@edgarblythe,
She was given an extensive interview by Amol Rajan of the BBC on 19th October
It's my feeling the voters are looking for something to vote for, not against. But against is the only choice available, so most stay home. Put up some real issues, such as universal health care and living wages, and back them with positive action. Get the people stirred up and hopeful. Then, whenever possible actually deliver. Never renege. You would reap landslides.
Josh Winiecke
23h
·
No matter what your politics are the fact that someone who was politically motivated and violent came to a politicians house and the result was the targeted politician deciding to remove themselves from politics afterwards is a huge signal to anyone looking to create change. There is no way that isn’t looked at as a win from their particular political groups. The times of peacefully holding signs on street corners will soon be gone. We are entering the phase of direct action. Wealth inequality has hit a level where regardless of your political affiliation and what you think the answers are people are seeing it as a us vs them situation. The real problem is that the only armed and organized groups in the US are fascist right wing organizations. Unlike the white supremacist right wing, the left has been under constant attack by the government through RICO, propaganda, and flat out assassinations of labor leaders and civil rights activists.
“Politics is war without bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed.”
Three days after Gov. Greg Abbott tweeted a legally dubious invocation of the “invasion clause” of the U.S. and Texas constitutions over the high number of migrant encounters at the Texas-Mexico border, his border mission is set to include armored personnel carriers designed to carry troops into battle alongside tanks, according to a planning document obtained by Army Times and The Texas Tribune.
The order issued Thursday by Texas Military Department officials to the headquarters overseeing Operation Lone Star reveals that the National Guard will soon deploy 10 M113 armored personnel carrier vehicles to the border.
According to the order, around 50 soldiers will be trained to operate the vehicles, and state officials will identify 10 positions to station them along the border.
Something Is Building
There's a reason authoritarians are growing more bold: around the world the people are rising up against tyrannical regimes and despotic corporations
JARED YATES SEXTON
NOV 26
∙
PREVIEW
SAVE
The protests this week at the Foxconn industrial complex in China were explosive. Scores of workers clashed against security forces in a display that looked more like the labor battles of the 19th and early 20th century than anything modern. Eventually, the situation grew so out of control that the company began offering unhappy employees the equivalent of $1,400 dollars to quit their job and vacate the premises.
To understand the conflict, it’s important to remember this is the company responsible for assembling the iPhone, one of the most influential and lucrative products in the world, and expectations and conditions are so unbearable that overworked, overburdened workers often choose to take their own lives rather than continue laboring. In fact, the problem got so bad the company began installing suicide nets to prevent workers from ending their suffering.
Full disclosure: I am writing this article, critical of Foxconn, Apple, and a whole host of similar arrangements with an iPhone literally inches away from my laptop. I say this because our reaction to these things is often to shut off because of our own complicity. It is borderline, if not totally, impossible to be ethical under capitalism. The entire system is designed to provide luxuries and goods and services that are at a distance from the exploitation that make them possible. This is important when we discuss this situation, when we spread information to the people being exploited that we need to build our movement.
Meanwhile, on Friday, Amazon workers around the world staged massive protests against the retail monopoly. It was a brilliant gambit and brilliantly timed to interfere with Black Friday operations, which are central to some of the most exploitative and cruel practices at the heart of this system. In the same way we have been watching a Right Wing authoritarian movement build and construct symbiotic operations, we witnessed (or rather, we didn’t fully witness because our media largely blacks out these events as they share a corporate-centric view of events with the corporations being protested.
On an almost weekly basis now supposedly powerless workers have been troubling these corporate behemoths, including Amazon, Wal-Mart, and Starbucks, supposedly some of the most powerful entities in world and human history. The people are racking up victories. Actions of solidarity like strikes and the forming of unions are rising rapidly and seem to be hinting at a future crescendo, which would mean an all-out showdown with concentrated capital the likes of which we haven’t seen since the Progressive Era, if not the Era of Labor.
Simply put, people are tired of this ****.
History tells us there is a zone of acceptibility, or rather, a “Goldilocks” region of labor relations in which the capitalists and their businesses can have profitability, production, and also a measure of power or leverage over the people. This happens because the people are given decent standards of living, including acceptable pay, perks, benefits, and a society that at least seems to work or trend toward fairness. The truth, unfortunately, is that much of this is predicated on the exploitation of Others, including the workers at Foxconn or in so-called “Second” and “Third World” countries, suffering which is beyond our perception or experience.
