• During the first gilded age in the 1890s, wealth accumulated quite quickly amongst bankers, industrialists, and the political class.  Most of the efforts generating this wealth were born out of chain gangs (a continuation of slavery following the North-South Compact of 1877), exploitation of sharecroppers, and self-described “wage slavery” of factory workers in the cities.  Over time, many of these workers unified in a concerted struggle to share in the benefits of an economy theretofore serving only the “masters of mankind”, to borrow Adam Smith’s designation of the overlords. The “vile maxim” of these masters was “all for ourselves and nothing for other people.”  Farmers created coops and unions (the largest of which, the Farmer’s Alliance actually appeared in my home state of Texas) and textile mill workers on the east coast organized and striked for safer working conditions, shorter than fourteen hour workdays, and higher incomes.   Aside from the setback of Woodrow Wilson’s aforementioned red scare and harsh treatment of dissenters such as Eugene Debs and anti-war labor leaders during the shameful debacle that was the first world war, organized labor surged as working conditions for most Americans deteriorated steadily in the 1920s and into the Great Depression.  Militant labor organizations carried out sit-down strikes in the second term of Franklin Roosevelt’s administration, a phenomenon utterly terrifying to the wealthy elites; after all, sit-down strikes in the factories are but one step removed from worker takeover of industry, a notion not without precedent in American history.  With a sympathetic administration in the White House, the painful struggles began to pay off with Roosevelt’s New Deal.
• An increasingly powerful movement of women achieved the franchise in 1920, the culmination of a dedicated popular struggle decades in the making; they fought hard for access to education, gainful employment “outside-the-home,” and decent healthcare and gender independence.  The battle continues today, but the victories already accomplished are astonishing when one ponders the paradigm shift in gender roles.
• African Americans, criminalized following the end of Reconstruction, would resist but continued to suffer under extreme duress for the decades to follow.  The rebranded slave labor essentially underwrote the wealth of the industrial revolution.  Civil rights groups in the 1930s continued to pursue a genuine franchise for African Americans; state and local institutions ensured most blacks couldn’t vote, either through literacy tests, poll taxes, or laws criminalizing black life [SOURCE].  Blacks serving in the second world war returned home hoping to share in equality for the first time.  Through considerable struggle, blacks began to reap benefits in the 1960s with a surprising ally in Lyndon Johnson; during his administration, Congress passed both the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts, the former of which could be the single most significant piece of civil rights legislation ever passed.  These achievements, again, were windfall from highly organized, hardworking popular movements coordinating their efforts throughout the nation; I’d highly recommend Ari Berman’s recent title Give Us The Ballot on the Voting Rights Act.  These advances haven’t come without cost: the slow progress forward often precedes a regression, as one can clearly see in COINTELPRO‘s assault on blacks and further black criminalization.  The War on Drugs and the state fascination with so-called “law and order” are essentially code for further repression and elimination of superfluous population unable to work due to shrinking manufacturing.  In 1967, interracial marriage was still illegal in a third of the states.  As I mentioned in a previous article, I can remember the vestiges and persistent, ugly legacy of segregation in my hometown in Texas in the 1980s and even 1990s.  Blacks lived in a certain area of town, largely segregated to their own elementary school.  The major recreational area in town, the Leonard Park, featured a large public pool, playground equipment, walking trails, picnic areas, and the Frank Buck Zoo, well-known for an elephant and other attractions.  Across the road was dilapidated Moffett Park with a small public pool and no other amenities.  Nonetheless, schools are at least legally desegregated, and race relations have improved largely over the past century.  Of course, we have a long way to go.
