Sympathy for the Devils...

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Re: Sympathy for the Devils...

Post by blindpig » Wed Nov 06, 2024 4:15 pm

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Attendees hold up signs during a campaign rally with Democratic presidential nominee and US Vice President Kamala Harris at Craig Ranch Amphitheater, Las Vegas, Nevada, on 31 October 2024 (Photo: Ethan Miller/Getty Images/AFP)

Why even progressive U.S. voters are America Firsters
Originally published: Middle East Eye on November 4, 2024 by Joseph Massad (more by Middle East Eye) | (Posted Nov 06, 2024)

One of the key responsibilities that critical American intellectuals have always shirked is considering the far-reaching effects of voting in the United States.

There is presently no other country whose elected officials’ policies and stances have as great an impact on the rest of the globe. It is an advantage that the U.S. has held since at least 1990 as a formidable force controlling most of the world.

Yet its hegemonic position and militarism seem immaterial to those Americans who feign a sense of cosmopolitanism or, more importantly, worldliness.

Talk of the “global village” does not usually recognise that this village is dominated by the U.S. and its superpower stature.

The global apartheid system in which we live is one wherein only Americans are eligible to vote for the power that controls the rest of the world.

Although few of these “worldly” intellectuals and academics who participate in the electoral process would deny this fact, they invariably limit their concerns to the impact of their votes on the U.S. alone.

Parochialism
For decades, I asked such intellectuals and academics with pretensions of worldliness how they could only consider the Democratic or Republican Party’s policies on domestic matters, which affect some 345 million Americans, versus global matters that affect eight billion people.

The answer consistently boils down to the fact that both parties pursue imperialist policies around the world. Since the only variation in their programmes relates to domestic issues, it becomes necessary to vote for the “lesser evil” and defend it as an absolute good to defeat the more evil.

Such logic renders the billions of people around the world whom the U.S. dominates and oppresses, directly or indirectly, as insignificant or at least utterly irrelevant to these American intellectuals’ political calculus.

The fate of these billions is effectively exchanged for a few possible reforms in domestic policies that would affect parts of middle-class and wealthy America—the main beneficiaries of American imperialism and oppression of the rest of the globe.

This means that the alleged worldliness and cosmopolitanism of many of these intellectuals and academics—and their dissimulation that they are “citizens of the world” about whose climate crisis they began to express much concern in the last two decades—evaporate every time they vote in national elections. It is then that their parochialism and “America first” attitude are shamelessly on full display.

Anti-colonial resistance
Dissident American anti-imperialist intellectual Noam Chomsky once dismissed the notion that people in the U.S.-dominated part of the world could ever defeat the U.S. empire and its European colonial lieutenants.

He argued instead that successful opposition to imperial policies can only come from Americans and Western Europeans:

There are few realistic options, in the world as it exists, unless the population of the major powers reaches a level of civilisation transcending anything we now see and restrains the violence of the states that dominate the international system.

He added with much alacrity:

As for the Third World liberation movements of the sixties, I never thought that they were likely to provide any useful lessons for Western socialists.

Although Chomsky declared this position in the late 1980s, he was intervening in an important debate that dates back at least to the first decade of the 20th century.

The importance of the self-determination of colonised peoples and whether their resistance against colonialism and imperialism was the primary struggle that would help defeat the colonial empires was the central issue at stake.

This part of the debate on the colonial question took place in the early 1920s within the Communist International.

The main issues centred on the question of “labour aristocracy” in the imperialist and colonialist countries, which, as the Indian communist Manabendra N Roy argued, would never be allies of workers and peasants in the colonised countries. Imperial powers had bribed their own working classes with the profits made in the colonies.



During this same period, the newly established Soviet state banked on socialist revolutions overtaking European colonising countries, after which they would presumably help liberate the colonised world. (The Soviets would go on to revise their position in 1921 after the defeat of the European revolutions and the eruption of anti-colonial uprisings across the colonised world.)

Roy, however, argued that the liberation of the colonised world was, in fact, the necessary pre-condition for the liberation of the colonising world—a view he shared with Soviet leader Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, though the latter did not articulate it as a pre-condition.

Liberal pretension
Frantz Fanon, the prominent anti-colonial thinker, also held this position on the struggle for liberation.

He understood by the early 1960s that only the colonised would be able to defeat the ongoing imperial depredations visited on the globe, especially given the complicity of the white liberals and socialists of the colonising countries.

Fanon recognised that these groups, like the white labour aristocracy, were also direct beneficiaries of the imperialist system:

Leave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them, at the corner of every one of their own streets, in all the corners of the globe.

Fanon added that “some Europeans were found to urge the European workers to shatter this narcissism and to break with this un-reality. But in general, the workers of Europe have not replied to these calls, for the workers believe, too, that they are part of the prodigious adventure of the European spirit”.

I cite this history to show that many communists in the 1920s, like most white liberals and socialists then and now, harboured such Eurocentrism.

They were always ready to sacrifice the welfare of the rest of the world for the sake of European revolution in the case of the communists, or domestic reform in the case of U.S. liberals, or even anarchists like Chomsky.

How else can one explain the persistent collaboration of western liberal and leftist intellectuals with the imperial system and their neglect of—if not outright contempt for—the rest of the globe?

Why is it that what supposedly moves them today are questions on the climate and not genocide, starvation, poverty, or imperial wars of aggression?

The answer is simple: the impact of the climate crisis, which we have inherited as a direct result of U.S. and European actions and policies, is now also felt in the U.S. and Western Europe, the two regions that are the central and principal concern of liberal and leftist American and European academics and intellectuals.

Their subterfuge that caring for the climate makes them “citizens of the world” is no more than the most recent pretension that these intellectuals and academics have to worldliness when it is yet another proof of their parochialism.

One would think that the racial and national privileges that American voters enjoy while deciding the fate of the entire global population would weigh heavily on those who consider themselves anti-nationalist, anti-imperialist, or simply “global citizens”.

Far from it!

What unites leftist and liberal voters with right-wing voters in the U.S. in this year’s elections is the same thing that has always united them: America first, and après nous le déluge

https://mronline.org/2024/11/06/why-eve ... -firsters/

******

Bill Clinton and the “Dictators Club”
Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor 06 Nov 2024

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Bill Clinton couldn’t be cozier, or more richly rewarded, in what he calls “the dictator’s club.”

In Bill Clinton’s infamously unhinged speech last week in Michigan, he said that Jews had been living in Judea and Samaria before Islam existed, that anyone upset by the Gaza genocide should understand how Israelis feel, and that Kamala Harris’s promise to work for a ceasefire should be enough to make them vote for her. Those statements were so tone deaf that they dominated the outraged response.

The rest of the speech was also rife with brutal lies and hypocrisy. One was a particularly glaring instance of the Democratic argument that Trump is a would-be dictator who consorts with dictators and would do away with all our democratic institutions. Clinton said that Trump wants to join “the dictator’s club,” and accused him of cozying up to Russia’s Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.

These allegations are based on the fact that as president, Trump actually sat down and talked to these heads of state of two of the world’s nuclear powers. In 2018 he met President Putin, in a two-hour, one-on-one conference in Helsinki. The same year he met with North Korea’s head of state Kim Jong Un in Singapore. God forbid that an American president should talk to either about how to avoid Armageddon instead of threatening to bring it on.

Bill’s Own Dictators’ Club

In 2009 Bill Clinton presented a Clinton Global Citizen Award to Paul Kagame, one of the worst dictators and war criminals in the world and a longtime favorite of his poverty pimping Clinton Foundation.

Clinton was in office during the final two years of the Rwandan Civil War, which he received daily briefings about. The US had selected Kagame and his Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) Army to represent US corporate interests in the African Great Lakes Region, making Kagame’s victory in the war a foregone conclusion.

Kagame and other RPF leaders had met with US officials years before the war began, and Kagame had trained at Fort Leavenworth. The RPF had a steady supply of advanced weaponry and intelligence that the existing government lacked.

When the last horrific 90 days of the war began, the UN Security Council proposed an emergency expansion of the UN peacekeeping operation in Rwanda, but Clinton sent his UN Ambassador, Madeleine Albright, to veto it.

Kagame seized power at the end of the slaughter and has held an iron grip on it since. The West’s constant complaint against the defeated government had been that it was not a multi-party democracy, but it has since heaped praise on Kagame even as he brutally repressed opposition, refused to allow any real challengers to run against him, and even imprisoned those who, like Victoire Ingabire, tried. Ingabire served eight years in prison after attempting to run in the 2010 presidential election and has since been confined to Rwanda, unable to travel to The Netherlands to visit her family, including her gravely ill husband.

Rwandan gospel singer Kizito Mihigo, who dared to dissent from the legally codified and enforced history of the genocide, died in jail several days after being apprehended trying to cross the Rwandan/Burundian border. He is just one of many murdered, missing, or exiled dissidents and journalists.

In February, Human Rights Watch (HRW) reported that

the Kagame regime is guilty of transnational repression that ranges from spying, intimidation, killings, kidnappings, beatings, and enforced disappearances to manipulated extradition requests, arbitrary detention, and attempted or successful renditions.

In October, HRW reported that torture has been widespread in Rwandan prisons for decades.

Kagame’s former advisor, development economist David

Himbara, describes Rwanda as a totalitarian state like that Hannah Arendt described in her classic study The Origins of Totalitarianism.

Ever since seizing power, Kagame has “won” staged elections by laughably implausible percentages in the high 90s, most recently, in 2024, by 99.18%.

In 1996 his army joined Uganda’s in invading the Democratic Republic of the Congo, initiating a brutal war and occupation that has cost millions of lives and continues to this day. University of Antwerp Emeritus Professor Filip Reyntjens, speaking in the BBC documentary “Rwanda’s Untold Story ,” called Kagame “the greatest war criminal in office today.”

Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev and the Uranium One deal

Bill Clinton also befriended and burnished the reputation of infamous dictator Nursultan Nazarbayev, the former president of Kazakhstan. Nazarbayev, a former prime minister of Kazakhstan under Soviet rule, became president after the collapse of the Soviet Union and ruled from 1991 to 2019. His regime was characterized by unlawful killings, torture, arbitrary detention, political imprisonment, restrictions on speech and press, restrictions on internet freedom, religious persecution, interference with the rights of peaceful assembly and freedom of association, political repression, government corruption, and restrictions on workers' freedom to associate and organize.

In 2015, Nazarbayev won re-election with 98% of the vote.

His extensive human rights violations were documented by Human Rights Watch , Amnesty International , and the US State Department . In 2021, however, State reported that “the law grants former president Nursultan Nazarbayev broad, lifetime authority over a range of government functions.”

In September 2005 Bill Clinton traveled to Kazakhstan, where he praised its economic progress under Nazarbayev. During the same trip, Nazarbayev pledged an undisclosed sum to a charitable fund created by Clinton and former President George W. Bush to respond to the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina on the US Gulf Coast.

One month later, Clinton traveled to Kazakhstan again, this time with Canadian mining magnate Frank Giustra on his luxurious private jet. While there he held a press conference praising Nazarbayev for “opening up the social and political life of your country.” According to The Nation , Clinton even recommended that Nazarbayev be named head of the very international election-monitoring organization that had ruled his own most recent election fraudulent.

On the same trip, Giustra somehow managed to secure a lease to mine Kazakhstan’s considerable uranium reserves for his shell company, Uranium One, which then immediately ballooned in value. Giustra then donated $31.3 million to the Clinton Foundation, following it up with at least $100 million more in 2007.

The deal raised eyebrows at the time, but even more so after Giustra’s company sold Uranium One’s assets to the Russian nuclear corporation Rosatom, in three transactions that Hillary Clinton’s State Department had to sign off on, from 2009 to 2013, because uranium is a strategic mineral. This episode was detailed by the New York Times , which also noted that Uranium One chairman Ian Telfer used his family foundation to make four donations totalling $2.35 million to the Clinton Foundation during the years in question. “And,” the Times wrote, “shortly after the Russians announced their intention to acquire a majority stake in Uranium One, Mr. Clinton received $500,000 for a Moscow speech from a Russian investment bank with links to the Kremlin that was promoting Uranium One stock.

Trump is of course also guilty of profiting on cozy relationships with dictators. During his presidency, his son-in-law Jared Kushner worked on Middle East affairs, despite having no demonstrated expertise, and developed a personal relationship with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS). Upon his return to private life, Kushner established a private equity firm which received a $2 billion investment from Saudi Arabia’s Sovereign Wealth Fund.

Kagame, Nazarbayev, MBS, the Clintons, and the Trumps are all part of an international network of autocrats and kleptocrats. Bill Clinton and the rest of the Democratic Party’s phony pieties about standing against tyranny are just more galling.

https://blackagendareport.com/bill-clin ... ators-club
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Sympathy for the Devils...

Post by blindpig » Wed Nov 06, 2024 7:34 pm

Election 2024 - Random Thoughts

Some random thoughts on Trump's reelection.

Trump's win in 2024 does not prove that the 2020 election was stolen by Democrats but it raises a new stink about the issue.

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When Biden was pushed out of the race there were calls among Democrats not to rush a choice, but to hold full-fledged primaries. Barack Obama had called for it. But Nancy Pelosi and the Clinton clan kept pushing for Harris. As a vacuous and unlikable person - carrying all the baggage of the Biden administration - she was the most likely to lose.

This is, hopefully, the end of wokeism and DEI nonsense. And of 'trans' children and teens.

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To send Bill Clinton to Michigan to justify the mass killing of Palestinians was not a good idea. The 2024 result in Dearborn, Michigan, a 90% Muslim area that Biden had won with 88% of the vote:

Trump: 46.8%
Harris: 27.68%
Stein: 22.11%
The Democrats will blame various groups - Muslim, progressives, youths - who's opinions and desires they had ignored, for their loss. And of course Russia.

Trump won the working class:

Jeff Stein @JStein_WaPo - 14:27 UTC · Nov 6, 2024
Staggering class realignment/shift in working class
Harris lost DESPITE major shift of affluent voters her way

2020: Trump wins voters over $100K, 54-52
2024: *Harris* wins voters over $100K, 54-45

2020: Biden wins voters $50K-$100K, 57-42
2024: *Trump* w/ voters $50K-$100K, 49-47

2020: Biden wins voters under $50K, 55-45
2024: Trump massive improvement w/ voters under $50K, 49-48


Harris had more billionaires on her side:

The Billionaire-ification of the U.S. Election

For the 2024 election, a staggering $15.9 billion has been spent on ads and campaigning by both Democrats and Republicans, making it the most expensive election in history; in just one week, nearly $1 billion has been poured into political ads.
...
Eighteen percent of all political ad funding has come straight from the pockets of a tiny handful of America’s mega-rich. In fact, according to USA Today, Harris has 83 billionaires supporting her—making up 6% of her campaign funds, according to Al Jazeera—while 52 are backing Trump, but they’re extremely generous donors, making up 34% of his campaign fund.
In other words: the country’s wealthiest are bankrolling the election, wielding political power and influence like never before. Not only is this bad news for democracy, it’s catastrophic for the planet.


