In the 1950s there was still some awareness that wealth came with a bundle of social responsibilities. Bill Gates has tried to drive this idea home with his fellow oligarchs, but many, such as the Kochs and Waltons have gone with a self-enrichment focus. In lower level corporations such as the Plains All American Pipeline Company, which was responsible for the Santa Barbara oil spill a few years back, the fights are all about who gets to use the jet, golf and scraping by on a few million a year. Altruism never enters the discussion. My sense is that government of the rich, for the rich and by the rich ends when the rich stop paying attention to their social duties. Trump, who may in fact be worth a lot less than he asserts to the Forbes 400 people, is an excellent foil for all this. He plays a rich guy, even portraying himself as rich and powerful to the elites. A lot of what this preference is about has to do with wealth, or at least the imagined wealth of the pre-rich.
If democrats don’t take at least one chamber the America I knew and loved will be dead for all practical purposes. As Obama said very clearly it will take several elections to right the “ship of State” back to some semblance of normality.
trump is a cancer that needs to be excised. Legally, by the ballot box, or resignation, or 25th amendment, or just arrest by breaking the Posse Comitatus Act.
And at the same time he decries the “elites” as some sort of evil group run by the rich like George Soros. Soros is rich so trump say he must be evil. And people give trump’s wealth and elite status a pass. It makes no sense but then that is trump’s style. Lie with no regard to logic. Which brings me to trump’s comment yesterday that we would all (all 350 million of us) have Mexican rapists camping on our lawns. Now, how many of us have lawns? My front yard is cactus and rocks. There are very few “lawns” in Tucson. I think the majority of people in America don’t have lawns because they cannot afford a house, I certainly was in that group for the majority of my life. I am no millionaire.
I sometimes wish out political system was more like those in Europe that when confidence is lost in the Head of State or Prime Minister, they resign…unless the “head of state” is royalty …but then they have only ceremonial duties which trump could manage.
You are so lucky to live in the Sonoran desert. Here in the Mojave in the Sierra Nevada rain shadow, we can only dream of your 10 or so inches of rain every year and luxurious saguaro forests.
I must admit that the heat gets to me come August when the humidity rises. But when I look over my right shoulder out my widow I see a 25 foot tall multi armed saguaro framed by mesquite trees. it’s one of 5 tall cacti in the yard.
Given the pokey nature of saguaro and cholla cacti, and other native plants in this desert, pitching a camp here by Mexican rapists might be a challenge.
And yeah, 10 inches a year of rain is luxury for a desert. Rain in the Atacama desert in South America is measured in millimeters. Some areas there may go 100 years without any rain.
This image is my yard. There’s a house in there somewhere.
Some "lawn’ eh trump? The guy is such an asshat.
We will do very well on Tuesday. It cannot be that every Democrat in the country is up in arms and donating and canvassing, in a midterm election in unprecedented opposition to an unpopular incumbent president, and that this won’t bear electoral fruit.
If we don’t get a majority of the House–and I would find it very difficult to accept the legitimacy of such an outcome, bearing in mind the systematic electoral cheating that is these days a central plank of Republican political operations–the outlook is, as you say, dire indeed. Never mind the fascist momentum will be nearly unstoppable, with the military now forming a part of the Republican political armory. It will all but rule out a majority in the House in 2020, since Dems really have given it our best shot this year, and if we can’t defeat the GOP this year, it’s hard to see how we could pull it off in a general election against an incumbent president with a massive cult following and a gerrymandered map. Something about the political landscape would in that scenario have to have changed–a financial crisis, an explosive Mueller investigation report.
But that’s all way too gloomy. We all know it’s now or never, and I’m very, very confident that the Blue Wave will prevail. One last push, folks.
Ayn Rand poisoned this country with her “Selfishness is a virtue, altruism is evil” crap. Now, Republicans like Paul Ryan, Rand Paul and Ted Cruz demand that their Congressional interns all read “Atlas Shrugged,” and Trump (himself, unsurprisingly, an Ayn Rand fan) is surrounded by other Ayn Rand devotees.
Are you kidding?!
Poor darr lives in Arizona: The Meth Lab of Democracy.
Of course, the good Lord willing and the Kremlin don’t rise, he’ll wake up to “Sen. Sinema” on Wednesday…
Opps. This writer seems not to have read the memo saying all is doom and gloom right now. Nice to see some truth poking through.
While I am happy to be on the majority side of this issue, I can never understand why the numbers aren’t more like 80% favoring the Democrats being in control. I just cannot make my mind small enough to get into the head of someone who would support Trump or the current crop of Republicans for any office. For me, it is like trying to imagine what it must be like to be an ant or a fern.
I’m excited that so many people have voted early already. Can you imagine over 1,000,000 ballots could be the cumulative total for the 2018 midterms?!
I think that would be AWESOME!
Sorry – I was following your discussion just fine, but there at the very end, you lost me.
HA! AZ is deeeeep red, that is very true. In fact we have had a GOP majority in both state chambers since 1969 !! That ain’t healthy. It just isn’t. But Tucson is a centrist city. 40%+ Hispanic, and we elect democrats to Congress around here. Raul Grijalva for example… his district is South Tucson and it’s “Liberalville”. The Catalina foothills, where the money resides is otherwise. I even had Mo Udall in person visit my house once…in 1989. I do miss him. I hope Krysten Sinema wins but the polls look bleak. It looks like Ann Kirkpatrick will be my new Congress critter and that’s good news. Tuesday cannot come soon enough. I am planning to vote as the sun comes up. My cheat sheet is ready. I need one for the ballot initiatives. The school funding bonds will get a yes vote but a couple other voter initiatives related to charter schools which give them undo advantages (Gov Ducey wants them) will be a “no” vote. I do my homework.
In the 1950s there was an exceptional social cohesion and ethos of collectivity, no doubt the effect of WW2 and the existential Russian nuclear threat. People were prepared to pay normal taxes, ie, more than half of their income above a certain level. Corporations bought into the ethos and did not treat employees as drags on the bottom line. The whole country was bound together by television and convergent news coverage. That America simply no longer exists. The country is separated into two information communities who only have in common a self-centered and self-defeating fear of taxes, even when they’re imposed on the rich. Even sports audiences have become fragmented on ideological lines, and an unprecedented gender divide is also opening up. The continued existence of a USA bound by a shared commitment to democracy is basically a thing of the past. Talk of a possible civil war is now routine. It’s all collapsed very quickly. The only hope of turning things around in the next decade or so rests with continuous total Democratic control of the federal government for a period of 8 years, which is actually an experiment this country has never tried in living memory. But that won’t happen, even if the GOP wrecks the country all over again, until we have new Democratic leadership that can act in an appropriately partisan way and argue that the GOP is a failed party that is a menace to our country and cannot be trusted anywhere near a single lever of power. Thatcher used this approach in the UK in the 1980s, and the Blair did the exact same thing. It’s a doable strategy as well as a necessary one, but we have a political leadership that has not got the vision or temperament or talent to prosecute this strategy. That’s why everything depends on the Dem grassroots, whether centrist or leftist. They have a much clearer sense of the partisan stakes, and a lot more talent.
trump can manage to stand around and have his picture taken. That’s about all he can manage with any skill. 
Tuesday evening as results come in…
Wednesday morning when Mueller indicts…
like W running as a political outsider
like a bunch of millionaire politicians telling you to fear liberal elites
like scorning science until they get sick
no self-knowledge
While you have many fine points in your screed, n, the gender divide is quite precedented - about 2,000 years worth.