• Consider the evolution of society’s perspectives on authoritarianism and war : the second world war left the American public mostly docile with respect to state violence with the triumph of American exceptionalism over the totalitarianism of Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo.  Even by the early 1960s when purported dove John F. Kennedy increased violence in Vietnam to gain access to the vast rubber, tin, and oil resources and “contain China”, scarcely could one find any mention in media.  Early efforts to protest the war during JFK’s years led to violent break-ups by students.  By the late 1960s, peace movements proliferated as Americans steadily began to learn of the horrors of chemical and biological warfare waged against a near defenseless agricultural people.  The release of the Pentagon papers by Daniel Ellsberg, catalogued by Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, revealed a striking but unsurprising delta between state-reported justification and internal objectives.  The incredible outpouring of solidarity for our victims, our wounded veterans, and disgust for the establishment felled Johnson’s reelection bid and partially destroyed Nixon’s favor.  The political class responded to anti-war movements with two seminal documents, the Powell memorandum and the proceedings of the Trilateral Commission.  Lewis Powell, a conservative lawyer later appointed to SCOTUS by Nixon, criticized public education for failing to generate graduates who “believe in the American system;”  that is, anything but unbridled support of state violence and corruption is tantamount to undermining the American way of life.  He took particular notice of Ralph Nader, a then rising star in consumer advocacy; his specifically criticized Nader’s stance that corporate executives knowingly selling lethal or dangerous products should face liability.  Powell also persisted a long tradition of complaining that bankers and businessmen are under imminent attack from a liberal-bias media and academia, despite both overwhelmingly supporting the war in its earlier years as well as the vast military industrial complex .  The liberal answer in the Trilateral Commission was a non-governmental agency staffed with internationalists from Europe, Japan, and the U.S. founded to address “the crisis of democracy” in the dramatic pressing of demands by popular movements over the past decade.  In Samuel Huntington’s report for the commission, these internationalists bemoaned the failure of the “institutions responsible for indoctrinating the young” and the “excess of democracy,” meaning the increasing desire to shape policy on the part of the “bewildered herd” as bemoaned by Walter Lippman, undermines the capacities of the responsible men to attend to the affairs of state.  This stark and rather honest expression of concern by both political parties follows closely the concerns of the masters since the nation’s founding: the political and aristocratic classes very much fear the population.  Yet despite the beating back of attitudes, Americans are more opposed to war as a general rule and often will protest before a war begins.
• A popular movement dedicated to environmentalism appeared in just the last handful of decades as the noxious effects of urbanization and industrialization on air, water, and wildlife became increasingly obvious.  Though the propagandization of environmental policy has affected polling numbers in recent years, Americans throughout the past thirty-five years have cared a good deal about the ecosystem.  Scarcely did such concern exist one hundred years ago, despite species and habitat destruction occurring with alarming regularity.  For instance, the American bison (buffalo) all but disappeared in a campaign of biological warfare against the Native Americans who critically relied upon them for food, clothing, and tools; aside from the much more serious crime of genocide, this was an egregious act against the ecosystem largely passing without comment.   Similar instances of extinctions occurred with little notice, such as that of the passenger pigeon; a public awareness in recent generations has emerged which recognizes the fragile balance of the biosphere.
• Consider the stark evolution of gay rights over the past sixty years.  Before 1950, homosexuality was illegal and diagnosable as a mental illness; the U.S. military performed ghastly experiments on gay servicemen in the early post-war years.  Gays routinely faced (and continue to face) discrimination in housing and employment, though popular movements in the wake of Stonewall have made great progress. More recent statistics on marriage equality demonstrate an uptick in support.  Transgendered persons continue to suffer incredible discrimination; their continued plight is much in need of activism
• Consider the remarkable achievement of Bernie Sanders’ campaign: deemed an outsider and no credible threat to the Democratic party, America’s youth raised him up as a leader who very likely would be president in January had the DNC not carried out obscene shenanigans to defeat him.  He received no corporate or political support; it was simply a popular movement underwriting him.  I was present for one of his political rallies; though I generally don’t attend rallies (they’re loud and generally center on gladiator politics with little or no substance), I was quite very much pleased with the articulate, historically relevant message Bernie offered: how many political debates make mention of Allende in Chile? We’ll return to this in later articles…  I was particularly moved by the outpouring of young people concerned for their planet and their people.