Trump is unlikely to have a full term. J.D. Vance will become president. He is the future of the Republican party.

Posted by b on November 6, 2024 at 17:49 UTC | Permalink

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2024/11/e ... .html#more

Though some of him commentators took "Trump is unlikely to have a full term" to mean Trump would be assassinated I think 'b' meant too sick or die. Looks like they are going totry to put up with him though if he goes too far from 'the imperial project' that could change. That dumbass kid that winged him was the best insurance Trump could have, who would dare try something after that?
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Sympathy for the Devils...

Post by blindpig » Thu Nov 07, 2024 4:10 pm

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Oh No, Now The US Will Have A President Who Does Bad Things

Democrats are sitting on a mountain of hundreds of thousands of human corpses they helped kill by mass military slaughter in the last four years, weeping and lamenting that now bad things are going to start happening.

Caitlin Johnstone
November 7, 2024



So hey, can Democrats finally start opposing genocide now?

Just kidding. They won’t.



Democrats are sitting on a mountain of hundreds of thousands of human corpses they helped kill by mass military slaughter in the last four years, weeping and lamenting that now bad things are going to start happening.



Democrats are shrieking so loud today because they know they’re wrong. They know their party ran a dogshit candidate. They know it was crazy to expect the left support the party that’s committing a live-streamed genocide.

It’s not anger.

It’s not fear.

It’s cognitive dissonance.



I should probably repeat what I said back in July: if you’re a Trump supporter who started reading me for my criticisms of the Biden administration, you are going to hate my guts after your guy gets in.






Democrats will spend the next four years viciously attacking Trump. So will I. But while Democrats will attack Trump because of the few ways in which he is different from themselves, I will be attacking him because of the many ways in which he is the same as the Democrats.

Both parties are in full alignment when it comes to the worst evils of the US empire. I and others like me will be focusing there, while the Democrats pour all their energy into pretending to be a real opposition party and exaggerating the differences between themselves and Trump.



The reason US presidential elections are so close and US politics remain divided pretty much 50–50 is because both parties are constantly walking the tightrope of trying to give the donor class as much as possible while giving Americans as little as possible and still getting votes. As soon as they figure out they can make fewer concessions to ordinary voters and still have a chance at winning, they roll back those concessions to make concessions to the plutocrats who own them.

They’re constantly calculating how little they can get away with giving the voting public. Give too much to the people and the plutocrats switch sides; give too little and the people won’t vote for you. So they both walk it right up to the line year after year, keeping them split right down the middle and never changing the status quo in any major way.

Which just so happens to be exactly what the rich and powerful oligarchs who own America want.




The only real solution to the trolley problem is to find and kill the prick who keeps tying people to trolley tracks and making people choose which ones die.



Meanwhile, Israel keeps brutally hammering Lebanon and Gaza with the full support of the United States. The Israeli military has publicly announced that the Palestinians who’ve been driven out of northern Gaza will not be allowed to return to their homes, meaning that this is a completely undisguised ethnic cleansing operation.

Benjamin Netanyahu fired Yoav “We’re exterminating human animals” Gallant on Tuesday because he’s too moderate and gentle for the current Israeli government. He has been replaced by the even nastier Israel Katz, who said in 2022, “Yesterday I warned the Arab students, who are flying Palestine flags at universities: Remember 48. Remember our independence war and your Nakba, don’t stretch the rope too much. […] If you don’t calm down, we’ll teach you a lesson that won’t be forgotten.”

If these things had happened after Trump was sworn in, liberals would be trying to rub it in our faces telling us it proves he’s worse on Gaza. But it’s happening now while they’ve still got a couple more months in power, so liberals are just ignoring it.



I honestly don’t think my respect for Democrats could sink any lower. It was very low already, but watching them try to bully people into supporting a genocidal monster these last few months has dropped me to a whole new level of disgust I didn’t know was possible.



A leftist is someone with logically and morally correct politics. A liberal is someone who wants to feel logically and morally correct without ever putting themselves at odds with power or costing themselves opportunities or experiencing the uncomfortable emotions that truth causes.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2024/11 ... ad-things/

******

Chris Hedges: The Politics of Cultural Despair
November 7, 2024

It is despair that is killing us. It fosters what Roger Lancaster calls “poisoned solidarity,” the intoxication forged from the negative energies of fear, envy, hatred and a lust for violence.

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The Morning After – by Mr. Fish.

By Chris Hedges
ScheerPost

In the end, the election was about despair.

Despair over futures that evaporated with deindustrialization. Despair over the loss of 30 million jobs in mass layoffs. Despair over austerity programs and the funneling of wealth upwards into the hands of rapacious oligarchs.

Despair over a liberal class that refuses to acknowledge the suffering it orchestrated under neoliberalism or embrace New Deal type programs that will ameliorate this suffering. Despair over the futile, endless wars, as well as the genocide in Gaza, where generals and politicians are never held accountable.

Despair over a democratic system that has been seized by corporate and oligarchic power.

This despair has been played out on the bodies of the disenfranchised through opioid and alcoholism addictions, gambling, mass shootings, suicides — especially among middle-aged white males — morbid obesity and the investment of our emotional and intellectual life in tawdry spectacles and the allure of magical thinking, from the absurd promises of the Christian right to the Oprah-like belief that reality is never an impediment to our desires.

These are the pathologies of a deeply diseased culture, what Friedrich Nietzsche calls an aggressive despiritualized nihilism.

Donald Trump is a symptom of our diseased society. He is not its cause. He is what is vomited up out of decay. He expresses a childish yearning to be an omnipotent god. This yearning resonates with Americans who feel they have been treated like human refuse.

But the impossibility of being a god, as Ernest Becker writes, leads to its dark alternative — destroying like a god. This self-immolation is what comes next.

Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party, along with the establishment wing of the Republican Party, which allied itself with Harris, live in their own non-reality-based belief system.

Harris, who was anointed by party elites and never received a single primary vote, proudly trumped her endorsement by Dick Cheney, a politician who left office with a 13 percent approval rating.

The smug, self-righteous “moral” crusade against Trump stokes the national reality television show that has replaced journalism and politics. It reduces a social, economic and political crisis to the personality of Trump. It refuses to confront and name the corporate forces responsible for our failed democracy.

It allows Democratic politicians to blithely ignore their base — 77 percent of Democrats and 62 percent of independents support an arms embargo against Israel.

The open collusion with corporate oppression and refusal to heed the desires and needs of the electorate neuters the press and Trump critics. These corporate puppets stand for nothing, other than their own advancement.

The lies they tell to working men and women, especially with programs such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), do far more damage than any of the lies uttered by Trump.

American Nightmare

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Oswald Spengler. (Bundesarchiv, Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-SA 3.0)

Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West predicted that, as Western democracies calcified and died, a class of “monied thugs,” people such as Trump, would replace the traditional political elites.

Democracy would become a sham. Hatred would be fostered and fed to the masses to encourage them to tear themselves apart.

The American dream has become an American nightmare.

The social bonds, including jobs that gave working Americans a sense of purpose and stability, that gave them meaning and hope, have been sundered. The stagnation of tens of millions of lives, the realization that it will not be better for their children, the predatory nature of our institutions, including education, health care and prisons, have engendered, along with despair, feelings of powerlessness and humiliation.

It has bred loneliness, frustration, anger and a sense of worthlessness.

“When life is not worth living, everything becomes a pretext for ridding ourselves of it … ,” Émile Durkheim wrote.

“There is a collective mood, as there is an individual mood, that inclines nations to sadness. … For individuals are too closely involved in the life of society for it to be sick without their being affected. Its suffering inevitably becomes theirs.”

Cult Leaders

Decayed societies, where a population is stripped of political, social and economic power, instinctively reach out for cult leaders. I watched this during the breakup of the former Yugoslavia. The cult leader promises a return to a mythical golden age and vows, as Trump does, to crush the forces embodied in demonized groups and individuals that are blamed for their misery.

The more outrageous cult leaders become, the more cult leaders flout law and social conventions, the more they gain in popularity. Cult leaders are immune to the norms of established society. This is their appeal. Cult leaders seek total power. Those who follow them grant them this power in the desperate hope that the cult leaders will save them.

All cults are personality cults. Cult leaders are narcissists. They demand obsequious fawning and total obedience. They prize loyalty above competence. They wield absolute control. They do not tolerate criticism.

They are deeply insecure, a trait they attempt to cover up with bombastic grandiosity. They are amoral and emotionally and physically abusive. They see those around them as objects to be manipulated for their own empowerment, enjoyment and often sadistic entertainment.

All those outside the cult are branded as forces of evil, prompting an epic battle whose natural expression is violence.

We will not convince those who have surrendered their agency to a cult leader and embraced magical thinking through rational argument. We will not coerce them into submission. We will not find salvation for them or ourselves by supporting the Democratic Party.

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Trump at a rally in Phoenix in June. (Gage Skidmore, Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0)

Whole segments of American society are now bent on self-immolation. They despise this world and what it has done to them. Their personal and political behavior is willfully suicidal. They seek to destroy, even if destruction leads to violence and death.

They are no longer sustained by the comforting illusion of human progress, losing the only antidote to nihilism.

Pope John Paul II in 1981 issued an encyclical titled “Laborem exercens,” or “Through Work.” He attacked the idea, fundamental to capitalism, that work was merely an exchange of money for labor.

Work, he wrote, should not be reduced to the commodification of human beings through wages. Workers were not impersonal instruments to be manipulated like inanimate objects to increase profit. Work was essential to human dignity and self-fulfillment. It gave us a sense of empowerment and identity.

It allowed us to build a relationship with society in which we could feel we contributed to social harmony and social cohesion, a relationship in which we had purpose.

The pope castigated unemployment, underemployment, inadequate wages, automation and a lack of job security as violations of human dignity. These conditions, he wrote, were forces that negated self-esteem, personal satisfaction, responsibility and creativity. The exaltation of the machine, he warned, reduced human beings to the status of slaves.

He called for full employment, a minimum wage large enough to support a family, the right of a parent to stay home with children, and jobs and a living wage for the disabled. He advocated, in order to sustain strong families, universal health insurance, pensions, accident insurance and work schedules that permitted free time and vacations. He wrote that all workers should have the right to form unions with the ability to strike.

We must invest our energy into organizing mass movements to overthrow the corporate state through sustained acts of mass civil disobedience. This includes the most powerful weapon we possess — the strike.

By turning our ire on the corporate state, we name the true sources of power and abuse. We expose the absurdity of blaming our demise on demonized groups such as undocumented workers, Muslims or Blacks. We give people an alternative to a corporate-indentured Democratic Party that cannot be rehabilitated.

We make possible the restoration of an open society, one that serves the common good rather than corporate profit. We must demand nothing less than full employment, guaranteed minimum incomes, universal health insurance, free education at all levels, robust protection of the natural world and an end to militarism and imperialism.

We must create the possibility for a life of dignity, purpose and self-esteem. If we do not, it will ensure a Christianized fascism and ultimately, with the accelerating ecocide, our obliteration.

https://consortiumnews.com/2024/11/07/c ... despair-2/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Sympathy for the Devils...

Post by blindpig » Fri Nov 08, 2024 4:13 pm

“The Democrats failed to deliver”: Socialists analyze Trump’s victory

Eugene Puryear and Brian Becker discuss key reasons why Trump won by such unexpectedly wide margins and why the Democrats were unable to mobilize their base

November 07, 2024 by Peoples Dispatch

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Trump makes one of his final campaign stops in North Carolina before winning the presidency (Photo via @realDonaldTrump/X)

President-elect Donald Trump’s victory in the November 7 United States presidential election was in many ways a shock—the Republican nominee took the popular vote for the first time since George W. Bush in 2004, and won every single swing state against Democratic opponent (and sitting Vice President) Kamala Harris.

What led to this massive failure of the Democratic Party apparatus to maintain its hold on power? Peoples Dispatch has published, in three parts, a discussion between socialist journalists and left leaders Brian Becker and Eugene Puryear on the key reasons behind Trump’s victory—demystifying the liberal argument that the country has supposedly moved to the right. This discussion originally took place on The Socialist Program, on BreakThrough News.

According to Becker and Puryear, the cost of living crisis is a far more critical issue than the Democratic Party operatives let on. “The Democrats failed to deliver,” Puryear argues. “Harris was speaking to the issue, but not actually providing a solution that meets the scale of the problem” faced by working people in the US.

Read the full interview, which has been lightly edited for clarity, below:

Brian Becker: Donald Trump has won the presidency for a second time. Donald Trump won the popular vote. He won the Electoral College. Four years ago, Joe Biden won by a greater margin than that in terms of popular vote. The Democrats controlled the House and the Senate. What happened [in this election] from your point of view?

Eugene Puryear: Obviously, turnout overall was lower. Of course, with some of these numbers, we take them with a grain of salt because as you mentioned, they will change as more states come in. You can take them as rough proxies.

The Democrats lost something like 14 million votes, Trump lost nearly 2 million votes. A lot of people who voted in the last election cycle just stayed home. Now, the question is, why did they stay home?

There are a lot of different reasons why that may be, and why we may be seeing some of these pieces. But I want to hone in on one particular piece, and that is if you compare 2020 to 2024, the percentage of [voters] making under 100,000 dollars went down 14%.

When you look at what’s going on with the economy, which people were saying was their major issue, it’s kind of always the economy, right? Because we live under capitalism. Your paycheck is your ration card. People are always going to be primarily concerned with how to have shelter, food, clothing, so on and so forth.

We are coming out of one of the largest inflationary spirals that many people have seen in their entire lifetime. We can actually measure where the cost of living crisis in the United States for almost all people has skyrocketed. You have the Census Bureau Household Pulse Survey saying that there’s 155 million people, roughly, who are having trouble making ends meet week to week. 21 million people roughly, that at least sometime in the past week, actually went hungry. So the level of hardship is so significant.

97% of Black respondents under 30 just tell The New York Times that the economy was poor or fair. We’ve seen the New York Times poll that also showed that something close to 70% of people in the United States think the economy needs to be massively transformed or completely torn down. Year over year wages have gone up about 4%, but the cost of housing has gone up about 4.9%. The cost of eating food away from home has gone up about 4%. The cost of electricity is going to be about 4%. Your wages aren’t keeping up with your rent. They’re barely keeping up or basically on par with the cost of powering your home, your Internet, your air conditioning, your electricity.

The cost of going out with your friends to try to have a good time, and to forget some of these bad times, has also basically been essentially the same increase in costs as your wages. People’s ability to survive is not keeping up with their incomes.

Then you put that together with the fact that you have a 14% reduction in terms of percentage of the electorate of people making 100,000 dollars and below. You can start to see that a big part of what took place in the 2024 election here was that a large number of working class people just did not believe that either of the two party candidates had any solution for this massive crisis that was affecting them. Many of them chose not to vote.

