Yves here. Some readers have been upset about the frequency of criticism in the comments section of Team Dem. I suggest you read this post and consider: the party has been treating workers, such as union members and the poor, as those to whom it can deliver cheap slogans and crumbs. The party has more and more become the vehicle for the needs and wants of the so-called Professional Managerial Class, and everyone below them should recognize how they deserve that privileged position and suck it up.
Mind you, Common Dreams is a loyal leftist outlet and author Phil Wilson has a long history of writing for progressive outlets. It takes a lot of abuse to get former followers to react like betrayed lovers or recovering cult members.
By Phil Wilson, a retired mental health worker who has written for Common Dreams, Counterpunch, Resilience, Current Affairs, The Future Fire, The Hampshire Gazette, and other publications. Phil’s writings are posted regularly at Nobody’s Voice. Originally published at CommonDreams
In the crazy, refracted light of bent and broken images, Kamala Harris can simultaneously be part of the administration sending billions of dollars of weaponry to the IDF, and also grieve for those innocents crushed under Gazan rubble.
I suffered through much of the three nights of non-reality programming called the 2024 Democratic National Convention. I watched nearly the whole fucking thing—the jugglers, acrobats, gladiator contests, cock fighting, and the dancers too. I sat mesmerized by an unlimited bounty of bread and circus offerings—lions and Christians, tight-rope walkers and card tricks—I might have been the only person on Earth to view pretty much the entire presentation.
Not exactly the whole thing—I walked my dog, checked baseball scores, spaced out and thought strange things, leafed through my brand new copy of The Complete Poems of EmilyDickinson—but I came back to the DNC like a musician circling back to a particular theme or motif. And what a spectacular and awful show it was!
It resembled an extended commercial, an infomercial, perhaps, but it also seemed a bit like a funeral where people shuffle to the podium to convey memories that have been denuded of objective content—at a funeral no one wants to hear about DUI arrests and domestic battery, we only want the good stuff about how the departed climbed a tree and saved a kitten.
U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris was given a magnificent send off to the land beyond the sun. We walked away knowing that she is a saintly woman at worst, and the daughter of God sent to save us at best. We heard not mere praise, but blessings, confessions, tears, and astonishment interspersed with tunes from Stevie Wonder, Pink, John Legend, and Sheila E! But what kind of funeral concludes with the deceased in the flesh, telling her own story? And what a story she told, being born into the almost Calcutta-style poverty of the Berkeley flats.
I know something about the mean streets of West Berkeley myself, having lived on Channing Way between Bonar and Browning for over a decade. On the flat plains of Berkeley homes now can be purchased—if you are goddamn lucky—for a hair under a million dollars. But I lived there in the 80s and 90s and Kamala would have been long gone by the time my wife and I moved to the west coast.
The Berkeley flats (as I experienced them 40 years ago) cannot be placed in the usual system of class categories, for Berkeley existed just outside the normal boundaries of our four-dimensional universe. It simultaneously exhibited working class, middle class, and upper-middle class features in some bizarre overlapping glitch of the matrix. On our block lived two doctors, a factory foreman, a preschool teacher, a single grandmother on public assistance, and the proprietor of a crack house. Kamala, in her DNC acceptance speech, attempted to pass herself off as a onetime lower-middle class child oppressed by the disrespect endured by her parents—two immigrants of color.
Kamala wowed us all with social class contortions in which a family headed by two academics with doctorates can be passed off as the embodiment of disadvantage. In the DNC rhetoric of the day, we heard nothing of class, but only about race and immigration status. We were expected to be shocked that Kamala and her younger sister, Maya, somehow, against all odds, excelled in school and went on to elite law schools.
Of course, this is the American myth that corrupts our national soul—the idea that we live in a meritocratic democracy in which all the layers of status reflect pure work ethic, and privilege has no part in the outcome (you know—the meritocracy in which Donald Trump became a self-made man). I would have had so much more respect for Kamala Harris if she had looked the nation in the eye and said:
I was born with two silver spoons in my mouth and you probably were not. My parents each held doctorates and high positions in the worlds of research and academia, and yours most likely have less than a bachelor’s diploma. Still, despite having had encouragement to study hard and succeed every day of my childhood, I do my best to imagine what it would be like to grow up in a family that owned no books, and I try to put myself in the shoes of someone forced to muddle through school with no guidance and no expectations. Of course, that is not easy for me, because my hyper educated parents made it almost impossible to envision what it might be like to feel that you are a stranger in school. But I will do my best to step outside myself and wear your five-year-old Nikes.
In the fun-house mirrors of American political theater, one has to know that every moment of election programming amounts to a pile of bullshit. In the crazy, refracted light of bent and broken images, Kamala Harris can simultaneously be part of the administration sending billions of dollars of weaponry to the IDF, and also grieve for those tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands according to The Lancet) of innocents crushed under Gazan rubble. In the physically impossible dreamscape of DNC fantasy, Kamala Harris can say in a single paragraph that she will feed the military industrial complex as if she were a zoo keeper with a bucket of meat entering a cage of famished tigers, and at the same time, fight climate change.
With all the trapeze artists, ballet dancers, and magicians beguiling us with feats of virtuosity, two things remained conspicuously absent at the DNC convention—a voice representing the agony of Palestinians and Kamala’s father. I had assumed that professor of economics, Donald Harris, must be long dead, but a quick run to Wikipedia proved that he still resides on our planet. Is Dr. Harris Kamala’s Mary Trump—the alienated family member in charge of family skeletons? If so, he bears witness oddly in silence and does not forcefully deposit his obscure secrets in public as does Dr. Mary Trump. Does his absence speak of something ominous? Mary Trump lets loose her family secrets with no inhibition and little enlightenment. She tells us nothing about her putrid uncle that we don’t already know.
But even more concerning, in a circus promising to lift all of humanity out of the muck of discouragement and horror, the failure of the directors and producers of the DNC extravaganza to produce a solitary, sympathetic Palestinian voice cannot be dismissed as an oversight. The blue honchos who must have meticulously agonized about a Palestinian speaker willing to say a reassuring word to amputate Kamala Harris from our doubts about her role in the ongoing genocide in Gaza—they all somehow came up with bupkis.
In an affair of mass manipulation, that must have cost the price of a nuclear delivery system, the DNC could not clear the one very low bar that absolutely needed to be stepped over. Millions of people waited futilely to hear that Kamala Harris would depart from President Joe Biden over the matter of supplying bombs to continue a genocidal attack on Palestinian civilians.
The great fear that many potential voters have is this: Behind the opaque curtain, the Wizard of Oz wears a Donald Trump puppet on one hand, and a Kamala Harris puppet on the other. A vote for either is a vote for more war, beefed up police spending, a military budget big enough to attack every inhabited planet within a hundred light years, and a vote to burn every drop of fossil fuel still buried in the lithosphere. Every vote is a vote for Oz.
