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100 pushups in 100 seconds in honor of today's innocent victims killed by Brazil's police, an average of 14 killed daily. This must stop.
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Timeline Maps
Mapping time has long been an interest of cartographers. Visualizing historical events in a timeline or chart or diagram is an effective way to show the rise and fall of empires and states, religious history, and important human and natural occurrences. We have over 100 examples in the Rumsey Map Collection, ranging in date from 1770 to 1967. We highlight a few below.
Sebastian Adams’ 1881 Synchronological Chart of Universal History is 23 feet long and shows 5,885 years of history, from 4004 B.C. to 1881 A.D. It is the longest timeline we have seen. The recently published Cartographies of Timecalls it “nineteenth-century America’s surpassing achievement in complexity and synthetic power.” In the key to the map, Adams states that timeline maps enable learning and comprehension “through the eye to the mind.”
Below is a close up detail of a very small part of the chart: (click on the title or the image to open up the full chart)
Detail of Sebastian Adams, Synchronological Chart of Universal History, 1881 (click to open full chart)
Another detail covering a larger area with the chart turned sideways:
Detail of Sebastian Adams, Synchronological Chart of Universal History, 1881
(click to open full chart)
Eugene Pick published the Tableau de L'Histoire Universelle in 1858 in two sheets, one for the Eastern Hemisphere (shown here) and one for the Western Hemisphere. The chart shows history from 4004 B.C. to 1856. Like many timelines in this style, it is based on the 1804 Strom der Zeiten (Stream of Time) by Friedrich Strass of Austria. Part of Pick’s chart is shown below:
Eugene Pick, Tableau De L'Histoire Universelle (Eastern Hemisphere), 1856
Close up detail of Pick’s chart:
Detail of Eugene Pick, Tableau De L'Histoire Universelle (Eastern Hemisphere), 1856
Another timeline chart based on the Strass chart was Joseph Colton’s 1842 Chart of Universal History. This is one of the earliest examples we have seen of the complete Strass model published in the United States (though earlier partial versions or derivations of the form appeared in the U.S.) The explanation at the bottom of the chart states “Each Nation is represented by a stream which is broken in upon or flows on undisturbed as it is influenced by the accession of Territory or the remaining at Peace.”
Joseph Colton, Chart of Universal History, 1842
Detail of Colton’s chart:
Detail of Joseph Colton, Chart of Universal History, 1842
Emma Willard’s 1836 “Picture of nations or perspective sketch of the course of empire” uses innovative perspective to add a time dimension to her chart which is otherwise similar to the Strass-Colton-Pick models. It appears in her “Atlas to Accompany a System of Universal History.”
Emma Willard, Picture of nations or perspective sketch of the course of empire, 1836
Willard timeline detail:
Detail of Emma Willard, Picture of nations or perspective sketch of the course of empire, 1836
Emma Willard uses another form of timeline in her 1824 “Progress Of The Roman Empire, Illustrated By The course Of The River Amazon.” Here she shows the actual course of the Amazon as a timeline showing the history of the Roman Empire. The chart appeared in her 1824 “Ancient Geography, As Connected With Chronology, And Preparatory to the Study of Ancient History.”
Emma Willard, Progress Of The Roman Empire, Illustrated By The course Of The River Amazon, 1824
Rand McNally published amateur historian John B. Spark’s “The Histomap. Four Thousand Years Of World History” in 1931. This popular chart went through many editions. On the cover, Sparks states: “Clear, vivid and shorn of elaboration, Histomap holds you enthralled as you follow the curves of power down time’s endless course. Here is the actual picture of the march of civilization from the mud huts of the ancients thru the monarchistic glamour of the middle ages to the living panorama of life in present day America.”
Rand McNally and John B. Sparks, The Histomap. Four Thousand Years Of World History, 1931
Francis Walker’s 1874 “Statistical Atlas of the United States” contains many maps and diagrams that show data from the 1870 U.S. Census arrayed in timelines. The chart below, with the title “Fiscal chart of the United States showing the course of the public debt by years 1789 to 1870 together with the proportion of the total receipts from each principal source of revenue and the proportion of total expenditures for each principal department of the public service,” shows 80 years of financial data arranged by time:
Francis Walker, Fiscal chart of the United States showing the course of the public debt by years 1789 to 1870
In 1878 O.W. Gray published “Chart Exhibiting the Relative Rank of the States for Nine Decades (1790-1870).” This is another kind of timeline that shows changing rank relationships between the U.S. states over time:
O.W. Gray, Chart Exhibiting the Relative Rank of the States for Nine Decades (1790-1870), 1878
The chart below appeared in Henry Gannett’s “Statistical atlas of the United States, based upon results of the Eleventh Census (1890).” Titled “Growth of the elements of the population: 1790 to 1890. (with) Proportion of aliens to foreign born males 21 years of age and over 1890,” it is based on the Eleventh Census (1890) of the United States. It combines perspective, three dimensional views, map and timeline together.
Henry Gannett, Growth of the elements of the population: 1790 to 1890, 1898
The “Chronological Chart of North American History” appeared in Colton and Fisher’s “Illustrated Cabinet Atlas and Descriptive Geography” of 1859. The chart uses color coding to arrange important historical events by time and geography.
Colton and Fisher, Chronological Chart of North American History, 1859
Edward Quin published “An Historical Atlas; In a Series of Maps of the World as Known at Different Periods” in 1830. Rather than a strict timeline, Quin creates an entirely unique kind of time map series by using 21 maps that show progressively receding cloud borders to indicate the expansion of geographical knowledge over time. Below are 4 of the 21 maps.
The first map in the series is B.C. 2348. The Deluge:
Edward Quin, B.C. 2348. The Deluge, 1830
The third is B.C. 753. The Foundation Of Rome:
Edward Quin, B.C. 753. The Foundation Of Rome, 1830
The eighth is A.D. 1. The Roman Empire In The Augustan Age:
Edward Quin, A.D. 1. The Roman Empire In The Augustan Age, 1830
And the sixteenth is A.D. 1498. The Discovery Of America:
Edward Quin, A.D. 1498. The Discovery Of America, 1830
These two time diagrams show time in several locations relative to the time of noon at Washington, D.C.  A.J. Johnson published the diagram below with the title “A Diagram Exhibiting the difference of time between the places shown & Washington.” It appeared as the last page in his “New Illustrated (Steel Plate) Family Atlas” of 1860.
A.J. Johnson, A Diagram Exhibiting the differences of time between the places shown & Washington, D.C., 1860
Mitchell’s “A time table indicating the difference in time between the principal cities of the World and also showing their air-line distance from Washington” is similar with a slight change in style.
