Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too? by 6ixStringJack

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too?

POSTED BY: 6IXSTRINGJACK
UPDATED: Saturday, May 30, 2026 12:14
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Friday, May 29, 2026 8:57 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Hegseth had just given the military an "open invitation to commit war crimes."

"No matter what, President [Donald] Trump and I will have your back when tough decisions are made," Hegseth said during his speech. "Especially decisions made in a split second in the heat of battle. No matter what. No matter if it's the right decision or the wrong decision. If it's made by the right person or the wrong person. For the right reasons or the wrong reasons. Your hands are untied. No matter what, we will have your back."

Former Army Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling voiced alarm over Pete Hegseth’s assurance that he and President Trump would support troops’ split-second battlefield decisions ‘no matter what.’ Speaking on the 'Bulwark Takes' podcast, Hertling said such remarks could be interpreted as disregarding legal implications and highlighted past cases where individuals accused of killing civilians were released. He warned that this approach would undermine discipline within the ranks and increase national security risks.

"And we've seen that in a couple of situations so far in this administration, where ... war criminals, people who murdered civilians, were allowed to go free and were paroled."

https://www.rawstory.com/pete-hegseth-2676964223/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Why aren't you in prison for murdering all those Vietnamese women and children?

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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Friday, May 29, 2026 9:34 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

A House Divided Against Itself Cannot Stand

By John Ambrosio | Friday, May 29, 2026 4:00AM

https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2026/05/a-house-divided-against-
itself-cannot-stand.html

On June 16, 1858 in his House Divided speech, Abraham Lincoln declared that the government “could not endure permanently as half slave and half free” and would eventually become “all one thing or all the other.” Addressing the Illinois Republican State Convention, he argued that the deep and intensifying division over slavery threatened to destroy the Union.

While the historical circumstances and issues are different today, the house is once again divided against itself. The nation is at a critical crossroads and faces a similar dilemma: can the social, cultural, and political chasm that emerged between Red and Blue America be repaired? Can the Union be saved or will the country continue to separate politically and ideologically, if not geographically, into two sharply opposed societies whose core values, beliefs, and identities are incommensurate and irreconcilable? Is the U.S. entering a prolonged period of social upheaval and political conflict, a kind of cold civil war, between and within Red and Blue states that leaves the country increasingly fragmented and politically dysfunctional?

While many sources contributed to this division, including the rise of neoliberalism and extreme income and wealth inequality, social media algorithms that produce incendiary content designed to addict users, and a far-right media ecosystem that disseminates socially corrosive and divisive propaganda, the primary issue driving national politics in the U.S. today is demographic: the racial restructuring of U.S. society, the browning of America.

This process began with the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which ended the national origins quota system established by the Immigration Act of 1924 that significantly reduced immigration and heavily favored immigrants from Northern and Western Europe to ensure the continued dominance of the white majority.

In the last few decades, Republican Party politics has largely been aimed at cutting taxes for the wealthy and large corporations and reversing this demographic trend, at re-establishing racial and gender hierarchies, in rolling back the civil rights gains of Black Americans and other minorities over the past half century. In addition to an agenda of deregulation and privatization, the party has sought to eliminate the social progress achieved by New Deal and Great Society programs and restore the racial, gender, and class relations of an idealized and fictionalized past.

To achieve this, Trump and his MAGA allies have exploited ambiguous legislation and anti-majoritarian features of the U.S. Constitution. The demographic and geographic distribution of the electorate gives the Republican Party a structural advantage because seats in the U.S. Senate are apportioned equally among the states, regardless of population. In this way, smaller and less populated states, which are typically more rural and conservative, are disproportionately represented. This advantage is then transferred to presidential elections through the Electoral College, so that California’s nearly 40 million residents have the same representation in the Senate as Wyoming’s nearly 600 thousand.