There is another narrative, that I can’t completely dismiss—that Donald Trump is a monster that makes every run-of-the-mill genocidaire into a comparative Fred Rogers. It may be that we have a choice between something murderously cold hearted and destructive and something much, much worse. Trump gives me the creeps in a way that Kamala Harris does not, but that may just be my own paranoid distortions. I worry about falling into a pond and coming face to face with a basking salt water crocodile wearing an orange wig.
Noam Chomsky called Trump the most dangerous person in human history, or something to that effect. How much longer do we kick the can down the road with the right-wing Democrats wearing their FDR masks, knowing that we get no universal healthcare, no safety net, endless war and CO2? Most of the people that I know agree with Chomsky and will be voting for Harris. I don’t hold that against them. Trump scares the shit out of most people with an intact set of wits.
We live in a time of irreconcilable truths: Donald Trump is a putrid psychopath with no more internal complexity than a bullet in a chamber. Kamala Harris can mimic human emotions, but I am not convinced that she feels real pain.
Maybe the choice is whether or not to admit that we have no choice. Welcome to America.
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“Kamala wowed us all with social class contortions in which a family headed by two academics with doctorates can be passed off as the embodiment of disadvantage. In the DNC rhetoric of the day, we heard nothing of class, but only about race and immigration status. “
Of course. The so-called “party of the working people” ain’t.
From Business Insider 2020.
How the 2020 election revealed 2 Americas, divided by wealth and opportunity
https://www.businessinsider.com/how-the-2020-election-revealed-divide-in-american-dream-2020-11?op=1
The Dem’s answer? Learn to code. Find joy in your identity (unless you’re a white male). Stop worrying and learn to love the bomb. / meh
The current Dem estab idea of “left” is all identity and identity oppression; it has nothing to do with economics. Economic oppression is a subject beyond the pale. (Except, I suppose, in the Dem backrooms where deals are made with their donors who like the low low wages for their workers.)
Misquoting Peter Weiss:
And so they chained down the poor in their ignorance so that they wouldn’t stand up and fight their bosses who ruled in the name of the lie of neoliberal economic right.”
― Peter Weiss, The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade
adding: when I here the Dems say “We won’t go back” my first thought is “to what?” My answer is “We won’t go back to the New Deal of FDR and his economic policies.” They leave the “to what?” question unanswered deliberately, imo, to let people think they mean something else. / my 2 cents.
And meanwhile, the party of the weird, those deplorables, are very visibly working class. And their leader, Trump, talks like them, looks like them, has their same faults, speaks their language, eats McDonalds.
On one side you have our tech overlords and far right Christian and Jews trying to get to Armageddon and on the other side the self-interested and incompetent DC swamp. With both, you get to the same place.
Yeah but we can’t let the fair right whackos get the credit for getting us to that horrible place!
Apropos the opening paragraph, the last words ought to be added to any politician’s 3 word slogan count today. Build Back Better, Fixing Foundations First, Get Brexit Done, Taking Back Control, etc., should all be subsumed under the vastly more honest political message Suck It Up.
Or how about, “Eat S^#*, Losers!”
Those Build Back Better hats must be collector items as rare few have been sighted in public. /s
The People, No!
The idea of meritocracy is usefully explained in two different ways, one by Michelle Obama at the convention as equality of opportunity, the other by Donald Trump with his conceited contempt for losers and glee in firing them. They are talking about the same thing in different terms. Those at the top, Harris for example, have merit and those at the bottom do not. However you want to put it, dangling the possibility of social mobility in front of voters is a weak excuse for policies supporting wealth and income inequality without social safety nets.
Kamala Harris has been a political “gold digger” her whole life. She is the perfect puppet for the DNC.
We live in a time of irreconcilable truths: Donald Trump is a putrid psychopath with no more internal complexity than a bullet in a chamber. Kamala Harris can mimic human emotions, but I am not convinced that she feels real pain.
Maybe the choice is whether or not to admit that we have no choice. Welcome to America.
So one candidate is a “pyschopath” and the other a “sociopath.” The author is just now coming to the realization that “we have no choice?” Late to the dance, maybe he should have included below Chomsky quote, a quote from a time Chomsky wasn’t suffering from TDS.
The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum….
You’ve highlighted the most important lesson here. But the author of this piece misses a crucial difference between our two “choices.” Harris was selected and nurtured to be a cog in the Machine by her elite benefactors – elements of our Oz collective. She was given (sorry – she “earned”) her requisite career resume, financial sponsorship, glowing media attention. But as the author notes, politics today is “non-reality programming.” Harris lacked the charisma and personal appeal to make it in the bizarre carnival that is our electoral process and fell flat. Trump, on the other hand, *is* a carnival barker. Though an outsider, he was the perfect character for what is basically a WWE match. Hell, he actually *was* a “reality show” host. Unlike Harris, who was pushed into the role by elites in spite of the people, Trump’s trajectory was the opposite. He pushed his way in *because* of the people (at least some of them) in spite of a massive and unified elite effort to keep him out.
This is why Chomsky’s TDS quote was so absurd regardless of how miserable, or even dangerous, another Trump presidency might be. Harris is a cog in the Machine. Trump, though he won’t change anything, is a potential wrench in the gears. Both of them, for different reasons, have given us munchkins a huge peak behind the Curtain.
Trump is there in spite of the smoke filled rooms.
Harris exists by and for the smoke filled rooms.
The only other difference is: Trump does not prostrate himself sufficiently for the Atlanticist war mongers.
Harris is a creation of those smoke filled rooms. Through some archaic form of political alchemy (using a pint of ice cream out of Pelosi’s freezer among other things) they actually created her out of smoke. One good sneeze and she dissapates like our hopes and prayers.
The two major parties along with complicit media have turned the election process into a reality show over the course of several decades – getting rid of the Fairness Doctrine, giving the League of Women Voters the boot on running debates, concentrating on the horse race aspects with increasingly shallow coverage, high production values with big shiny sets to yap on, but no mention of actual policies, etc.
And yet they act surprised when an actual reality show celebrity wins the election working within a system that was designed by both parties for someone just like him.
Rather than changing course and offering something more substantive to voters, they just double down on the stupid.
A recent article here ‘splained all: Most voters are definite Decideds, so the two parties must compete for the handful of ‘low information’ unmotivated voters left. ie both sides pile on the stupid, so they can relate.
I know it’s a distinction without much of a difference, but the League chose to walk away once the campaigns decided to take control of every little aspect of how the debates would be run, and turn the debates into, as League President Nancy Newman referred to them, “just another risk-free stop along the campaign trail.”
