What America is experiencing under the media-fueled dictatorship of Donald Trump has been in the works for a long time. Two centuries after the US constitutional system was created, it has unraveled under the explosive force of manufactured fears, an imperial president, and exploitation of reactionary tendencies in the family and church.
As this series documents in excerpts from my book Managing Chaos, the Justice Department and FBI certainly weren’t working within any guardrails in 1978 when they demonized Kristina Berster to neutralize federal oversight by pumping up fears of a domestic terrorist threat. It also describes some of my adventures in alternative media, thoughts about being an editor, an FBI Census scandal that made national news, and how Bernie Sanders decided to run for mayor.
The Fog of Information War
The birth of my son Jesse in July 1978, moments before Burlington’s annual fireworks display, was one of the most incredible experiences of my life. Robin Lloyd and I had made a life-changing decision — to co-parent a child. Then, just three weeks later, after a brief break from political journalism and parenting to cover stock car racing, a provocative new story came my way.
It ended up challenging my assumptions and changing my life…
Managing Perceptions (or, how I learned to stop trusting the federal government)
At the federal building, the security force was ready for a siege. US Marshals, security specialists and assorted agents roamed the five floors of the downtown building with walkie-talkies. Packages and handbags weren’t permitted into the courtroom, and no one except the lawyers could speak with the now-infamous defendant.
After a week of jury selection, the defense wasn’t optimistic — and working toward a hung jury. The air was thick with intrigue. US Attorney William Gray insisted that he was merely prosecuting a simple border case, but one in which the bail was initially set at half a million. Bill Kunstler shot back that the issues were far from simple and the FBI was very much involved…
Full Story: https://www.globalresearch.ca/managing-perceptions-how-stop-trusting-federal-government/5900529
Adventures in Alternative Media
Before Burlington’s progressive revolution, the Vermont Vanguard Press was one of the Champlain Valley’s strongest voices for change to emerge in years. For more than a decade it was a platform and launch pad for talented young journalists, activists and thinkers who shook up the status quo. An alternative newspaper wasn’t a political movement, but the dividing line was less than clear.
In the early years, editorial board meetings often became encounter groups where ideology clashed with the desire for respectability and the need for advertisers. It was a voice of opposition, bringing problems like Burlington’s housing crisis, homelessness, environmental threats, the nuclear arms race, the perils of urban growth and the decaying dynasty inside city hall into the mainstream of public consciousness…
Breaking News, Making History and Taking Stock
After the post-Watergate revelations of the mid-1970s reform was in the air and Congress moved briefly toward defining a set of standards. But by the time the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) was passed in 1978, the mood was already shifting back toward broadening the powers of the FBI and CIA. That summer, increasingly concerned about the power and danger of covert operations and perception management, I began to turn my focus to the intelligence community and threats to civil liberties, publishing investigative pieces and speaking at conferences and protests.
Civil libertarians feared that future Supreme Court decisions would be even more damaging to individual rights than congressional actions. As a result, many of them supported FISA, which set up a “secret court” to handle wiretap warrants…
Shortly after helping to launch the Citizens Party, a new coalition linked with Barry Commoner’s environmental campaign for US President, I circulated a memo about next steps. It urged leaders of the Vermont chapter to focus on Burlington. The state’s largest city “can be extremely fertile ground,” I wrote in March 1980. Fiscal crisis, cronyism between the Democratic mayor and business leaders, unrest among the youths, skyrocketing rents — the city’s problems made it ripe for a political upheaval.
“In a three-way race, even a mayoral candidate might be elected,” I predicted…
Managing Chaos: Adventures in Alternative Media was published in 2024 and is available from Amazon. A review in The Progressive called it’ “a great read… revealing and sometimes brutal.” I don’t know about being “brutal,” but urge you to get a copy.
The excerpts describe events that happened around 45 years ago, when I was already becoming skeptical about the long-term prospects for democracy. I just thought perhaps Burlington could move in a different direction. “Make where you are paradise,” I used to say. It made sense for a while. But today Burlington faces many of the same troubles afflicting other cities — affordability, public safety, drug abuse, and homelessness, among others.
Ten years ago, I attempted to warn people about what was coming. But running for mayor may not have been the most effective way to do it. The Progressive Party had lost City Hall in 2012 to a Democrat who thought he could build Burlington out of its problems. Miro Weinberger won the 2015 re-election race, and two more after that. In coverage of the campaign, the Burlington Free Press reported that I “slammed the mayor for trying to ‘turn the city into a resort town’ and ‘promoting an anything-goes building boom’.” Doing that ended up making life in Vermont’s largest city more expensive and less human-scaled. Eventually the tax base couldn’t keep up with growing demands.
Fortunately, Vermont’s Queen City hasn’t been big or important enough so far to attract Trump’s militarization of daily life. But the administration has requested data on all registered voters in an apparent effort to track down immigrants. So far the state has declined to cooperate. In the future, we are likely to experience more extreme ways of both enriching Trump’s tribe and turning the country into a centralized, white nationalist police state that would have impressed George Orwell. As Orwell imagined, when writing 1984 in 1948, we are getting comfortable with Doublethink, the constant distortion of reality to maintain the leader’s image of infallibility. Many other Orwellian concepts have resurfaced in a post-modern, reality TV, AI-curated form.
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