Saturday, June 06, 2020

1930s Post-Scarcity Dreams: Remembering the Technocracy Movement

Benjamin Abbott Mar 1, 2013 Ethical Technology



https://ieet.org/index.php/IEET2/more/abbott20130301



For a brief moment in the 1933, a radical solution to the Great Depression seized public attention across the United States. Claiming the mantle of scientific authority and well-equipped with facts and figures, Technocracy condemned the economic status quo – the price system – as hopelessly antiquated in an age of abundant energy. Technocrats argued the era of meaningful scarcity had ended.

The movement proposed a technician-run economy of equally distributed prosperity as the only way to prevent ecological and social collapse in the North American continent. In the context of financial meltdown and widespread destitution coupled with overproduction, the country's population proved receptive to the possibility of switching to economic system firmly grounded in material reality and organized by engineers' logic of instrumental rationality.

That transition never happened, of course; the price system weathered that crisis and others that followed. Technocracy fell back into obscurity as suddenly as it rose to prominence. Many historians treat the movement as a curiosity worthy only of ridicule – and not without reason. I've scant interest in promoting Technocracy as such and less still in apologizing for movement figurehead and would-be supreme leader Howard Scott.

However, I consider Technocracy's critique of capitalism and future vision valuable in that comes from an engineering perspective. Through insistent focus on the physical and technical, Technocracy turns on its head economists' claims about the efficiency of capitalism and effectively characterizes the price system overwhelmingly wasteful. Despite their myopia and enthusiastic embrace of numerous forms of oppression, Scott and company's analysis provides insight into the profound contradictions of the industrial world system and the project of cultivating better future.


Here in the twenty-first century, eighty years past the zenith of the Technocracy movement's notoriety, the contrast between actually existing production and human wants stands out as even more absurd. There's so much manufactured stuff around that many affluent folks don't know what to do with it. Few things last; designs routinely assume or ensure rapid obsolescence.

Dumpsters swell and spill over; landfills sprawl across acres and acres. In the Pacific Ocean, trash coalesces into patch of arguably continental proportions. Waste, as miserably processed as vast majority of it is, constitutes as resource for scavengers. Bottle, can, and scrap metal collection forms an important income for impoverished urban residents. I personally survive primarily from food deemed unsellable and thus donated. I know comrades who live off the food people leave on their plates at restaurants when traveling. Between gift markets and friends, I can hardly remember the last time I paid for clothing.

The scavenger economy marginals like me participate in – constrained as it is by gates, locks, and zealous garbage defenders – only hints at the staggering excesses of capitalism. Let's begin with a big-picture view of basic necessities and comforts. First, nutrition. A recent report by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers concludes that a third to half of all food produced simply spoils. Next, shelter. In in the United States, approximately twenty-four houses go completely empty for each houseless person. So much more residential space goes unused at the micro level; the other bedroom in the apartment where I stay has been unoccupied for the better part of a month while I search for someone to fill it.

What about transportation? As Bianca Mugyenyi and Yves Engler convincingly show, U.S. car culture approaches optimization's antithesis. You’ve got to work at it to devise a system that squandered more resources than multiton hunks of metal that commonly carry only a single person and spend 95% of time idly taking up space.
Members of the Technocracy movement examined similar dynamics from their time and concluded that it could and had to be done better. Along with Thorstein Veblen's 1921 The Engineers and the Price System, the Technical Alliance's studies of industrial waste appear in any account of the Technocracy movement's origins. The Technical Alliance – a group that included both Scott and Veblen during its 1920-1921 existence – prepared reports from clients such as the Railroad Brotherhood and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Stuart Chase used his research with Technical Alliance as the foundation for his 1925 book The Tragedy of Waste. From a system-design standpoint, capitalist production and distribution looks like an awful, ugly mess.