S.A. Mitchell, A time table indicating the difference in time between the principal cities of the World, 1870
Finally, Herbert Bayer’s amazing chart below, the “Succession of Life and Geological Time Table” extends the timeline from the birth of the earth to the appearance of man - tying geologic history and the evolution of life together in one chart. It appeared in his “World Geo-Graphic Atlas” of 1953.
Herbert Bayer, Succession of Life and Geological Time Table, 1953
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MY TEACHER
By Chris Hedges
I drove to Hamilton, N.Y., last December to take part in the funeral service for the Rev. Coleman Brown. Coleman, who had taught at Colgate University, had the most profound impact of all my teachers on my education. I took seven courses as an undergraduate in religion. He taught six of them. But his teaching extended far beyond the classroom. The classroom was where he lit the spark.
He was brilliant and slightly eccentric. Concerned one winter day that the heating system in Lawrence Hall was making us students too comfortable and complacent, he opened the windows, sending blasts of snow into the room as we sat huddled in our jackets. He had a habit of repeatedly circling words on the blackboard with chalk, leaving behind series of massive white rings and faint white streaks on his face (he repeatedly ran his index and middle fingers down his cheek as he spoke). His worn tweed coats seemed to always have a soft coating of chalk dust.
He was loved, often adored, by most of his students, whom he looked upon as an extended family. His office hours were packed. He regularly brought groups of students home for meals and evenings with him and his wife, Irene, and their four children. Three decades later, some of the most vivid memories I have of Colgate are of doggedly following him out of the classroom to continue the conversation he had begun in class, of meeting him weekly in his office, of listening to his sermons on Sunday mornings in the chapel, of dinners at his house and, finally, after my graduation, of bursting into tears in front of my parents as I said goodbye to him.
Education is not only about knowledge. It is about inspiration. It is about passion. It is about the belief that what we do in life matters. It is about moral choice. It is about taking nothing for granted. It is about challenging assumptions and suppositions. It is about truth and justice. It is about learning how to think. It is about, as James Baldwinwrote, the ability to drive “to the heart of every matter and expose the question the answer hides.” And, as Baldwin further noted, it is about making the world “a more human dwelling place.”
I wanted to learn. Coleman wanted to teach. And my education—my real education—is not discernable from my college transcript. Coleman and I met late Friday afternoons each week in his book-lined office. There and in class he introduced me to the theologians Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, William Stringfellow and Daniel Berrigan. I devoured the books he gave me, especially Niebuhr’s “Moral Man and Immoral Society,” which I read and reread. He gave me poems by John Donne, W.H. Auden and T.S. Eliot. He taught me the importance of C.S. Lewis and Fyodor Dostoevsky. I read “The Brothers Karamazov” twice in college because of Coleman, although the novel was never taught in any of my classes.
Coleman would read poems and cherished prose passages out loud as I met with him in his office. It was about the musicality of language. His sonorous voice rose and dipped with intonations and emphasis. To this day I still hear his recitation in pieces of writing and poems. He understood, as Philip Pullmanwrites, that “the sound is part of the meaning, and that part only comes alive when you speak it,” that even if you do not at first understand the poem “you’re far closer to the poem than someone who sits in silence looking up meanings and references and making assiduous notes.” Coleman had open disdain for New Criticism, the evisceration of texts into sterile pieces of pedantry that fled from the mysterious, sacred forces that great writers struggle to articulate. You had to love great writing before you attempted to analyze it. You had to be moved and inspired by it. You had to be captured by the human imagination. He once told me he had just reread “King Lear.” I recited a litany of freshly minted undergraduate criticism, talking about subplots, themes of blindness and the nature of power. He listened impassively. “Well,” he said when I had finished. “I don’t know anything about that. I only know it made me a better person and a better father.”
I would spend the week memorizing poems he had read to me—Auden’s “September 1, 1939” and “Epitaph on a Tyrant,” Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi,” passages of Shakespeare—and return the following Friday to recite them to him.
Poetry, he taught me, is alive. It must be felt. It has a hypnotic power that, as Shakespeare understood, is a kind of witchcraft. And poetry, along with all other writing, is just a spent, dead force if you do not surrender to its spell.
“If you graduate knowing how to read and write, you will be educated,” Coleman said.
I was a writer, but the two people who most influenced my life—my father and Coleman—were Presbyterian preachers and social activists. Coleman, before he went to teach at Colgate, had been a minister in an inner-city church in Chicago. As a seminarian at Union Theological Seminary he had worked in East Harlem. He was involved in the Chicago Freedom Movement, which was a tenant action collaboration with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and, like my father, he was a member of Clergy and Concerned Laymen, a group of religious leaders who opposed the Vietnam War. Martin Luther King Jr. preached at Coleman’s church in Chicago (an event for which Coleman could not be present).
A descendant of the abolitionist John Brown, he placed at the center of his critique of American society the poison of white supremacy and the nightmare of racism that had been and remains part of our body politic. Being educated meant understanding how racism and white supremacy were ingrained in the beliefs, institutions, laws and systems of power—especially capitalism—that ruled America. And I felt, largely because of the example of Coleman’s life, that I should become an inner-city minister. I applied to Harvard Divinity School during my senior year at Colgate, an application for which my Shakespeare professor, Margaret Maurer, as she later told me, ruefully wrote a recommendation that informed the admissions committee that I had probably read more books than any other student she had taught but that “unfortunately most of them were never assigned.” This was true in a formal sense. But of course Coleman had informally assigned many of them.
When I was accepted at Harvard, Coleman announced he would teach me how to preach. He was one of the finest preachers I have ever heard. There was and is no course at Colgate University in preaching. But that spring, in the basement of the chapel, there became one, although it would never be noted in the registrar’s office. I wrote a weekly sermon. Coleman sat in a chair in front of me and took notes in felt pen on a yellow legal pad. For all his compassion and gentleness, he was possessed of an intellect that was uncompromising and intimidating. My sermons were torn to shreds under his critique. I would be sent back to do them again. And again. And again. At the end of the semester he seemed satisfied.
“Now you know how to preach,” he told me. “Don’t let anyone change you.”
This truth did not escape my homiletics professor at Harvard, Krister Stendahl, who pulled me aside after my first sermon to the class and asked, “Where did you learn to preach?” I won the divinity school’s preaching prize.
I lived across the street from the Mission Main and Mission Extension housing project in Roxbury, the inner city in Boston, and ran a small church as a seminarian. It was one of the poorest and most dangerous projects in the city. I commuted to Cambridge for classes and went home to the ghetto. The vast disconnect between Harvard, where students went on about the suffering of people they had never met, and the poor filled me with despair. I went back to Colgate to sit again in Coleman’s office. The slants of pale, yellow light fell with a comforting familiarity on the shelves of books and the tweed jacket of my old teacher.
There was a long silence.
“Are we created to suffer?” I finally asked.
“Is there any love that isn’t?” he answered.