Other anti-majoritarian and undemocratic features of the U.S. political system include the practice of extreme racial and partisan gerrymandering, which divides voters into state legislative and congressional districts that favor one political party, the filibuster rule in the U.S. Senate that enables a minority of senators to exercise veto power over most legislation, and the Supreme Court, which currently has three justices who were nominated by a president (Trump) who lost the popular vote and were confirmed by narrow margins by Republican senators who represent a minority of the U.S. population.

Majoritarian democracy was further eroded by the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder in 2013, which gutted section five of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by eliminating the requirement that states with a history of racially discriminatory voting laws obtain preclearance by federal courts before making changes in voting laws, and by weakening section two of the Act in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee in 2021, which made it harder to challenge racially discriminatory effects of voting laws.

More recently, in Louisiana v. Callais, the court effectively nullified the enforcement provision of section two of this landmark civil rights legislation by requiring that opponents of district maps that deny Black voters a fair opportunity to elect candidates of their choice must prove intentional discrimination. The court ruled that all racial gerrymanders, even those that were created to remedy a long history of racial discrimination, are unconstitutional. In doing so, it eliminated majority-minority districts, which will significantly reduce the number of seats in the House held by Black and other minority representatives. With this catastrophic decision, the crowning achievement of the civil rights movement, the decades-long struggle of Black Americans and others to create a multiracial democracy, has been demolished.

The hollowing out of the Voting Rights Act opened the way for the passage of a wave of voter suppression laws by Republican-dominated state legislatures after the 2020 presidential election, which were passed mostly on party-line votes by Republican majorities that were themselves elected on the basis of extreme racial and partisan gerrymandering.

In a further erosion of democracy by a rouge Supreme Court that is untethered to the law or precedent and invents legal doctrines, the Court decided in Rucho v. Common Cause in 2019 that states are free to engage in extreme partisan gerrymandering, even if it produces district maps that diminish the voting power of Black Americans or other minority groups. This decision gave a green light to use partisan gerrymandering as a cover for racial gerrymanders that dilute the voting power of minority groups. Republicans can simply claim they were drawing districts to achieve maximum partisan advantage, which just happened to pack minority voters into the fewest number of districts or break up concentrations of minority voters into others.

In the wake of these Supreme Court decisions a number of Southern states rushed to eliminate majority-minority state legislative and congressional districts in the midst of an unprecedented mid-term redistricting process, initiated by Trump, in which extreme partisan gerrymanders will give the Republican Party a structural advantage in the House. This means that Democrats will likely need to win the combined national popular vote by about four percentage points to win a slight majority, perhaps by more if the political winds shift before the midterm elections. In this way, as Jamelle Bouie argues, the House may come to resemble the Electoral College, in which the party that wins a slight majority in winner-take-all elections in the states can “rewrite the rules to keep themselves in power indefinitely.”

Electoral democracy was dealt another blow by the Supreme Court in Buckley v. Valeo in 1976, which ruled that individuals can spend unlimited funds “on their own political campaigns or on independent expenditures on behalf of other politicians they hoped to elect.” Then, in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission in 2010 the Court enabled the rise of super PACs that can raise and spend unlimited funds from corporations, unions, and individuals on political advertising and communications. With these decisions, the Court opened the floodgates for massive corruption in elections, unleashing a tsunami of donations from wealthy individuals and dark money organizations, in which donors remain anonymous, into the bloodstream of electoral politics. The result is that large corporations and billionaire oligarchs have been given a disproportionate amount of power to influence elections in the U.S.

The exploitation of these anti-majoritarian aspects of the U.S. Constitution and political system by Trump and a supine Republican Party, aided and abetted by a MAGA-friendly Supreme Court majority with a far-right ideological agenda, has contributed significantly to fostering a loss of faith in U.S. elections and the capacity of liberal constitutional democracy to deliver stability, security, and prosperity.

