“Manufactured garbage” that Trump is trying to steal the election? He is trying of course. Orwellian that so many million people will believe this opposite-of-the-truth con blathered by someone whose only trick is to talk fast with confidence and a female racist.

Truth is absolutely stranger than fiction.

One of my big worries is the white supremacists trying to start their race war- straight out of the Turner Diaries. If you want to know why these groups are just Nazis-by-another-name there are three books that need not be read, just the summaries understood: The Turner Diaries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turner_Diaries, Camp of the Saints https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Camp_of_the_Saints, and Atlas Shrugged https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_Shrugged

Atlas Shrugged, instead of Mien Kampf, might be surprising, as Ayn Rand was a Jew, but the influence of the ideas in this science fiction novel on these extremists is obvious. Neoliberalism is the religion of Ayn Rand and along with racism the only ideology the white nationalists are interested in.

Exactly what violence these ultra-conservative groups are willing to perpetrate in the event the election is disputed is anyone’s guess. Based on this Portland rally it does not appear they are dedicated enough to go to prison or be killed for their cause. I hope not but I never forget the Oklahoma City Bombing and so they will always scare me.

I grew up with World War Two veterans in my family and as a boy I learned that Nazis are not to be imitated, glorified, complimented, admired, or spoken in anything but the most derogatory terms. Really. My uncle was at the Battle of the Bulge. No love for Nazis. Zero.

So…I don’t like what Trump said. Not at all.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/25/world/moon-radiation-astronauts-exposure-scn/index.html

For several years I endlessly argued with Muskrats about cosmic radiation, among other things, on the forums found on popular space blogs and news sites. Until, one by one, I was eventually banned from all of them. My message was as unchanging as the amount of radiation and decrease in bone mass experienced by astronauts, so when I used other names I was instantly recognized and banned again.

I was allowed to continue posting on Dr. Paul Spudis’ blog but he died of cancer in 2018 and now I have only my own blog on which to comment on these issues. The political situation has kept me occupied for many months and after we throw that maniac out of the white house I hope to again concentrate on space travel and life extension as the main subjects of this blog. That said, the radiation on the Moon is one of those things the NewSpace fanatics discount as unimportant when it is actually the single most important issue in Human Space Flight (HSF).

Of the three named scientists in my own view concerning HSF, which I call
“The Parker-Dyson-Spudis Continuum” (PDSC), only Eugene Parker, age 93, is left, Freeman Dyson having passed away at the beginning of this year and, as noted, Paul Spudis also passed in 2018. Parker wrote the classic laymen’s guide to space radiation for Scientific American in 2006. titled “Shielding Space Travelers.” NewSpace adherents reject this article and react in righteous indignation whenever it is cited. They also have no use for Nuclear Pulse Propulsion, despite the concept having been validated by Freeman Dyson in project Orion and endorsed by several famous figures such as Wernher von Braun, Arthur C. Clarke, and Carl Sagan. In fact, they have nothing good to say about anything not found on the SpaceX website. At this point I am hoping Bridenstine gets picked up by the Biden administration and the SLS program is expanded.

NewSpace is the worst thing that has ever happened to space exploration.

Worse than both shuttle disasters.

I wanted to go back to writing about space and life extension but it seems the closer the election the harder it becomes to control my anxiety and I am driven to keep posting on it. I think I am trying to subconsciously process what is happening and so I cannot let it go. And if anyone were to look at my posts over the last couple weeks they would see I am indeed starting to form a larger picture. The main feature of this “big picture” comes from one of the first principles I was taught in boot camp when I joined the Army as a young man 2 score ago: know your enemy.

The enemy is that fifth prince of hell- greed– and the world-wide Neoliberal ideology now promoting that absolute greed. It has translated itself into social media algorithms which manipulate people so as to sell them consumer products. This has turned into a Frankenstein radicalizing millions of people. Add to this “the death of truth” which is the main tactic of Trumpism and the makings of the possible imminent catastrophe become crystal clear.

Well done Emma and Ana; the algorithms steer people towards their biases and emotional gratification. This is psychological manipulation on a vast scale. People are gradually conditioned to believe what they want to believe instead of the truth. Combined with white grievance this explains the big mystery the rest of us cannot seem to wrap our heads around: why forever-trumpers are so brainwashed. My coworkers have displayed to me how this works- on every break they are watching the hodgestwins and other propaganda. Week after week, month after month, for the last couple years. I will not own a smart phone.