The pervasive theme of the achievements enumerated above should be clear; these leaps forward have never, ever been gifts from on high: they are the fruits of hard, dedicated people’s struggles.  Not military might or the butt of a gun, but concerted, organized popular movements pressing for their fair shake.  So my answer to how to enchant the disenchanted?  We begin by reminding our peoples of this forgotten history.  We explain, crucially, that we are NOT impotent, nor are we incapable of mounting a defense against institutional assault on personhood, human rights, and victims of state violence.  It can begin with whatever issue is important to you, whether it be auto workers in Michigan, water protectors in North Dakota, or even just getting a stop sign erected at a busy intersection near your house.  An activist I respect greatly, David Swanson, once wrote that activism appears not to succeed until the moment before breakthrough, as the powerful wouldn’t dare hint at your success.  It’s by no mistake that Americans feel powerless; a careful reading of the notes by the founding fathers, as well as an analysis of the early form of which the republic took, demonstrates a profound fear of the population.  Power was restricted to a quite small selection of the wealthy crowd by federal concessions to state power, the electoral college, and voting requirements.  The founders’ intentions seem to include disempowering the principal adversary of any national government, the population itself.  Learning our history and sharing this knowledge with others enhances meaningfully their impressions of their capacities to effect change.

This generation of human beings has inherited the most awesome, pivotal responsibilities of any since the origin of the species.  The critical decisions we make today will determine the fate of our children and grandchildren, to say nothing of those of us likely to hang around another fifty or sixty years.  We therefore are neither powerless nor hopelessly doomed; we can turn the tide, even in the midst of hysterical frauds like Donald Trump or career politicians such as Ted Cruz or Hillary Clinton.  We can build a sustained people’s movement which addresses the issues all humans face, be them white workers duped by Trump’s artifice, minorities, immigrants, victims of state violence and climate change, and the like.  We can organize with like-minded individuals who genuinely hunger for knowledge and for change.  We can try to reverse the damage dealt by post-truth media and politics by offering insightful, meaningful alternatives.  A great starting place is Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, a fantastic treatise on American history through the eyes of segments of the population generally ignored in the official telling; Democracy Now, founded by journalist Amy Goodman, is an alternative, 100% viewer-supported, news station recently celebrating twenty years of reporting on people, war, and peace; I’d also highly recommend the works of Noam Chomsky: most of you in computer science or cognitive science will recognize the eminent linguist, but his many books on activism and world politics are incredibly well-researched, sourced, and offer a perspective you almost won’t read anywhere else; I’d start with How the World Works, and his documentaries Manufacturing Consent and Requiem for the American Dream; many of his talks and articles are free online.

We’ll continue with more articles in the days ahead noting that though we confront the greatest existential threats in our history, all is not lost.

As mentioned earlier, Donald Trump’s electoral success relied critically on an outsider’s populist appeal to white disenchanted working class Americans, many of whom dislike him personally but found no other viable alternative.  Do they stand to gain anything?  His cabinet choices seem to belie the message, as each selection represents unprecedented wealth and privilege in the highest bureaucratic roles in the government.  Further, Trump’s allegation that his opponents, including Ted Cruz in the primaries and Hillary Clinton in the general election, are paid-for lackeys of Goldman Sachs, seems to ring rather hollow after noting that his roster of nominees and advisors comfortably represent the banking giant in Steven Mnuchin, Steve Bannon, and Anthony Scaramucci.  Will they represent Main Street?  While at IndyMac, Mnuchin presided over some 36,000 foreclosures on American families, many of whom were elderly folks duped into reverse mortgage scams; Trump’s constituent supporters parallel many of these victims demographically.  As secretary of the treasury, Mnuchin would regulate the very institutions responsible for the housing and financial crises; will he protect these same families?  Trump’s commerce secretary pick in billionaire investment banker Wilbur Ross follows a similar theme.  Will donning a red cap confer to him understanding of the plight of American working families?  Trump’s own business interests carry myriad ethical conflicts, as articulated by Robert Weissman of Public Citizen in a recent analysis.  Early signs of promoting his self-interest are public record; three days after Trump’s telephone chat with the president of Argentina, a long delayed construction project of Trump received a greenlight.

The recent publicity stunt to preserve a thousand or so American jobs (Trump’s numbers don’t jive with facts) within the Indiana-based Carrier corporation might seem to bode well, except it’s accomplished through gentle promises of tax cuts (bemoaned on the campaign trail by Trump) for Carrier’s parent corporation rather than the harsh, authoritarian threats to increase tariffs issued by Trump while campaigning; a possible consequence could be corporate threats to offshore jobs to trim their alleged tax burdens.  In fact, a frequent talking point in the quest to restore jobs for American workers is that the effective corporate tax rate in the U.S. is simply too high and thus drives out business: it turns out this is simply false.  On the critical question of restoring manufacturing jobs to the U.S., it’s worth noting that both political parties have missed golden opportunities.  Obama’s government bailout of the automotive industry in the early days of his administration was extremely costly and essentially restored ownership to the very people responsible for its demise, yet we could have easily repurposed the plants and retrained their highly skilled workers to construct high-speed rail, an badly needed advance in public transportation, remarkable mostly in its total absence from the United States.  Trump promises $1B to infrastructure; it’s unclear whether he plans to deliver.

What is clear is that his pick for education secretary in Christian supremacist Betsy Devos represents a hard right turn for public education; a long outspoken proponent of vouchers for “for-profit” schools, she’ll likely press forward with a the right’s strong desire to dismantle the public education system.  Education vouchers, conceived by economist Milton Friedman in the 1950s, have long been a carrot of “free choice” proffered by religious and business interests eager to Christianize American youth, cash in on the taxpayer, and whitewash from history and science the purported (though largely unsubstantiated) liberal atheist bias.  Yet private institutions receiving the vouchers often fail to outperform their public counterparts, and public support for vouchers is still quite low.  Will this effort reflect the hopes of Trump’s followers?