That heavily affected all of the other issues that were playing into the election. Of course, there was the anger with the Democratic Party amongst many of its core supporters over their complicity and participation in the genocide in Gaza.

There was the manipulation of the immigration issue here in the United States, where a lot of the economic hardship was placed on the backs of immigrants, where both major parties essentially pandered to that.

We’re in a rapidly changing cultural environment in America. There is a huge amount of demagogy around the issue, for instance, of trans rights and trying to exploit the various different views people may have about the trans community that are incorrect, or wrong, or bigoted.

I don’t want to just say it’s all one factor, but I think it’s very notable that we are in a massive situation of economic crisis.

In almost every single country, the leader who was in power during this inflationary crisis has been turfed out, regardless of their politics. We’re seeing a similar trend here in the United States of America, that after the massive COVID-19 crisis, people have seen that there is this huge corporate smash and grab raid that drove up prices, only for the needs of corporate profiteering.

We had seen over COVID how easy it is to do things that help working class people. People just could not fathom that the political system was offering them so little in terms of actual solutions to their core economic issues.

Kamala Harris lost this race. The Biden administration, the Democratic Party lost this race, because they could not offer an alternative to the Republican far right agenda that also is offering no solutions, but was able to speak more substantially to a larger subset of the population.

BB: You see all of these liberal commentators who are pro Kamala Harris say that people in the United States are so backward, so reactionary, they voted for this racist, this reactionary xenophobe, Donald Trump, this misogynist.

Well, Eugene, the Democrats had control of the House and the Senate and the White House, they could have done anything they wanted in the last four years. And they apparently did whatever they wanted, and it didn’t satisfy the needs of working class people.

Let’s go back to inflation. Harris said price gouging is bad. Well, all of the inflation is price gouging. I mean, inflation isn’t something from God. It’s not divinely mandated. Capitalist companies raise prices. And so the government has the ability, the executive authority, to be able to do something about it. And Kamala Harris and Biden maybe whined about it once in a while when they were trying to get votes. But they did nothing to stop this looting of the working class, which is called inflation, but it’s really looting for corporate profit.

EP: The Economic Policy Institute has done a lot of studies on this issue and the height of the inflationary spiral, and was saying that 50 odd cents of every dollar of inflation was going towards corporate profits. If you average it out from 2021 now to 2024, it’s a little bit less than that. But you can still see a substantial amount of every dollar of inflation is going directly to corporate profits. So there is no doubt whatsoever that this was the case.

There are a number of other aspects that spoke to this, especially the issue of concentration in certain industries, especially the meatpacking industry, where you have collusion between different companies to keep the prices at the level that they want to keep them at.

Everywhere you look, it’s very clear that there is a corporate price gouging reality. The point that’s deeper here is that there is no real answer coming from the Biden-Harris administration.

The irony is that the White House actually put out a number of very good reports and studies actually laying out the role of corporate profiteering, monopolization and other things that were causing inflation. But they took no real substantial action. They didn’t try to put in any sort of price controls or price caps of any significance. The Kamala Harris plan for inflation was never really explained. She said that she was going to keep your grocery prices down and she said it over and over again. But she never really explained how she was going to do it.

The one thing that she shied away from was the overall issue of price caps. Her plan essentially was to make it easier for the FTC, the Federal Trade Commission, to sue companies over price gouging, which means that two years down the line, after you get through some long court case, the company might have to pay a fine and be held responsible.

We know that the fear of regulation doesn’t really prevent big corporations in America from doing anything whatsoever. There are dozens of states, including Republican led states, that have very similar provisions and power, and none of them were really used to bring down prices in any substantial way over the course of the inflationary price spiral.

So she was speaking to the issue, but not actually providing a solution that meets the scale of the problem.

The Democrats failed to deliver. Kamala Harris is saying we should increase the national minimum wage to $15 an hour. That obviously would have to pass Congress. And if they can’t pass the signature agenda of Joe Biden across a range of programs, when they controlled the House, the Senate and the presidency, how could you expect them, in a potential era of divided government, to just pass one policy like raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour?

When you look at people saying in polls that they trust Trump to handle the economy more than they trusted Harris, I think a lot of that is the credibility gap, the inability to actually address the price spiral as it was happening, the inability to actually deliver on things like a child tax credit and other social protections that people enjoyed during the brief pandemic Goldilocks zone for social policy.

It’s the inability to present a plan going forward that was actually credible, in terms of people being able to understand how the policies were going to translate into lower prices in the midst of a massive cost of living crisis.

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2024/11/07/ ... s-victory/

*****

Third Party Perspective on the Rightward Lurch of the US Body Politic
Posted by Internationalist 360° on November 6, 2024
Roger D. Harris

Image

The chickens that the Democrats hatched in 2016 came home to roost in 2024. Back then, the Democratic National Committee (DNC), representing the party’s establishment, promoted Donald Trump as the Republican nominee. They thought him to be an easy mark who would be opposed by both the Republican Party establishment and most US voters.

That stratagem turned out to be correct about the Republican establishment but wrong about the electorate. In any case, Trump went on to not only capture the GOP but the archaic Electoral College as well.

The DNC reprised that strategy with the same suicidal results this year, putting all their deplorable eggs into the one basket of running on a platform of “not-Trump.”

Trump campaigned on the gambit of asking whether Americans felt they were better off now after four years of Joe Biden. The populace roared back a resounding “NO.” Pitching to a disaffected and dispossessed citizenry, he threw them reactionary red meat, scapegoating immigrants and others.

Kamala Harris flew the blue banner but her woke message that she was “not Trump” was less convincing. A red tsunami has swept the Democrats not only out of the White House but congress and many governorships. Trump is on track to win the popular vote.

This “triumph of the swill,” borrowing from the Dead Kennedys, will have consequences for the Supreme Court and the larger makeup of the US politics going into the future. MAGA has now firmly infected the body politic and threatens to metastasize. Hillary Clinton’s smug words in 2016, “Trump is the gift that keeps on giving,” turned out to be unintentionally prescient.

Would it have been any different had the DNC not rigged the 2016 presidential nomination for establishment candidate Clinton by sabotaging Bernie Sanders, who campaigned on issues of empowerment and economic benefit that also appealed to Trump voters? For them, the fear that Sanders could activate and organize genuine grassroots discontent into a social movement was greater than the risk of a Trump presidency.

But the faux independent senator from Vermont had a fatal flaw – “thou shalt not do anything that harms the Democratic Party.” This was all the DNC needed to crush his campaign. His “Our Revolution” was domesticated, while Bernie shepherded progressives into the big blue tent.


Green Party campaign manager Jason Call, speaking personally on election night, said it was better to vote for a third party candidate who was opposed to the genocide in Palestine. Even if one accepts the bogus argument that doing so throws the election to Trump, in the larger picture, that would still be preferable to telling the Democrats, who are the party in power, that their conduct is acceptable.

Democratic Party supporters, of course, disagree. They claim that Trump is even more pro-Zionist than their candidate, which may be true. Although today the Democratic Party is arguably the leading war party, we will have cold comfort with the Republicans in power. And domestically the Democrats spout a better line on some social wedge issues that don’t threaten elite rule, such as women’s reproductive rights, although their walk is not as good as their talk.

Yes, things will get worse under Trump. But things would also get worse under Harris. This is because the entire political discourse has been staggering to the right regardless of which wing of the duopoly is in power.

In contrast, the voting public is well to the left of them on almost every issue, from universal public healthcare to opposition to endless war. By any objective measure, Jill Stein’s Green Party campaign was middle of the road compared to her corporate party competitors.

The lesser-evil voting strategy itself bears some degree of responsibility for this reactionary tide. By unconditionally supporting the Democrats, progressive-leaning voters become a captured constituency to be ignored. They incentivize the Democrats to scurry even further to the right to try to pick up the votes of the undecided and to further cater to the class interests of their corporate funders.

Wednesday morning quarterbacks (election day is on Tuesday) are saying that the Democrats should have given more emphasis in their campaign messaging to economic issues affecting working people. This ignores the fact that Harris, and Biden before her, had claimed that they had turned the economy around.

The debate on how much better the post-Covid economy is and who benefited leads to a deeper question. The current incarnation of capitalism, what is popularly called “neoliberalism,” has failed to meet the material needs of working people. This structural problem, not simply a question of policy, begs for another economic model.

The now manifest failure of the Democrats to offer a platform beyond “not Trump” exposes their bankruptcy. They do not even pretend to have an agenda to address the underlying economic distress, because the limits of the economic system that they embrace provides no succor.

In fact, neither of the major parties offer an alternative to neoliberalism. Both duopoly wings tend to campaign on cultural rather than substantive economic issues precisely because neither have solutions to the erosion of the quality of life for most citizens.

The Republican’s capitalized on popular discontent with the incumbents. But come the mid-term elections in two years, the tables will be turned. This drama is being played out abroad with social democrats getting the boot in places like Argentina and Austria, part of a larger blowback filling the sails of an international far-right insurgence.

A major left-liberal concern is the supposed imminent threat of fascism. Their fear is focused on Trump’s dysfunctionality and his “deplorable” working class minions; not on the security apparatus of the state, which they have learned to love. However, fascism is not a personality disorder. The ruling class – whether its nominal head wears a red or blue hat – has no reason to impose a fascist dictatorship as long as people embrace rather than oppose the security state.

The New York Times reported: “US stocks, the value of the dollar, and yields on Treasury bonds all recorded gains as Mr. Trump’s victory became clear.” That is good for the ruling class but not so much for the rest of us.

Lesser-evil voting contributes to the rightward trajectory of US politics at this time when structural change is needed. Absent a third-party alternative, the two-party duopoly doesn’t even recognize existential threats, such as global warming or nuclear annihilation, let alone address them.

Meanwhile, the US military launched a test hypersonic nuclear missile right after the polls closed on November 5. The scariest thing about their “reassurance” to the American public regarding this practice run for World War III was that it was “routine.”

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2024/11/ ... y-politic/

(Italics added.)

******

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2024/11/ ... y-politic/

Working class activists and U.S. President cross paths in Baltimore
November 7, 2024 Struggle-La Lucha Baltimore bureau

Image
Amazon: Invest in Workers, not Genocide flyer.

Oct. 31 — We and President Joe Biden had very different Tuesdays. But somehow, we crossed paths in Baltimore City, Maryland.

In the first place, Biden and these writers are very different kinds of people. We’re members of the Peoples Power Assembly, working on the “Amazon: Invest in Workers, not Genocide” campaign. Biden is a segregationist from Delaware who, right now, is in charge of the biggest, most violent, and most profitable military apparatus in the world.

When we woke up on Tuesday, Oct. 29, 2024, all we knew was that we’d be leafleting around the Amazon warehouses, getting the word out about the campaign.

When Joe Biden woke up that Tuesday, his staffers and the Secret Service already had his itinerary mapped out. All the appropriate police and city officials had been contacted and coordinated with. Every photo op was carefully vetted, every available police and military vehicle had full gas tanks, and all personnel had a full kit.

His “visit” to the city was nothing more than a stop for ice cream (in one of Baltimore’s most gentrified neighborhoods) and a speech at the port. Outside those two stops, Joe Biden traveled with a small army of armed security.

He must have been going to his speech at the port when we crossed paths.

We had already finished leafleting around the warehouse in Sparrows Point for the day. We’d been leafleting around the Broening Highway warehouse for maybe half an hour when we saw Baltimore City police shutting down roads. Curious, we hung around to see what was happening.

Sure enough, the motorcade appeared. We made sure to film its entirety so we could let Joe know we were there and what we were raising to the working class.

While we traveled on foot to meet the workers where they were, the president, boxed away in his “Beast” — the presidential armored limousine — pushed people as far away from him as possible. The sirens of the convoy rang out in unison until they spotted us. One by one the pattern switched and the volume intensified as if to deter us from filming our “public servant.”

Of course, the public was not invited to his speech at the port.

It was his usual fare—folksy lip service that rang hollow. It’s clear that the White House is desperate to protect its left flank and knows very well that it has to at least appear to address the issues of working people in Baltimore.

In one moment, he congratulated the dockworkers on the higher wages they earned through their strike against automation and, in another, claimed his party would lead the way in the “modernization” of America’s ports. This was a slap in the face of the dockworkers who continue to fight against the tide of automation.

Keep in mind that most of the funds the President announced for Baltimore’s ports are still only theoretical. He made no real commitment to fund the rebuilding of the Key Bridge, only that he is “calling on Congress” to pass a bill.

It would go a much longer way if he accomplished any of the demands we raised on his most recent visit. There’s a lot of money in the war budget that’s funding a genocide that could be spent on infrastructure.

Ultimately, it’s all far too little and far too late. No new bridges or tunnels are going to curb the rising police violence across the city. No “modernized” port is going to relieve the food deserts. Schools across the city don’t have drinkable water, heat, or air conditioning.

While the ruling class and their personal army in Baltimore City Police continue to get money, the people of Baltimore continue to survive as their public infrastructure remains ignored and crumbling.

What the workers need is a revolutionary change that is far-reaching and absolute. No president or agency has the answers; only the people know what the people need. The people stand with the workers, not with war profiteers or genocide enablers!

Long live Baltimore’s oppressed and working class, and long live international solidarity!

https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2024/ ... baltimore/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Sympathy for the Devils...

Post by blindpig » Sat Nov 09, 2024 4:20 pm

About This Election Week…
Posted on November 9, 2024 by Lambert Strether

By Thomas Neuburger. Originally published at God’s Spies.

Analyses of the recent historic Democratic loss are thick on the ground. Some provide data or forensic analysis and some prescribe, giving recipes for what to do differently.

Before I delve into forensics of my own, I’d like to offer material from other quarters for your consideration. Consider this a mosaic of what’s being said. What do you think this adds up to?

I’ll offer my own take soon, this week or next.

* * *
What the Party Expected Long Term

To understand what happened this week, I think we need to start here. This chart is from a 2020 Center for American Progress (CAP) report titled “America’s Electoral Future: The Coming Generational Transformation”. It claims to show the “full generation effect” on voting for the next few cycles in selected states. Note the slow but inevitable march to the sea — in this case, the warm embrace of the Party in blue.

Image

Note the highlighted projection for 2024. (2020 is shown as a projection because the study was published before that year’s election. Of the states CAP projected to turn blue in 2020, all but Florida did.)

The youth vote was supposed to be a very large part of this move, but as the population shifted, almost all segments were supposed to turn blue eventually.

* * *
What Actually Happened: Voter Segments

The actual results were drastically different this time. Let’s start with voter segments.

Youth Realignment

With the CAP report in mind, consider this from The Circle at Tufts University, which studies the youth vote:

According to CIRCLE analyses of the AP VoteCast Survey, nationally 52% of youth voted for Vice President Harris and 46% of youth voted for President Trump. …[In 2020 [Trump] received 36% of votes from 18- to 29-year-old voters.

Democratic youth vote collapsed by nearly 20% of its 2020 amount. Here’s what that looks like by gender, 2024 vs 2020:

Image

Go back to the CAP projection above. Of the states projected to turn blue in 2024 — Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Florida, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina — none did. Arizona, which has yet been called, is leaning toward Trump.