My comment: It is evident he is a narcissist and his ego will not accept not being re-elected so he is completely obsessed with staying in office and will do anything to make that happen. I am scared. Most of us who have not been brainwashed by social media algorithms on smartphones and have been trained to think critically (I was an autopilot troubleshooter most of my working years) are scared.

Not just the history books; in the years immediately after this election people are likely going to prison and those who supported them are going to be rightfully defamed in perpetuity. The forever-trumpers may finally realize what suckers they have been and could even become Trumps worst enemies. Possible but not likely.

Despite the 7 demon princes of hell working so hard for Trump.

From “Demopedia Wiki: The Lanterne of Light’s classification of demons-

In 1409-1410 The Lanterne of Light (an anonymous English Lollard tract often attributed to Wycliffe) provided a classification system based on the Seven Deadly Sins, establishing that each one of the mentioned demons tempted people by means of one of those sins. This list was later used in the works of John Taylor, the Water Poet. (Terms in brackets are those found in the text)

• 1. Lucifer: Pride “I am the chosen one”

• 2. Beelzebub (Belzebub): gluttony (glotouns) Trump weighs 244 pounds. At 6 feet, three inches tall that puts him over the threshold for obesity set by the U.S. National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute

• 3. Satan (Sathanas): Wrath (wraþþe) ABC News has identified at least 54 criminal cases where Trump was invoked in direct connection with violent acts, threats of violence or allegations of assault. In many cases of assault or threat, charges are never filed, perpetrators are never identified or the incident is never even reported to authorities.

• 4. Leviathan (Leviathan): Envy (envous) “I will be a better warrior than anybody.” (better than John McCain, despite Vietnam deferments and bone spurs)

• 5. Mammon: Greed (Auarouse)

• 6. Belphegor: sloth (slow) Executive time- and more golf than any president in history

• 7. Asmodeus: Lust (leccherouse) Individual Number 1 (Trump as co-conspirator in the Cohen felonies of paying off a playboy model and a porn star with campaign funds)

The most profound and lasting damage Trump has done is to make lying accepted as just another feature of society- and the deadly corrosive effects could destroy America. The most unrecognized and underestimated effect of Trumpism- the death of truth.

They are trying to set it up and it looks like they WILL try: Trumps regime will announce the election was NOT fair and try to steal it.

Brianna explains it well: it is not about “us” against Black Lives Matter.

They lie about lying.

My comments: I am sure the Joint Chiefs know what to do- and they have special forces operators (thousands of them) who can and will blow through any kind of private army Trump has and remove him from office. I have worked with these people and it will not matter if they voted for Trump…they will accomplish whatever mission they are given, including removing a president who refuses to leave office. You have to understand the code they live by to know why that is virtually guaranteed. They did not swear any oath to Donald Trump. It is not like in the movies where all kinds of improbable drama happens- that is contrived trash. They will be given a brief and asked if they want to opt out in this case…and none of them will, and then they will go do it. And Putin will be disappointed. Trump will not understand, but likely he has some minions who do, and that is why they are trying to find any way they can to muddy the waters and poison the well. They will either have to somehow prevent those votes from being counted, put in place electors to disregard the popular vote, or start a nuclear war. Or…just wing it and hope the citizenry is so dumbed-down and apathetic they will get away with it. And after working with forever trumpers for the last 4 years I am scared.

The officer corps is college educated and has a far lower percentage of Trump supporters- and they will do what is right: they WILL remove Trump. They will give the orders and those orders will be obeyed. I know this to be true- myself and most of my family are retired military (enlisted and not officers). Guaranteed.

The president of the United States is actually saying his enemies are delaying a life-saving vaccine (and thus actually causing needless deaths). Madness. It is becoming so absolutely clear that Trump is really going to try and steal the election. Less than 40 percent of the citizenry support him and the rest of us want him OUT…and it seems obvious he is going to try and cheat his way into another 4 years. It is happening.

Unbelievable. I am losing it also Sam.

The clock is winding down and time is running out.

The right is no longer running against Trumps opponent; they are running against the election process itself. Trump and his republican supporters are going to call the election unfair and try to stay in power. What we only thought happened in dictatorships like Russia and banana republics. It is happening in America right now.

Ironic the side the Russians are supporting happens to be red.

I guess I better buy a black hat Because Lives Matter. What scares me is what the states where the Governors are Republicans, 26 of them, will order their respective National Guard units to do if fighting breaks out.

The major military bases will likely isolate themselves by closing their gates and using heliborne forces to secure outside water and power facilities that supply the bases. When the helicopters start landing at water and power plants that will mean the war has started.