Watch Ms. Newman’s scathing rebuke here: https://youtu.be/e6ECHHDn_TA
The Chomsky quote is absurd and the author of the above should step back and take his own advice about living in bubbles. To people who didn’t grow up in Berkely, west or east, Trump is a familiar social figure–the always selling car dealer who is wealthy and important in his own world which is the thing that is all important to him. Being already ruler of his own world he has no need to conquer others. You don’t have to like such a person–and I don’t much and never watched his TV show–but they are quite transparent and therefore less to be feared than the obscure who covet fame, power and riches.
In a more reasonable world neither Trump nor Harris should be president but given the choices presented by a corrupt system then transparency is to be preferred over a figure whose only accomplishment seems to be knowing how to advance within that corrupt system. For some time now the public has been in a rather desperate quest for authenticity whereas people like Harris, Obama and the Clintons are pure facade. The facade may win as it has in the past but one shouldn’t discount that desperate quest.
At this point in the story, it’s interesting to see who on the old economic “left” is both reviling the modern New Dem estab, AND is still desperately trying to stay in the New Dem’s good graces. If the old “left” folks are trying to appeal to the better angels in the New Dem party, trying to shame them, the old “left” are wasting their energy, imo. The current New Dem neoliberal-neocon estab have no shame, imo. Witness their convention. / ;)
Harris is, imo, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Neocon project. No wonder no Palestinian voice was on stage at the convention. Irving Kristol would be so proud. / ;)
from Due Dissidence, utube, ~11 minutes.
‘Muslim Women For Harris’ PULLS SUPPORT After Convention SNUB
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ah7I_iNUxaU
The Due Dissedence guys made an interesting point yesterday. What do Trump, Gabbard, Musk, and RFKjr have in common? They used to be Democrats. For whatever reasons, they are out of the party and got absorbed into the Republican party. If you hold outsider opinions,, you’re much more likely to be tolerated in the Republican party than the church of demotology. The Democratic party is structured to put down insurgencies. The Republicans never expected one, ergo no superdelegates. As a father of an autistic child sitting in waiting room of the behavioral therapist office, only one party is talking about chronic illness of American children. While there is debate as to why, at least they are asking. There’s a lot of autistic kids with parents in America and only one party is even mentioning our kids. I wouldn’t wish autism on a kid and the parents if they were my worst enemy. We all just supposed to sit here and act like this is just the way things should be. If you ask questions, especially the wrong ones, one party seems much more ok with censoring. This and several other reason are why I left the church of demotology.
Well Trump left the dem party as a a favor to the Clintons, who wanted a heel to run against that would make Hillary look good. They should have aimed lower I guess.
It seems like the GOP is driven by its right wing, and the Dems are also driven by the repub. right wing.
The truth you speak of is one of the most important issues for humankind that is being overlooked and not mentioned by many, the most important subject is the health of children and their parents. RFK has been an advocate of health for decades and the main reason he has enemies.Those that attack these facts may be part of he problem without their own knowledge or lack of.So many are scared of being left in shallow water if the swamp gets drained. Harris may not even be there the way coups are playing out in in the DNC. Biden in Hospital and all the family’s crimes are coming to a head in public after being hidden by the controlers.
Canvassing for the Labour Party in the UK in 2019 it became obvious that the LP base was no longer the ‘working class’. The base is now the ‘middle class’ but what exactly is this? It turns out that it is those (according to the UK LP and US Democrats) who occupy ‘white collar’ and managerial work, and not those who do ‘blue collar’ work. It is as superficial as that. And this lends itself to identity politics. So they have redefined ‘working class’ in the most superficial of ways. Our mission was to unite the majority of people who worked for a wage against those and their representatives who owned the means of production (distribution and exchange). The nature of the labour force has changed with the majority of ‘the workforce’ now employed in organisational and white collar work BUT the essential class nature of our world has not. We used to be clear that the UK LP represented ‘the workers’ when manufacturing was dominant and the workforce much more homogenous. It has changed but our political system hasn’t changed with it so we still have the party of Labour and the Party of Capital – in theory. In reality it is increasingly Tweedledee and Tweedledum. PR could address this a bit but the basic issue is the way that propaganda and control now allows those ‘middle class’ people to construct a pretend world around ideas that simply neglect class reality – that there is a ruling class and a working class, more varied than it was, but still essentially the same. Politics is now advertising – for the ruling class and you are increasingly not allowed to debate ‘their’ ideas. In the UK LP Starmer forbade branches discussing anything to do with Palestine and introduced the crude meme that since Israel was ‘the Jewish State’ criticism of it was automatically ‘antisemitic’. The triumph of vulgar clunk-click politics is only possible where there is no discussion allowed and where there is wall to wall propaganda. Discussing the Democrat National Convention Alistair Campbell (Blairs old spin doctor) was positively ecstatic listing lessons the UK LP could adopt. Politics relegated to backrooms or entirely extinguished, no debate and everything else stage managed advertising. Gut wrenchingly awful and I thought more than once – wouldn’t it be great if there WAS a civil war in the USA and the country just tore itself to pieces. The world would be a lot safer….
Well, not necessarily safer for the increasingly impoverished Americans living amongst the ruins.
an aside: during the US Civil War, 1860-1865, the UK was actively supporting the South as a way to break up the US and reclaim some of their once colonies. See: 1775, 1812, 1860, etc. A good argument can be made that Lincoln was interested in preventing breakup in order to keep the UK out of US territory.
So, I take any UK comments about how great it would be for a US civil war with a Large grain of salt. Large grain. Even if well meant. / ;) granting that the rest the comment about the UK situation may be accurate.
More fodder for my view that, for practical purposes, UK is an enemy of united States. ;)
Better to be an enemy than a friend, Kissinger knew that…
Since I am often defending Chomsky here I will do it again now.
He in essence was referring to the world wide dead and destruction caused by a climate that has totally collapsed.
Due to the GOP´s anti-environment position he concluded that Trump as POTUS held much responsibility for those, obstructing anything to stop that climate change. He did not speak about Trump personally being dangerous. It´s the consequences of his actions.
Since I am often defending Chomsky here I will do it again now.
He in essence was referring to the world wide dead and destruction caused by a climate that has totally collapsed.
Due to the GOP´s anti-environment position he concluded that Trump as POTUS held much responsibility for those, obstructing anything to stop that climate change.
He did not speak about Trump personally being dangerous. It´s the consequences of his actions as POTUS.
On the other hand, It was Obama who presided over the fracking boom that lead to the U.S. becoming the world’s larger producer of gas & oil. Under Biden, 2023 saw the largest production levels ever. And, under Biden public land oil leases soared. Furthermore, Biden drew down the Strategic Oil Reserve to keep gas prices low during an election year. I respect Chomsky & have enjoyed hid books, especially those written with Ed Herman, but on this issue he’s allowed himself to be hoodwinked.