The reality is that majoritarian democracy no longer works for the Republican Party, whose core constituency is overwhelmingly white, male, rural, and evangelical, although suburban dwellers accounted for almost half of all Trump voters in 2024. The Republican Party rejected the recommendations of the autopsy it conducted after losing the 2012 presidential election, which urged the party to moderate its platform and expand its shrinking base of white voters by becoming more diverse and inclusive. Party leaders failed to heed the call for change and chose instead to double-down on its core constituency, which means that Republicans can only win national elections by making it increasingly difficult for minority or “counterfeit” voters, as opposed to white or “real” Americans, from casting what Republicans consider “fraudulent and illegitimate” votes.

The legislative gridlock imposed by the Republican Party on successive Democratic administrations (Republicans are only concerned about budget deficits when Democrats control the White House), ostensibly began in 1994 with the Gingrich-led Republican revolution and was continued by Senator Mitch McConnell and others, whose confrontational and unyielding politics sought to undermine Obama’s ability to govern. As Majority Leader McConnell sought to diminish Obama’s legacy by refusing to hold hearings on his nominee for the Supreme Court in 2016, effectively stealing a seat from the Democrats. Their objective has been to politically weaken the Democratic Party and prevent it from meaningfully addressing pressing social and economic issues, which helped open up a political space in which an authoritarian and neo-fascist movement is now challenging the liberal democratic constitutional order.

In autocratic regimes things go from bad to worse in stages, they do not happen suddenly and all at once. The proverbial frog in the pot of water does not realize it’s boiling until it’s too late. As the water gets incrementally hotter, people adapt to the warmer temperature, to the latest outrage or atrocity, which sets the stage for the next incremental increase in heat, to which they also adapt. Each time they adapt they normalize a higher level of heat, of tolerance for state violence and lawlessness, until the autocratic regime consolidates its power and it is too late to jump out of the pot of boiling water. The hot water in America is reaching the boiling point.

There are a number of strategies to address these anti-democratic features of the U.S. Constitution and political system. They include the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which is an agreement among states and Washington, D.C. to award all of their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote in presidential elections. Virginia recently joined the compact, increasing the number of electoral votes by 13 to 222, with 270 needed to reach a majority. Once it becomes operative, presidents will be elected on the basis of the national popular vote and the Electoral College will, in effect, be null and void.

Other strategies to democratize the political system include establishing fusion voting systems that allow candidates to be endorsed by more than one party, rank choice voting, in which voters rank their choices, making it more likely that less well-known or financed candidates will win elections, multi-member congressional districts so that voters who support smaller parties are represented in Congress, term limits for politicians, and abolishing the filibuster in the Senate.

Congress can pass legislation to democratize the Supreme Court by expanding the number of justices, limiting the appellate jurisdiction of the Court and its ability to adjudicate certain kinds of cases or legal issues, such as appeals to voting rights bills, establishing term limits with staggered terms so that every president has an opportunity to nominate justices, and limiting the Court’s ability to use the “shadow docket” to decide cases, which does not require that cases be argued before the Court or that the Court state its legal reasoning for the decision.

While amending the U.S. Constitution is the most direct and effective way of democratizing the political system, it is also subject to the will of a small minority. Slightly more than one-third of the House and Senate, or thirteen states, can prevent an amendment from being proposed and ratified. While state legislatures can mandate that Congress call a constitutional convention to propose amendments, this route has never been taken and is equally onerous. The reality is that amending the Constitution to democratize the political system in such a deeply polarized context has become virtually impossible.

Where does this leave us? While these strategies can open up possibilities for change, they do not necessarily lead to the kind of structural change that is desperately needed to democratize the political order. Structural reform will require a major party realignment, a reconfiguration of the national electorate, and the creation of a politically stable coalition that is capable of passing major legislation and proposing amendments to the Constitution, one that cannot be swept away in the next election cycle. By definition, this is a long-term project that will likely take many years to accomplish but must nonetheless be attempted since the alternative is the increasing consolidation of authoritarianism and neo-fascism in America.