I would leave Harvard, without being ordained, to go off to war as a reporter. I would cover conflicts for 20 years in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. I would see the worst of human evil. I would come back once or twice a year to the United States. And I would almost always find my way to Hamilton to see Coleman Brown.
I have always thought of myself as a preacher. This is not a vocation one proclaims openly if he or she works for The New York Times, as I did. Preachers, like artists, care more about the truth than they do about news. News and truth are not the same thing. The truth can get you into trouble. During the calls to invade Iraq I denounced the looming war, drawing on my seven years in the Middle East and my former position as the Middle East bureau chief for the Times. My outspokenness led to me being issued a formal reprimand and leaving the paper. It was then I began to write books. I sent my drafts to Coleman. He sent chapters back with notes and comments. In one proposed chapter of the manuscript that would become“American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America,”he drew large X’s across four full pages and wrote at the bottom of the fourth page, “Frankly, you are over your head.” In a book I was writing on the New Atheists, he sent back the opening page, which I had spent some time putting together. Every sentence with the exception of the first had been meticulously crossed out with his thick black felt pen. “Keep the first sentence and cut the rest,” he wrote. He lifted to his level many passages in my books, especially in “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning,” which I dedicated to Coleman and my father. My books bear the imprint of his wisdom.
His decline was long and painful. He suffered dementia and neurological damage that left him in a wheelchair. He would, on my periodic visits, rouse himself with herculean effort to connect, to summon from deep inside him the great spirit and intellect that somehow never left him. On my last visit with him before he died at 80, I came with my friend and onetime classmate from Colgate and Harvard, the Rev. Michael Granzen. We sat at the dinner table with Coleman and Irene Brown. “Now which preacher here will say the grace?” I asked of Coleman and Michael. “You will,” Coleman said.
I was ordained last October. The first time I wore a clerical collar was at Coleman’s funeral. My hand, and the hands of some of Coleman’s other students who had gone on to be preachers, rested, at the end of his service, on his coffin. I too am a teacher. I teach in a prison. My students do not, as I did not, learn in order to further a career or to advance their positions in society. Many of them will never leave prison. They learn because they yearn to be educated, because the life of the mind is the only freedom most will ever know. I love my students. I love them the way Coleman loved his students. I visit their families. I have met at the prison gate the very few who have been released. I have had them to my home. I have pushed books into their hands.
Last semester one of my most dedicated students stayed behind after the final class. This is a man who when I mention a book even in passing will find it, take it to his cell and consume it. He was imprisoned at the age of 14 and tried as an adult. He will not be eligible to go before a parole board until he is 70.
“I will die in prison,” he said. “But I work as hard as I do so that one day I can be a teacher like you.”
In the Christian faith this is called resurrection.
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They Can’t Be Serious
by Paul Krugman
This was, according to many commentators, going to be the election cycle Republicans got to show off their “deep bench.” The race for the nomination would include experienced governors like Jeb Bush and Scott Walker, fresh thinkers like Rand Paul, and attractive new players like Marco Rubio. Instead, however, Donald Trump leads the field by a wide margin. What happened?
The answer, according to many of those who didn’t see it coming, is gullibility: People can’t tell the difference between someone who sounds as if he knows what he’s talking about and someone who is actually serious about the issues. And for sure there’s a lot of gullibility out there. But if you ask me, the pundits have been at least as gullible as the public, and still are.
For while it’s true that Mr. Trump is, fundamentally, an absurd figure, so are his rivals. If you pay attention to what any one of them is actually saying, as opposed to how he says it, you discover incoherence and extremism every bit as bad as anything Mr. Trump has to offer. And that’s not an accident: Talking nonsense is what you have to do to get anywhere in today’s Republican Party.
For example, Mr. Trump’s economic views, a sort of mishmash of standard conservative talking points and protectionism, are definitely confused. But is that any worse than Jeb Bush’s deep voodoo, his claim that he could double the underlying growth rate of the American economy? And Mr. Bush’s credibility isn’t helped by his evidence for that claim: the relatively rapid growth Florida experienced during the immense housing bubble that coincided with his time as governor.
Mr. Trump, famously, is a “birther” — someone who has questioned whether President Obama was born in the United States. But is that any worse than Scott Walker’s declaration that he isn’t sure whether the president is a Christian?
Mr. Trump’s declared intention to deport all illegal immigrants is definitely extreme, and would require deep violations of civil liberties. But are there any defenders of civil liberties in the modern G.O.P.? Notice how eagerly Rand Paul, self-described libertarian, has joined in the witch hunt against Planned Parenthood.
And while Mr. Trump is definitely appealing to know-nothingism, Marco Rubio, climate change denier, has made “I’m not a scientist” his signature line. (Memo to Mr. Rubio: Presidents don’t have to be experts on everything, but they do need to listen to experts, and decide which ones to believe.)
The point is that while media puff pieces have portrayed Mr. Trump’s rivals as serious men — Jeb the moderate, Rand the original thinker, Marco the face of a new generation — their supposed seriousness is all surface. Judge them by positions as opposed to image, and what you have is a lineup of cranks. And as I said, this is no accident.
It has long been obvious that the conventions of political reporting and political commentary make it almost impossible to say the obvious — namely, that one of our two major parties has gone off the deep end. Or as the political analysts Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein put it in their book “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks,” the G.O.P. has become an “insurgent outlier … unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science.” It’s a party that has no room for rational positions on many major issues.
Or to put it another way, modern Republican politicians can’t be serious — not if they want to win primaries and have any future within the party. Crank economics, crank science, crank foreign policy are all necessary parts of a candidate’s resume.
Until now, however, leading Republicans have generally tried to preserve a facade of respectability, helping the news media to maintain the pretense that it was dealing with a normal political party. What distinguishes Mr. Trump is not so much his positions as it is his lack of interest in maintaining appearances. And it turns out that the party’s base, which demands extremist positions, also prefers those positions delivered straight. Why is anyone surprised?
Remember how Mr. Trump was supposed to implode after his attack on John McCain? Mr. McCain epitomizes the strategy of sounding moderate while taking extreme positions, and is much loved by the press corps, which puts him on TV all the time. But Republican voters, it turns out, couldn’t care less about him.
Can Mr. Trump actually win the nomination? I have no idea. But even if he is eventually pushed aside, pay no attention to all the analyses you will read declaring a return to normal politics. That’s not going to happen; normal politics left the G.O.P. a long time ago. At most, we’ll see a return to normal hypocrisy, the kind that cloaks radical policies and contempt for evidence in conventional-sounding rhetoric. And that won’t be an improvement
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Mindless Entertainment and Propaganda Is Destroying Us
Michael P. Printup, president of Watkins Glen International, one of the country’s largest racetracks, stood with a group of about a dozen race fans at 8:30 a.m. Saturday. Next to him were boxes of free doughnuts and coffee. A line of men with towels, who had spent the night in nearby RV campers, pop-up campers and tents, stood patiently outside the door to a shower room. A light drizzle, one that would turn into a torrential downpour and lead to the races being canceled in the afternoon, coated the group, all middle-aged or older white men. They were discussing, amid the high-pitched whine of cars practicing on the 3.4-mile, 11-turn circuit racetrack, the aging demographic of race fans and the inability to lure a new generation to the sport.