See my comment below: I would guess he chooses not to address what you state, not because it weren´t true (he sure knows it is and is probably furious about it in private) but when having to decide what to say publicly and what not he chooses what he regards as the bigger evil.
The contradictions of the intellectual in the public sphere.
Also consider how his statements have changed since the 1970s-1990s to now. They are reactions to the reduction of discoursive space, the limitation of the topical span.
I would argue there is a direct connection between the deterioration of the information space in the wake of security services and capital increasingly taking over after 9/11 and his treatment of the subjects he thinks matter most.
He had warned of such a demise in the mid 1990s btw with the rise of the internet.
p.s. but also he would fiercly argue much has become better since the 1960s. Which doesn´t mean we could not easily lose it again.
Bush/Cheney and Team Halliburton were all over the HUGE oil boom after 911.
Obama stepped in and let the juggernaut roll on.
Chomsky makes clear that Trump is merely the culmination of a long historical process in which our neolib/neocon global policies have steadily advanced through both Democrat and Republican administrations. He notes that unlike, say, a Stalin or a Hitler, Trump is just a narcissistic “Tin-pot dictator” type. Yet as a skilled rhetorician, he manages to twist this into an argument for Trump being “the worst criminal in human history” somehow. In doing so, he ignores the fact that this “dictator” was elected to office in 2016, and he justifies voting for the “lessor evil” in the case of both Hilliary and Joe, even though both have been integral parts of this history while Trump has not. He therefore provides cover for supporting what is essentially the status quo and using whatever means necessary to eject this “worst criminal in human history” from our midst. Again, even in his 90s Chomsky is a skilled rhetorician so reading his arguments seem to make sense – until you step back and look at the implications of his conclusions.
Like everyone else, I have a great appreciation for all the light Chomsky has shed on the dark corners of our history over the decades. But he has had his blind spots. This is one of them, but unfortunately his reputation provides an almost religious sanctification to Trump derangement on the “left” and an excuse for ignoring what I see as the greater Evil.
The problem with NC (not naked capitalism ;-) is his out-of-proportion role in the intern. discourse which he is aware of (and as a scientist not necessarily happy about albeit he got used to it.)
So he cannot speak complex truths without possibly undermining certain causes which he supports.
And this has increased with the changing nature of MSM.
I assume this e.g. is true for the Kurdish cause.
He is full well awar of the CIA´s role and the geopolitics there. Yet at the same time it cannot be ignored that some parts of the Kurdish movement do attempt to create a progressive communal project couched between Iraq and Turkey.
So what do you do? How do you address these things? Without betraying your own convictions (fighting for justice and equality)?
His talking about Trump I believe also was a means to address the entire nation´s deep structural troubles which go well beyond any one person, such as SCOTUS´ righ-wing turn and many state legislatures; the entire structure of power has moved more and more to the right and he fears that removing EVERY last resistance be it as compromised as a late AOC (sorry if I do her injustice but she is best known I guess) makes things worse than they already are.
All of this made easier with a Trump presidency. (I am not saying alls this is true, especially not in terms of foreign policy but that´s again a different topic.)
Again it´s about the big picture not the stuff on the pinnacle of news media headlines.
Chomsky did often express this himself: You have to decide what you are fighting for. Very limited in scope. Focus is the only way. That´s why – being an intellectual himself – he had not much regard for Foucault e.g. at least as the real world was concerned with real problems of “bread and butter”.
p.s. Look into his statements about MLK. He often argued no MLK without Hundreds of unknown activists killed in the South who are the true “heroes”. The restless many might not be talked about but without them no real change.
Reply to AG , re: Chomsky.
Frankly, the way you explain “what Chomsky really meant”, or “what the words he said really meant” (which is how I understand some of your comments above about Chomsky and what I would call his own case of TDS) seems a lot like gaslighting to me. In the sense that gaslighting is often explained as someone making a statement, then telling the person who heard or read the statement and disagrees with it (or simply repeats the statement back to the speaker, to remind them of their words and their meaning): “but you don’t understand what I am saying; you don’t understand the meaning of my words; what you are telling me I have said is not what I said”.
Could you perhaps specify that with an example…
Then Chomsky is a fool. The difference between the Dems and the Reps on climate change is that the Reps deny it and do nothing about it while the Dems acknowldge it and do nothing about it beyond their lip service. There is no “lesser evil” here.
After winning all branches of government in 2020, then Speaker Nancy Pelosi famously said in reference to the Green New Deal: “We can’t afford the Green Dream or whatever they call it”. There’s the Dems on climate. By the way, how much are the various climate catastrophes costing producers, consumers, governments, insurance companies, climate migrants, etc?
Based on the condition that one agrees with NC that there is the threat of climate change -(if not, the discussion is a completely different one obviously) – NC says it is better to argue with a party that acknowlegdes the problem than with a party that neglects its existence.
That is banal. But that´s where he would start and from that point on one can expand on speculating about possibilities of change. Of supporting certain people, movements, bills etc.
Besides that he commented at a time when Biden had made steps – I believe – which could have been read as movement into a “sensible” direction. I don´t know how he would argue today.
p.s. For this reason I was e.g. totally opposed to his position regarding RU´s attack on UKR and the breach of Art. 51. Initially NC had argued in favour of limited arms support of the AFU because that´s what the UN would allow based on international law and agreements.
I would have told him that since Art. 51 doesn´t say anything about the particular nature of arms shipments and their true purpose of possible intended escalation it´s the wrong decision and he would have to question that option offered by UN regulations.
Because unlike US domestic policy on environmental questions Art. 51 is no open policy process open to all kinds of groups of society and thus open to constant change. But a moving train instead confined to a very limited number of elite players. Which knows only yes and no. Only war or no war. Which makes confirmation of arming a long-term commitment with dire consequences since its deeply affirmative of increasing violence by design. I doubt Art. 51 in this respect ever worked, i.e. supplying the attacked party with arms by third parties never made the attacker change his mind to cease the military incursion.
With respect to “NC says it is better to argue with a party that acknowlegdes the problem than with a party that neglects its existence,” I disagree. Climate change as an issue has been effectively neutralized. Neither party is going to do anything about it, So I am going to prioritize other issues.
Strategically speaking, if a problem is existential, even if only for “First World Populations and Standards of Living,” and a Party obstructs any feasible solution to said ‘problem,’ then the Party must be removed, by force if necessary.
That is the level of danger we are entering now, as a species.
Chomsky is probably right, but must also seemingly conclude that every president is the most dangerous person in the world.
How did Trump move up in the all-time league tables to become the most dangerous person in human history?
There must’ve been quite the lobbying behind the scenes against some pretty stiff competition.
Chomsky’s TDS gave him a case of hyperbolic Trumpism, bigly.
>Maybe the choice is whether or not to admit that we have no choice. Welcome to America.