Trumpism Top Twenty… and let us not forget- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_sexual_misconduct_allegations

1. “No, I don’t take responsibility at all-” (Covid)
2. “Losers and suckers.” (Killed In Action and all veterans)
3. “It was a perfect call.” (the quid pro quo weapons deal he was impeached for)
4. “A made up fake news media hoax.” (Russian bounty on U.S. troops)
5. “I don’t think science knows.” (climate change)
6. “-is that supposed to be a bad thing?” (after being told QAnon is…crazy)
7. “That makes me smart.” (on not paying taxes)
8. “And so, that’s a very tricky one.” (on the virus being airborne and deadly, 7 Feb 2020)
9. “-this is their new hoax.” (on the virus at rally, 28 Feb 2020)
10.  “It is what it is.” (Covid death toll in early August at 155,000 and now over 200,000)
11. “You really drank the Kool-Aid, didn’t you?”(on white privilege)
12. “You had very fine people on both sides.” (Charlottesville rally featuring Neo-Nazis)
13. “It’s freezing and snowing in New York- we need global warming!” 
14. “-I will make Mexico pay for that wall. Mark my words.” 
15. “I sort of get away with things like that.” (on going into the dressing rooms at pageants)
16.  “-cheating as a way of life.” (Mary Trump on Donald paying someone to take his SAT)
17. Individual Number 1 (Trump as co-conspirator in the Cohen felonies of paying off a playboy model and a porn star with campaign funds)
18. “Dating is like being in Vietnam. You’re the equivalent of a soldier going over to Vietnam.” (on Trumps personal Vietnam of sexually transmitted diseases in the 1990’s)
19. “I will be a better warrior than anybody.” (better than John McCain, despite Vietnam deferments and bone spurs)
20. “He’s against God, he’s against guns, he’s against energy, our kind of energy.” (Biden is a devout Catholic, advocates shotguns instead of assault rifles for self-defense, and 145 progressive groups have urged him to shun fossil fuel lobbyists)

Michael is talking pure Anti-Trumpism by speaking the truth. God, I pray for the Green New Deal and an end to this crazy clown circus administration. This explains a good deal of white grievance.

This is what fascism looks like- the strongman leader glorifying the police putting down peaceful protests and his cult cheering him on.

I was speaking with a coworker last night and he agreed any explanation of FT’s (forever trumpers) has to involve extraterrestrials.

I could not “fathom” it till I finally used my O Negative blood psychic faculties and received information subliminally from the creatures manipulating us. My coworker agreed with me on this: there are super-intelligent beings living in the subsurface oceans of the icy bodies in our solar system. Long ago one species realized the radioactive heating taking place in the rocky core of their moon would eventually fade and they would die- so they formed a plan. They looked to other icy bodies and found candidates tidally heated that do not depend so much on radioactivity and decided relocating to one of these more long-lived oceans would save them. The problem was they cannot build spaceships in their environment. They used cryo-volcano cannon to eject micro-organisms on a precise trajectory to Earth. These organisms were designed to genetically engineer primates for greater intelligence and subconsciously influence them. Eventually these primates would build the spaceships the moon dwellers needed.

But at least one of the tidally heated moons was already inhabited by a different race and these other beings, detecting the threat, sent their own micro-organisms to Earth to foil the radioactively heated moon dwellers plan for conquest. And so our minds are being subtly programmed by one or the other of these species. Forever Trumpers are infected with one micro-organism while Progressive Democrats are being driven by the other entities. This is why FT’s and LeftT’s are at odds. The conflict has raged for several centuries but was always building to this, for millennia.

It is the only explanation that makes any sense.

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/men-qanon/story?id=73046374

“Trump is secretly battling a global network of billionaire pedophiles, devil-worshipping Democrats and baby-eating Hollywood stars and their “deep state” counterparts embedded in the U.S. federal government’s sprawling bureaucracy.”

“QAnon’s messaging is laced with religious allegory, prophesies, puzzle-solving and an emboldening sense of belonging to the right side of an epic battle of good versus evil.”

“What began in 2017 as a political conspiracy theory has since morphed into a meta-conspiracy movement that in sum aims to account for much of the evil in the world, sweetened by the promise of evil’s swift demise with “The Storm” — the perpetually imminent arrest of tens of thousands of “enemy” Americans — and “The Great Awakening” — the subsequent, Rapture-like new beginning for the world where believers’ faith is recognized and rewarded.”