“Maybe if you installed chargers for phones around the track they would come,” suggested one gray-haired man.
But it is not just sporting events. Public lectures, church services, labor unions, Veterans of Foreign Wars halls, Masonic halls, Rotary clubs, the Knights of Columbus, the Lions Club, Grange Hall meetings, the League of Women Voters, Daughters of the American Revolution, local historical societies, town halls, bowling leagues, bridge clubs, movie theater attendance (at a 20-year low), advocacy groups such as the NAACP and professional and amateur theatrical and musical performances cater to a dwindling and graying population. No one is coming through the door to take the place of the old members. A generation has fallen down the rabbit hole of electronic hallucinations—with images often dominated by violence and pornography. They have become, in the words of the philosopher Hannah Arendt [3], “atomized,” sucked alone into systems of information and entertainment that cater to America’s prurient fascination with the tawdry, the cruel and the deadening cult of the self.
The entrapment in a world of nonstop electronic sounds and images, begun with the phonograph and radio, advanced by cinema and television and perfected by video games, the Internet and hand-held devices, is making it impossible to build relationships and structures that are vital for civic engagement and resistance to corporate power. We have been transformed into commodities. The steady decline of the white male heaven that is NASCAR—which has stopped publishing the falling attendance at its tracks and at some speedways has begun to tear down bleachers—is ominous. It is the symbol of a captive society.
“We don’t see the youth coming in,” Printup said. “The millennial, the younger adults 18 to 35, is our target. We spend millions of dollars a year to target that group. But it’s hard. Look around. Who’s the youngest person here? That’s our problem. Every sport from the NFL to NHL is struggling with the 18 to 35 demographic. They call them weird. They call them difficult. They only want to look at their computers.”
Printup’s parent company, the International Speedway Corp. (ISC), has invested significant sums to reach this demographic with little to show for it.
“We have a digital firm that represents nearly all our tracks in the ISC,” he went on, noting that Watkins Glen, which drew about 16,000 fans this past weekend, is one of the few exceptions to the decline in numbers. “The digital platform is about the only way you can get to them. We target them. We buy lists. We hire an agency that tracks their Web and Internet interactions. If they bring up racing, we want to be there. When a kid Googles ‘Ferrari—racing—sports car’ we are one of the top 10 lists. We pay for that. It is not cheap. That’s how you have got to get these kids. But it’s not working the way it should.”
Robert D. Putnam [4] pointed out the decline of independent civic engagement, or what he called our “social capital,” in his book “Bowling Alone: [5] The Collapse and Revival of American Community.” He noted that our severance from local communal and civic groups brought with it not only loneliness and alienation, but also a dangerous and passive reliance on the state.
Totalitarian societies, including our own, inundate the public with a steady stream of propaganda accompanied by mindless entertainment. They seek to destroy independent organizations. In Nazi Germany the state provided millions of cheap, state-subsidized radios and then dominated the airwaves with its propaganda. Radio receivers were mounted in public locations in Stalin’s Soviet Union; and citizens, especially illiterate peasants, were required to gather to listen to the state-controlled news and the dictator’s speeches. These totalitarian states also banned civic organizations that were not under the iron control of the party.
The corporate state is no different, although unlike past totalitarian systems it permits dissent in the form of print and does not ban fading civic and community groups. It has won the battle against literacy. The seductiveness of the image lures most Americans away from the print-based world of ideas. The fascination with the image swallows the time and energy required to attend and maintain communal organizations. If no one reads, why censor books? Let Noam Chomsky[6] publish as much as he wants. Just keep his voice off the airwaves. If no one attends community meetings, group events or organizations, why prohibit them? Let them be held in near-empty rooms and left uncovered by the press until they are shuttered.
The object of a totalitarian state is to keep its citizens locked within the parameters of official propaganda and permanently isolated. Propaganda and isolation make it difficult for an individual to express or carry out dissent. Official opinions, little more than digestible slogans and clichés, are crafted and disseminated by public relations specialists on behalf of the power elite. They are repeated endlessly over the airwaves until the public unconsciously ingests them. And the isolated public in a totalitarian society is unable to connect its personal experience of despair, anxiety, fear, frustration and economic insecurity to the structures that create these conditions. The isolated citizen is left feeling that his or her personal misfortune is an exception. The portrayal of society by systems of state propaganda—content, respectful of authority, just, economically secure and free—is mistaken for reality.
Totalitarian propaganda, accompanied by isolation, or what Arendt called “atomization,” makes it possible for a population not to “believe in anything visible, in the reality of their own experience; they do not trust their eyes and ears but only their imaginations, which may be caught by anything that is at once universal and consistent in itself.” This propaganda, Arendt went on, “gave the masses of atomized, undefinable, unstable and futile individuals a means of self-definition and identification.”
Corporate propaganda saturates the public, especially a generation wedded to new technology, with these lies. Its power, however, comes from the meticulous study of the moods, prejudices, whims and desires of the public, to manipulate the masses in their own language and emotions. Konrad Heiden [7] made this point when he examined fascist propaganda in Nazi Germany, noting that propaganda must detect the murmur of the public “and translate it into intelligible utterance and convincing action.”
“The true aim of political propaganda is not to influence, but to study, the masses,” Heiden wrote. “The speaker is in constant communication with the masses; he hears an echo, and senses the inner vibration.” Heiden, forced to flee Nazi Germany, went on: “When a resonance issues from the depths of the substance, the masses have given him the pitch; he knows in what terms he must finally address them. Rather than a means of directing the mass mind, propaganda is a technique for riding with the masses. It is not a machine to make wind but a sail to catch the wind.”
Dissent will only be possible when we break the dark spell of corporate propaganda and the isolation that accompanies it. We must free ourselves from corporate tyranny, which means refusing to invest our emotional and intellectual energy in electronic images. We must build what the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin [8]  called “voluntary associations for study and teaching, for industry, commerce, science, art, literature, exploitation, resistance to exploitation, amusement, serious work, gratification and self-denial.”
“We know well the means by which this association of the lord, priest, merchant, judge, soldier, and king founded its domination,” Kropotkin wrote. “It was by the annihilation of all free unions: of village communities, guilds, trades unions, fraternities, and medieval cities. It was by confiscating the land of the communes and the riches of the guilds; it was by the absolute and ferocious prohibition of all kinds of free agreement between men; it was by massacre, the wheel, the gibbet, the sword, and the fire that Church and State established their domination, and that they succeeded henceforth to reign over an incoherent agglomeration of subjects, who had no direct union more among themselves.”