It does not have to be this way, and the burgeoning People’s Movement, which has grown in those “Second” and “Third World” places where exploitation has been especially cruel and made it necessary to push back, is pressing against this expectation. In China, the people are pushing back. In Iran, the people are pushing back. In Russia, the people are pushing back. And in America, where the “acceptable” conditions have long since been replaced by systemic exploitation, cruelty, and corruption, the people are pushing back.
Have hope. Because something is building. There is a palpable feeling that, in action and in thought, in physical reality but also the psychic space, that things are changing and moving toward democracy and a movement that will ultimately, thankfully, change the world.
And so, unfortunately, this also brings us to the subject of rising Authoritarianism and the growing openness with which they are spreading hate and fear and fascistic ideas...
There is more to the article, but only for paid subscribers. Even the revolution, it seems, is monetized.
@edgarblythe,
I can imagine the robocop going to court and defending itself on the grounds its life was in danger.
“Law” by Charles Bukowski
“Look,“ he told me,
“all those little children dying in the trees.”
And I said, “What?”
He said, “Look.”
And I went to the window and sure enough, there they were hanging in the trees,
dead and dying.
And I said, “What does it mean?”
He said, “I don’t know it’s authorized.”
The next day I got up and they had dogs in the trees,
hanging, dead, and dying.
I turned to my friend and I said, “What does it mean?”
And he said,
“Don’t worry about it, it’s the way of things. They took a vote. It was decided.”
The next day it was cats.
I don’t see how they caught all those cats so fast and hung them in the trees, but they did.
The next day it was horses,
and that wasn’t so good because many bad branches broke.
And after bacon and eggs the next day,
my friend pulled his pistol on me across the coffee
and said,
“Let’s go,”
and we went outside.
And here were all these men and women in the trees,
most of them dead or dying.
And he got the rope ready and I said,
“What does it mean?”
And he said, “It’s authorized, constitutional, it passed the majority,”
And he tied my hands behind my back then opened the noose.
“I don’t know who’s going to hang me,” he said,
“When I get done with you.
I suppose when it finally works down
there will be just one left and he’ll have to hang himself.”
“Suppose he doesn’t?” I ask.
“He has to,” he said,
“It’s authorized.”
“Oh,” I said, “Well,
let’s get on with it.”
Mickey Blowtorch
MickeyBlowtorch
Throughout my entire tenure with my company, I’ve had a special needs guy on the payroll. We will call him Jimmy. Jimmy worked a position for several years with no incident until one day new management rolled in and decided they didn’t want him around. As a young manager I moved Jimmy to other positions and places, trying to find a fit. Jimmy would eventually have a miscommunication or blunder and would get fired or removed, but I would keep shuffling and hiding him around.
I don’t know a whole lot about him other than his family who took care of him are all dead and gone and I think he lives in a group home possibly.
I have spent the better part of two decades watching out for Jimmy from afar. I’ve arranged for transfers, persuaded managers, and made deals just to keep this guy on the books and employed.
The funny thing is, despite working directly and indirectly for me throughout the majority of his career, Jimmy has no idea who I am, other that just one of the “office people” and he never remembers my name. I guess he really doesn’t need to.
The world is a big scary place, it’s even scarier when you’re alone and your family is gone. Just remember this though - the existence of an unlikely person, like me for instance, lurking and watching out for you from the shadows isn’t out of the realm of possibility.
No one is ever really alone.
Merry Christmas, Jimmy.
Jan☭🇵🇸
GodandtheBear
·
I hate when liberals and conservatives come at me with their arguments like I'd ever want to be anything like them or even want to get their approval. No. Idc what you want or think so just stay away. I already was you and I'm not going back to that ****.
"The system isn't broken. It was built this way."
don't know who said it first
I DON'T THINK PISSED REALLY COVERS IT ! ! !
Alan Simpson, the Senator from Wyoming calls senior citizens the Greediest Generation as he compared "Social Security " to a Milk Cow with 310 million teats. Here's a response in a letter from PATTY MYERS in Montana ... I think she is a little ticked off! She also tells it like it is!
"Hey Alan, let's get a few things straight!!!