I find this approach of comparison with the physically possible ideal an illuminating and provocative heuristic device. I heartily recommend contemplating what you want whether it’s possible or not as technique of both social critique and personal understanding, but the materialist-empiricist epistemology employed by the Technocracy movement adds a grounding element to this utopian exercise. If wielded prudently, Technocracy’s extreme reduction of human beings to machines with energy inputs and outputs constitutes a fruitful thought experiment. As sketched above, the ideal here obliterates assertions of capitalism’s efficiency. At best proponents can retreat to the stance that capitalism least bad among a lineup of stinkers.

While Scott insisted on distinguishing Technocracy and the technical mindset he idolized from Leftist revolutionary ideology, Veblen took a less rigid view and happily channeled Marxism in his notorious call for “a soviet of engineers and technicians.” Technocracy promised an old socialist, communist, and anarchist objective: universal comfort with minimal toil. Following Henry Elsner, Jr., I interpret the Technocracy – especially Technocracy, Inc. under Scott’s domination – as an authoritarian Left movement not as far removed from the Marxist spectrum as Scott repeatedly proclaimed. Dreams of egalitarian automation animated Leftists of Elsner’s era; I’m especially fond of socialist-feminist Shulamith Firestone’s cybernetic communism and Valerie Solanas’s plan for complete automation. Today, apart from Technocracy Inc. itself and explicit descendants such as Network of European Technocrats, Technocracy’s influence seems strongest in the Zeitgeist Movement and associated Venus Project.

In relation to the post-scarcity discourse prevalent within transhumanist and Singularitarian circles, remembering the Technocracy movement indicates that we need not wait for nanofactories and artificial general intelligence to terminate human want. The technical ability to create abundance of the basics has been around since the dawn of the twentieth century if not much earlier. Building a post-scarcity society requires political struggle and isn’t likely to happen on its own. There’s no guarantee that increasingly potent productive technology will lead to distributed plenty. As the current intellectual property rights regime demonstrates, governments can manufacture scarcity through coercion.

I conclude with a passage from the soul-searching debate within the Continental Committee on Technocracy that resulted from the split with Scott. The sentiment expressed applies as well to transhumanism and the Singularity movement in my estimation:
Some of us contended that behind the fad, the fantastic figures, and the pseudo-scientific jargon, was a sound idea. And that civilization itself might very well depend on getting this fundamental idea accepted, on proving to the people that the days of material scarcity would be over as soon as they willed it (Continental Committee on Technocracy, Bulletin No. 13, August 1, 1934).

Further Reading:

Akin, William E. Technocracy and the American Dream: The Technocrat Movement, 1900-1941. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977.

Elsner, Jr., Henry. The Technocrats: Prophets of Automation. Syracuse: University of Syracuse Press, 1967.

Segal, Howard P. Technological Utopianism in American Culture. Syracuse: University of Syracuse Press, 2005.

Stabile, Don R. “Veblen and the Political Economy of Technocracy: The Herald of Technological Revolution Developed an Ideology of 'Scientific' Collectivism.” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 46:1 (1987), 35-48.
The American Utopia 
Eduard Batalov
Chapter II
American Utopia in the 19th and the First Half of the 20th Centuries