Income Realignment

Exit polls show income realignment. In 2020, all income groups except the reasonable well off (those making more than $100,000 per year) favored Democrats by a lot.

All of that changed in 2024. Both low and middle income groups now support Republicans, while the well off now support Dems. The margins are smaller, but the switch is unmistakable.

Image

In the main, Democrats most represent the well off.

Race and Ethnicity Shifts

Many have already noted the change in support among racial and ethnicity groups. CNN has done a lot of analysis using the exit polls:

Image

Latino voters, and men in particular, have been moving toward Trump since 2016. This year, Latino men broke in his direction for the first time. Biden won their support by 23 points in 2020 and Trump won them in 2024. Latina women still favored Harris, but by smaller margins than they supported either Clinton or Biden.

Educational Gap Support

From CNN again. Trump’s support among whites with no degree remains strong. Harris lost support among voters of color both with and without degrees.

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Harris’s drop from Clinton in 2016 is especially stark.

Economy Voters Broke for Trump

Views on the economy and personal experience of hardship motivated many voters toward Trump. If the economy was your issue, you probably voted for Trump.

Image

Image

The number of people who thought they were doing worse more than doubled since 2020.

In 2020, just about one-fifth of voters said they were doing worse than four years before. This year, it’s nearly half of voters who say they are doing worse than four years ago. Trump won them overwhelmingly.

One could argue that the first chart is subjective (“views” are always subjective), but the second (“family has fallen behind”) is likely fact-based.

‘Democracy at Stake’

Finally, the “democracy at stake” message worked only with Democrats.

Image

* * *
What Actually Happened: The Electorate Everall

Some data from the electorate overall: mixed messages.

Near Universal ‘Red Shift’

Here’s the red shift by county (all voters) as of this writing:

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National Popular Vote

Yet with all this shifting toward Trump, the overall national popular vote went down while Trump’s share went up:

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Wooing the Republican Party

The Democrats closing strategy seemed to be to grab Republican voters who may not have liked Trump. Here’s how that worked out (hat tip Dave Johnson by email).

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‘Double Haters’ Broke for Trump

In fact, people who hated (“had an unfavorable view of”) both candidates mostly chose Trump over Harris.

Image

I’m among those who didn’t think that would happen.

* * *
Analysis: Party Professionals

A number of people close to the Party core — consultants, media mavens and the like — have offered their thoughts.

One of the more notable (and typical) takes is by Morning Joe Scarborough, talking with Rev. Al Sharpton. Bottom line: Racism and sexism doomed the campaign.

[youtube]http://youtu.be/Sn-cKt4YGaE[/img]

“Blame the electorate” responses are everywhere. Here’s campaign and gun control activist Shannon Watts:

Image

Feminist writer Jill Filipovic:

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DNC chair Jaime Harrison, countering Bernie Sanders’ pro-populist advice:

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In general, Party leaders and supporters say Harris ran a good campaign. It’s not her fault.

* * *
Analysis: Others Weigh In

Others have differing opinions. Economist Pavlina Tcherneva, in a good Twitter thread, notes how many progressive measures passed in Trump-won states.

Image

Ian Welsh took a look at abortion reform — ballot measures that supported it and how Harris did in those states:

Image

David Sirota thinks Harris’s embrace of the rich had a major damping effect:

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And consider this, from the late David Graeber on the sin of “radical centrism”. He claims Obama, and by extension most of the Party, is guilty (hat tip Double Down News).

[youtube]http://youtu.be/-9afwZON8dU[[/youtube]

Food for thought, yes? Probably more than a meal’s worth.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/11 ... -week.html

OK, I'll bite: This “radical centrism" is what the Dems are, there's no fixing that. it is straightforward classical liberalism that John C Calhoun would recognize draped in the tattered rags of the ephemeral New Deal.

Many Voters Backed Abortion Rights and Donald Trump, a Challenge for Democrats
Posted on November 9, 2024 by Yves Smith

Yves here. While many women are legitimately upset about the loss of abortion rights under Roe v.Wade, it’s pretty disingenuous to depict the Democrats as stauncher defenders of abortion rights. Like “fighting” for workers when the Dems presided over an erosion of organizing rights (which could have been bolstered by legislation) and perilous little effort on raising minimum wages, there’s been a long and marked gap between Democratic party virtual signaling and action on the abortion front.

Let’s start with an issue this article skips over: that by pushing ballot initiatives on the state level, the Dems look not even to be considering national abortion legislation. Yet in Europe, most states that provide for abortions have made these protections a matter of law. The Democrats did nothing to secure abortion right when it would have been politically uncontroversial, in the era of peak feminism, the 1970s, or at the start of Obama’s first term, when the desperation over the financial crisis and the filibuster-proof majority gave him a once-in-century opportunity to pass all sorts of sweeping reforms, not just related to finance. He punted instead.

Mind you, feminist activists in the 1970s were just as culpable. They focused on the sure to be unattainable Equal Right amendment, rather than security the most important elements, equal pay for equal work, and solidly securing abortion rights, which could have been done much more easily via new laws. But then what would happen to all those donations when the “fight” was won?

Another ground for criticizing Dems and disingenuous feminists is the packing of the Federal bench with conservatives. Where were feminists when the Dems supported these appointments, which they did in the overwhelming majority of cases? I don’t recall a peep about this, even though the clear intent was to advance a whole host of right-wing agenda items, including on “the right to life”. So even though Trump fell in with the anti-abortion types after being pro-abortion before he won the Republican nomination in 2016, it’s misleading to depict the loss of Federal abortion rights yet another Hair Furore evil. This change came about as a result of a decades-spanning campaign.

And for families struggling to make their money last to the next paycheck, or choosing between paying the rent or for gas, abortion rights are a comparative luxury. Poverty rose markedly under Biden, and voters made clear that the economy and immigration (which is perceived to affect pay rates and the cost of rental housing in communities with a noticable increase) were their top issues.

By Susan Varney, previously a senior correspondent for KFF Health News. Originally published at KFF Health News

Voters in three states — Arizona, Missouri, and Nevada — chose on Tuesday to advance protections for abortion rights in their state constitutions. Donald Trump, meanwhile, is likely to win all three states in his victorious bid for the White House.

It’s a conundrum for Democrats, who expected ballot initiatives on abortion rights in those states to boost the prospects of their candidates, including Vice President Kamala Harris. But data from VoteCast, a large survey of U.S. voters conducted by The Associated Press and partners including KFF, found that about 3 in 10 voters in Arizona, Missouri, and Nevada who supported the abortion rights measures also voted for Trump.

“We saw lots of people who voted in favor of abortion access and still voted for Donald Trump,” said Liz Hamel, director of Public Opinion and Survey Research for KFF, a health information nonprofit that includes KFF Health News.

VoteCast is a survey of more than 115,000 registered voters in all 50 states conducted between Oct. 28 and Nov. 5. It’s intended to be “the most accurate picture possible of who has voted, and why,” according to the AP.

About 1 in 4 of the polled voters said abortion was the “single most important” factor to their vote, though that number was higher among Democrats, young women, Black adults, and Hispanic adults.

Abortion rights referendums passed in seven states on Tuesday, including Missouri and Arizona, where state bans were overturned. Vice President Kamala Harris made reproductive rights a cornerstone of her campaign, but the VoteCast results reinforce earlier surveys that indicated economic concerns were the foremost issue in the election.

Tuesday’s was the first presidential election since the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority overturned Roe v. Wade. During Trump’s first term as president, he nominated three Supreme Court justices who later joined the 2022 ruling that eliminated women’s constitutional right to abortion care.

Mike Islami, 20, voted for Trump in Madison, Wisconsin, where he’s a full-time student. He said abortion is “a woman’s right” that “was definitely in the back of my mind” when he cast his ballot.

“I don’t think much is going to change” about abortion access during Trump’s second term, he said. “I believe his policy is that he’s just going to give it back to the states and from there they could decide how important it was.”

The survey found that the percentage of voters who said abortion was the most important factor in their vote was similar in states that had abortion measures on the ballot and states without them.

When voters cast their ballots, they were more motivated by economic anxiety and the cost of filling up their gas tanks, housing, and food, according to the survey results. Trump won those voters as much in hotly contested states such as Pennsylvania and Wisconsin as in reliably red states.

Glen Bolger, a Republican campaign strategist, said the 2022 election results demonstrated that Republican candidates are better off talking about the economy and the cost of living than they are about abortion.

This year, Trump voters who supported abortion rights amendments may have decided to take Trump “at his word that he was not going to support a national ban,” Bolger said. In casting their vote for Trump, he said, those supporters may have thought, “Let’s elect him to deal with the cost of living and health care and gasoline and everything else.”

The VoteCast survey found stronger support for abortion ballot initiatives from female voters: 72% of women in Nevada, 69% in Arizona, 62% in Missouri.

Erica Wallace, 39, of Miami, voted for Harris and in favor of an abortion rights ballot measure in Florida, which fell just short of the 60% threshold needed to amend the state constitution.

“As a grown woman, you’re out and you’re working, living your life,” said Wallace, an executive secretary who lives in Miami. She said the state’s ban, which criminalizes abortion care before many women know they’re pregnant, amounts to unequal treatment for women.

“I pay my taxes. I live good,” she said. “I’m doing everything every other citizen does.”

Men were more likely to vote against protecting abortion rights. Men voted 67% in Nevada, 64% in Arizona, and 55% in Missouri for the abortion rights ballot initiatives.

The VoteCast survey found that, overall, voters believed Harris was better able to handle health care. That is consistent with the long-standing view that “Democrats traditionally have the advantage on health care,” Hamel said. Still, Trump outperformed Harris among more than half of voters who said they were very concerned about health care costs.

Family premiums for employer-sponsored health insurance rose 7% in 2024 to an average of $25,572 annually, according to KFF’s 2024 Employer Health Benefits Survey. On average, workers contribute $6,296 annually to the cost of family coverage.

“Everybody is impacted by high health-care costs, and nobody has a solution to it,” Bolger said. “That’s something voters are very frustrated about.”

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/11 ... crats.html

The 'solution' is Medicare for all in the short term but socialism for all is better.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Sympathy for the Devils...

Post by blindpig » Sat Nov 09, 2024 4:23 pm

About This Election Week…
Posted on November 9, 2024 by Lambert Strether

By Thomas Neuburger. Originally published at God’s Spies.

Analyses of the recent historic Democratic loss are thick on the ground. Some provide data or forensic analysis and some prescribe, giving recipes for what to do differently.

Before I delve into forensics of my own, I’d like to offer material from other quarters for your consideration. Consider this a mosaic of what’s being said. What do you think this adds up to?

I’ll offer my own take soon, this week or next.

* * *
What the Party Expected Long Term

To understand what happened this week, I think we need to start here. This chart is from a 2020 Center for American Progress (CAP) report titled “America’s Electoral Future: The Coming Generational Transformation”. It claims to show the “full generation effect” on voting for the next few cycles in selected states. Note the slow but inevitable march to the sea — in this case, the warm embrace of the Party in blue.

Image

Note the highlighted projection for 2024. (2020 is shown as a projection because the study was published before that year’s election. Of the states CAP projected to turn blue in 2020, all but Florida did.)

The youth vote was supposed to be a very large part of this move, but as the population shifted, almost all segments were supposed to turn blue eventually.

* * *
What Actually Happened: Voter Segments

The actual results were drastically different this time. Let’s start with voter segments.

Youth Realignment

With the CAP report in mind, consider this from The Circle at Tufts University, which studies the youth vote:

According to CIRCLE analyses of the AP VoteCast Survey, nationally 52% of youth voted for Vice President Harris and 46% of youth voted for President Trump. …[In 2020 [Trump] received 36% of votes from 18- to 29-year-old voters.

Democratic youth vote collapsed by nearly 20% of its 2020 amount. Here’s what that looks like by gender, 2024 vs 2020:

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Go back to the CAP projection above. Of the states projected to turn blue in 2024 — Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Florida, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina — none did. Arizona, which has yet been called, is leaning toward Trump.

Income Realignment

Exit polls show income realignment. In 2020, all income groups except the reasonable well off (those making more than $100,000 per year) favored Democrats by a lot.

All of that changed in 2024. Both low and middle income groups now support Republicans, while the well off now support Dems. The margins are smaller, but the switch is unmistakable.

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In the main, Democrats most represent the well off.

Race and Ethnicity Shifts

Many have already noted the change in support among racial and ethnicity groups. CNN has done a lot of analysis using the exit polls:

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Latino voters, and men in particular, have been moving toward Trump since 2016. This year, Latino men broke in his direction for the first time. Biden won their support by 23 points in 2020 and Trump won them in 2024. Latina women still favored Harris, but by smaller margins than they supported either Clinton or Biden.

Educational Gap Support

From CNN again. Trump’s support among whites with no degree remains strong. Harris lost support among voters of color both with and without degrees.

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Harris’s drop from Clinton in 2016 is especially stark.

Economy Voters Broke for Trump

Views on the economy and personal experience of hardship motivated many voters toward Trump. If the economy was your issue, you probably voted for Trump.

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The number of people who thought they were doing worse more than doubled since 2020.

In 2020, just about one-fifth of voters said they were doing worse than four years before. This year, it’s nearly half of voters who say they are doing worse than four years ago. Trump won them overwhelmingly.

One could argue that the first chart is subjective (“views” are always subjective), but the second (“family has fallen behind”) is likely fact-based.

‘Democracy at Stake’

Finally, the “democracy at stake” message worked only with Democrats.

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* * *
What Actually Happened: The Electorate Everall

Some data from the electorate overall: mixed messages.

Near Universal ‘Red Shift’

Here’s the red shift by county (all voters) as of this writing:

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National Popular Vote

Yet with all this shifting toward Trump, the overall national popular vote went down while Trump’s share went up:

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Wooing the Republican Party

The Democrats closing strategy seemed to be to grab Republican voters who may not have liked Trump. Here’s how that worked out (hat tip Dave Johnson by email).

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‘Double Haters’ Broke for Trump

In fact, people who hated (“had an unfavorable view of”) both candidates mostly chose Trump over Harris.

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I’m among those who didn’t think that would happen.

* * *
Analysis: Party Professionals

A number of people close to the Party core — consultants, media mavens and the like — have offered their thoughts.

One of the more notable (and typical) takes is by Morning Joe Scarborough, talking with Rev. Al Sharpton. Bottom line: Racism and sexism doomed the campaign.



“Blame the electorate” responses are everywhere. Here’s campaign and gun control activist Shannon Watts:

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Feminist writer Jill Filipovic:

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DNC chair Jaime Harrison, countering Bernie Sanders’ pro-populist advice:

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In general, Party leaders and supporters say Harris ran a good campaign. It’s not her fault.

* * *
Analysis: Others Weigh In

Others have differing opinions. Economist Pavlina Tcherneva, in a good Twitter thread, notes how many progressive measures passed in Trump-won states.