I disagree.
I know that when I step into the booth on Election Day in the Green Mountain State, I will have other choices than the Ds or Rs. 3 others anyway, 4 if they still leave RFK JR. on the ballot.
https://ballotpedia.org/Sample_Ballot_Lookup.
It may not/will not make a difference but there are still options. Yes, call me naive if you’re being polite, delusional if you want.
Yes, the menu has the featured DrumpfScheisswurst and Joy jerkRassclaat
Down below I can see the SteinerTorte and CornelBeef but the waiter says they are not available
Today I am still hungry and do not want a $h!t sandwich
The New York Dems are doing weverything in their power to deny me a vote for anyone other than Harris or Trump. I’d like to vote for Stein, but the Dems who control the state won’t let me. On the one hand there is little Harris could do to earn my vote. On the other hand, I am quite happy to express my displeasure by not voting for down ticket Dems as I was planning to.
Not that Trump is really an option. Yet while I would not have voted for him prior to Gabbard endorsing him, I thought Gabbard made some good points and may give the matter some consideration after all.
Well, Gillibrand and Goldman were already on my ‘bad smell’ list, so there wasn’t going to be much down ticket voting on my part either, but it does annoy the hell out of me that the Democrats being so anti-Democratic to close off the ballot from even minor competition might drive me to hold my nose and vote for Trump.
Thanks, Andy. Please stay away.
I dont know how anyone could watch that DNC infomercial without being first heavily sedated to avoid nausea…the obvous attempts to cover anything except the issues, the dreadful music, fake emotion, even the state representatives did not have their states names on those “poles”…they had the name Kamala…such a distortion of reality…one can only hope that the great, manipulated masses, who do not read naked capitalism felt and understood the bullshit of it all…
We are witnessing the dry rot of the so-called two-party system exposed for all to see. As ever, it is a Uniparty of Property (and war as war profiteeering).
To be balanced, I will point out that all one has to know about Trump is that interview with undesirable-alien Elon Musk in which the two of them yuck it up about Musk firing striking workers. What’s Trump’s opinion? Fire their asses out of here.
All one has to know. (With a reminder that many earnest liberals are quite good at “downsizing” workforces, too.)
With regard to Kamala, I am appalled, and I seldom am appalled by public behavior these days, at her moment of Kali, Goddess of Destruction, at the Democratic National Convention.
“Lethal force”? Does she even know what “lethal” means? It means the politics of death. (Which is why Phil Wilson found no advocate for the Palestinians — acknowledging that Israeli snipers are targeting Palestinian children might interrupt the Dems stuffing their blowholes at the buffet table.)
Phil Wilson has many wonderful turns of phrase, but we all know that it is well past time for us to become apostates: It is either the “two-party” system of us. I’d rather have “us” survive.
Thanks to Randall Flagg, above, I looked up the Illinois sample ballot, which, evidently, is still a work in progress. I will expect the worst.
They were talking about booting the Twitter censorship team were they not? So the victims not exactly virtuous people, union or no.
But yes Trump represents his class of plutocrats fighting the new Jacobins who want to upend the apple cart in order to put themselves in power. The working class at least had a place in that apple cart whereas the great replacers prefer to dispose of them altogether. That said, it’s really foreign policy where presidents have all their power and perhaps the reason many of them prefer to play in that sandbox. And on that front the agreement incapable (re the Russians) and backbone incapable (re Israel) Biden/Harris administration has been a danger to us all not to mention the hundreds of thousands now dead as a result. This must always be front and center if the scale of virtue is being calibrated.
The Abraham Accords were bad for the Palestinians but letting the Israelis simply kill them all is much worse. Trump, for all his egotism, does have the ability to see more than one side as part of his much boasted “dealmaking.” The Dem cult merely cover their ears as they walk out of the circus tent.
Yes, Mr Wilson, the DNC was a circus selling snake oil to America, but I think you missed some of the most nausea inducing aspects. Their celebration of the installation of a candidate that has not in two election cycle garnered a single primary delegate while parading as champions of democracy was hubris on a scale I haven’t often seen before.
And I might suggest that some of that time away from the spectacle might have been better spent looking at what Harris did do in California and didn’t do in DC. It is deliberately opaque, but she has form. Just as the image of her childhood is imaginary, her time in elected office rather than real public service was a mix of obsequious donor service, incompetence and yes a fair amount of arrogant cruelty and harm. Knowing That might have allowed you to conclude the analysis without mistakenly giving Harris any room. She might be better mimicking human emotions than the average psychopath, but quite honestly the description of Donald Trump could fit Harris even better. Putrid is a good start.
Trump never won any election, ever, prior to his first republican primary. And I have seen zero evidence that Trump isn’t looking for ways to be a Toady son long as the poor rarely see it – unless it’s a photo op like touching a glowing orb.
FFS, a pillar of his first-run financing was the Mercers Alamo PAC which was originally intended to pay for a Ted Cruz candidacy. To be a fly on the wall for some of his conversations with them!
Trump came out of left field, but he is hardly a maverick with his own ideas.
In the plus column for Harris is that, mysteriously, she’s not particularly weird when talking to kids.
But he did run in primaries, and win them. That’s a huge difference. Harris couldn’t even compete in her own state — she got her clocks cleaned by a democratic socialist.
Trump beat Jeb Bush in the Republican primary battle of 2016. He beat Nikki Haley in 2024. And he beat Hillary Clinton in the general and came a hell of a lot closer to beating Biden in 2020 than Democrats want to admit. He may have bean a neophyte but his election record is quite clear. People voted for him beyond any donor support
Harris couldn’t even beat Buttigieg, was rejected in the primary and without massive thumbs on the scales never would have been on the ticket in 2020, because Biden wasn’t doing much better. She didn’t run and the party made no effort to hide that the public had no say in the candidate, not even a charade of throwing the decision to a floor vote. She is a fully owned subsidiary of the DNC major donors. Frankly we are getting to the point where that phrase should just be attached to any Senator from NY or California.
And if Trump was such a toady do you honestly think there would be such a lawfare campaign against him. His win upset a lot of Apple carts but we wouldn’t see this if Jeb had beaten Clinton, so it is not just that the Republican won. I’m not saying he isn’t a rich assh***, but the overreaction to him by the other rich and powerful says he hasn’t been entirely absorbed by the borg.
Ah, if only being “not particularly weird when talking to kids” had any relevancy to being qualified to hold elected office, let alone be president. (Not to mention Kamala is plenty weird when talking to adults.)
Well if that had been a requirement we might have been lucky enough to avoid hair sniffing and awkwardly touching Biden.
Which demonstrates how utterly weird and creepy this whole Harris/Walz concoction is, dumping Biden from the campaign, but not the presidency? Pulling a mystery candidate for VP cause the canceled primaries left no vetted contenders? Utter amateurs gaslighting their followers again.