5. The Technocratic Utopia
A new social utopia type began to take shape in the United States in the 1930s. This was the so‑called techno­ [102/103] cratic utopia, which subsequently played an important part in American culture and political thought.
It reflected those changes in America's social consciousness and interpretation of social ideals which had affected first and foremost, part of the industrial bourgeoisie and experts in science and technology and had been caused, on the one hand, by rapid advances in science and technology and the social change they produced and, on the other, by the crisis of laissez‑faire liberalism, the transition from free competition capitalism to monopoly capitalism, and the development of the working‑class movement.
Aimed at a radical transformation of the bourgeois‑democratic institutions of government, which it saw as the only way to save and consolidate capitalism, the technocratic utopia broke with the ideals (and even with the rhetoric) of democratic self‑government and proclaimed the ideal of a centralized society built according to the principles of rationality and efficiency. In that world, all life of society, all institutions, relations and values are determined by positivistically interpreted laws of science (natural science) and technology. The principles which operate in the limited sphere of human activity are extended—fully in the spirit of scientific and technological fetishism—to all spheres of activity, ousting and replacing social laws and thus appearing universal. Man is subordinate to machine; he loses his identity and becomes an easily replaceable cog in a giant bureaucracy which is built with the help of modern science and technology and according to their principles.
The second salient feature of the technocratic utopia—and a logical consequence of the approach described above—is that society is ruled by the masters of technology and by scientists (this is what makes it possible to call this type of utopia "technocratic"). The result is a latter‑day version of a utopian society headed by a wise ruler; the only difference is that he is a technocrat, not a humanitarian philosopher.
Despite its break with the democratic tradition of the American utopia and social consciousness, the technocratic utopia attracted many Americans by its promises. In the words of Robert Walker, "technocracy . . . appealed to a broad stripe in the national character by arguing that the country should become more—rather than less‑produc [103/104] tive and at the same time more efficient." [1] V. L. Parrington, Jr. agrees but adds that the technocratic utopia attracted Americans not only by promises of abundance but also by images of a technological world so dear to the American's heart. "This willingness to accept the promise of plenty," he notes, "this faith in the fruits of the machine, is typical of the American dream. For a hundred years and more we have beguiled ourselves with visions of a utopia which was a sort of mechanical heaven where the goods coming off the conveyor belts were always bigger and better and more functional. The Technocrats capitalized on this faith with their romantic and frequently exaggerated promises." [2]
The technocratic utopian projects most popular in the United States of the 1930s were those developed by a group of engineers, economists and architects led by Howard Scott. In late 1931 and early 1932 a group of experts under Howard Scott studied the relationship between technological development and the economy. In April 1932 the Energy Survey of North America was created on the basis of that group. Members of the Survey were soon called "technocrats". [3] Subsequently, the term "technocracy" acquired a broader, more general meaning and was no longer associated directly with Scott's group.
As could be expected, the technocrats disclaimed both the utopian nature of their projects and their involvement in the utopian tradition. Berating "utopians and socialists" for basing their constructs on "a priori objectives", "eventual desired human goals", "value orientations" and the like, they did point to the actual substantive features of utopianism. This, however, did not prevent the technocrats themselves from claiming to have found the perfect solution to the problems which had defied authors of projects based on "moral or philosophical constructs", and from advancing a typically utopian model of a "rationally harmonized society". "Between 1933 and 1936 the Scottians, who defined technocracy as a form of social organization, drafted an idealized social system based on their assump
1  The Reform Spirit in America, p. 216.
2  V. L. Parrington, Jr., op. cit., p. 203.
3  Henry Elsner, Jr., The Technocrats, Prophets of Automation, Syracuse University Press, 1967, pp. 1‑2.
[104/105]
tions about the nature of modern science and society. They could not imagine anyone choosing the austerity of a nonindustrial world; and, they reasoned, having elected to partake of the material benefits of a high‑energy civilization, man would have to organize himself around its immutable laws and principles in a way that would maximize efficiency and harmony. Following this reasoning, their thinking led them to construct mentally the most rigorously mechanical society Yankee ingenuity had yet devised." [1]