Corporate propaganda has become so potent that many Americans are addicted. We must leave our isolated rooms. We must shut out these images. We must connect with those around us. It is only the communal that will save us. It is only the communal that will allow us to build a movement to resist. And it is only the communal that will sustain us through mutual aid as climate change and economic collapse increasingly dominate our future.
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Donald Trump and the Ghost of Totalitarianism
By Henry Giroux
 In the current historical moment in the United States, the emptying out of language is nourished by the assault on the civic imagination.  One example of this can be found in the rise of Donald Trump on the political scene. Donald Trump’s popular appeal speaks to not just the boldness of what he says and the shock it provokes, but the inability to respond to shock with informed judgement rather than titillation. Marie Luise Knott is right in noting that “We live our lives with the help of the concepts we form of the world. They enable an author to make the transition from shock to observation to finally creating space for action—for writing and speaking. Just as laws guarantee a public space for political action, conceptual thought ensures the existence of the four walls within which judgment operates.”[1] The concepts that now guide our understanding of American society are dominated by a corporate induced linguistic and authoritarian model that brings ruin to language, politics and democracy itself.
Missing from the commentaries by most of the mainstream media regarding the current rise of Trumpism is any historical context that would offer a critical account of the ideological and political disorder plaguing the American society—personified by Trump’s popularity. A resurrection of historical memory in this moment could provide important lessons regarding the present crisis, particularly the long tradition of racism, white supremacy, exceptionalism, war mongering, and extended wars on youth, women, and immigrants. Calling Trump a fascist is not enough. What is necessary are analyses in which the seeds of totalitarianism are made visible in Trump’s discourse and policy measures. One example can be found in Steve Weissman’s commentary on Trump in which he draws a relationship between Trump’s casual racism and the neo-fascist movements across Europe who “are growing strong by hating others for their skin color, religious origin, or immigrant status.”[2]  
Few journalists have acknowledged the presence of white militia and white supremacists groups at his rallies and almost none have acknowledged the chanting of “white power” at some of his rallies which would surely signal not only Trump’s connections to a racist past but also to the formative Nazi culture that gave rise to genocide.[3]  Another example can be found in Glenn Greenwald’s analysis of the mainstream media’s treatment of Trump’s attack on Jorge Ramos, an influential anchor of Univision.[4] When Ramos stood up to question Trump’s views on immigration, Trump refused not only to call on him, but insulted him by telling him to go back to Univision. Instead of focusing on this particular lack of civility, Greenwald takes up the way many journalists scolded Ramos because he had a point of view and was committed to a political narrative. Greenwald saw this not just as a disingenuous act on the part of such reporters but as a weakness that furthers the march of an authoritarian regime that does not have to be accountable to the press. Trump may be bold in his willingness to flaunt his racism and make clear that money drives politics, but this is not new and should surprise no one who is historically and civically literate.  
What is clear in this case is that a widespread avoidance of the past has become not only a sign of the appalling lack of historical consciousness in contemporary American culture, but a deliberate political weapon used by the powerful to keep people passive and blind to the truth, if not reduced to a discourse drawn from the empty realm of celebrity culture. This is a discourse in which totalitarian images of the hero, fearless leader, and bold politicians get lost in the affective and ideological registers of what Hannah Arendt once called “the ruin of our categories of thought and standards of judgment.”[5]  Of course, there are many factors currently contributing to this production of ignorance and the lobotomizing of individual and collective agency. The forces promoting a deep seated culture of authoritarianism run deep in American society.
Such factors extend from the idiocy of celebrity and popular culture and the dumbing down of American schools to the transformation of the mainstream media into a deadly mix of propaganda and entertainment.  The latter is particularly crucial as the collapse of journalistic standards that could inform the onslaught of information finds its counterpart in a government wedded to state secrecy and the aggressive prosecution of whistleblowers,[6]  the expanding use of state secrecy, the corruption of political language,[7] the disregard for truth, all of which have contributed to growing culture of political and civic illiteracy.[8]  The knowledge and value deficits that produce such detrimental forms of ignorance not only crush the critical and ethical imagination, critical modes of social interaction, and political dissent, but also destroy those public spheres and spaces that promote thoughtfulness, thinking, critical dialogue, and serve as “guardians of truths as facts,” as Arendt once put it.[9]
Under the reign of neoliberalism, space, time, and even language have been subject to the forces of privatization and commodification. Public space has been replaced by malls and a host of commercial institutions. Commodified and privatized, public space is now regulated through exchange values rather than public values just as communal values are replaced by atomizing and survival-of-the fittest market values.  Time is no longer connected to long term investments, the development of social capital, and goals that benefit young people and the public good. On the contrary, time is now connected to short-term investments and quick financial gains.
More broadly, time is now defined by “the non-stop operation of global exchange and circulation”[10] and the frenetic reproduction and perpetuation of an impoverished celebrity and consumer culture that both depoliticizes people and narrows their potential for critical thought, agency, and social relations to an investment in shopping, and other market-related activities.  Under neoliberalism, time presents itself as a form tyranny, an unquestioned necessity,  and in speeding up the flows of work, leisure, knowledge, and everyday life it spawns a new kind of violence in which the flow of capital replaces the flow of thoughtfulness, atomization replaces a notion of shared solidarity, the spectacle undermines historical memory, privatization seeks to erase all notions of the public good, and manufactured precarity replaces any sense of security and long-term planning.
In the age of casino capitalism, time itself has become a burden more than a condition for contemplation, self-reflection, and the cultivation of thoughtful and compassionate social relations. The extended arc of temporal relations in which one could imagine long-term investments in the common good has given way to a notion of time in which the horizon of time is contained within the fluctuating short-term investments of the financial elite and their militant drive for profits at any price. What is lost in this merging of time and the dictates of neoliberal capital are the most basic elements of being human along with the formative culture and institutions necessary to develop a real, substantive democracy. As Christian Marazzi observes:
Taking time means giving each other the means of inventing one’s future, freeing it from the anxiety of immediate profit. It means caring for oneself and the environment in which one lives, it means growing up in a socially responsible way. [Taking time means] questioning the meaning of consumption, production, and investment [so as to not] reproduce the preconditions of financial capitalism, the violence of its ups and downs, the philosophy according to which ‘time is everything, man is nothing.’ For man (sic) to be everything, we need to reclaim the time of his existence. [11] Civic death and disposability are the new signposts or a society in which historical memory is diminished and ethical evaluations become derided as figments of liberal past.  Dispossession and depoliticization are central to the discourse of neoliberalism in which language is central to moulding identities, desires, values, and social relationships. As Doreen Massey observes, under neoliberalism the public is urged to become consumers, customers, and highly competitive while taught that that the only interest that matters are individual interests, almost always measured by monetary considerations.[12] Under such circumstances, social and communal bonds have been shredded, important modes of solidarity attacked, and a war has been waged against any institution that embraces the values, practices, and social relations endemic to a democracy.
