The thug in the White House

We have known since the 2016 campaign he approves of the third degree, police brutality, torture, and war crimes like murdering the families of terrorists.

His voters like him because they share those attitudes.

Trump issued direct order to halt disciplining of Navy Seal Edward Gallagher

Hitler's Nazis had a mass following. The Italian Fascists were a mass party.

Brutality was part of their appeal, and is still essential to the appeal of modern authoritarians and so-called "populists" in America, Europe, and around the world.

Lindsey Graham and others of the fucking bastard party are now talking about the need to cut, if not to outright privatize, Social Security and to cut Medicare benefits so money gathered by the relevant dedicated taxes can be diverted to deal with the shortfall in general tax revenues created by the Republican wet dream tax cuts so long wanted by the plutes and so well fronted by that pal of the common man, the forgotten man, Bozo the Liar, the Mini-Mussolini in the White House.

Plutes gonna plute.

An entire party whose central task is to fuck over everybody who isn't really, really rich, on behalf of those who are.

And they are delighted to find a front as effective as Trump.

They are like German and Italian plutes and capitalist sympathizers between the wars happy to find so effective a bulwark against the dreaded socialists and communists.

Warren and Sanders are, on this matter of excessive individual wealth, right, just as both Roosevelts were.

And I could live with a cap on individual private wealth.

Might be a good idea, like trust busting.

Too much individual wealth is also too much market power as well as too much political power.

And that's why Obamacare for all is better than Medicare for all.

Not a good idea for just one insurer to be effectively the only customer of all medical providers in the country, and that one under the direct, immediate, and constant control of bourgeois politicians of only weak, unreliable, minority, and limited loyalty to the masses.

Still, he's wrong to urge actual socialism as better than capitalism and she's right to urge what's needed is capitalism run by progressives for the social good.

All the same, a lot more Americans need to learn that Ayn Rand, Robert Nozick, and libertarian ideology are just bullshit really handy for the plutes.

They need to stop thinking, in effect, that the rich have every right to screw them to the wall.

Marx was certainly right that the moral and political convictions of the many are to far too great an extent a duperie, a false consciousness, an ideological smokescreen that makes the 90% - or more like 99.99% - their own class enemies.

But this is not.

There is no reason for the 90% to accept any version of capitalism that doesn't work as well as possible for them.

Even such a capitalism will work just swell for the remaining 10%, don't you worry about that.

Not as much as they want, but then there is no limit to what they want.

It goes way, way beyond anything remotely like rational self-interest, except on the most ludicrous construals of what is or might be rational.

Homo homini lupus, not because of need, but because of human nature.

The idea that there is no human nature, that "socialist man" is a social creature so much superior to "capitalist man", is part of the bullshit the left, unwilling to face the horrid truth, have sold themselves.

That it's all nurture, the stuff that matters, and none of it nature.