The technocratic utopia is shot through with the spirit of criticism of American society—its politics, economy and culture. But this criticism is very unlike that offered by romantic or socialist utopians. For all the distinctions that separated them, those utopians criticized society for restrictions on freedom and democracy, suppression of individuality, and absence of the true equality of opportunity. Making references to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, they suggested blueprints for a more humane, free, egalitarian and democratic society because, they held, democracy and freedom were indispensable for abundance, prosperity, personal security and meaningful recreation.
The utopian technocrats abandon that type of critical tradition; in their opinion, the root of all evil is not a lack or shortage of democracy but the lack of harmony born of the disbalance between the logic of efficiency and the logic of social relations in conditions of bourgeois democracy. To prevent social chaos and save the nation, it is indispensable to establish harmony between the social structure and the imperatives of science and technology, or, to be more precise, to subordinate the former to the latter. But democracy, the technocrat maintains, is essentially incapable of coping with the task. Decisions have always been and will always be taken by a minority; this is perfectly reasonable, and the important thing is for this minority to be competent and not to engage in pointless games of politics while taking decisions on important matters, not to stage the usual cheap
1  William E. Akin, Technocracy and the American Dream. The Technocrat Movement, 1900‑1941, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1977, p. 131.
[105/106]
political shows.
Like the romantic utopian, the technocrat would like to take power out of the hands of politicians and to build a depoliticized society. However, unlike the romanticist who sees the meaning of depoliticization in investing each individual with power and thus eliminating centralized government, the technocrat would like to replace political institutions with organizations of scientific and technological experts and hand power over to a technocratic elite.
The Scottian technocrats pictured a powerful social hierarchy which Scott defined as the "technate", a single continent‑wide corporate structure (Scott held that it should include, aside from the United States, Canada, Mexico and Central America) in which social and production divisions coincided. These "functional divisions" were to comprise industry, services, education, health care, etc. They would also include "certain social and quasi‑political sequences to handle research, foreign relations, armed forces and 'social control'." [1]
In Scott's view, the technate was to be a pyramid, with functional divisions at its base, each represented by a director and all directors making up a Continental Control Board which would be responsible for all important decisions bearing on the functioning of the social mechanism as a whole; at the top of the pyramid there would be a Continental Director elected by the members of the Board and responsible for the normal operation of the technate. As a result, instead of an ineffective democracy with its three branches of power and its mechanisms of control and regulation, America would be blessed with an efficient Director relying on a narrow group of top experts.
The technocrats did not deny that their system was not only undemocratic but also inhumane in the sense in which humanism and humanitarianism had been interpreted heretofor. But they held that humanism, freedom and democracy were worthless in a technological civilization since they were not directly indispensable for rationality and efficiency. Why should man, merely a human animal composed of atoms, they argued, need freedom and democracy? Man is "an engine taking potential energy . . . and con
1  Ibid., p. 138.
[106/107]
verting [it] into heat, work, and body tissue", [1] while freedom and democracy introduce anarchy and arbitrariness into a rational system. They claimed that while the technate, ruled by engineers and scientists, would mean a dictatorship, it would be a dictatorship not of an individual but of science; people could expect only good from it, for this dictatorship would be totally objective and free of any preferences or mistakes.
The technocrats proposed that the technate include a special division dealing with social control to ensure that "human relations be subordinated to efficiency". The institutions regulating human relations on the basis of a subjective approach and "passion", like the "judgment by the twelve good men" were to be abolished; the matters they dealt with were to be decided "by the most impersonal and scientific methods available". [2]