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Ian Welsh took a look at abortion reform — ballot measures that supported it and how Harris did in those states:

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David Sirota thinks Harris’s embrace of the rich had a major damping effect:

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And consider this, from the late David Graeber on the sin of “radical centrism”. He claims Obama, and by extension most of the Party, is guilty (hat tip Double Down News).

[youtube]http://youtu.be/-9afwZON8dU[[/youtube]

Food for thought, yes? Probably more than a meal’s worth.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/11 ... -week.html

OK, I'll bite: This “radical centrism" is what the Dems are, there's no fixing that. it is straightforward classical liberalism that John C Calhoun would recognize draped in the tattered rags of the ephemeral New Deal.

Many Voters Backed Abortion Rights and Donald Trump, a Challenge for Democrats
Posted on November 9, 2024 by Yves Smith

Yves here. While many women are legitimately upset about the loss of abortion rights under Roe v.Wade, it’s pretty disingenuous to depict the Democrats as stauncher defenders of abortion rights. Like “fighting” for workers when the Dems presided over an erosion of organizing rights (which could have been bolstered by legislation) and perilous little effort on raising minimum wages, there’s been a long and marked gap between Democratic party virtual signaling and action on the abortion front.

Let’s start with an issue this article skips over: that by pushing ballot initiatives on the state level, the Dems look not even to be considering national abortion legislation. Yet in Europe, most states that provide for abortions have made these protections a matter of law. The Democrats did nothing to secure abortion right when it would have been politically uncontroversial, in the era of peak feminism, the 1970s, or at the start of Obama’s first term, when the desperation over the financial crisis and the filibuster-proof majority gave him a once-in-century opportunity to pass all sorts of sweeping reforms, not just related to finance. He punted instead.

Mind you, feminist activists in the 1970s were just as culpable. They focused on the sure to be unattainable Equal Right amendment, rather than security the most important elements, equal pay for equal work, and solidly securing abortion rights, which could have been done much more easily via new laws. But then what would happen to all those donations when the “fight” was won?

Another ground for criticizing Dems and disingenuous feminists is the packing of the Federal bench with conservatives. Where were feminists when the Dems supported these appointments, which they did in the overwhelming majority of cases? I don’t recall a peep about this, even though the clear intent was to advance a whole host of right-wing agenda items, including on “the right to life”. So even though Trump fell in with the anti-abortion types after being pro-abortion before he won the Republican nomination in 2016, it’s misleading to depict the loss of Federal abortion rights yet another Hair Furore evil. This change came about as a result of a decades-spanning campaign.

And for families struggling to make their money last to the next paycheck, or choosing between paying the rent or for gas, abortion rights are a comparative luxury. Poverty rose markedly under Biden, and voters made clear that the economy and immigration (which is perceived to affect pay rates and the cost of rental housing in communities with a noticable increase) were their top issues.

By Susan Varney, previously a senior correspondent for KFF Health News. Originally published at KFF Health News

Voters in three states — Arizona, Missouri, and Nevada — chose on Tuesday to advance protections for abortion rights in their state constitutions. Donald Trump, meanwhile, is likely to win all three states in his victorious bid for the White House.

It’s a conundrum for Democrats, who expected ballot initiatives on abortion rights in those states to boost the prospects of their candidates, including Vice President Kamala Harris. But data from VoteCast, a large survey of U.S. voters conducted by The Associated Press and partners including KFF, found that about 3 in 10 voters in Arizona, Missouri, and Nevada who supported the abortion rights measures also voted for Trump.

“We saw lots of people who voted in favor of abortion access and still voted for Donald Trump,” said Liz Hamel, director of Public Opinion and Survey Research for KFF, a health information nonprofit that includes KFF Health News.

VoteCast is a survey of more than 115,000 registered voters in all 50 states conducted between Oct. 28 and Nov. 5. It’s intended to be “the most accurate picture possible of who has voted, and why,” according to the AP.

About 1 in 4 of the polled voters said abortion was the “single most important” factor to their vote, though that number was higher among Democrats, young women, Black adults, and Hispanic adults.

Abortion rights referendums passed in seven states on Tuesday, including Missouri and Arizona, where state bans were overturned. Vice President Kamala Harris made reproductive rights a cornerstone of her campaign, but the VoteCast results reinforce earlier surveys that indicated economic concerns were the foremost issue in the election.

Tuesday’s was the first presidential election since the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority overturned Roe v. Wade. During Trump’s first term as president, he nominated three Supreme Court justices who later joined the 2022 ruling that eliminated women’s constitutional right to abortion care.

Mike Islami, 20, voted for Trump in Madison, Wisconsin, where he’s a full-time student. He said abortion is “a woman’s right” that “was definitely in the back of my mind” when he cast his ballot.

“I don’t think much is going to change” about abortion access during Trump’s second term, he said. “I believe his policy is that he’s just going to give it back to the states and from there they could decide how important it was.”

The survey found that the percentage of voters who said abortion was the most important factor in their vote was similar in states that had abortion measures on the ballot and states without them.

When voters cast their ballots, they were more motivated by economic anxiety and the cost of filling up their gas tanks, housing, and food, according to the survey results. Trump won those voters as much in hotly contested states such as Pennsylvania and Wisconsin as in reliably red states.

Glen Bolger, a Republican campaign strategist, said the 2022 election results demonstrated that Republican candidates are better off talking about the economy and the cost of living than they are about abortion.

This year, Trump voters who supported abortion rights amendments may have decided to take Trump “at his word that he was not going to support a national ban,” Bolger said. In casting their vote for Trump, he said, those supporters may have thought, “Let’s elect him to deal with the cost of living and health care and gasoline and everything else.”

The VoteCast survey found stronger support for abortion ballot initiatives from female voters: 72% of women in Nevada, 69% in Arizona, 62% in Missouri.

Erica Wallace, 39, of Miami, voted for Harris and in favor of an abortion rights ballot measure in Florida, which fell just short of the 60% threshold needed to amend the state constitution.

“As a grown woman, you’re out and you’re working, living your life,” said Wallace, an executive secretary who lives in Miami. She said the state’s ban, which criminalizes abortion care before many women know they’re pregnant, amounts to unequal treatment for women.

“I pay my taxes. I live good,” she said. “I’m doing everything every other citizen does.”

Men were more likely to vote against protecting abortion rights. Men voted 67% in Nevada, 64% in Arizona, and 55% in Missouri for the abortion rights ballot initiatives.

The VoteCast survey found that, overall, voters believed Harris was better able to handle health care. That is consistent with the long-standing view that “Democrats traditionally have the advantage on health care,” Hamel said. Still, Trump outperformed Harris among more than half of voters who said they were very concerned about health care costs.

Family premiums for employer-sponsored health insurance rose 7% in 2024 to an average of $25,572 annually, according to KFF’s 2024 Employer Health Benefits Survey. On average, workers contribute $6,296 annually to the cost of family coverage.

“Everybody is impacted by high health-care costs, and nobody has a solution to it,” Bolger said. “That’s something voters are very frustrated about.”

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/11 ... crats.html

The 'solution' is Medicare for all in the short term but socialism for all is better.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Sympathy for the Devils...

Post by blindpig » Sun Nov 10, 2024 6:26 pm

Trump, a product made from the moral bankruptcy of the Democratic Party

Hugo Dionísio

November 9, 2024

Voting for Trump to solve the problems of the living conditions of the U.S. working class is like leaving someone in the desert because he is thirsty.

Immigration, abortion, wokism, the Ukrainian war, eternal wars, reindustrialization and protectionism. With the exception of abortion and Wokism (identitarianism), which are matters concerned with each one’s conscience rather than about structural policy, they all represent, in some way, some of the most brutal consequences of neoliberalism in the U.S., and are among the major causes of Kamala’s defeat and Trump’s victory.

Deindustrialization, blamed by Trump as one of the major causes of America’s loss of power, happened as a direct result of the financialization of the economy (accelerated by Republican Nixon) making the Wall Street casino business the economic engine of the USA. Without industry came the deterioration of real power resolved through the creation of eternal conflicts. Eternal wars take a heavy toll on the Western economy (also in Europe) and hamper public investment in infrastructure and other social necessities. The loot they make possible for Blackrock, Monsanto, Golden Sachs and others does not go back to the American people, but to the accumulation of a few.

As a way of diverting attention, frightening and anesthetizing the masses, Russophobia, the Cold War and identitarianism are being revived, causing social atomization and the fracturing of social movements that could consistently and coherently challenge this situation. The result is a humane feeling of instability and precariousness about all aspects of life.

Trump has emerged as the solution that will fulfill the aspiration for stability and a certain “normality” in customs, the economy, work and the family. Kamala has never been free from the accusation that she wants to keep untouched the factors that cause this social breakdown.

Trump’s announced victory shows that Biden’s economic “successes” were not recognized by the population. The oligarchic gains never reached the pockets of working people. The Democratic Party refused to acknowledge this fact, and in doing so guaranteed Trump’s victory.

Having explained the cause, we now need to establish its constituents, which I will list at random:

The role of eternal wars
Trump has used this banner masterfully, capitalizing on factors such as the fear of a world war, the opacity of the military-industrial complex, its lack of control over spending and the fact that it operates beyond democratic rules, without auditing, scrutiny or the need to justify spending.

NATO’s more than predictable defeat in Ukraine brings with it another novelty, which is a certain discrediting of the mythical – but never proven – U.S. military capacity. Trump presented himself as the candidate who would solve the eternal conflicts, freeing the American people from this burden, but at the same time recovering the lost military mysticism. A kind of nationalism typical of empires that are on its way to an end.

There are two problems about this assumption: the first is that the discourse of peace and the end of war should, conceptually, be on Kamala’s side; the second is that believing that Trump will even succeed in putting an end to U.S. militarism is laughable, to say the least. Trump may even cool down some conflicts, but he will aggravate others, in line with his arrogance and narcissism, not because he is Trump, but because he shares the U.S. ideological providentialism.

As will be seen, however, Trump will not only increase military spending, in line with the Heritage Foundation‘s Mandate 2025, but he will also have to fuel conflicts to justify them. Probably more cold conflicts than hot ones, but conflicts nonetheless. Europe will be one of the biggest victims of its own cowardice. Trump will not stop extorting European cowardly politicians out of what he considers to be their fair contribution to a NATO that only works for the U.S. and no one else.

Trump feeds off the lack of a pacifist discourse, advocating the end of eternal wars, which doesn’t mean “the end of wars” and certainly doesn’t mean “the end of conflicts” and military tensions.

Immigration blames the wrong people
This flag is not new. However, as everyone can state, what Trump doesn’t say is that the employers themselves are the ones who demand that Western governments open the migratory “doors”. No migrant moves to a country if he thinks that won’t find work there. It is the likelihood of finding work that attracts migration. This information circulates through the trafficking networks and reaches the poorest people, who seize the opportunity.

And who spreads the information? Just look, for example, at the position of European employers’ associations on the subject. They believe that more migrants are needed. After all, they need cheap, available, well-behaved, disposable labor that puts downward pressure on the wage costs of local people. Trump, the far right, says nothing about this.

The far right does capitalize massively on the problems of social exclusion linked to the flow of migrants and their descendants’ poor living conditions. And this social exclusion is once again Democratic Party’s fault. The Democratic Party responds to employers by maintaining or increasing the migratory stock, but the money that should be used to integrate these people and their children actually is used for war and to finance big corporations. Biden’s anti-inflation package (the Inflation Reduction Act) has financed hundreds of billions of dollars in stock market capital purchases done by the corporations themselves, so that they are artificially valued. This money was not used to improve access to health care, housing or social security, all flagships used by the Democratic Party. This party has been penalized for treating migrants the way the Republican Party treats them when it is in power.

The Democratic debacle on the Palestinian question
The Democratic Party has lost a lot of the trust that American youth from urban areas placed in it, on the Palestinian issue. If until now, whether badly or well, young progressives and anti-Zionist adults saw the Democratic Party as a kind of appeaser – at least – in the face of Republican anti-Arabism and zionism, with Biden and Kamala, everything has gone up in smoke.

It was under Biden and Kamala that the world witnessed an unacceptable Genocide live. It is under a Democratic administration that the U.S. has embarked on a war on two fronts, one of which is waged against a defenseless people, and one of which has the most unpredictable consequences.

Kamala and the Democratic Party thus failed to make a substantial difference to Trump, and if anyone capitalized on this, it was the latter’s candidacy. At least he will have captured some votes that he would not have had access to before. The fact that he advocates an end to perpetual wars and says he doesn’t want war with Iran ended up making an important difference on this issue too.

The antipathy generated by the figures who are now the face of the Democratic Party
The establishment was convinced that the American people liked Hillary Clinton. They were wrong. Hillary was “Killary” and there was no special sympathy for her. They were also convinced that Kamala would not fail. Just put her in front of a teleprompter and it was done. She didn’t have to talk much, and think even less. No one was able to capitalize on anything positive about Kamala. The times she was left without a teleprompter, her improvisation was appalling. Her oratorical, rhetorical and theoretical incapacity was made obvious.

But the fact that she is a woman, combined with the fact that she is “Brown“, could not fail. The card had worked with Obama, why should it fail now? Obama was the most likeable genocidal politician in history. While he was showing off his enormous capacity for discourse, he was locking up children in cages on the southern border, threatening Syria with invasion, creating the conditions for the Islamic State to enter Syria and Iraq, destroying Libya and supporting neo-Nazis in Ukraine.

This bet on an innocuous, lackluster and incapable figure is not new and represents a huge void of real leadership. Biden was the last of the leaders behind the U.S. Democratic machine. People like Cornel West, Jill Stein or Bernie Sanders were prevented by big donors from giving voice to the popular anxieties important to young people and workers. This is American “democracy” in its entirety.

Capitalize on dislike in the system and about the state of affairs
The precariousness of life, the harshness of living conditions, the ideological stagnation of the political system and the dimming of the lights that can pave the way to an alternative, and with stagnation, rot and deterioration, combined with the absence of alternatives, create the ideal contradictions for the emergence of movements that defend, even if only apparently, that alternative. It’s a law of life. If the water doesn’t go one way, it goes the other.

However, the Democratic Party, like the social democratic parties in Europe, is controlled by neoliberalism. The deterioration of public services during their terms in office has become evident, resulting in the ideological demoralization, not only of social democracy, but of all progressive and democratic forces considered “moderate”. The radicals are persona non grata and no longer constitute an effective difference to the other forces of the right.

When we have a Democratic Party defending neoliberal hegemony and globalism, a socialist or social democratic party defending neoliberal Europe and historical revisionism, allying itself with neoliberals and neoconservatives, the space opens up for the appearance of an alternative to the far right. Reality never stops.

Trump is emerging as an alternative to the system that builds and feeds him. And it succeeds because the establishment has transformed the Western party system into a broad neoliberal and neoconservative right-wing camp, in which different figures parade in appearance but the same in substance, tamed by the elites, with the sole aim of maintaining the appearance of a democratic movement, when in practice it doesn’t exist.