1. As a career politician, you have been on the public dole (tit) for FIFTY YEARS.
2. I have been paying Social Security taxes for 48 YEARS (since I was 15 years old. I am now 63).
3. My Social Security payments, and those of millions of other Americans, were safely tucked away in an interest bearing account for decades until you political pukes decided to raid the account and give OUR money to a bunch of zero losers in return for votes, thus bankrupting the system and turning Social Security into a Ponzi scheme that would make Bernie Madoff proud.
4. Recently, just like Lucy & Charlie Brown, you and "your ilk" pulled the proverbial football away from millions of American seniors nearing retirement and moved the goalposts for full retirement from age 65 to age, 67. NOW, you and your "shill commission" are proposing to move the goalposts YET AGAIN.
5. I, and millions of other Americans, have been paying into Medicare from Day One, and now "you morons" propose to change the rules of the game. Why? Because "you idiots" mismanaged other parts of the economy to such an extent that you need to steal our money from Medicare to pay the bills.
6. I, and millions of other Americans, have been paying income taxes our entire lives, and now you propose to increase our taxes yet again. Why? Because you "incompetent bxxxxds" spent our money so profligately that you just kept on spending even after you ran out of money. Now, you come to the American taxpayers and say you need more to pay off YOUR debt.
To add insult to injury, you label us "greedy" for calling "bxxxxxxt" to your incompetence.
Well, Captain Bxxxxxxit, I have a few questions for YOU:
1. How much money have you earned from the American taxpayers during your pathetic 50-year political career?
2. At what age did you retire from your pathetic political career, and how much are you receiving in annual retirement benefits from the American taxpayers?
3. How much do you pay for YOUR government provided health insurance?
4. What cuts in YOUR retirement and healthcare benefits are you proposing in your disgusting deficit reduction proposal, or as usual, have you exempted yourself and your political cronies?
It is you, Captain Bxxxxxxt, and your political co-conspirators called Congress who are the "greedy" ones. It is you and your fellow nutcase thieves who have bankrupted America and stolen the American dream from millions of loyal, patriotic taxpayers.
And for what? Votes and your job and retirement security at our expense, you lunk-headed, leech.
That's right, sir. You and yours have bankrupted America for the sole purpose of advancing your pathetic, political careers. You know it, we know it, and you know that we know it.
And you can take that to the bank, you miserable son of a bxxxxx.
P.S. And stop calling Social Security benefits "entitlements". WHAT AN INSULT!!!!
I have been paying in to the SS system for 45 years “It's my money”-give it back to me the way the system was designed and stop patting yourself on the back like you are being generous by doling out these monthly checks .
EVERYONE!! If you agree with what a Montana citizen, Patty Myers, says, please PASS IT ON!!!!
Richard D. Wolff's Anti-Capitalist Enterprise
Dodger Codger Mills · 47m ·
I've got a really, really great suggestion that will make everything absolutely wonderful. It will produce the greatest boon in world history.
Let's forget that the entire inability of holders of "student debt" to restructure their debt through bankruptcy was created by a bill of Congress written and pushed through to becoming Law by none other then Joseph R. Biden Jr.
Now for my great, magnanimous solution to make the entire problem go away.
Let's totally forget that this entire Student Debt problem was created by our dear kind sweet and loving Uncle Joe Biden.
That will surely solve our student debt problem.
@edgarblythe,
BREAKING: Biden administration has withdrawn plan to cancel student loan debt for about 38 million Americans.
edgarblythe wrote:
Richard D. Wolff's Anti-Capitalist Enterprise
Dodger Codger Mills · 47m ·
I've got a really, really great suggestion that will make everything absolutely wonderful. It will produce the greatest boon in world history.
Let's forget that the entire inability of holders of "student debt" to restructure their debt through bankruptcy was created by a bill of Congress written and pushed through to becoming Law by none other then Joseph R. Biden Jr.
Now for my great, magnanimous solution to make the entire problem go away.
Let's totally forget that this entire Student Debt problem was created by our dear kind sweet and loving Uncle Joe Biden.
That will surely solve our student debt problem.
Trump Demands Control of Panama Canal, Transfer of Greenland to U.S.
“We are not for sale and will never be for sale,” Greenland Prime Minister Múte Egede said.