The technocrats also intended to radically restructure the economy in order to abolish pursuit of profit as the goal of production and change the system of pricing and distribution of material goods. "The cost of any particular commodity," Howard Scott wrote, "would be determined entirely by the energy consumed in the process of its production and delivery to the point of consumption." [3] The plan was to abolish money, replacing it with "energy certificates" each state‑employed worker under the "energy contract" would receive. "Such a period of service should not exceed four hours per day, four consecutive days at a shift, and 165 days per year. For a period of about twenty years, from the age of twenty‑five to forty‑five, this period of service would cover the fulfillment of the energy contract.” [4] The technocrats promised to involve all able‑bodied people in useful work and thus eliminate unemployment; to ensure equal profits for all, including the technocracy which, Scott assured, would not enjoy any material privileges; and to balance the ratio of production, thus creating a stable and crisis‑free economy.
1  Technocracy Study Course, N. Y. Technocracy, Inc., 1934, pp. 105, 117. Quoted in: W. E. Akin, Technocracy and the American Dream, p. 134.
2  Ibid., p. 141.
3  Passport to Utopia. . ., p. 235.
4  Ibid., pp. 234‑35.
[107/108]
Essentially, economic and social stability, a new ideal for the American Utopia, was the prime objective of the technocratic utopians. Besides, they were becoming increasingly convinced that the level of socioeconomic stability was inversely proportionate to the level of political activity and directly dependent on the degree of centralization of government. It was not surprising that the technocrats regarded the army as the most efficient and rational organization and, with the advent of World War II, they called for a nationwide labor conscription.
The concrete forms of the technocratic utopia which it assumed originally in the 1930s proved to be short‑lived, but as a distinct type, this utopia took firm root in the mainstream of the American socioutopian tradition.
Ideologically and theoretically, Scott and his colleagues in "Technocracy, Inc." did not invent the technocratic utopia. Its formation was to a high extent influenced by Thorstein Veblen's ideas about rational organization as the substantive basis of social forms capable of ensuring effective functioning of capitalist society against the background of growing social tensions on the global, regional or local scale. Curbing the unruly market and social elements, generally regulating social processes to make them rational and effective, nominating "engineers" to rule society—all these ideas had been formulated, in one form or another, in Veblen's book The Engineers and the Price System. Scott's plan was merely an ambitious attempt to project Veblen's ideas onto a specific social situation and on this foundation to build an alternative (given the utopian pluralism of the 1930s) utopia. This utopia was crude, simplistic and theoretically artless (the fate of almost all initial forms of new utopian types). But as a type, it was a sign of the times. The technocratic utopia reflected not only the crisis of the traditional political and economic forms brought on by the changes in the structure and functions of the state and the market which became clear in the mid‑1930s. It also reflected the disintegration of the traditional constructs of consciousness which was manifested in the crisis of the liberal ideology and the consequent rift among liberals.
The idea of a direct correlation between bourgeois democracy and the efficiency of the institutions it generated and sanctified, including economic institutions, that matu [108/109] red in the thinking of the third estate and forced its way into the political science and political practice of the 17th‑19th‑century bourgeois revolutions, that idea emerged as one of the fundamental ideological precepts of 19th‑century liberalism. The sociopolitical practice of "mass" society, that is, bourgeois society at the time of imperialism, showed that in the new conditions traditional democracy was no longer capable of ensuring the former efficiency of social institutions.
One of the most important lessons of the technocratic utopia was perhaps the fact that it demonstrated not only the volatile and unstable nature of the links between democracy and efficiency, but also the readiness of many Americans to sacrifice, in certain conditions, the traditional democratic values to the promises of "abundance", "rationality", "efficiency" and "order". On this scale, this was a new development in social consciousness; and it prompted critical remarks from some in the Left to the effect a fascist‑type dictatorship could be established in the United States.
From the mid‑1930s to the mid‑1960s the technocratic utopia consolidated its positions in American culture; naturally, this influenced the status and functions of this utopia in the national perceptions. But, having consolidated its positions, this utopia was never to absorb, let alone eliminate, other types of utopia. On the contrary, the 1960s proved that each new stage in the development of technocratic consciousness triggered a "democratic", romantic or socialist reaction (and this was reflected in the sphere of utopia), simultaneously generating social despair and pessimism expressed in negative utopia and antiutopia.