Well considering she laughs manically and brags about putting kids parents into jail I’ll take weird any day of the week.
Harris’ anointment is just an expedited version of most elections due to circumstances. In most, the elites are split between a couple different candidates and then the primaries sort it out but those candidates often are set up a good election cycle beforehand. Same is true of Harris’ run as attorney general and Senate. The voters are just a mere inconvenience or, at best, a final decision maker when the elites and power brokers can’t decide amongst themselves.
My sense of it this time around is that most people realize the whole thing is a farce, and know very well, whether they admit it or not, that the Dems have no intention whatsoever on delivering policies which will help working people in any significant way. Not that the GOP will either, but that isn’t the point. There’s this implicit understanding that the two major parties are just loudmouthed used car salesmen rolling back the odometer on a decrepit status quo.
The three ring circus of this convention is about as much democracy as the powers that be are going to throw us, and most of us know it. What more can be said? I don’t want Trump back in office, believe me, but the idea that this election means substantive change of any kind in US foreign or domestic policy regardless of how you vote is absurd.
The election may hinge on the “volatility vote” as people speculate on the possible range of actions of both candidates.
This is like the 2016 election where a voter could surmise “with Clinton I know I’m screwed, with Trump I might not be.
With all the Democratic law fare, the dems may have made Trump into the “I might not be screwed by Trump as he “feels my pain” ” candidate.
Well said. Indeed, the elites are using race to distract us from the reality of class war. But I do disagree, there is (or was) a difference between Trump and the cardboard cutout that is currently Kamala Harris. The ‘Biden administration’ proxy for the super rich is committing base treason, by aiding and abetting a foreign invasion of the United States. This has nothing to do with morality, but is yet another vicious example of forced population growth, whose objective is purely to drive wages and living standards down for the many, and rents and profits up for the few. Trump never built a wall, but – perhaps by accident – he did reduce immigration. Why do you think that, for a brief time at the end of Trump’s term, rents were moderating? And why do you think that they are now shooting up? Was it that Trump had divine powers, or perhaps, it’s just supply and demand? This is not about ‘scapegoating immigrants’ but just pointing out how the world works. So maybe next time Trump will go full-on neoliberal open borders, but at least by the record, Trump is significantly better than Harris on this one thing – and it’s a very big thing indeed.
Well, here in Maryland I can vote for RFK or Jill Stein. Cornell West apparently did not submit the required number of signatures to get on the ballot. I haven’t looked for the why behind that. I don’t know if his problem came from the absurd D cult in Maryland challenging his access to the ballot. Because in Maryland you could have people simultaneously be self-righteous about Republicans not helping Black people while keeping a black man from running for office.
And still, we’re faced with the spoiler accusations if we vote third party. As if any of these candidates have done anything to earn my vote. Still I have to listen to Democrat mouth breathers talk about democracy when they have been the least democratic institution I have observed in my lifetime.
I realize I have no say in my own government. I realize my vote does not matter. I realize that no matter who is elected the current policies will continue. But I refuse to accept that reality without exercising a modicum of speech. If people don’t like to hear me say the Democrats are more effective fascists and racists than the Republicans then maybe they should do something about it.
Fellow Maryland resident here. The Democrats could nominate a ham sandwich and still win MD by 10-15%.
Sounds like California as well.
I haven’t voted in over 10 years. It was becoming a half-ass virtue. Anyway, my guy never won. Cornell West has avoided the D icepick and made it on to the Maine ballot, so I sent for an absentee ballot the other day. I like his books, and his gentle demeanor. When he speaks it’s like he is bestowing a blessing. Even though my guy never wins, it will be a virtuous thing voting for brother West.
I’m with you (in California so it doesn’t matter but anyway). I’ve voted for lesser evilism for 50 years, and here’s where it got us. Einstein would approve: I’ve learned something.
Like a dog worrying a bleached bone, or a dog returning to its vomit, so this fool to his folly:
Write-in, or Turd party, or leave the top of the ticket blank?
Arcane Pollyanna notion of License and Consent- or the withholding of the same?
The void — as in removal of coyotes, will be filled in by at least three new ones, vying for the apparently unlimited spoils Inside the Beltway(tm). And, as far as choosing or material difference between DNC or RNC and their respective troops and tropes, it will not matter.
Inasmuch as Harris is a disaster, I still am steadfast that Trump, too, is on equal disaster footing, in a different set of togs.
If Trump is a demon (and he is), Kamala is The Devil.
The Trump Derangement Syndrome is very real here and comes across as childish. Trump is merely a symptom of a dying empire and the manifestation of the devilish desires of the American settler class. Kamala, on the other hand, is a hollow avatar for the corporate masters who rule the West, which is far from an ideal situation.
The reality is that within the confines of this electoral system, candidates like Trump and Kamala will inevitably rise because that is what the situation demands from the perspective of the settlers and elites.
As an African-American, I have to laugh at the panic gripping this satanic empire and its white (immoral) citizenry. The rest of us—Black, Brown, and Indigenous people—who are continually exploited by this conglomerate of evil will take every advantage of this dying society to build a new one for ourselves, free from the masses of exploiters, looters, and Satanists.
Good read. I’m growing less concerned about this race by the day. All those cans Joe kicked down the road? I think some of them have morphed into IEDs and are just waiting to blow the wheels off Harris’ campaign Humvee as it rolls by.
I don’t think there’s any meaningful activity on the campaign front this year. The real action is going to be mau-mauing the press. They’ve been very naughty and they know it. Not just Trump supporters, everyone should give news media an earful every chance you get. At the very least, it will give them pause when writing their “Trump stole the election” stories in November.
Nothing unnerves professional management crooks like having a bright light shining on them. Think of short to the point things to yell at these them on the rare occasion when you see one in the wild (or in a fancy restaurant).
Trump won in 2016 because he spoke to the concerns of the working class.
In office, he killed the Trans-Pacific Partnership, renegotiated NFTA, worked the bully pulpit for onshoring, tried to secure the southern border, and did not start any new wars. Compare that with any other president since Nixon per working class interests.
NFTA 2.0 included strengthened ISDS provisions (a la TPP) so one must read the fine print. It is a fine print universe.
The large print giveth, the small print taketh away. (Tom Waits)
Amen!
Alastair Crooke, today: “posed in Chicago in a similar Hegelian dialectic opposition to the former capitalism versus communism; but in today’s case, it is “extremism” in conflict with “Our Democracy”.
“extremism is so dangerous it will allow for the state religion of our democracy to “go after” enemies like white Christian nationalists or Trumpers, or peaceniks….. at the cost of the entire Bill of Rights.
Who will be their Tail Gunner Joe?