This retreat into private silos has resulted in the inability of individuals to connect their personal suffering with larger public issues. Thus detached from any concept of the common good or viable vestige of the public realm, they are left to face alone a world of increasing precarity and uncertainty in which it becomes difficult to imagine anything other than how to survive. Under such circumstances, there is little room for thinking critically and acting collectively in ways that are imaginative and courageous.
Surely, the celebration and widespread prevalence of ignorance in American culture does more than merely testify “to human backwardness or stupidity”; it also “indicates human weakness and the fear that it is unbearably difficult to live beset by continuous doubts.”[13] Yet, what is often missed in analysis of political and civic illiteracy as the new normal is the degree to which these new forms of illiteracy not only result in an unconscious flight from politics, but also produce a moral coma that supports modern systems of terror and authoritarianism. Civic illiteracy is about more than the glorification and manufacture of ignorance on an individual scale: it is producing a nation-wide crisis of agency, memory, and thinking itself.
How else to explain, for instance, the mainstream media’s willingness to provide a platform for Donald Trump whose  views  express an unchecked hatred of immigrants, women, the welfare state, and any viable notion of the public good.  As Richard Hofstadter, Noam Chomsky, and Susan Jacoby have made clear ignorance is not simply about the absence of knowledge, it is a kind of ideological sandstorm in which reason gives way to emotion, and a willful stupidity spreads through the culture as part of a political project that both infantilizes and depoliticizes the general public.[14]
Trump is simply the most visible embodiment of a society that is not merely suspicious of critical thought but disdains it. Trump is the quintessential symbol of the merging of a war-like arrogance, a militant certainty, and as self-absorbed unworldliness in which he is removed from problems of the real world.  The clueless Trump is far from a kind of clownish fiction some writers have described him to be. And while liberals such as Michal Tomasky have pointed to his appeal to racial resentment, a gladiatorial style, and his ability to combine a war like discourse and elements of conservative fundamentalism with a flair for entertainment,[15]  this type of analysis shies away from talking about Trump represents the challenge of understanding how totalitarianism now confronts Americans in new forms.[16]
He is the embodiment of a political party and casino driven social order in which informed judgments, moral responsibility, and collective action disappear from the world of politics.  Trump’s often insulting, humiliating, misogynist, and racist remarks signify more than the rantings an antediluvian, privileged white man who is both savvy in the world of public relations and delusional in the world of politics.  Trump represents the new face of what Hannah Arendt once called the “banality of evil.”[17]   Unapologetic about the racist nature of his remarks, unreflective about an savage economic system that is destroying the planet and the lives of most of its inhabitants, and unaware of his own “criminal” participation in furthering a culture of fear and cruelty, he is typical of an expanding mass of pundits, anti-public intellectuals, and right-wing fundamentalists who live in a historical void and for whom emotion overtakes reason.
     Clearly, the attack on reason, evidence, science, and critical thought has reached perilous proportions in the United States. A number of political, economic, social, and technological forces now work to distort reality and keep people passive, unthinking, and unable to act in a critically engaged manner. Politicians, right-wing pundits, and large swaths of the American public embrace positions that support Creationism, capital punishment, torture,  and the denial of human-engineered climate change, any one of which not only defies human reason but stands in stark opposition to evidence-based scientific arguments. Reason now collapses into opinion, as thinking itself appears to be both dangerous and antithetical to understanding ourselves, our relations to others, and the larger state of world affairs. Under such circumstances, literacy disappears not just as the practice of learning skills, but also as the foundation for taking informed action. Divorced from any sense of critical understanding and agency, the meaning of literacy is narrowed to completing basic reading, writing, and numeracy tasks assigned in schools. Literacy education is similarly reduced to strictly methodological considerations and standardized assessment, rooted in test taking and deadening forms of memorization, and becomes far removed from forms of literacy that would impart an ability to raise questions about historical and social contexts.
     For Arendt the inability to think, to be thoughtful, and assume responsibility for one’s actions spoke not just to a regrettable type of civic and political illiteracy, but was crucial for creating the formative cultures that produced totalitarian regimes. Absent any residue of moral responsibility, political indignation, and collective resistance, crimes committed in a systemic way now emerge, in part, from a society in which thinking had become dangerous and non-thinking normalized.  Of course, thinking critically is largely produced in public spheres that instill convictions rather than destroy them, encourage critical capacities rather than shut them down, invest in public spheres rather than eliminate them by turning them over to private interests.  
What Donald Trump represents is rarely talked about in the media. He is the most current egregious highly visible symbol of a terrifying  stage in American society haunted by the protean elements of a new totalitarianism. Totalitarian forms are still with us but they no longer find expression in the rounding up and killing of Jews, gays, and intellectuals or in the spectacles of militarism with the heightened show of armies of thugs dressed in military uniforms and black boots. The new totalitarianism is echoed in the resurgence of religious bigotry that runs through the current like an electric current and personified in the media celebration of bigots such as Kentucky clerk Kim Davis who believes that her religion gives her the right to both deny marriage license to gays and the disavow the separation of church and state.  Unfortunately, Davis is more than an embarrassment politically and ethically, she reflects a sizable number of religious fundamentalists who have the backing of Republican Party and presidential candidates such as Ted Cruz and Mike Huckabee.
Totalitarianism throws together authoritarian and anti-democratic forms that represent a new historical moment in American history. Economic fundamentalism now governs all of society rather than just the market and in doing so drives politics and sets polices that promote massive inequalities in wealth and power, produce huge amounts of suffering, and appear to delight in a culture of cruelty. Military fundamentalism points to a society that now militarizes everything from knowledge to schools. In this scenario, an increasing number of behaviors are criminalized, militarism feeds the punishing and incarceration state, and a kind of hyper masculinity now parades as the new model for legitimating aggression and violence in multiple spheres and against an increasing range of populations extending from women and black youth to Mexican immigrants.
One of the most deadly fundamentalisms is education. We now live in a world in which illiteracy has replaced literacy and civic values have gone the way of the typewriter.  As the orbits of privatization increase furthering what has been called by Mark Fisher the “empire of the self,” knowledge is transformed into the flow of non-stop information just as education collapses into training. Students are now defined as test-takers and celebrity culture has overtaken any viable notion of a critical, questioning, and informed culture.  Trump’s rise in the polls is tantamount to the collapse of civic literacy and the public spheres that support it.