After all, it is JD Vance, Trump’s Vice President, who appears to oppose corporations’ displacements to Mexico and China. Shouldn’t the Democrats have done it? When we see Biden applying tariffs so that Chinese brands don’t enter the U.S., it’s worth asking whether he shouldn’t have remembered to do so to U.S. companies that were closing in the country and opening overseas. Why was the Democratic Party complicit in the destruction of U.S. industrial capacity and, with it, the destruction of the American working class ways of life?

Abortion and concern for the living
It wasn’t just abortion, a flag that can be capitalized on in a reactionary and very religious society. There’s no point in the Kamalas of the world coming out and saying that a Trumpist or a traditional Republican cares more about human fetuses than the lives of those already born, if they then keep wages frozen for more than 40 years, allow wealth to concentrate again at the level it did in the 1930s, don’t create a network of cheap or free childcare, don’t support the formation of families and the birth rate grow, and so on. Their discourse contradicts what they actually do.

Where is the morality in defending abortion in a situation like this? Even if it exists, it is very much conditioned by the failure of the DP’s social policies. How can you say that abortion can be defended as a last resort, when you are directly responsible for not creating the conditions to support the birth rate, which make this “last resort” the first resort?

The defense of “normality”
The linking between neoliberal Wokism (identitarianism) and LGBTQ propaganda to left-wing movements, is also the fault of the Democratic Party and of the social democratic parties, which have given up on universalism in favour of an atomization of identity and gender liberalization.

Women, homosexuals, Latinos, blacks, trans people are chosen just because they are what they are, and not because of who they are as persons, as human beings. Choosing an incapable homosexual, just because he is homossexual, is a huge disservice to the homo movement, choosing an incapable woman, just because she is a woman, is a disservice to the cause of women. Someone like Von Der Leyen, being a woman, perpetuates the war. Someone like Paulo Rangel (Portugal’s Foreign Minister), being a homosexual, perpetuates war. What is the advantage that this policy brings to society? We have to eradicate discriminatory ways of doing things, not introducing others.

Used as an opportunistic banner, wokism atomizes identity, atomizes society. Woke propaganda is used as a political banner and a sign of sophistication and mental freedom, but its effect is to convey to society that its “normality” is at stake. We can question whether or not “normality” includes other identities, but always as part of a whole, of course. The system simply has to ensure that, whatever you choose to be, you are naturally entitled to the same living conditions as everyone else.

Instead, the Democratic Party has allowed itself to be caught up in the idea that the most important thing is to be able to assert your identity, and even to do so with outrage and pamphleteering. What matters is that you can choose to be trans, homo or non-binary, even though you may have to live on the street and without a job. This is an inversion of priorities. In order to guarantee effective freedom of choice you need first to provide the basic universal conditions necessary for survival with dignity. And not the other way around. Defending the former, to the detriment of the latter, sends out a message that means the subversion of things, which destroys the appearance of normality and the idea of social stability.

Wokism consists of a set of principles that are the direct result of liberalization of individual identity and the possibility of choice from a set of marketed identities, in disconnection from one’s material and biological existence. In a way it means the freedom from biology and from each one’s material condition. No one has to be imprisoned anymore behind his or her biological condition, you can go beyond that, since you can choose from something like an “identity market”. It’s the application of consumerism ideology to the human biological condition. It is therefore a divisive individualism, an idealism. The Democratic Party should never embark on idealism. You don’t discuss each one’s likes, conditions or ways of life, you just have to guarantee that by choosing one or another, one doesn’t suffer discrimination in any form. The rest is up to you. By stating the difference every step of the way, you start dividing society into small tribes, breaking social links between people. So, it’s not hard to understand why, today, you find more and more bigotry.

By introducing wokeism and exacerbated individualism in its program, the Democratic Party has contributed to the division amongst society. A more fragmented society plus harder living conditions, plus the destruction of working class grassroots organizations (substituted by CIA NGO’s), you get the ideal playground for far right populism.

In doing so, it has allowed Trump to sell himself as the guarantor of normality. The far right sells itself as the guarantor of normality!



The error of the Zelensky card against Trump
Trump’s association with Putin and Russia was intended to capitalize on a Russophobia that has never really caught on, except among those who feed and live off the establishment. On the voting day, in the state of Georgia, Putin was back on the scene. There were supposedly bomb threats from Russia. No one believes this any more and the results in Georgia demonstrate a certain and growing popular immunity to the scams made by the corporate press.

The truth is that few believe in Zelensky anymore, and even fewer are able to hear him speak. In total disconnect with popular sentiment, they believed that putting Trump against Zelensky would affect Trump. On the contrary, it reassured many who doubted that Trump would end the war that it was the right vote.

Like the Ukrainian people, we Westerners have had enough of this war.

The discrediting of the Mainstream Press
The entire Western mainstream press, even those aligned with the Republican Party, was pushing for Kamala. Kamala had the hawks on her side.

Kamala’s defeat is the defeat of the corporate press. Kamala’s defeat is the defeat of the narratives commissioned by Wall Street, the Pentagon, the CIA or the White House. Today in the U.S., according to Gallup, there are already more Americans who don’t believe the mainstream media at all than those who believe it at all.

Trump has used it exhaustively. From the post-truth of his first term, to the total discrediting of his second, Trump beat the Mainstream Press. Elon Musk and his Twitter account played a key role here. Twitter was Trump’s online propaganda force. No human being should have as much power as Musk, but one of those responsible for manufacturing these “neofeudal” powers is no one but the Democratic Party itself.

In conclusion:

Kamala’s defeat is thus the victory of political demagoguery, providentialist messianism and Supremacism, from which the Democratic Party has not freed itself and which it has also helped to normalize, allowing Trump to win despite it and in despite of the exacerbated way in which he defends it. The Democratic Party could never dismantle it in its essence, because the Democrats also defend “American leadership”, the “indispensable nation”, all the triumphalist and neo-colonialist slogans of the U.S. elite, manufactured under Clinton.

Trump’s victory is the defeat of polling companies, denounced as instruments for constructing the desired results.

Democracy is understood as a superior system in which informed and conscious people make conscious choices, according to programs that have been discussed, reflected on and debated. The parade of Trump supporters without the slightest political, intellectual or ideological decency, or the parade of Kamala supporters without the slightest ability to convey ideas, in either case only called to the limelight because of their popularity, is one of the sad episodes of this decadent circus show that they call “democratic elections” in the U.S.

Lastly, Kamala this time prevented the Democratic Party from capitalizing on her disintelligence: the votes related to limiting the use of weapons, since she presented herself as someone who uses them, talking about it with pride, which will not have failed to shock a lot of good people; the votes of migrants and descendants of migrants, concerned about the constant aggression by the U.S. against their countries of origin (the case of the Chinese, Iranians, Cubans, Arabs and many others); the pro-Palestinian votes and many votes from the working classes.

She has failed to make a real difference to Trump’s policies and has thus either demobilized her supporters or, due to the factors I’ve mentioned, caused many to switch to the other candidate. The weight of international issues may not be very great, but from them we can see that very little distances Kamala from Trump. This is unacceptable in a democracy.

In the end, there can only be one conclusion: no matter who wins, the American people will always lose. Voting for Trump to solve the problems of the living conditions of the American working class is like leaving someone in the desert because he is thirsty.

Look at the desert we’re in!

https://strategic-culture.su/news/2024/ ... tic-party/

******

(Oh boy, here we go again...)

Matt Bruenig: Election Musings
Posted on November 10, 2024 by Conor Gallagher

By Matt Bruenig, who writes about politics, the economy, and political theory, with a focus on issues that affect poor and working people. He is currently the president of 3P, a think tank founded in 2017. The primary mission of 3P is to publish ideas and analysis that assist in the development of an economic system that serves the many, not the few and aims to fill the holes left by the current think tank landscape with a special focus on socialist and social democratic economic ideas. Bruenig previously worked as a lawyer at the National Labor Relations Board and as a policy analyst at the Demos Think Tank. Originally published at his website.

For me, this election differed from the last two in that my particular policy interests — a universalist welfare state, mass unionization, and socialization of wealth — were absent. The Biden administration achieved nothing significant on these fronts. There was no primary campaign that featured a candidate championing these causes. Harris did not run on them.

This absence made me fairly intellectually detached from the election, not because the outcome doesn’t matter, but because it had no real stakes for the stuff that I promote in the discourse.

Other elements of the left-of-center world did not have this luxury.

The macro people are contending with a reality where fiscal and monetary policy helped achieve high employment, good GDP growth, and some wage compression, but Democrats still lost.

The self-styled populists got to run the relevant parts of the administrative state — Lina Kahn at FTC, Jonathan Kanter at DOJ, Rohit Chopra at CFPB, among others — and were able to achieve significant influence beyond that through a “whole-of-government” approach that had agencies as far flung as the Copyright Office, the DOT, and the NLRB all taking actions meant to support this broader agenda. All of these agencies took actions championed and then celebrated by this group. The self-styled populists even had significant influence over crafting the little bits of policy Harris actually released. But Democrats still lost.

The foreign policy apologists spent the year leading up to election in the unenviable position of having to defend that the Biden administration provided money and weapons to the Israeli government to assist the carrying out of an atrocity in Gaza. They argued that this was necessary because a less supportive policy would cause some voters to stop supporting Democrats. To the extent that Biden’s actual policy caused some voters to stop supporting Democrats, the argument was that those voters need to get over it and realize that Trump is worse than Harris in a variety of ways. Democrats still lost.

The moderates got to essentially run the Harris campaign. This group claimed that the way to win the election was to move to the right in rhetoric and in policy on things like immigration, guns, and identitarian issues while also paring down the policy agenda to a few seemingly popular topics like health care and abortion. Harris clearly did run her campaign this way, but Democrats still lost.

When the party does what you want, either in policy or in campaigning, but still loses, it is hard to escape this feeling that maybe you are implicated, maybe people now think you are stupid and your ideas were wrong. This also triggers a sort of defensiveness in the form of finding other explanations or defiantly doubling down. It’s a troubling thing to watch when viewed from the outside.

The truth of course is that nobody has some kind of silver bullet for how to win elections and generally people who talk a lot about that topic end up having views about the optimal way to govern and campaign so as to win elections that conspicuously overlap with their own separately-formed policy preferences or some unrelated antagonism they have with some other faction in the party.

Last time Trump won, the convenient explanation was that it was because of racism. This is nice because it places the blame elsewhere and on something that there is little you can do about because anti-racism is something that cannot be compromised.

The racism explanation seems to be falling away this time in part because Trump made inroads with nonwhite voters, most prominently Latinos.

The emerging convenient explanation this time is that it all comes down to inflation. Prices are up 20 percent since Biden took office. During the Trump administration, they only grew by 6 percent over the same period of time.

This explanation is convenient because it’s plausible to argue that (1) inflation was mostly caused by factors outside of Biden’s control, including post-COVID supply issues and the post-COVID spend down of pandemic savings, (2) to the extent that inflation was caused by things like the American Rescue Plan, that was part of achieving the other macroeconomic policy goals of high employment, GDP growth, and wage compression, and (3) the bout of inflation was a one-off thing related to unique dynamics that don’t have much to do with policy questions going forward. So the inflation explanation is consistent with “we did nothing wrong” and “we don’t need to change anything going forward.”

Which is not to say it isn’t true, just to say it is convenient in that it can conceivably absolve all of the groups above who may otherwise have a finger pointed at them.

For now, I don’t really intend to make bold claims about why this election was lost or how to make changes that will result in the winning of all future elections. Instead, as I did in 2016 and 2020, I will simply try to determine who will carry the torch for the left in the next Democratic presidential primary and see if I can help them construct a well-designed social democratic policy agenda.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/11 ... sings.html

(...doing the same thing over and over expecting different results...)
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Re: Sympathy for the Devils...

Post by blindpig » Sun Nov 10, 2024 7:01 pm

Trump wins: What is next for America and the World
Originally published: MintPress News on November 6, 2024 by Greg Stoker (more by MintPress News) | (Posted Nov 09, 2024)



Donald J. Trump is president yet again, and while the focus must shift toward the future, the only rational response to Trump’s victory is radical action. An autopsy of the Harris campaign’s failures can provide valuable insights into the course forward.

The DNC and Harris campaign relied heavily on appeals to figures like former Vice President Dick Cheney, adopting positions that aligned with neoconservatives and promising a bipartisan cabinet, including Republicans. They commended strict border policies and spotlighted Harris’s prosecutorial record—a stance that alienated many voters.

Her campaign, which younger critics dismissed as “mostly vibes,” counted on women rallying to protect abortion rights. Yet Harris offered little beyond a vague return to the flawed and unreliable framework of Roe v. Wade.

Harris was inextricably attached to, and a vocal proponent of, the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza, failing to distance herself ideologically from prominent Zionists like Biden and Trump.

President Biden’s most recognizable achievements revolved around union support and organized labor, but surprisingly, these were not a focus of the Harris campaign. Instead, the Democrats promoted an economic plan friendly to corporate interests, offering little concrete support for the middle class beyond flowery language about “opportunity.”

Many Democrats are blaming the Palestine Solidarity movement for Harris’ loss, but data does not support this accusation as the cause for such a decisive Trump victory. Harris, a deeply uninspiring and problematic candidate, failed to drive voter turnout in the way Biden did in 2020. We may never have reliable data on how many voters simply abstained, disillusioned by the choice between two unappealing candidates, but this perspective undoubtedly influenced the election.

The Harris campaign, quite simply, moved too far to the right, alienating parts of its base that are committed to progressive, left-wing policies. Many others grew apathetic, watching the Democratic Party—a party often seen as centrist—adopt conservative positions to appeal to disaffected white conservative voters and independents.

It appears that the DNC’s logic was to draw in these conservative-leaning voters to hold back the far right. But this approach is likely to fail. “Republican Lite” will never beat “Republican actual,” especially since the electoral system itself structurally favors Republicans.

This misstep has been a disaster in realpolitik. One could argue that the Democrats’ inability—or unwillingness—to embrace progressive platforms has had lasting consequences, harming America’s most vulnerable communities and intensifying struggles for those in the Global South who endure the impacts of U.S. imperialism.

The salient question remains: Will Democrats learn from these mistakes and losses? History, in that regard, looks bleak. Establishment Democrats have already started to blame the left for their poor and alienating decisions, with surprising bile. “I hope you are happy; just look what Trump will do to Gaza now” is a common refrain. The Palestine solidarity movement is an easy scapegoat, but again, it’s not reflected in the data.

On this episode of State of Play, we discuss how the Democratic Party cannot save us—so how do we save ourselves?

https://mronline.org/2024/11/09/trump-w ... the-world/

There were no mistakes at the highest level, the Dems prefer defeat rather than give an inch to any effective Left.

Dump them chumps.