Another shot across the bow for supporters of Trump’s populism is the rush to repeal the Affordable Care Act, promised by Trump, and to privatize Medicare and Medicaid, eyed greedily by Paul Ryan as critical set pieces of the arch-conservative agenda; such measures likely will harm working class families whose incomes cannot cover medical care, many of whom voted for Trump.  Republicans and Democrats have long stymied efforts to reform our ailing semi-public/semi-private healthcare system, deferring to an obscene insurance lobby at great cost to American taxpayers; a source of international ridicule, our system leaves millions uninsured, and as much as ACA was a meager step in the right direction, Obama himself abandoned the public option without ever trying to leverage his electoral mandate, something largely unreported in the mainstream press.  With Trump’s plan to eliminate ACA, many of his supporters will suffer without an alternative, and the tepid, incremental crumbs tossed by Democrats face utter reversal.

And what of Trump’s promises to deport millions of immigrants and revamp the H1-B visa program?  As mentioned in a previous article, lost in the hysteria surrounding illegal immigration are the careful analyses demonstrating the advantages conferred to the American economy.  Frankly, I find these arguments rather hollow when one considers the ethical questions of why the immigrants come here and whether we should tear families apart in observance of the shamefully obsolete notion of citizenship.  Argued simply, why should being born five hundred feet south of the Rio Grande differ so much from being born five hundred feet north of it?  The majority of illegals in this country do what the majority of poor and working class people do: they work harder, longer hours than perhaps anyone else.  Trump’s ascent strikes fear into immigrants who genuinely want a chance at decent existence; I know some of these people personally, and rarely have I encountered anyone harder working.  Trump’s stern warnings of curtailing H1-B visas would damage the technology sector where a tremendous scarcity of talent has necessitated extending opportunities to foreigners.  Nativists organize petitions with the largely unsubstantiated claim that the program harms American workers; a more moral approach might be to recognize that uplifting outsiders enriches both the American economy and the technology sector with more talent.

The celebrations of hate groups, mentioned in the previous article, bode dangerously for people of color and other marginalized groups.  The Roberts court quickly moved to gut key provisions of the Voting Rights Act, perhaps the most significant civil rights piece of legislation in American history; Trump’s repeated, unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud persist even now as he arrogantly insists he “won the popular vote” when one subtracts votes cast by illegals.  Never in American history has the winner of the electoral college so denigrated the integrity of American elections.  If anything, voter suppression and disenfranchisement of minorities and the populations of the coastal cities should be of much greater concern.  Trump’s power to appoint justices to SCOTUS means a sharp, rightward turn for perhaps the least democratic yet tremendously powerful component of our government; the right to choose, marriage equality, and the wafer thin protections against plutocracy are now in play, and his choices will shape the court for decades to come.  Likely we’re facing a metastasis of Citizen United decisions and their ilk.

Regarding Trump’s damning foreign policy proposals, he insists our military, bigger and more expensive than all other militaries combined and a veritable sinkhole for tax revenues, needs much greater might; he also with some confusion indicated that first nuclear strike capability should be a reserved power to America, and that our nuclear arsenal desperately needs an update, following carefully the Obama doctrine of nuclear modernization .  The Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has monitored the danger of nuclear war for some time, and analysts easily articulate the threat of mutually assured nuclear devastation as one of the two greatest existential threats ever to face the human species.  A cavalier, reckless attitude toward weapons which can easily decimate chances of decent survival among the human race is quite dangerous.  Pervasive in the past 70 years is the looming threat of even trivial mistakes and accidents capable of wiping out civilization.  Somewhat understood is the Cuban missile crisis, described by historian Arthur Schlesinger as the “most dangerous moment in human history,” when a single Russian submarine commander saved the world by disobeying orders to deploy nuclear warheads.  Less known are the myriad false alerts which have imperiled civilization, including incidents in 1979, 1983 and 1995.  Permitting anyone, let alone a man marred by aspersions of narcissistic pathology and grandiosity, access to such destructive force seems suicidal.  Trump promised no more regime change in a recent statement, but like so many former president-elects, he likely won’t keep this promise; murdering hundreds of thousands of people and exiling millions more has been a small price to pay to maintain “access to key markets” and “security.”  His carrying the tradition of hysteria with respect to outsiders, Iran, and the Middle East strongly indicates a pseudo-fascist foreign policy likely to heighten global tensions and diminish further the very safety and security many of his supporters sought in him.