Some political analysts argue that the United States is already far along the path to autocracy, that a long period of democratic backsliding has opened the door to an autocratic takeover of the country. Barbara Walter, a professor at UC San Diego and author of How Civil Wars Start and How to Stop Them, participated in a CIA taskforce that examined factors that can lead to civil war. Based on the findings, she argues that “the most important indicator of a growing risk of instability, political violence, and civil war is a weak and rapidly declining democracy” that is moving quickly toward autocracy. Another key risk factor is when “citizens of a democracy choose political parties on the basis of race, religion, or ethnicity rather than ideology,” when they support a party based on identity “rather than because they are liberal or conservative.”

Both of these risk factors are present in the U.S. today. The nation is experiencing an unprecedented deterioration of democracy in which the Republican Party has become the overwhelming choice of white voters, especially white evangelicals.

If Trump succeeds in creating a nearly 1.8 billion dollar “anti-weaponization” slush fund to hand out to his supporters in paramilitary militias like the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, and to other January 6 insurrectionists who assaulted police officers, the probability of political violence in the near term will increase significantly.

Based on these findings, Walter argues that the U.S. is “solidly in the autocracy zone,” the space between a declining democracy and an autocracy, and is at a high risk for political violence and instability in the short-term. The taskforce’s findings also suggest that the trigger for civil war tends to be contested elections “that people don’t trust, that are close, and have a winner-take-all zero-sum feeling to them.” That is, a situation in which people feel that “there might never be another election again and you might permanently be shut out of power.”

This is clearly the case regarding the 2026 midterm elections. Given the increasingly deranged and fascistic rhetoric of Trump and his MAGA allies, their efforts to suppress and disenfranchise potential Democratic voters, and their transparent plans to disrupt and, if necessary, steal the election, many Democrats are alarmed and fear that this may be the last free and fair election for the foreseeable future, that Republicans will refuse to give up power if they lose and will further consolidate their control of the federal government and political system. When this perception leads more moderate voters to give up on playing by the rules of electoral democracy, Walter warns, “bad things happen.”

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, political science professors at Harvard and co-authors of How Democracies Die, argue that “the U.S. has descended” into what they call “competitive authoritarianism,” in which “elections are held, but the ruling party abuses its power to stifle dissent and tilt the playing field in its favor.” That is, a situation in which a country is no longer a full democracy nor an autocracy, but is in a kind of liminal political space that Walter calls the “autocracy zone” in which a declining democracy is rapidly moving toward an Orbán-like illiberal democracy, to a ruling one party dictatorship.

There is no going home again. We cannot return to the past to restore what existed before Trump severely damaged or destroyed large parts of the federal government, politicized the rule of law, and trampled on the separation of powers. The growing divide between Red and Blue America is not one of policy differences, or of different conceptions of the proper size and role of government, but of fundamentally opposed views about the value and desirability of liberal constitutional democracy, of a multicultural and multiethnic America.

What, then, are the prospects for making the structural changes needed to democratize the political order? The short answer is that we have a long road ahead to get to where we need to go to reinvent and restructure the political system, but history shows that it is possible, as demonstrated by the recent election in Hungary in which Viktor Orbán, the icon of the American far-right, and his Fidesz party were soundly defeated, despite being in power for 16 years and controlling much of the Hungarian media and economy. History tells us that the seemingly impossible is sometimes possible, that Nelson Mandela can become president of South Africa and that the former Soviet Union can disintegrate, can collapse like a house of cards. The future is unknown and unknowable, whatever the historical patterns and trends may indicate.

In the meantime, pro-democracy forces must turn out in large enough numbers that Republican efforts to barricade themselves behind a raft on voter suppression laws and tactics, and extreme racial and partisan gerrymanders, fails to win elections. If and when Republicans lose and try to steal the midterm elections through baseless claims of voter fraud and meritless court challenges, by strongarming state legislators to delay or reject the results or declaring an emergency in which the federal government seizes voting machines or takes over state-administered elections, that the pushback is so strong and pervasive that they are forced to accept the will of the voters.