*****

How Trump Won and What Black People Should Do
Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist 06 Nov 2024

Image
Donald Trump celebrates victory on election night (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)

Donald Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris must be a wake up call to Black people. The Democratic Party is a dead end and a movement killer. Our survival depends on getting that corrupt wing of the duopoly out of our lives and out of our politics.

On the evening of November 8, 2016, this columnist realized that Hillary Clinton had lost. She hadn’t yet conceded, the polls were still open on the west coast, but she lost Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin to Donald Trump. When he turned these formerly democratic states republican, he secured a victory in the electoral college and became the 45th president of the United States.

Late that night and in the early morning hours I wrote, “Dump the Democrats for Good” and pointed out what is still true eight years later. “Black people are now in fear and in shock when we ought to be spoiling for a fight. All is not lost. Even the victory of the openly bigoted Trump poses an opportunity to right our political ship. Not the electoral ship, the political one. For decades black Americans have been voting for people who have done them wrong.”

Trump is a political figure unlike any other in U.S. political history. He is a failed businessman who excelled only at self-promotion, who had never held public office, who differed only from masses of white people in that he was wealthier. It was often said that he “spoke his mind” but that really meant that his every racist and ignorant utterance was on the minds of white middle Americans who felt validated by him.

Trump defeated Hillary Clinton, the choice of the political establishment and corporate media. He seemingly went down to permanent defeat in 2020, although he never admitted he had lost, and on January 6, 2021 his followers vandalized the capitol while attempting to stop the electoral college certification.

Since that time he lost a civil trial that found him guilty of rape and he was assessed a judgement of $350 million for defaming his accuser. He was convicted of falsifying business records in New York, which is a felony. He has been indicted in Georgia for attempting to overturn election results in that state, and he may face more charges regarding the mishandling of classified documents.

Yet he is poised to become the 47th president of the United States. His own determination not to give up is largely responsible for this political comeback but the democrats share a large part of the blame in allowing their nemesis to once again occupy the white house.

In 2020 democrats rigged the primary process in favor of former vice president Joe Biden. Biden was not popular with voters but he was with his party’s oligarchs. The other candidates left the race when they were told to and Bernie Sanders took a dive instead of fighting for his supporters. Many observers noted Biden’s frailty even then but he still had some political advantages. Trump was seen as being responsible for all the upheavals caused by the covid-19 crisis. He won in 2016 but only in the electoral college. He lost the popular vote and his approval rating never hit the 50% mark . Covid and the months-long Russiagate story proved too much in the 2020 campaign.

Biden’s victory was greeted with celebrations but he was still the old right winger and his team falsely claimed he was “the most progressive president since FDR” even though he was nothing of the sort.They said he would “cut child poverty in half” but he allowed covid era support programs to lapse. He had no desire to fight against the oligarchs who insisted on continuing austerity. Millions of people who had Medicaid and SNAP benefits were suddenly kicked off of these life saving programs. Stimulus payments were gone and eviction protection and extensions of unemployment insurance payments were too. While working people continued to struggle economically, the Biden administration told them that economic indicators that have nothing to do with their lives were humming along and they were just too stupid to know they were doing well. Build Back Better legislation was supposed to provide some of the missing support but the oligarchy wasn’t having it. Build Back Better died and so did Biden’s chances of being re-elected.

Instead of easing him out in 2022 or 2023 as one would expect, the democrats instead reordered the primary process to help their president who suffered from low approval ratings. Then came Biden’s very public collapse during his June debate with Trump. Anyone paying attention could see that Biden was not a well man, and his stumbling effort was an opportunity to get rid of him. Wealthy democratic donors took the lead in getting Biden to end his campaign.

Democrats were then stuck with Kamala Harris. It would have been awkward to pass over the vice president and such a move would offend Black voters and thus Harris was anointed. They even dispensed with proposals to have an open convention which might have given some appearance of a process which had some veneer of democracy.

Harris’ weaknesses were clear. Despite years in public office including as a senator who had her own presidential campaign, she was still unable to overcome personal deficiencies such as struggling to express herself whenever she was unscripted. Her lack of self-confidence was evident with her famous nervous laughter. She was also heartily disliked, as any prosecutor should be, and earned the nickname Copmala, because of her strict allegiance to the mass incarceration system. She dropped out of the 2020 presidential election without having won a single delegate.

Her campaign website, usually a repository of pandering and sloganeering, had no content at all, except requests for money, for 50 days. Her campaign spoke of joy but nothing substantive that might inspire low motivation voters to make any effort. Even after a respectable debate performance against Trump, she resorted to being the Kamala Harris of old with her bad instincts intact such as in an interview with Oprah Winfrey, and bragged about being a gun owner who would shoot anyone who broke into her home. She continued her foolish appeal to the non-existent “never Trump republicans,” fanciful creatures akin to unicorns, because they don’t actually exist. Harris pledged to include a republican in her cabinet and form a bipartisan commission to guide her in office. None of the unrequited republican love got her any votes.

It must be pointed out that her biggest campaign obstacle was handed to her by her boss. The ongoing genocide in Israel has engendered revulsion among millions of people. Israel has now killed at least 200,000 people in Gaza alone and recently invaded Lebanon where it continues to commit war crimes of collective punishment and starvation and torture and rape, all with the help of the United States.

The notoriously clumsy politician tried to talk out of both sides of her mouth, simultaneously claiming to work for a ceasefire while also promising to give Israel whatever it wants. She fooled no one, although she tried to by presenting a pro-Israel message in Pennsylvania while also showing pretend concern for Palestine in Michigan, a state with a large Arab population. Voters consistently showed bipartisan support for a ceasefire but support for genocide in congress was also bipartisan. The atrocities continued and democrats gave Trump an opening, allowing the candidate preferred by the Israeli government to claim he would be the peacemaker .

While Kamala struggled to connect with democrats, Trump’s people don’t care about his criminal or civil cases. They don’t care if the corporate media don’t like him or if finance capitalists prefer the democrats. Mocking them makes liberals feel superior, but Trump supporters love their guy and don’t care about the opinions of those who don’t. This realization should have kept the Harris camp from calling him Hitler or a fascist when she should have been giving voters affirmative reasons to vote for her.

As in 2016, a Trump victory should be the beginning of new Black politics. It should mean the end of Democratic Party as the focus of Black voters. Even though the Republican Party has been the “white people's party” for 60 years, it is clear that seeing ourselves solely as electoral opposition is a losing proposition.

So is believing that we must vote for democrats at all. Their party is lost, existing only as a money laundering operation, which is why Kamala Harris raised nearly $1 billion , more than twice as much as Donald Trump did. It is the party of the Israel lobby, weapons manufacturers, Wall Street, and big pharma, and as such offers nothing to Black people.

Even their campaign promises are more meager over time. Biden campaigned in 2020 saying he would raise the federal minimum wage, but he didn’t and that made it impossible for Harris to raise the issue, assuming she thought about it at all. That issue is but one reason that we must let the Democratic Party die.

Aside from a vague Opportunity Economy offering tax credits to small businesses and maybe giving up to $25,000 for a home down payment, she offered Black people nothing. She didn’t even mention bringing back the Voting Rights Act enforcement provisions. If a candidate has nothing to offer except repeating that they aren’t their opposition, then they are headed for defeat.

Black people don’t have to be defeated because the democrats are. We still have agency. We can still organize instead of hitching our wagons to failure and betrayal. When they blame the Green party, Palestinian voters, Latino men, white women, or anyone else, we must hold up a mirror to their faces and point out that the fault is their own. If we hold on to traitors and losers, the fault will also be ours.

Trump again enters office with majorities in both houses of congress and this time he won the popular vote as well. Beginning on January 20, 2025 he will have a free hand to do whatever he wants. Between now and then we need clear headed thought, and any laments about the return of segregation or the end of elections or other nonsense are unhelpful. I stand by and repeat what I wrote in 2016, “The destruction of the Democratic Party and the creation of a truly progressive political movement is the only hope for black America.” It is also the only hope for the world.

https://blackagendareport.com/how-trump ... -should-do

'Red' Added

*****

Trump’s Return to the White House
November 8, 2024

Trump is clearly not the change required, says John Wight, but he understands far better the America that for Washington has become enemy territory.

Image
Trump at a re-election campaign rally in Rochester, New Hampshire, on Jan. 21. (Liam Enea, Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0)

By John Wight
Special to Consortium News

Despite Jan. 6, 2021. Despite all of his legal travails. Despite the endorsements of Taylor Swift, Beyonce, Bruce Springsteen, George Clooney, Oprah Winfrey et al. Notwithstanding it all, Kamala Harris lost and Donald Trump won the keys to an increasingly ill-begotten kingdom.

If the result of the U.S. presidential election of 2024 has proved anything it is that the corporate Democratic Party establishment, to paraphrase the famed French statesman Talleyrand, has “learned nothing and forgotten everything.”

Kamala Harris was Hillary Clinton 2.0. She was the change-nothing candidate in an age in which change has never been more necessary.

Trump is not the change required, clearly, but with all his abundant flaws he understands far better the America from which Washington has become so detached, it has long since become enemy territory.

No shortage of money when it comes to subsidising wars and conflicts in far flung corners of the globe, while millions at home struggle to keep food on the table and a roof over their benighted heads.

Huge amounts of political bandwidth expended in the name of propping up Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, in his failing and disastrous war against Russia — a war being waged in the name of U.S. and Western hegemony — while failing to mount a serious intervention to save the lives of Palestinian babies as they were and still are slaughtered by the thousand on the altar of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Zionist, ethno-supremacist chopping block.

All of that and yet, still, we have overpaid and under-qualified Democratic Party ideologues scratching their heads as to the reasons why Trump prevailed in this election.

Trump’s brand of vulgar realism speaks to the mounting late stage capitalist chaos that is blighting the lives of the many in the name of the few in this land of the unfree. A rogue billionaire snake-oil salesman par excellance, Trump has perfected the art of playing to the fabricated fears of America’s forgotten and ignored.

Where once Robert De Niro was a poster-boy for Americana, this now stumbling, bumbling wreck of a man with his regular tirades against the now two-time president is a lightning rod for a Hollywood and movie celebrity culture despised by millions in an age in which social media and the podcast is king.

“Trump’s brand of vulgar realism speaks to the mounting late stage capitalist chaos that is blighting the lives of the many in the name of the few in this land of the unfree.”

Here it must be said and said again that the two Joes — Biden and Rogan — had a huge part to play in Trump’s victory. President Biden, with the hubris of a man who placed his own personal interests above those of country, remained steadfast in his determination to stand for a second term way past the point where it was obvious to all that he could hardly stand on his own two feet.

If Trump is America’s Nero, then Biden was its Emperor Claudius — the accidental leader of a country mired in imperial decline.

The cultural phenomenon that is Joe Rogan is a man whose microphone wields more power than a thousand bayonets. His three-hour-long Trump interview in the run-up to Nov. 5 was a game-changer in this election.

In it, Trump came across as the relatable alternative to a Harris campaign that excelled itself in excelling in nothing. Her VP pick, Tim Waltz, was cast as her folksy and down to Earth all-American foil. In truth, and in fact, he came over as a ham actor in an episode of The Waltons.

Taking a step back, the gnashing of teeth in Kiev, London, Brussels — in every part of the world in which Western liberal values still reign to the detriment of progress — in response to Trump’s election victory has been wonderful to witness. But here any sense of triumphalism must give way to the hard fact that Donald J. Trump ain’t no Henry Wallace.

“If Trump is America’s Nero, then Biden was its Emperor Claudius — the accidental leader of a country mired in imperial decline.”

Where Wallace believed in the cause of the common man as an end worth fighting for, Trump has used the common man as his own personal footstool. Netanyahu will have celebrated Trump’s victory on Nov. 5.

In him he sees a kindred white supremacist, Islamophobic spirit. In him he sees a man he can utilize in his malign desire to reshape the Middle East with blood and bullets.

Yes, we can — and we should — despise everything that Harris and Biden represents. But we should do so without celebrating the nativism of Trump and the beast of Trumpism it has unleashed.

On the contrary, impervious to truth, decency, humility or limitation, his is the warped character of the megalomaniac, driven by the ineluctable belief in his own wisdom and strength, underpinned by off-the-scale narcissism.

The shifting tectonic plates of American politics today emits chilling parallels to the prelude of the “first” U.S. Civil War of 1861–65. In the lead-up to this event of world-historical-importance, partisan politics reached such a pitch of intensity that the breach between the two Americas forged became irreconcilable.

Political opponents morphed into political enemies to the point where the ballot became the precursor to the gun.

This said, the depiction of Trump as the fascist threat to American democracy is as overblown as it misses the point. When your precious democratic system normalizes the genocidal slaughter of an indigenous people in the third decade of the 21st-century, it is hardly worth saving or salvaging.

When it upholds Third World levels of poverty amid islands of obscene wealth and ostentation, it has ceased to be the answer and has become the problem.

America as a country is circling the drain. When a clown enters the palace, the palace becomes a circus. Trump is a clown who knows how to weaponize fear for political ends.

When the people become ‘sheepified’ they yearn for a shepherd. In him, millions believe they have found one. The point at which he fails them in this role — as he will and as he must — this is the point at which serious politics will begin.

False consciousness is a helluva thing.

https://consortiumnews.com/2024/11/08/t ... ite-house/

(Italics added, serious opportunity can be in the offing, but it will require much work, starting now.)
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Sympathy for the Devils...

Post by blindpig » Mon Nov 11, 2024 4:17 pm

Image

Biden’s Legacy Is Genocide, War, And Nuclear Brinkmanship

That’s all anyone should talk about when this psychopath finally dies. Anything positive he may have accomplished in his political career is a drop in the ocean compared to the significance of these mass-scale abuses.

Caitlin Johnstone
November 11, 2024

Biden’s legacy is genocide, war, and nuclear brinkmanship. That’s all anyone should talk about when this psychopath finally dies. Anything positive he may have accomplished in his political career is a drop in the ocean compared to the significance of these mass-scale abuses.

Biden spent his entire career promoting war and militarism at every opportunity, and then spent the twilight years of his time in Washington choosing to continue supplying an active genocide that is fully dependent on US-supplied arms.

He refused off-ramp after off-ramp to the horrific war in Ukraine that has burned through a generation of men in that country, which he knowingly provoked by amassing a military proxy threat on Russia’s border in ways the US would never tolerate being amassed on its own border. In the early weeks of the conflict Biden and his fellow empire managers sabotaged peace talks to keep the war going for as long as possible with the goal of bleeding Moscow, and at one point his own intelligence agencies reportedly assessed that the probability of a nuclear war erupting on this front was as high as 50–50.

Coin toss odds on nuclear war. To call this a crime against humanity would be a massive understatement.

Biden has been facilitating Israeli atrocities in the middle east with US military expansionism in the region and bombing operations in Yemen, Iraq and Syria. He will spend his lame duck months backing Israel’s scorched earth demolition of southern Lebanon.