Totalitarianism’s curse finds public and political support for a mode of non-thinking in which rails against any attempt to ask what it might mean to use knowledge and theory as a resource to address social problems and events in ways that are meaningful and expand democratic relations.  This this is a form of illiteracy marked by the inability to see outside of the realm of the privatized self, an illiteracy in which the act of translation withers, reduced to a relic of another age. The United States has become a country in which a chron­ic and deadly form of civic illiteracy finds its most visible expression in a disimagination machine that celebrates the Donald Trumps of the world.
The world of politics is far from clownish and in fact points to a poisonous future at a time in which  the educational force of the culture is being used  to promote the a form of civic illiteracy. Donald Trump is not the singular clown who has injected the color and idiocy into American politics, he is the canary in the mineshaft warning us that totalitarianism relies on mass support and feeds on hate, moral panics, and “the frenzied lawlessness or ideological certitude.”[18]  As American society moves from a culture of questioning to a culture of shouting, it has restaged politics and power in ways that are truly unproductive, frightening, and anti-democratic.
Jerome Kohn in writing about Arendt’s notion of totalitarianism provided a commentary that contains a message for the present age, one that points the possibility of hope triumphing over despair—a lesson that needs to be embraced at the present moment. He writes that for Arendt “what matters is not to give oneself over to the despair of the past or the utopian hope of the future, but ‘to remain wholly in the present.’ Totalitarianism is the crisis of our times insofar as its demise becomes a turning point for the present world, presenting us with an entirely new opportunity to realize a common world, a world that Arendt called a ‘human artifice,’ a place fit for habitation by all human beings.”[19]  
And if Trump represents a symbol of a threatening totalitarianism, the legacy of individual and collective struggle now on the horizon in the struggles emerging among the Black Lives Matter Movement, fast food workers, environmentalists, and a range of other groups point to a different future in which the ideological stupidity and the unbridled braggadocio of the loud mouth authoritarians will be challenged and overcome by the urgency of hope in the face of despair.  Rather than view Trump as an eccentric clown maybe it is time to portray him symbolic of the legacy of a totalitarian post whose story needs to be told again. And in making such connections, there is not only the power of resistance but a call to civic action to prevent such horrible narrative from appearing once again.
I want to conclude by arguing that inherent in Arendt’s notion of the banality is view of education as central to politics. That is, for her the educative nature of politics is dialectical in that it is central to both creating the formative cultures of thoughtlessness and Nazi pedagogy and in creating those modes of politics in which matters of critique, desire, and agency are central to constructing critical and socially responsible citizens alive to the demands of economic, racial, and political justice. For those of us who believe that education is more than an extension of the business world, it is crucial to address a number of issues that connect the stress the educative nature of politics as part of a broader effort to create a critical culture, democratic public spheres, and a collective movement that supports the connection between critique and action and redefines agency in the service of the practice of freedom and justice.  Let me mention just a few.
First, educators, artists and others can address and make clear the relationship between the attack on the social state and the transformation of a range of democratic public spheres into adjuncts of corporate power. The neoliberal attacks on the welfare state, social provisions, public servants, and the public good must be understood and addressed as not simply an agenda to solidify class power but as an attack on democracy itself. . Nor can it be understood outside of the production of the atomized neoliberal subject who is taught to believe in a form of possessive individualism that disdains matters of compassion, solidarity, and the type of sociality crucial to a democratic society. In a society in which  the “social self’ has been transformed into the “disembedded individual,” any viable notion of the  public good is now repudiated by the privatizing and atomistic values at the heart of a hyper-market driven society. [20]
As I have mentioned earlier in this essay, militarism has a deadly grip on Ameican society as both an ideology with its celebration of the ideals of war, violence, and military heroism and as a policy that fuels the arms race, invests billions in military weapons, and spends more on the tools of surveillance, war, and state violence than on schools, health care, and the welfare state. Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies has done extensive research on military spending and the costs of war and states that as a result of the Iraqi War alone “American taxpayers will ultimately spend roughly $2.2 trillion on the war, but because the U.S. government borrowed to finance the conflict, interest payments through the year 2053 means that the total bill could reach nearly $4 trillion.”[21] At the very least, any viable form of resistance against the onslaught of totalitarianism will have to develop as Rabbi Michael Lerner of Tikkun has pointed out a Marshall Plan in which funding is sufficient to make all levels of education free, while also providing enough social support to eliminate poverty, hunger, inadequate health care, and the destruction of the environment.[22] There is nothing utopian about the demand to redirect money away from the military, powerful corporations, and the upper 1 percent.
Second, progressives need to develop a new radical democratic imaginary that challenges the notion that a market economy is synonymous with democracy. Capitalism and democracy are antithetical and the ways in which democracy is undermined by casino capitalism needs to be endlessly addressed as part of the pedagogical and political task of rupturing what might be called neoliberal commonsense, especially regarding the assumption that the market should govern all of social life. The greatest threat posed by authoritarian politics is that it makes power invisible and hence defines itself in universal and commonsense terms, as if it is beyond critique and dissent.
Moreover, disposability has become the new measure of a savage form of casino capitalism in which the only value that matters is exchange value. Coupled with making the machinery of neoliberal power visible is the need to overcome the fragmentation of the left while not denying the various modes of oppression at work in the United States. Put differently, there is a need young people, workers, educators, artists, and others to become part of a broader social movement aimed at dismantling the repressive institutions that are moving the United States into a new authoritarian age. This is especially true with regards to addressing the mass incarceration state, which drains billions of dollars in funds to put people in jail when such resources could be used to fund health care, free higher education, much needed infrastructure, a social wage, free day care, and so it goes.
What I am suggesting here is that progressives need to develop a more comprehensive view of society and the mutually informing registers of politics, oppression, and political struggle. There is a noble and informing example of this type of analysis in the work of theorists such as Stanley Aronowitz, Angela Davis, Michael Lerner and the late Martin Luther King, Jr., who drew connections between militarism, racism and capitalism as part of a call not for reform but for a radical restructuring of American society.
Third, against the new thoughtlessness that drapes the American public in the abyss of ignorance, infantilism, consumerism, militarism, and environmental stupidity, there is a need to create those pedagogical spaces in which shared faith in justice replaces the shared fears of precarity, hatred of the other, and a fear of the demands of justice.  Against the savage brutalism of the new totalitarianism, there is a need to develop new discourses, vocabularies, values, desires, and a sense of spirituality that brings people together around a need for critique, passion for justice, and a desire for new modes of collective resistance and struggle.  We may be in the midst of “dark times” but the light of hope is never far off and while it offers no guarantees, it posits the possibility of a future that will not mimic the horrors of the present.