SOURCE: Batalov, Eduard. The American Utopia, translated from the Russian by Dmitry Belyavsky (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1985), Chapter II, American Utopia in the 19th and the First Half of the 20th Centuries, section 5, pp. 102-109.

http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/batalov/AU2-5.html



Social Scientist. v 7, no. 84 (July 1979) p. 14.
14 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
a most succinct way Eduard Batalov points out that they include "the rejection of the working class of the advanced capitalist countries as the main driving force of the modern revolutionary process; a critical approach to Marxist-Leninist parties as 'integrated9 in the system of state monopoly capitalism and thus 'bereft5 of their former revolutionary functions; concentration on the Third World as the sphere in which a 'genuinely socialist society" is supposedly growing up; criticism of the Marxist-Leninist theory of revolution and attempts to create an 'up-to-date' revolutionary action based on a release of unconscious forces and aimed at shaping a new culture and a 'new man5; refusal to make use of the democratic institutions of bourgeois society as a mechanism of repression and manipulation, and the boosting of utopianism as a principle of revolutionary�critical action.551

Perspective on Historical Change

All these features of the New Left movement can be discerned in the theoretical construction of Marcuse. His perspective on them can be fully grasped in the light of his orientation to history which is different from that of Marxism. Marcuse proceeds from the standpoint that capitalism and communism are varieties of a single industrial society, a standpoint similar in many respects to the one spelled out by Raymond Aron in his The Industrial Society (1967). Walt W Rostow in his The Stage of Economic Growth (1960), also subscribes to the view of the convergence of the capitalist and the communist systems. Marcuse points out that both the systems are marked by some common features: want of indivi" duation that stems from an excessive emphasis on technical efficieny, dehumanization of the individual, containment of dissent and protest, introjection of values, etc. He writes: "The most advanced areas of industrial society exhibit throughout these two features: a trend towards consummation of technical rationality and intensive efforts to contain this trend with the established institutions. Here is the internal contradiction of this civilization:

the irrational element of its rationality.552

Marcuse launches his attack on the corporate capitalism of the US and communism of the USSR on the basis of the theory of convergence (it may be noted that the main target of his attack is the former). In their defence, Russian scholars contend that the technological similarities between the two systems are of a temporary nature at a particular stage of economic growth. Moreover, what the theory of convergence misses is the difference in value systems. "As the socialist countries marching towards com-



by D Nelson - ‎1978 - ‎
Henry ElsnerJr.'s, The Technocrats,. Prophets of Automation (1967) is the most comprehensive treatment; it traces the movement from its origins to the 1960s.

CANADIAN STUDY MASTERS DEGREE SFU
COVERS CANADIAN TECHNOCRACY AS WELL AS US
VANCOUVER HAD A BUILDING AND LARGE TECHONCRACY
FOLLOWING IN THE CITY PRE WAR AND POST WAR.

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Trump Has Gone Full Authoritarian
By Jonathan Chait

Art: Stanley Whitney and Lisson Gallery

Alittle more than a year ago, President Trump made one of the most terrifying and prophetic statements of his presidency. “You know, the left plays a tougher game; it’s very funny. I actually think that the people on the right are tougher, but they don’t play it tougher,” he told Breitbart. “I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump. I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough — until they go to a certain point and then it would be very bad, very bad.”

There are two remarkable things about this statement. One is Trump’s casual conflation of the state security forces (police, military) with extremely unofficial political activists (“Bikers for Trump”). In his mind, they all blur together as a kind of private militia. The second is his view of violence as an extension of politics. The context of his statement was congressional oversight of his administration. The passage immediately following his threat to unleash bloodshed was “But the left plays it cuter and tougher. Like with all the nonsense that they do in Congress … you know, they do things that are nasty.” His mind moves seamlessly between peaceful, constitutional functions and violent repression, observing no demarcation.

Trump may not have been revealing a plan, exactly, but he was certainly revealing a general intention. The political conflict he has never stopped stoking would reach “a certain point.” Trump did not know what it would be. It turned out to be national demonstrations over the police murder of George Floyd and the culture of racism that allowed it, which created an atmosphere that Trump took as a personal humiliation. And now observe his prediction coming true: The response is very, very bad.

Trump’s view of the police as the armed wing of the MAGA movement is reasonably well founded. A 2017 Pew survey asked if this country “needs to continue making changes to give blacks equal rights with whites.” While 54 percent of white people agreed, only 6 percent of white police officers did. Investigations by government agencies and reporters have found deep links between networks of white police officers and anti-Islamist, pro-Confederate, or openly white-supremacist groups.

Trump has excited and cultivated the white-supremacist far right in ways no previous Republican president dared, and he has nurtured the pervasive sense of violent police impunity now on display in the streets. After the Obama administration built policies to repair the trust between police and urban communities, Trump tore them down contemptuously, restoring the practice of transferring used military equipment to police departments, which Obama had halted, and restricting the consent decrees Obama’s Department of Justice had signed with more than a dozen police departments. Appearing at a Trump rally this past fall, Minneapolis police-union president Bob Kroll gloated, “The first thing President Trump did when he took office was turn that around, got rid of the Holder–Loretta Lynch regime, and decided to start taking — letting the cops do their job, put the handcuffs on the criminals instead of us.”Trump is eager to incite disorder in the streets and defiance of the law on his own behalf.