How Fascism Came
For over two decades, I and a handful of others — Sheldon Wolin, Noam Chomsky, Chalmers Johnson, Barbara Ehrenreich and Ralph Nader — warned that the expanding social inequality and steady erosion of our democratic institutions, including the media, the Congress, organized labor, academia and the courts, would inevitably lead to an authoritarian or Christian fascist state. My books — “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America” (2007), “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle” (2009), “Death of the Liberal Class” (2010), “Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt” (2012), written with Joe Sacco, “Wages of Rebellion” (2015) and “America: The Farewell Tour” (2018) were a succession of impassioned pleas to take the decay seriously. I take no joy in being correct.
“The rage of those abandoned by the economy, the fears and concerns of a beleaguered and insecure middle class, and the numbing isolation that comes with the loss of community, would be the kindling for a dangerous mass movement,” I wrote in “American Fascists” in 2007. “If these dispossessed were not reincorporated into mainstream society, if they eventually lost all hope of finding good, stable jobs and opportunities for themselves and their children — in short, the promise of a brighter future — the specter of American fascism would beset the nation. This despair, this loss of hope, this denial of a future, led the desperate into the arms of those who promised miracles and dreams of apocalyptic glory.”
President-elect Donald Trump does not herald the advent of fascism. He heralds the collapse of the veneer that masked the corruption within the ruling class and their pretense of democracy. He is the symptom, not the disease. The loss of basic democratic norms began long before Trump, which paved the road to an American totalitarianism. Deindustrialization, deregulation, austerity, unchecked predatory corporations, including the health-care industry, wholesale surveillance of every American, social inequality, an electoral system that is plagued by legalized bribery, endless and futile wars, the largest prison population in the world, but most of all feelings of betrayal, stagnation and despair, are a toxic brew that culminate in an inchoate hatred of the ruling class and the institutions they have deformed to exclusively serve the rich and the powerful. The Democrats are as guilty as the Republicans.
“Trump and his coterie of billionaires, generals, half-wits, Christian fascists, criminals, racists, and moral deviants play the role of the Snopes clan in some of William Faulkner’s novels,” I wrote in “America: The Farewell Tour.” “The Snopeses filled the power vacuum of the decayed South and ruthlessly seized control from the degenerated, former slaveholding aristocratic elites. Flem Snopes and his extended family — which includes a killer, a pedophile, a bigamist, an arsonist, a mentally disabled man who copulates with a cow, and a relative who sells tickets to witness the bestiality — are fictional representations of the scum now elevated to the highest level of the federal government. They embody the moral rot unleashed by unfettered capitalism.”
“The usual reference to ‘amorality,’ while accurate, is not sufficiently distinctive and by itself does not allow us to place them, as they should be placed, in a historical moment,” the critic Irving Howe wrote of the Snopeses. “Perhaps the most important thing to be said is that they are what comes afterwards: the creatures that emerge from the devastation, with the slime still upon their lips.”
“Let a world collapse, in the South or Russia, and there appear figures of coarse ambition driving their way up from beneath the social bottom, men to whom moral claims are not so much absurd as incomprehensible, sons of bushwhackers or muzhiks drifting in from nowhere and taking over through the sheer outrageousness of their monolithic force,” Howe wrote. “They become presidents of local banks and chairmen of party regional committees, and later, a trifle slicked up, they muscle their way into Congress or the Politburo. Scavengers without inhibition, they need not believe in the crumbling official code of their society; they need only learn to mimic its sounds.”
The political philosopher Sheldon Wolin called our system of governance “inverted totalitarianism,” one that kept the old iconography, symbols and language, but had surrendered power to corporations and oligarchs. Now we will shift to totalitarianism’s more recognizable form, one dominated by a demagogue and an ideology grounded in the demonization of the other, hypermasculinity and magical thinking.
Fascism is always the bastard child of a bankrupt liberalism.
“We live in a two-tiered legal system, one where poor people are harassed, arrested and jailed for absurd infractions, such as selling loose cigarettes — which led to Eric Garner being choked to death by the New York City police in 2014 — while crimes of appalling magnitude by the oligarchs and corporations, from oil spills to bank fraud in the hundreds of billions of dollars, which wiped out 40 percent of the world’s wealth, are dealt with through tepid administrative controls, symbolic fines, and civil enforcement that give these wealthy perpetrators immunity from criminal prosecution,” I wrote in “America: The Farewell Tour.”