My own version of this has for years been how to freeze a human being without damage. A Japanese company, Cells Alive, has a machine that can prevent damage by inhibiting ice formation during freezing- and my theory has always been this technology can be used to freeze people without damage thus allowing them to be successfully revived years or even decades later. I would like to think such technology would never be kept a secret but I suppose it is possible. Everything would change. And it would start with some animal, like “Benny”, being revived in a lab, maybe tomorrow:

So… “The Storm” would be what I call “The Great Rescue” as millions and possibly billions are frozen to avoid imminent death and placed in storage. This would subsequently generate “The Great Race” as finding a process to reverse aging is organized and initiated using a majority of the scientific resources of the entire human race. Such a process must be found before storing so many billion frozen bodies becomes impossible. And upon perfecting this process would come “The Great Awakening.” Once all begin to be revived we would move on to star travel as “Sleeper Ships” carrying frozen-again colonists embark on centuries-long voyages to other solar systems.

All it takes is throwing enough money at the freezing technology. For some reason we are not doing this. Could it be that when I use the word “we” there is actually no such collective entity- and only self-interested sociopathic billionaires driving “us” to extinction? Ayn Rand did not approve this message.

“Every passing minute is a chance to turn it all around.”

Chris Hedges from a speech in 2015 before Trump:

“The true history of the breakdown of capitalism in the 1930’s is not that a beneficent oligarch by the name of Franklin Roosevelt decided to shower us with gifts. It is that there were powerful radical movements, the progressive party, the communist party, which was white-washed from our history, powerful unions, especially around the CIO- that went to Roosevelt and said, look, it’s not working, people are destitute, and either you respond or you get revolution. And Roosevelt went to his fellow oligarchs and said you better give up some of your money, or you are going to lose all of your money. And that’s how we got heavy government intervention, 15 million jobs, social security, public works- which created the parks, the libraries, the schools, the post offices- many of which we use today, which of course, we are now watching them being closed.”

The stock market crashed in 1929 for the same reason it crashed 77 years later in 2008: Bought politicians and absolute greed. Any money system based on gambling on markets, without strict regulation, will destroy itself, over and over again, as history proves. The wealthy become super-wealthy and buy politicians who deregulate so they can become even more wealthy and gamble with vast wealth. And it must crash due to the greed of those who will eventually break any rule and falsify any numbers for a profit. Eventually the wealth inequality of a very few owning almost everything- and economic downturns- drive revolution and governments fall, often to be replaced by something much worse. The French and Russian Revolutions are examples, with the latter happening less than a decade before the crash of 1929. Poverty was so bad that bloody revolution was a possibility and something the U.S. wished to avoid at all costs.

In the 1930’s during the great depression the United States went to a new political-economic system known as Embedded Liberalism. In this mix of capitalism and socialism a strictly regulated capitalist market was allowed to function on the condition it support a social safety net insuring workers were not left homeless and starving when big business schemes, or the entire economy, failed. This was called “The New Deal” and it was hated by the biggest companies and most wealthy individuals because of the high tax rates necessary to pay for the social services safeguarding the citizenry. In the decades to follow the elites worked behind the scenes on a new ideology to replace Embedded Liberalism and this was to become known as Neoliberalism. The turning point came in the 1980’s with the “Reagan Revolution” and from that point on Embedded Liberalism would be quickly replaced with “free market economics.”

In as few words as possible, Neoliberalism makes money the god of this world. The poor become either useless eaters or a commodity depending on if they can generate revenue and the rich become semi-divine. The few live in luxury while the many live in squalor and Neoliberals consider this the natural order.

In the 1990’s politics in America became purely a matter of money as the 1 percent paid hundreds of millions of dollars for influence and politicians realized they either obeyed or lost office.

NAFTA was signed at the end of 1993 and President Clinton’s signing of it is sometimes identified as a milestone in a rightward shift for the Democrats. https://time.com/5468175/nafta-history/

“The Democrats had long championed workers’ rights, and the Republicans had become a free-trade party; that kind of broke down with Clinton,” Cowie says. “The Democrats got walloped in [the presidential elections of] 1980, 1984, 1988, and they had to figure out how to accommodate the power of the new conservatism in America. There was an old wing that wanted to fight to defend the industrial protections and collective bargaining represented by the New Deal, and a new wing that shifted to the right and Clinton became the standard-bearer of that movement, the New Democrats.”

Cameron echoes that Clinton “fundamentally reoriented the Democratic Party from being the party of the working class and middle class to being a party that actually fought to compete with the Republicans for Wall Street’s favor.”