This is who Biden is. It is who he has always been. It is true that his brain has begun to rot away like just like his conscience has rotted, but in his lucid moments he adamantly defends his administration’s decisions as the only correct course of action, and it aligns perfectly with his past. To know this, one need only to look at the pivotal role he played in pushing the Iraq invasion, or his extremist rhetoric about how “If there were not an Israel we’d have to invent one.”

This is the legacy that Democrats were forced to spend the last election cycle pretending is great and awesome. It’s no wonder they lost. So now, as a parting gift from Joe Biden, Americans and the world get another four years of Donald Trump.

That’s the story of Joe Biden. That’s the whole entire thing. Anything on top of that is irrelevant narrative fluff.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2024/11 ... nkmanship/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Sympathy for the Devils...

Post by blindpig » Thu Nov 14, 2024 2:44 pm

Progressive Stalwart Dennis Kucinich Sees in 2024 Vote a Rejection of Globalist Agenda and Democratic Party War Mongering
By Jeremy Kuzmarov - November 13, 2024 2

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Dennis Kucinich [Source: apnews.com]

In an era of right-wing ascendancy and endless wars, Dennis J. Kucinich has stood out as one of the few respectable figures in American politics.

During his 16 years in Congress between 1997 and 2013, Kucinich (D-OH) was consistently anti-war—opposing even wars like Kosovo, Serbia, Syria and Libya orchestrated by Democrats that most of his Democratic Party colleagues supported.

Kucinich additionally tried to reign in the CIA, and supported a bill to replace the Federal Reserve with a monetary authority within the U.S. Department of the Treasury that would undercut the power of private banks and allow direct government financing of infrastructure projects.

Unfortunately, Kucinich was defeated in his bid to return to the U.S. Congress in Ohio on November 5.

Running as an independent, Kucinich’s campaign platform was to end America’s endless wars, protect constitutional rights to free speech and cut the deficit, which he has said is the result of “financing foreign adventures and getting dragged into more wars.”

In an exclusive interview on November 7, Kucinich told me that he was encouraged that he “got 50,000 votes in a highly polarized political environment, which was more than any independent candidate in the country in a three-way race.”

Kucinich said that a lot of voters told him that they appreciated everything he had done for the people of Ohio throughout his career but that they were voting on a straight party ticket.

Kucinich believes that the national election result represented a “rejection of the globalist agenda and policy of endless war that has been embraced most fervently by the Democratic Party.”

“People want things taken care of at home,” he said. “58 percent of discretionary income is being spent on the military and you can’t separate the domestic economic problems from the waging of endless wars. Over $8 trillion of the [$35 trillion] deficit is linked to wars and globalist policies have helped precipitate the crisis at the border and illegal immigration.”

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[Source: news5cleveland.com]

Kucinich is among those dismayed at how the State Department has evolved into “an extension of the Pentagon which no longer engages in diplomacy” and believes that many people supported Donald Trump because they “believe he will follow through on his rhetoric about extracting the U.S. from global conflicts and [about] avoiding wider wars.”

Image
[Source: cleveland.com]

According to Kucinich one of Trump’s biggest challenges will be to “sustain the U.S. economy amidst the rise of BRICS” and “potential loss of elasticity of the U.S. dollar resulting from the BRICS states’ development of alternative economic arrangement and desire to undercut the primacy of the U.S. dollar as a medium of global exchange.”

The BRICS conference at Kazan, Kucinich says, was significant in “setting the groundwork for an alternative global economic structure.” The pressure being put on the U.S. dollar now is resulting from a “backlash against U.S. foreign policy, including failure of U.S. sanctions policies, which helped the Russian economy but damaged the American one.”

Kucinich stated that his break from the Democrats occurred because he “couldn’t be part of a party that he was in fundamental disagreement with,” especially over its “constant promotion of war which it needs to get away from.”

Kucinich recalled clashing directly with Barack Obama in 2011 over his bombing of Libya, noting that Obama “was not happy with me for challenging him over that.” At the end of his presidency, however, “Obama admitted that Libya was his greatest mistake and claimed that Hillary Clinton pushed him into it.”

Image
[Source: youtube.com]

After Kucinich challenged Obama on Libya, he says that his congressional phone was tapped illegally. He learned about this when reading a story in The Washington Times recounting what was supposed to be a secret conversation that he had with some of Libya’s top leaders.

This is just “one example of the intelligence agencies’ having gone amuck,” he said, and “there are plenty of others.”[1]

It is worth noting that Donald Trump’s previous tenure as President of the United States was markedly hawkish in many areas of his foreign policy. Trump allowed neocon forces led by John Bolton to kill any peace negotiations with North Korea, expanded the sanctions regimes on Iran, Venezuela, and Cuba, and pledged his support to Israel by moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem.

Fighting the Good Fight in Cleveland
Kucinich has been battling against entrenched special interests for more than 55 years, having spearheaded a petition drive to block privatization of Cleveland’s utilities after his election to the Cleveland city council as a 23-year-old in 1969.

After a failed run for Congress in which he advocated for ending the Vietnam War, Kucinich was elected mayor of Cleveland in 1977 at age 31 based on his promise to save public power.

The ensuing epic campaign pitting Kucinich against Cleveland’s entrenched financial powers is chronicled in his 2021 book The Division of Light and Power.

Kucinich opens his book with a quote from Tom Johnson, Cleveland’s mayor from 1901 to 1909 who founded Muny Light electric company and was an admirer of progressive thinker Henry George, who said he believed in “public ownership of all public service monopolies for the same reason as I believe in the municipal ownership of waterworks, of parks, of schools, which is because if you do not own them [corporate monopolies], they will in time own you. They will corrupt your politics, rule your institutions and finally destroy your liberties.”[2]

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Tom Johnson [Source: metmuseum.org]

Kucinich’s affinity for the underdog was rooted in his experience as an undersized high school quarterback where he “prepared for a career in Cleveland politics with every blinding tackle, sack, forearm in the face, bell-ringer and dirt-eating episode known as ‘the game.’”[3]

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Dennis Kucinich, #26, on his high school football team in Cleveland in the 1960s. [Source: clevelandscene.com]

Refusing to accept favors from special interests whose money incapacitated many of his colleagues, Kucinich says that he campaigned door-to-door relentlessly and built a big personal following as a healthy substitute for corporate contributions.[4]

Kucinich was mentored by a local attorney named Milt Schulman who provided him with documents on land frauds, corrupt federal programs and capital improvement boondoggles and explained to him how bond financing was a “racket for law firms, investment bankers and Wall Street”—the people he said who “run the financial system” and were “a bunch of crooks.”[5]

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Dennis Kucinich—Mayor of Cleveland. [Source: slate.com]

One of the schemes adopted by some of these crooks was to create artificial blackouts to undermine support for Kucinich and Muny Light, the publicly owned utility.

Cleveland Electric Illuminating Company (CEI) wanted to force the sale of Muny Light so it could obtain a monopoly on electric power in Cleveland.[6]

Image
CEI Lakeshore plant in the late 1970s. CEI used all kinds of skullduggery in an attempt to foster the sale of its main competitor, the state-owned Muny Light, in an attempt to obtain a monopoly on electric power in Cleveland. Its plans were foiled, however, by Dennis Kucinich. [Source: jacobin.com]

City Council President George L. Forbes, who was in the pocket of CEI, precipitated a garbage strike in order to try and further erode support for Kucinich, while CEI aligned with local banking interests tied to CEI through interlocking directorates to plunge Cleveland into a default of its debts.[7]

Smeared by his political opponents and the local media[8] and blacklisted for a period he left office, Kucinich survived a mafia assassination plot that, according to Lieutenant Edward Kovacic, then-head of Cleveland’s police intelligence unit, resulted from Kucinich’s efforts to “stop the selling [of] a light plant in Cleveland that would have made some people a lot of money.”[9]

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A Kucinich administration sign proclaiming “Power to the People: Muny Light” is vandalized with the words “For Sale.” [Source: jacobin.com]

Kucinich lost his re-election campaign, though he was celebrated 20 years later by the City Council for helping Cleveland provide low-cost electricity that saved the city more than $300 million while keeping taxes low and fueling economic development.[10]

Today, Kucinich is the same man who fought City Hall and corporate power in Cleveland back in the 1970s.

In February 2023, I heard him give a speech at the Rage Against the War Machine rally in Washington, D.C., where he criticized U.S. weapons sales and the proxy war in Ukraine; raised alarm about unethical gain-of-function research that resulted in his assessment in the manufacture of the COVID-19 virus; and lamented censorship of anti-war activists and scientists who questioned the dominant narrative about COVID-19 being promoted in the mainstream.

Kucinich stated in his speech that “the reprehensible conduct of the U.S. government has “debased the U.S. Constitution and threatened the peace of the world” to the extent that “even former intelligence officials are aghast.” The people of Ukraine have been “used as pawns in a vicious geopolitical chess game,” and “the people of Taiwan will be used next as the U.S. tries to portray China as the aggressor while it surrounds it with military bases.”

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Former Congressman Dennis Kucinich in his speech at the Rage Against the War Machine rally in February 2023 called for Americans to work to restore the rule of law and change their government before it “destroys” the country. [Source: Photo courtesy of Jeremy Kuzmarov]
These words resonate even more a year and a half later with the looming threat of world war driven by the powerful financial interests that Kucinich has nobly fought against for the last 55 years.



1.Another example Kucinich gave was when the CIA broke into the computers of the Senate Intelligence Committee, then headed by Senator Dianne Feinstein, which was investigating its support of torture. ↑



2.Dennis J. Kucinich, The Division of Light and Power (Cleveland, OH: Avenue Books, 2021), VI, 135. ↑



3.Kucinich, The Division of Light and Power, 4. ↑



4.Kucinich, The Division of Light and Power, 71. ↑



5.Kucinich, The Division of Light and Power, 77. ↑



6.Kucinich, The Division of Light and Power, 178. CEI was trying to negotiate a deal for the sale of Muny Lights at a discount price. ↑



7.Kucinich, The Division of Light and Power, 335. Cleveland Trust and National City Bank, which stood to cash in on the fire sale, refused to allow the city to refinance the city’s debt unless it sold Muny Light. Two former city employees under Kucinich, Dan Marschall and James Harkins, Jr,, uncovered how Cleveland Trust held more than $27 million of CEI securities and nearly 784,000 shares of CEI stock, while managing $70 million of CEI’s $130 million pension funds. A Democrat who was African-American, Forbes precipitated the garbage workers strike by refusing to pass legislation for contractually obligated pay increases for the city’s mechanics who serviced the garbage trucks. Forbes was himself later indicted on bribery charges and engaging in organized crime, though was acquitted in what Kucinich described as a corrupt judicial process. In 1992, Forbes became president of the Cleveland NAACP. ↑



8.Kucinich says that he was compared to Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and cult leader Jim Jones who engineered the mass suicide of his followers at Jonestown. The Cleveland Plain Dealer received extensive advertising revenue from CEI. ↑



9.Kucinich, The Division of Light and Power, 544. A mob hitman interviewed by a local television network complained: “We can’t buy Kucinich. That’s what I was told. We can’t buy Kucinich. He was cut from a different cloth, and they didn’t know where he was coming from, what angle he was coming from, and so we had to go different ways with him. You can’t get any more serious than that.” ↑



10.Kucinich, The Division of Light and Power, 358. Besides surviving the financial earthquake caused by the shadow government of big business and banking interests that sought to undermine him and saving Muny Light from privatization, Kucinich cites his accomplishments as mayor as follows: “making Muny Light profitable for the first time in ten years, reducing city payrolls by 17%, paying off the inherited $15 million debt to CEI, saving millions by eliminating outside contractors, improving police response time, tripling the size of the snow removal fleet, expanding recreational faciities, securing development without tax abatements, and stopping corruption, kickbacks, payroll padding, and racketeering.” ↑

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2024/1 ... mongering/

Sure he's mostly right but fuck that runt anyway. After running a 'return to the New Deal' campaign for president in 2004 he kow-towed to the DNC endorsing that horse-faced phony anti-war aristo. I suppose I should thank him, I washed my hands of the Democratic Party for good after that. Like Bernie he's good at 'truth saying' and platitudes but not accomplishing much of anything on the national level.


******

Image

When The Show Is Over, The Actors Hold Hands And Take A Bow

This is it. This is the real story. This image, right here.

Caitlin Johnstone
November 14, 2024

President Biden and President Elect Trump met at the White House on Wednesday and shook hands and exchanged pleasantries after an emotionally exhausting presidential race in which each side accused the other of presenting an immediate existential threat to the country.

This is it. This is the real story. This image, right here.

https://twitter.com/gumby4christ/status ... 1080294808
Ignore all the fake drama. Forget all the campaign rhetoric and kayfabe conflict. This is what’s real. This is what deserves your attention.

They do not hate each other. They do not see one another as an existential threat to the nation. They are not enemies. They’re barely even opponents. When the show is over they hug and kiss like boxers after weeks of phony trash talk made solely to sell pay-per-views.

One may say his opponent is the next Hitler, coming to end democracy and take everyone’s votes and destroy the country. The other may say his opponent is a communist dictator, come to do the same. But when the play is over the performers hold hands and bow, and then they go out and have a drink together.

They each pretend to be fighting against each other in defense of you and your interests, when in reality they’re on the same side, fighting against you, in defense of the interests of oligarchy and empire.



You can see it right there. They’re not hiding it anymore. They don’t have to. It was all a show, and they’re openly admitting it. A friendly match, like two rich ladies playing tennis at the Hamptons.

They can show it openly because they know most of you won’t pay attention to what you are seeing, or if you do you’ll forget all about it and get swept up in the heat of the next election cycle. There’s so much messaging reinforcing the illusory partisan divide that these tacit little admissions tend to go completely overlooked.

Don’t get me wrong, the depravity of Trump himself is not illusory. Real people are going to suffer and die under his administration, just as real people suffered and died under Biden’s. But they themselves know they have nothing to fear. They and the powers they serve will go completely untouched by the imperial murder machine. They will die of old age surrounded by wealth and luxury, completely free from any consequences for their actions.

It was all a sham. Always is. The elections are fake and the game is rigged. The empire will march on completely uninterrupted and entirely unchanged, served by one fraudulent president after the next until its eventual collapse.


Stop buying into the performance. Stop screaming for your favorite political pro wrestler and notice that the blows aren’t connecting and the whole match is just a show.

If you want to fight the power, focus your opposition where the real power is. The war machine. Imperial power structures. Intelligence agencies. Plutocracy. Capitalism. Fully unplug your emotional energy from the illusion of electoral politics and dedicate your attention instead to the concrete movements of weapons, resources, and wealth.

As long as they can keep us clapping along with the puppet show, we’re never going to pay attention to the forces pulling the strings. We’re never going to bring enough awareness to the real problems to find actual solutions and carry them out. We’re never going to be able to bring real opposition to real power.

And that’s the whole idea. That’s why this silly puppet show keeps coming back every four years.

Stop clapping along and start looking around the theater. You know where the empire managers want you to place your attention, so start looking where they don’t want you to look.

Wake up.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2024/11 ... ake-a-bow/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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