[1] Marie Luise Knott, Unlearning With Hannah Arendt, trans. by David Dollenmayer, (Other Press: New York, NY. 2011, 2013), p. 47. [2] Steve Weissman, “Bashing Blacks, Latinos, Jews, and Muslims: Never Again!,” Reader Supported News, (September 2011). Online at: http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/32150-focus-bashing-blacks-latinos-jews-and-muslims-never-again [3] See, for example, Randy Blazak, “Donald Trump is the New Face of White Supremacy,” Counter Punch, (August 28, 2015). Online at: http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/08/28/donald-trump-is-the-new-face-of-white-supremacy/ [4] Glenn Greenwald, “Jorge Ramos Commits Journalism, Gets Immediately Attacked by Journalists,” The Intercept, (August 27, 2015). Online at: https://theintercept.com/2015/08/26/jorge-ramos-commits-journalism-gets-immediately-attacked-journalists/ [5] Hannah Arendt, Hannah Arendt: The Last Interview and Other Conversations, (Brooklyn, NY. : Melville House Publishing, 2013) [6] Glenn Greenwald, No Place to Hide (New York: Metropolitan, 2014). [7] Charles Lewis, 935 Lies: The Future of Truth and the Decline of America’s Moral Integrity (New York: Public Affairs, 2014). [8] Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason (New York: Pantheon, 2008); Robert N. Proctor and Londa Schiebinger, eds. Agnotology: the Making and Unmaking of Ignorance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008).  The classic text here is Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in America Life (New York: Knopf, 1963). [9] Hannah Arendt, Hannah Arendt: The Last Interview and Other Conversations (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House Publishing, 2013), p. 31. [10] Jonathan Crary,  24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, (Verso,  2013) (Brooklyn, NY: Verso Press, 2013), p. 5. [11] Christian Marazzi, The Violence of  Financial Capitalism (New York: Semiotext(e) 2011), p. 96. [12] Doreen Massey, “Vocabularies of the economy,” Soundings, (2013) http://lwbooks.co.uk/journals/soundings/pdfs/Vocabularies%20of%20the%20economy.pdf [13] Zygmunt Bauman and Leonidas Donskis, Moral Blindness: The Loss of Sensitivity in Liquid Modernity (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2013), p. 7. [14] Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon, 2002); Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason (New York: Pantheon, 2008) and Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in America Life (New York: Knopf, 1963). [15] Michael Tomasky, “Trump,” New York Review of Books (September 24, 2015). Online: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/sep/24/trump/ [16] See, for instance, Cornelius Castoriadis, “The Destinies of Totalitarianism,” Salmagundi, No. 60, (Spring -Summer, 1983), http://www.jstor.org/stable/40547754 [17] Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin, 2006). [18] Bill Dixon, “Totalitarianism and the Sand Storm,” Hannah Arendt Center (February 3, 2014). Online: http://www.hannaharendtcenter.org/?p=12466 [19] Jerome Kohn, “Totalitarianism: The Inversion of Politics,” The Hannah Arendt Papers at the Library of Congress Essays and lectures—"On the Nature of Totalitarianism: An Essay in Understanding” (Series: Speeches and Writings File, 1923-1975, n.d.) Online at: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/arendthtml/essayb1.html [20] These two terms are taken from Stefan Collini, “Response to Book Review Symposium: Stefan Collini, What are Universities For,” Sociology 1-2 (February 5, 2014), Online: http://soc.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/02/14/0038038513518852 [21] Ben Armbruster,”Study: Iraq War Cost U.S. $2.2 Trillion, Claimed Nearly 200,000 Lives,” ThinkProgress (March 14, 2013). Online: http://thinkprogress.org/security/2013/03/14/1721961/study-iraq-war-cost-2-triillion/ The publication by the Watson Institute of the March 14, 2013 ‘Costs of War’ Project, “Iraq War: 190,000 lives, $2.2 trillion,” can be found online at http://news.brown.edu/articles/2013/03/warcosts [22] For Tikkun’s Marshall Plan, see http://spiritualprogressives.org/newsite/?page_id=114
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Money Manager Thinks “High-Decibel” Elizabeth Warren Doesn’t Know Her Place
By David Dayen
“HIGH-DECIBEL” SEN. Elizabeth Warren doesn’t know her place, according to a Friday New York Times op-ed.
Roger Lowenstein, the journalist-turned-chairman of the Sequoia mutual fund, criticizes Warren, “the nation’s unelected regulatory czar,” for being too outspoken about the financial industry. At one point, Lowenstein condemns her for “painting bankers with as broad a brush as Donald J. Trump uses to demean Muslims.”
For the record, Warren has not called for all bankers to be barred from entry into the United States “until we figure out what’s going on.”
Lowenstein first disparages Warren for calling for the termination of Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Mary Jo White for “failing to have the SEC draft rules requiring corporations to disclose details of their political spending.”
While it is terribly uppity of a senator to have a perspective on a public policy issue, the corporate political spending rule is only one of Warren’s criticisms of White.
The letter she wrote to President Obama urging White’s firing is 12 pages long, only three of which discuss the political spending rule. Warren spends much more time in the letter on White’s desire to have public companies reduce disclosure to investors (a key priority of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce) and the SEC’s refusal to finalize 19 Congressionally mandated rules under the Dodd-Frank Act, from regulations on disclosure of conflict minerals to enhancing reporting of borrowing of securities.
Lowenstein calls Warren’s position on the SEC “turf encroachment,” adding that, “Last I checked, the SEC was a regulatory agency of the executive branch, in which Ms. Warren is not, in fact, employed.”
Last I checked, the SEC is an independent regulatory agency accountable to Congress, established by the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Congressional oversight of the SEC happens at the committee level, for example by the Senate Banking Committee, of which Warren is a member.
Lowenstein also demeans Warren for opposing the appointment of investment banker Antonio Weiss to the No. 3 position in the Treasury Department. The author notes that, after Weiss withdrew from the appointment and was made an adviser to Treasury, he “brokered a highly praised law to restructure Puerto Rico’s debt,” proving that Warren is a dunderhead who doesn’t understand anything about regulation.
That law has been met with vociferous protest in Puerto Rico because it installed an unelected control board to usurp the island’s sovereign government and force continued austerity on its impoverished citizens. In the rarefied circles where Lowenstein mingles, this is seen as responsible and praiseworthy.
Finally, Lowenstein fumes that the SEC shouldn’t have to develop a political spending rule at all, because it distracts from the agency’s core mission. Instead, the SEC should think about “retail investors flocking to index funds” and whether they understand the risks of doing so.
As noted, Lowenstein is the director of a mutual fund, which stands to lose significant market share if investors leave for index funds. So his hit job on Elizabeth Warren has the dual purpose of lobbying a regulatory agency to protect his business.
Speaking of that mutual fund, Lowenstein should perhaps not be so confident that he is more knowledgeable than Warren about the ways of finance. Until this July, the Sequoia Fund was the second-largest investor in pharmaceutical firm Valeant, which is under SEC investigation for dubious accounting practices and a hidden relationship with a mail-order pharmacy. The fund lost 13 percent of its value in the first half of 2016.
Perhaps Sequoia’s investors would have been better served by a more active securities regulator.
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