Is it possible that the readers who complained in the comments were doing so because – I assume – the GOP has done for workers even less than the Dems? And that this might have been underreported (I don´t know myself it was underreported or not.)
p.s. Is there a comprehensive report that juxtaposes both parties´ “accomplishments” re: labour on federal and state level?
That may have been the argument, but the high emotional content of many of those remarks said there is more at work.
Lambert described the situation quite well some time back:
It was Clinton who tried to reform, as in cut, Social Security and Medicare. We can thank Monica Lewinsky for that not happening.
Obama also tried to cut Social Security and Medicare with his grand bargain. I could not stand to follow that closely but fortunately it did not come to fruition.
The way Obama handled the foreclosure crisis resulted in the biggest destruction of black wealth evah. The Republicans has actually left $75 billion in the TARP for foreclosure relief which the Obama Administration never used.
Obama also campaigned in 2008 on raising the minimum wage. See this editorial by Reuters, as in an official editorial, not an op-ed:
https://www.reuters.com/article/opinion/where-is-obamas-promised-minimum-wage-hike-idUS1308839017/
So there are actually a lot of bad facts on the Team Dem side that would not wind up being included in your sort of list. And this is what is getting some Democrats angry enough to punish the party. It isn’t just making promises and not being able to deliver on them. It’s not even trying to deliver.
The Democrats’ slogan should be “We’ll kiss you first and use more lube”
I don’t disagree except with the part about punishing the party. I don’t doubt some people have this intention, but the idea that option is even on the table is ridiculous. I guess in an extremely limited sense, a few dozen politicians might not get to hold office, and this negatively impacts them personally. In a wider sense, the real power in this country has a heads I win, tales you lose relationship where it gets what it wants regardless.
I think that baffles me the most. Not that the Dems are a joke, because of course they are, but that there’s plenty of people who have deluded themselves into thinking voting for Trump is a protest vote. Third party voting or simply stating home I can accept as an act of ethical protest, but actively trying to put the GOP in charge isn’t.
>think that baffles me the most. Not that the Dems are a joke, because of course they are, but that there’s plenty of people who have deluded themselves into thinking voting for Trump is a protest vote
There was always this from Michael Moore in 2016…
https://www.youtube.com/results?sp=mAEA&search_query=michael+moore+trump+speech+2016+
Of course things weren’t going to change substantially for them but at least he may have given them a little hope. Isn’t it about connecting with voters? Which Trump did?
Exactly what Obama and his ” Hope and Change” carnival act did.
And to those who say Trump didn’t deliver to those poor rubes, well, any different in the end than any other politician’s hot air on both sides?
And if Trump wins in 2024 the Democratic Party will likely self-destruct. And from the ashes . . . a better democracy? Civil strife? The end of US Militarism? One can only hope!
I’m starting to wonder if it’s going to take something external happening to the US to really reconfigure the system.
As the Dems didn’t self-destruct in 2016, which was a direct meteor hit to their vanity of the org via the political process, I don’t think it’s going to happen in 2024.
vote for stein and get blamed for trump,…it’s a win win
IMO,If enough people vote for either rfk or stein it’s going to leave a mark
even if they don’t win
and randall, trump axed the tpp on day one which was definitely not anti poor rube
Sorry but I have read and heard quite a few formulating not voting for Team Dem as punishment for their bait and switches over the years. One of the regular versions is if it means Trump winning, so be it, they don’t want Team Dem to think Orange Man Bad is a justification for not formulating and being serious about delivering on policies to help ordinary citizens.
They are specifically engaging in altruistic punishment:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11805825/
“Altruistic punishment” is not settled science in small group sociology, much less a proven explanation for a chaotic system like voting. Obvious caveats to the theory on a mass scale would include poor information, poorly informed participants, lack of group coordination and a vanishingly small number of voters determined to injure their own condition to “punish” a distant entity which will continue to exist out of power.
“Spite” might be a better explanation — namely, voting for an evil for whatever satisfaction that may supply, on the presumption that if anyone suffers for it, it will be third parties, not oneself.
Punishing the Democrats is also a valid electoral approach. Michael Hudson explained well in a 2020 interview on Steve Grumbine’s podcast Macro N Cheese.
(my bold)
Here’s the transcript https://michael-hudson.com/2020/10/%E2%80%A8debt-deflation-and-the-neofeudal-empire/
You can listen to the episode in a podcast app.
Steve Grumbine also interviewed Glen Ford that year who explained how the Democrats exploit black voters to always vote against the Republic Party, which also helps the Democrats to move as right wing as they want.
– there cannot be any progress made until you break up the Democratic Party.
After two decades as a union member told to vote for the Democratic Party that did nothing, that is my premise. Wipe them out first, since they are the weakest, then wipe out the Republican party.
Please explain: if Trump wins thanks to a small minority of voters who regard the Democratic party as insufficiently populist, virtuous or left-wing, how does that punish anyone but the public? Through what mechanism does it recreate the Democratic party when the usual suspects are perfectly content to remain out of power for a term or two? Have we forgotten 2000? 2004? 2016? What did those losses achieve?
And on what basis have you determined that this dubious strategy is worth the pain — when others, who don’t have the leisure to participate on sites like this one, will be enduring it?
I think it is adequately explained by Hudson above and in the linked transcript. In the short term you lose. But if you do not demonstrate that you are serious about wrecking the party at the elctions then you have no power within that party. You’ve got to be ready to take your progressive dissident movement elsewhere. Otherwise lesser of two evils voting means your party will always serve itself and not you.
In effect, you’re affirming the wretched wisdom of the Clinton strategy. Based on your requirements, it makes far more sense for the party to write off the left as hopelessly enbubbled in fantasy, and court suburban Republicans instead. That pool is much larger and less rigidly ideological.
It’s called “politics”.
You got the best Democratic administration in years, but go ahead, “punish”, because social democratic ideals with no precedent in American politics, or anywhere else, were not met…..
Don’t forget to add codifying abortion rights to the failed promise list. A big nothing burger from the Dems but they sure raise a lot of money off of the subject still to this day.
Thank you very much for taking the time.
Of the very broad brushes of Ds´ “treason” of labour I am aware.
p.s. One of my private issues is lack of expertise due to inadequate reporting in the German MSM and US sources that I used to look into since the 1990s.
Don´t throw rocks at me if I say those were sources like Democracy Now, Znet or even the New Yorker.
I remember that even Barbara Ehrenreich wasted an entire piece on musing about feminism and Lewinsky.
So I wonder when did left media break down for real? There was Doug Henwood though and there still is…
On the other hand 15 years ago the New Yorker had 2 very good portraits about the true colours of Obama and how he had sold out on his Chicago supporters AFTER they had helped him get into Senate.
Without their help using the old Civil Rights movement base he had lost out on Congressional runs as we know because he was regarded as too much of a pro rich white Chicago upper class activist.