Ross Perot, the 1992 third-party presidential candidate, famously predicted that an agreement like NAFTA would produce a “giant sucking sound” — meaning Mexico sucking jobs out of the U.S.”

I have voted only twice in my life- once for Perot and once for Obama. I thought Obama might possibly bring the troops home. He did not and I did not vote for him again. Biden will make it three times.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Democrats#Defunct

“According to historian Walter Scheidel, both major political parties shifted towards promoting free-market capitalism in the 1970s, with Republicans moving further to the political right than Democrats to the political left. He noted that Democrats played a significant role in the financial deregulation of the 1990s.^[29] Anthropologist Jason Hickel contended that the neoliberal policies of the Reagan era were carried forward by the Clinton administration, forming a new economic consensus which crossed party lines.^[30]

New Democrats have faced criticism from those further to the left. In a 2017 BBC interview, Noam Chomsky said that “the Democrats gave up on the working class forty years ago”.^[31] Political analyst Thomas Frank asserted that the Democratic Party began to represent the interests of the professional class rather than the working class.^[32]“

https://www.inverse.com/science/supercooled-water-study

The only mechanism that keeps humans from being frozen and thawed out decades later when a cure for their illness or a technique to reverse aging is available is ice. Ice crystals forming disrupt cells and cause profound micro-damage to multi-cellular organisms. If we could freeze people without ice crystals forming then when we warmed them up and re-started their hearts they would have experienced “suspended animation.” And the world and everything we know would suddenly change. Everything.

In the 1997 movie Abre los ojos (open your eyes) and the remake Vanilla Sky, a TV commercial plays giving a clue to the plot. The commercial is for a cryopreservation company that freezes people with a process that allows the person to be reanimated without damage. A dog is given as the famous example. And on that day, if a lab animal is actually brought back to life from a frozen state, a new age will begin. It will be in truth a new beginning for humankind, a new state of being. Because the possibility of having an indefinite life-span will suddenly became more than just a possibility. It will become the single most important and common collective project in history.

“-the characteristics of a liberal are useless…and Reinhold Niebuhr writes this saying that in moments of extremity liberals are too intellectual, too ineffectual, and too little emotional a force to deal with radical evil- that those who rise up and resist are possessed by what he calls “sublime madness.”

“We the people” have been stolen from for half a century.

Because of corporate money in the democratic party, it seems the republicans are just the party of the rich vs the party of the less rich. Things like this have historically ended badly for everyone. Guillotines being the most graphic example of that. We are now faced with a 3 part complex problem-

1. Vote out Trump.

2. Get the money out of politics (by exposing Neoliberalism).

3. Remake the New Deal by making it Green.

Chris Hedges: In the end I don’t fight fascists because I will win, I fight fascists because they are fascists.

9:28 “The true history of the breakdown of capitalism in the 1930’s is not that a beneficent oligarch by the name of Franklin Roosevelt decided to shower us with gifts. It is that there were powerful radical movements, the progressive party, the communist party, which was white-washed from our history, powerful unions, especially around the CIO- that went to Roosevelt and said, look, it’s not working, people are destitute, and either you respond or you get revolution. And Roosevelt went to his fellow oligarchs and said you better give up some of your money, or you are going to lose all of your money. And that’s how we got heavy government intervention, 15 million jobs, social security, public works- which created the parks, the libraries, the schools, the post offices- many of which we use today, which of course, we are now watching them being closed. Power concedes nothing without a demand…and they took away the mechanism by which we can make a demand.”

49:02 “This is what happens at the final stages of capitalism, they consume the very structures that make capitalism possible. Marx got that right. I am not a Marxist but his analysis of capital is dead on-“. Chris is talking about all the education being converted to generate profit as a private industry and train workers instead of citizens.

Austerity passed the cost of the 2008 financial crash on to the citizens who did not want the too-big-to-fail companies bailed out 100 to 1. This signaled the end of the citizenry having any power to counter corporate agendas.

Citizens United 2010 Court Case- from wiki: President Barack Obama stated that the decision “gives the special interests and their lobbyists even more power in Washington”. The ruling had a major impact on campaign finance, allowing unlimited election spending by corporations and labor unions and fueling the rise of Super PACs. Later rulings by the Roberts Court, including McCutcheon v. FEC (2014), would strike down other campaign finance restrictions. Studies show that the Citizens United ruling boosted the electoral success of Republican candidates.^[2][3]

While the case allowed labor unions to also contribute this was a farce as the money available to corporations compared to unions was orders of magnitude larger.

20:15 Sheldon Wolin, erased from history- “Democracy Incorporated.”