The result of Trump’s unwinding of police reform was predictable. So too was the police response to the protests. The irony of meeting protests against police brutality with more brutality seems to be lost on the cops. And while many have shown restraint, empathy, and compassion, it is they, not the violent ones, who seem to be exceptions. The good apples have been overwhelmed by cops applying gratuitous force to peaceful demonstrators and, with suspicious frequency, journalists — or, to use the Trumpian lingo, “enemies of the people.”

Trump has used the same rationale to promote both the general policy of unshackling the police and the specific tactic of roughing up protesters: The law must be strictly enforced. Attorney General William Barr has denounced “district attorneys that style themselves as ‘social justice’ reformers, who spend their time undercutting the police.” Trump has seized upon the violence and looting that has sprung up around the protests to legitimize a broader crackdown.

There is no justification for instigating violence or destroying people’s neighborhoods, but Trump has not exactly devoted his life to the principle of strict legal compliance. Put aside his long history of criminal behavior and associations that alone would forfeit any moral standing he might have. (Trump has personally stolen millions and millions of dollars through what the New York Times described as “outright fraud,” in addition to numerous schemes that have been the subject of litigation, making him a far bigger thief than any looter.) Trump is eager to incite disorder in the streets and defiance of the law on his own behalf.

Just a little over a month ago, in Michigan, armed militias stormed the state capitol in a quasi-insurrection against public-health regulations, menacing the legislature into canceling its session. In the face of this blatant assault on law and order, Trump lectured the state’s governor to placate their demands. “The Governor of Michigan should give a little, and put out the fire. These are very good people, but they are angry,” he tweeted. “See them, talk to them, make a deal.” The only deal Trump wants to offer anti-cop protesters is a faceful of pavement.

Trump’s critics often psychoanalyze him from afar as an instinctive authoritarian incapable of grasping any relations except as a zero-sum contest of domination. The protests have brought that tendency to the surface like a scripted crescendo to his presidency. In a phone call with governors, Trump berated them as “weak” and promised, “We will activate Bill Barr and activate him very strongly,” signaling the return of a key accomplice in Trump’s past scandals. He even bellowed, “You have to dominate,” as if he had just stumbled onto his psychiatric diagnosis and was reading it aloud.

Even side character Vladimir Putin returned for an encore. Immediately before the call with governors, Trump spoke with the Russian president. After getting off the line, Trump told the governors that Minneapolis’s feeble response to the protest was “a laughingstock all over the world.” Overseas democracies have expressed sympathy for the protesters and horror at their treatment by police. But those are not the parts of the world whose perspective on handling anti-regime protests Trump values.

One of the features of authoritarian and quasi-authoritarian states is the use of security forces as regime tools. Anti-regime protests are curtailed, undermined, and, should they grow too large and threatening, violently suppressed. Pro-regime protests receive protection. Trump has harbored a belief all along that once he had gained control of the presidency, its security apparatus would be put at his disposal.

The forceful clearing out of a peaceful protest from Lafayette Park demonstrated the methods Trump has long had in mind. The operation was ordered by Barr, whose presence on the scene, reviewing the troops before battle, was its most chilling visual detail. Barr has spent years prosecuting a culture war as a legal war and was now, following the natural progression, waging a literal one. And just as Trump and Barr have bent the rules to protect Trump’s allies, they were bending them the other way to punish his enemies, evicting protesters well in advance of a city curfew.

Suppose this happens in November: the protests centered on a contested election, one whose results have been called into question by a second wave of the coronavirus, clunky ballot counting, or hacked voting equipment. And what if Trump and Barr again seize on sporadic acts of vandalism and violence to depict anti-Trump demonstrators as endemically criminal?