So what of the other looming threat facing the human species?  Donald Trump is the very first president-elect to deny the overwhelming scientific consensus of anthropogenic climate change.  Species loss currently exceeds the natural background rate by a factor of ten according to the fossil record, suggesting strongly that the changes in climate very well could precipitate another mass extinction event, the fifth and most recent of which occurred 65 million years ago when an asteroid destroyed the dominant reptilian megafauna on earth.  On a more personal note, when I grew up in a small Texas town in the 1980s, virtually no one I knew disputed the rather obvious understanding of the runaway greenhouse effect and the human contribution to the gases known to cause it.  Through a concerted propaganda campaign led by fossil fuel and energy agencies and complicity in mainstream media in offering “equal time” to the very fringe one to two percent of scientists who deny very well-understood mechanisms, American understanding of the issue is considerably more muddled than that of other western democracies and even the third world.  I suspect this is a feature of the post-truth era, something we’ll examine more closely in later posts.  In any case, warning sign after warning sign, including massive amphibian die-offs, destruction of coral reefs, rising ocean levels and temperatures, along with massive droughts caused by glacial retreat, and increased releases of methane, a greenhouse gas orders of magnitude more potent than carbon dioxide, from peat bogs in the melting Siberian tundra go virtually unnoticed in most mainstream reporting.  Trump’s insistence that no such mechanisms exist not unexpectedly coincide with lavish promises of opening up more federal lands for fracking and extraction of other fossil fuels.  Trump also supports, both in policy and in his private investments, the Dakota access pipeline, a rarely discussed construction project in North Dakota resulting in further destruction of native burial and sacred grounds; in recent months the Water Protectors, native groups and sympathizers, have clashed with violent security forces.  Unlike in other dark periods of American history, we have cellular technology which offers firsthand looks at how private security and law enforcement treat descendants of the original Americans.  Recent evidence has emerged that the Obama administration has attempted to conceal the destructive effects of fracking on water supplies, a pattern very likely to continue in what promises to be a secretive, exploitative Trump administration.  I’ve witnessed the effects of fracking myself, having had family living in regions of the U.S. where running water is undrinkable and very often not safe for contact with human flesh.

The evidence currently seems clear; for all his promises to “drain the swamp” and restore the American economy, Trump’s policies will likely harm further his chief constituencies by robbing them of medical care, enriching the masters running the very companies who caused the banking collapse and were happily a party to the neo-liberal program, further deepen his own financial interests, and at worst edge us more rapidly into a world in which decent survival isn’t possible.

So what can we do? In our final article in this series, we’ll investigate how activism works and what we can do to peacefully resist the neo-fascist kleptocracy and rising alt-right movement.

The critical global events of recent months have wrought within me the unshakable conclusion that much more than passive spectatorship is required of me to begin to address the challenges, both potentially catastrophic and historically persistent, facing the peoples of today’s earth.

For most of my adult life, I’ve monitored closely current events and carefully studied the documentarian record of American history, deeming my scant commentary and analysis peppered here and there in the online format as appropriate and even reasonable; I preferred to allot most of my effort to my studies in the sciences and my day job, and though that apportionment likely cannot change in the near term, that of my free time can.

Living in the United States and working in high technology, I’m incredibly blessed to have access to good education, limitless data, and the means of  understanding it.  These advantages are highly nontrivial and not without cost: despite the remarkably steep evolution in our society in both civility and the proliferation of wealth-generating technology over the past century, an unacceptably large fraction of people lack both franchise and voice; therefore, I can no longer deny my own voice to the downtrodden, the marginalized, the impoverished, and the victims of state violence in the ongoing struggle for justice, peace, and a chance for decent survival.  And I should add that this is neither virtue nor conceit; I think of it as an elementary moral principle that privilege and advantage confers enormous responsibility, responsibility I intend to take more seriously in the days ahead.

This blog represents a long belated endeavor on my part in realizing this objective.  I, along with co-bloggers and guests, plan to offer detailed arguments and discussion, along with my growing reading list of primary and secondary sources I’ve found quite helpful in formulating sound judgments and appropriate, if stern, conclusions; born out of anecdotal discussions with hundreds of working class people of varying demographics, I’ve discovered a uniformly profound hunger for knowledge and understanding largely missing from mainstream and even articulate opinion.  With these articles, I hope to offer a host of factual refutations to common myths about poverty, war, wealth, and the like to satiate that hunger.  As the name of the blog suggests, I believe we can effect change most successfully by acquainting ourselves and others with both the population and power; I hope you the reader will join me in these monumental tasks of demonstrating solidarity with victims, empowering a disenchanted working class, elevating a marginalized underclass, and proving through historical precedent our capacity to discover within ourselves strength, compassion, and justice.