The utopian ideology of neoliberalism and global capitalism is a vast con. Global wealth, rather than being spread equitably, as neoliberal proponents promised, was funneled upward into the hands of a rapacious, oligarchic elite, fueling the worst economic inequality since the age of the robber barons. The working poor, whose unions and rights were stripped from them and whose wages have stagnated or declined over the past 40 years, have been thrust into chronic poverty and underemployment. Their lives, as Barbara Ehrenreich chronicled in “Nickel and Dimed,” are one long, stress-ridden emergency. The middle class is evaporating. Cities that once manufactured products and offered factory jobs are boarded up-wastelands. Prisons are overflowing. Corporations have orchestrated the destruction of trade barriers, allowing them to stash $1.42 trillion in profits in overseas banks to avoid paying taxes.
Neoliberalism, despite its promise to build and spread democracy, swiftly gutted regulations and hollowed out democratic systems to turn them into corporate leviathans. The labels “liberal” and “conservative” are meaningless in the neoliberal order, evidenced by a Democratic presidential candidate who bragged about an endorsement from Dick Cheney, a war criminal who left office with a 13 percent approval rating. The attraction of Trump is that, although vile and buffoonish, he mocks the bankruptcy of the political charade.
“The permanent lie is the apotheosis of totalitarianism,” I wrote in “America: The Farewell Tour”:
It no longer matters what is true. It matters only what is ‘correct.’ Federal courts are being stacked with imbecilic and incompetent judges who serve the ‘correct’ ideology of corporatism and the rigid social mores of the Chrtistian right. They hold reality, including science and the rule of law, in contempt. They seek to banish those who live in a reality-based world defined by intellectual and moral autonomy. Totalitarian rule always elevates the brutal and the stupid. These reigning idiots have no genuine political philosophy or goals. They use clichés and slogans, most of which are absurd and contradictory, to justify their greed and lust for power. This is as true for the Christian right as it is for the corporatists that preach the free market and globalization. The merger of the corporatists with the Christian right is the marrying of Godzilla to Frankenstein.
The illusions peddled on our screens — including the fictitious persona created for Trump on The Apprentice — have replaced reality. Politics is burlesque as Kamala Harris’ vapid, celebrity-filled campaign illustrated. It is smoke and mirrors created by the army of agents, publicists, marketing departments, promoters, script writers, television and movie producers, video technicians, photographers, bodyguards, wardrobe consultants, fitness trainers, pollsters, public announcers and television new personalities. We are a culture awash in lies.
“The cult of the self dominates our cultural landscape,” I wrote in “Empire of Illusion”:
This cult has within it the classic traits of psychopaths: superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance; a need for constant stimulation, a penchant for lying, deception, and manipulation, and the inability to feel remorse or guilt. This is, of course, the ethic promoted by corporations. It is the ethic of unfettered capitalism. It is the misguided belief that personal style and personal advancement, mistaken for individualism, are the same as democratic equality. In fact, personal style, defined by the commodities we buy or consume, has become a compensation for our loss of democratic equality. We have a right, in the cult of the self, to get whatever we desire. We can do anything, even belittle and destroy those around us, including our friends, to make money, to be happy, and to become famous. Once fame and wealth are achieved, they become their own justification, their own morality. How one gets there is irrelevant. Once you get there, those questions are no longer asked.
My book “Empire of Illusion” begins in Madison Square Garden at a World Wrestling Entertainment tour. I understood that professional wrestling was the template for our social and political life, but did not know that it would produce a president.
“The bouts are stylized rituals,” I wrote, in what could have been a description of a Trump rally:
They are public expressions of pain and a fervent longing for revenge. The lurid and detailed sagas behind each bout, rather than the wrestling matches themselves, are what drive crowds to a frenzy. These ritualized battles give those packed in the arenas a temporary, heady release from mundane lives. The burden of real problems is transformed into fodder for a high-energy pantomime.
It is not going to get better. The tools to shut down dissent have been cemented into place. Our democracy cratered years ago. We are in the grip of what Søren Kierkegaard called “sickness unto death” — the numbing of the soul by despair that leads to moral and physical debasement. All Trump has to do to establish a naked police state is flip a switch. And he will.
“The worse reality becomes, the less a beleaguered population wants to hear about it,” I wrote at the conclusion of “Empire of Illusion,” “and the more it distracts itself with squalid pseudo-events of celebrity breakdowns, gossip and trivia. These are the debauched revels of a dying civilization.”
C Hedges