Events have gotten “to a certain point,” as Trump put it, compelling him to bring in the tough people. The unanswered question is, What points might lie beyond?

*This article appears in the June 8, 2020, issue of New York Magazine. 




FAUX NEWS PHUCK UP

Fox Compares Stock Market Performance After Cases Of Violence Against Black Men



Screengrab / @Acyn / Twitter
JakeThomas

A Fox News graph compared how the stock market performed after historic cases of violence against black men.
Fox News’ Susan Li ran down a list of stock market performances in the wake of high-profile cases of police brutality and violence against black men over the past several decades, striking a particularly insensitive tone as much of the country remains outraged by George Floyd’s death.
Appearing on Fox News' Special Report with Bret Baier on Friday, Media Matters reports that Li said:
Stock markets hitting new highs despite the nationwide protests this week. Historically, there has been a disconnect between what investors focus on and what happens across the rest of the country, for instance in 1968, the week after the tragedy of Martin Luther King, the S&P 500 rose over 2%. Also up the week after Rodney King ruling and Wall Street trading on the reopening instead this year in 2020.
The graphic displayed during the segment showed the S&P’s percentage change one week following each tragic incident, which also included the deaths of Michael Brown and George Floyd.
Li then rolled right into comments on the latest jobs report and economists’ rosier-than-expected view of America’s recovery amid the pandemic.

THIS STORY USES THE FOX GRAPHIC CLEANED UP FOR BROADCAST
IT HAS REMOVED THE BAR SAYING; 
"STOCKS SOAR, DOW SURGES AFTER PROMISING JOBS REPORT"
ONLY MAKING IT WORSE

Fox News Apologizes for Graphic Showing Stock Market Reactions to Violence Against Black Men

NOSEDIVE

Fox News

WTF  

Buffalo Mayor: Hospitalized 75-Year-Old Protester Was a ‘Major Instigator’ of Violence

‘AGITATOR’

GOOD TO KNOW BLACK OR WHITE THE STATE 
IS THE STATE DEFENDING ITS DEFENDERS

Maxwell Tani

Media Reporter

Updated Jun. 06, 2020 



Lindsay DeDario/Reuters
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Buffalo’s mayor defended the police officers charged with second-degree assault for violent pushing a 75-year-old protester in video that has gone viral and sparked global outrage. In a press conference on Friday, Byron Brown said he was told that longtime peace activist Martin Gugino, who is in the hospital following the push, was a “key and major instigator” of activities such as vandalism and looting, and “was asked to leave numerous times” before the shove. “That individual was an agitator,” the mayor said. “He was trying to spark up a crowd of people.”

Brown, who had earlier said he was “deeply disturbed” by the video, said on Friday he was not calling for the cops to be fired. “There were conflicts between protesters, there was a danger of fights breaking out between protesters, and the police felt it was very important to clear that scene for the safety of protesters,” he said. But Erie County District Attorney John Flynn said on Saturday that the officers could have arrested Gugino if he was committing a crime. “You arrest him. You don’t take a baton and shove hi


THE OCCUPATION OF THE LINCOLN MEMORIAL


   



UNIDENTIFIED MILITARY UNIT PROBABLY 
FEDERAL PRISON RIOT SQUADS DEFEND 
LINCOLN  MEMORIAL FROM GRAFFITI 

PROTECTING THE PEOPLES BUILDINGS
FROM THE PEOPLE AND THEIR CONSTITUTIONAL 
RIGHT TO PROTEST




       

 "WHO ARE THOSE GUYS" 

























PROTECTING THE PRIVATE PROPERTY
OF TRUMP THE TYRANT






THESE GUYS ARE AFRAID OF A BOTTLE OF WATER
THIS LITTLE BOTTLE OF WATER 

THREATENED THIS RIOT SQUAD

SO THEY CHARGED PEACEFUL 
PROTESTERS 

YOU JUST HATE TO GET ALL 
DRESSED UP AND NOT BE 
ABLE USE YOUR TOYS