As we have seen, the problem is not just Trump, but his enablers in the Republican Party and on the Supreme Court who refuse to hold him accountable for his crimes and lawlessness or put any meaningful limits on his abuse of executive power, who have willfully dismantled democracy for personal and partisan advantage. The structural impediments to defeating the MAGA movement and expanding democracy are significant and will require playing the long-game of continuously building grassroots electoral power at all levels of government around a credible and compelling vision of change that expands democracy and makes people’s desire for a dignified life, for economic security and an equal opportunity to thrive, a realistic possibility.

Supporters of multiracial democracy need to approach the future clear-eyed and with resolve, but also with humility, with the understanding that we do not always know what we think we know, that we are participants in making history but, as Marx said, we do not make it under circumstances we choose, or in ways we can predict and anticipate. The future prospects for American democracy may well be dire, as many of the key elements of fascism are already present, but we cannot know that in advance. Americans are always looking to the future. While we need to prepare for the worst, we should not act as if we know, with absolute certainty, which way the political winds will be blowing over the horizon.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Saturday, May 30, 2026 5:42 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Trump clears way for companies to dodge taxes in havens like Malta, Bermuda, and Cyprus

By Jesse Drucker and Dylan Freedman
May 29, 2026

The New York Times reports:

A year ago, the Trump administration withdrew from a global effort to curb offshore tax-dodging by multinational companies. That decision has been a huge gift to corporate America, enabling companies to avoid at least $40 billion in income taxes since the beginning of 2025.

A New York Times review of securities filings from nearly 500 companies showed that they avoided taxes by attributing hundreds of billions of dollars in earnings to low- or no-tax foreign locales like Cyprus, Bermuda, Switzerland and the Cayman Islands. Often, corporations funneled the profits through subsidiaries in places where they had no employees, offices or customers.

Tax havens became more appealing after President Trump signed an order on his first day back in office withdrawing the United States from a 13-year international effort to end such schemes. The effort led dozens of countries to impose a minimum corporate tax and rules for pursuing companies using tax havens. After House Republicans passed legislation last year targeting some of those countries with a new tax, international officials agreed to exempt U.S. companies from much of the crackdown.

American Express avoided paying $423 million in taxes last year using the island of Jersey. PayPal trimmed its taxes by nearly half during 2025 thanks to its units in Singapore. Stanley Black & Decker cut its bill by $27 million — nearly one-third — using the island of Cyprus.

A favorite destination was the tiny Mediterranean island of Malta, where Abbott Laboratories, the pharmaceutical giant, has claimed all its global profits were earned by a subsidiary with no employees. Malta helped the company cut its tax bill by $336 million last year, the filings show.

Companies making similar moves spanned nearly every sector of the economy: Walmart and Uber; Mastercard and Pepsi; Crocs and Merck; Honeywell and Cigna. To put the $40 billion in taxes they avoided in perspective, it would be enough to triple the annual budget of the Federal Aviation Administration or U.S. Customs and Border Protection. [Continue reading…]
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/29/business/economy/offshore-tax-haven
s-trump.html?unlocked_article_code=1.mFA.Euhg.uOz6XnAdIugP

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Saturday, May 30, 2026 12:11 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Or. If we're going to be honest about it...

This has been happening to Americans no matter who was in office since before I was fucking born.

You're only reporting on it now because you hate the guy running the show.

Take all your hypocrisy and bounce on it, faggot.

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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Saturday, May 30, 2026 12:14 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
A House Divided Against Itself Cannot Stand

By John Ambrosio | Friday, May 29, 2026 4:00AM

https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2026/05/a-house-divided-against-
itself-cannot-stand.html

On June 16, 1858 in his House Divided speech, Abraham Lincoln declared that the government “could not endure permanently as half slave and half free” and would eventually become “all one thing or all the other.” Addressing the Illinois Republican State Convention, he argued that the deep and intensifying division over slavery threatened to destroy the Union.

John is writing about the Death of the Democratic Party.

He's not wrong. He's just a year and a half late with that prediction is all.

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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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