So you could argue Obama changed not the slightest compared to his very early years.
(As my Dad would say, people never change…🙄)
Harpers is still very good, most of the time. It’s a very old publication and it’s something of a unicorn, in a good way.
Jacobin is tolerable.
I actually have a friend who is totally p.o.ed that it’s not Buttigieg who got the nod from corporate and might write him in.
She’s PMC in a creative position and is convinced that it’s not Mayo Pete this year because America is homophobic and isn’t ready for a gay president. She’s also cis-hetero fwiw. Crazy world.
“The Republicans say they will knife you in the face.
“The Democrats say they are so much nicer, they only want one kidney.
“What they don’t tell you is they are coming for the other kidney next year.”
This. The way Himself puts it is “The Republicans knife you with a snarl, the Democrats knife you with a teary eye.”
The thing about Republicans is that historically they haven’t pretended to be something they aren’t. The Dems have definitely been deceptive and I’ve had it.
If y’all want to still support the Dems and keep considering them the lesser evil then fine. But I can’t. I’m not turning to the Republican Party…. I just realize that I have no one representing me. That’s the reality as far as I am concerned.
10 Reasons Bill Clinton Was Secretly A Terrible President there are more of course, just about every problem america and the world are facing this dim wit either created them, or compounded them.
The financial crash of 2008 was the result of so many complex, compounding factors that people still can’t agree on who, if anyone, was responsible. However, there’s one name that keeps cropping up again and again: Bill Clinton
https://listverse.com/2014/02/05/10-reasons-bill-clinton-was-secretly-a-terrible-president/
……….
the only president that even tried to reverse what this monster did, was trump.
obama was to make sure none of clintons disastrous policies would be reversed.
and both clinton and obama were key note speakers at the DNC circus show.
proving once again, anyone who thinks a vote for them would be good for working people, are out of their minds.
unions owe trump some gratitude.
I’ve just received one of my frequent emails from the Claudia de la Cruz/Karina Garcia campaign, this time in their fight against being thrown off the Georgia ballot. Like Jill Stein, there are options, but which you will never hear about in the MSM. DN, outside the DNC circus, did have a clip of Claudia speaking (in the crowd). It was very brief. That’s about as good as it gets (so not very good).
Western propaganda is ubiquitous. Yesterday, JudgeNap and Alistair Crooke reviewed a photo of a purported Iron Dome interception of a Hezbollah missile in the recent exchange run by both the WSJ and NYT. The photo was a year old in broad daylight when the recent exchange was in darkness.
I’m worn out from screaming.
sorry if this is on the OT-part of your post only, but since you mention IRON DOME, here Ted Postol last autumn in a Boston Globe interview – (when I spoke to him he did explain very well what the difficulty with the system is and how IDF in fact keeps every shred of evidence under wraps. That´s why there is no definite proof that the thing indeed doesn´t work as you point out yourself. But from the circumstantial evidence alone there is no other explanation):
“Israel’s Iron Dome system doesn’t work, says missile defense critic”
By Hiawatha Bray Globe Staff,Updated October 13, 2023
https://archive.is/0ThHq
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/10/13/business/israel-iron-dome-does-not-work/
Well yes, whether it works or not, it is expensive (US taxpayers take note). What I was mostly getting at is that these people (the MSM) shamelessly make sh¡t up. Out of whole cloth.
For me, the break came in 2016 when, supporting HRC, the DNC revealed how disconnected from the people and how undemocratic it was.
I thought that surely now we have the opportunity to get back on track. Instead, the Democratic Party elite circled the wagons, and far worse, the Democratic Party base shrugged their shoulders and accepted it. Unfortunately, whenever the people do not demand more from their “betters,” they steadily receive only less. And here we are today…
(My 12:27pm comment below was intended as a reply to this. Sorry it went in the wrong place.)
They didn’t just circle the wagons and shrug their shoulders. They concocted a huge story that they really won the election but somehow Russia stole it for Trump — and even the people who made it all up wound up convincing themselves it was true!
And then Trump did the same thing when he lost, minus the part about having the opponents surveilled 24/7 by the MIC.
“Noam Chomsky called Trump the most dangerous person in human history, or something to that effect. How much longer do we kick the can down the road with the right-wing Democrats…”
Is it really an affront to inquire if persons who can’t, or decline to, distinguish Harris from Trump have any actual interest in what we call “politics” or “governance”?
And if those who do participate hopefully in the “political process” are regarded as “naive”, blind to the dark forces which Chomsky (and even lesser minds) decline to see, what do we say of a large online cohort which insists that if the public policy of a superpower doesn’t take a form both saintly and disinterested, beyond any reasonable expectation of individual human behavior, it’s irredeemable?
Who’s naive here? Or so far removed from the reality of human life and actual dissent (with actual consequences), that the observations of the perfidy of government amount to little more than a spectator sport, an affirmation of collective virtue and insight never put to the test, beyond the comments section?
Hear hear. Chomsky and his ilk very conveniently overlook America’s foreign policy of kill, kill, kill, and then take.
Trump is definitely not a nice guy, but he kept the US out of a war with Iran and didn’t start one with Russia. As an overseas American, I can’t decide whether I would like to see Trump elected, and hope for a decrease in international no-fly zones, or Kamala, and take mean pleasure for the wailing of the PMC as they realize she is totally incompetent to run the presidency.
I’m sorry, but I was trying to say exactly the opposite. Chomsky isn’t naive.
What’s naive is expecting the Democratic party to be a body of virtue and goodness. And if it fails at that, voting Republican or third party or staying home.
If persons with pretensions to socialist or democratic socialist aspirations can look at the four years of Trump and the four years of Biden and conclude that there’s no meaningful difference between them, I’d suggest that person has no business voting at all.
Thanks for your reply. Upon review, I see that I’m guilty of ignoring the quote marks in your opening paragraph and so reacted as if that was your position. My apologies.
Now for your final paragraph, I would agree there were significant differences between the Trump and Biden administrations, especially from on overseas American PoV. But I still avocate not voting, or voting for “none of the above” to show an individual’s refusal to support a broken political process.
In today´s links Yves has this piece by JACOBIN.
In case it gets overlooked and because it fits here:
“Why Do So Many Workers Love Trump?”
By Jared Abbott
Racism and xenophobia are a part of why so many ordinary workers were won over to Donald Trump, but that’s far from the whole story. A careful study breaks down how Trump spoke to economic grievances and personal experiences.
https://jacobin.com/2024/08/trump-workers-trade-populism-rhetoric
https://archive.is/p74xH
It has a biased intro (quoting The Atlantic repeating the talking points which we know all too well) until it gets more interesting.
“(…)A Careful Study of Trump’s Rhetoric
My analysis of Trump’s 2016 campaign speeches and statements reveals that, however disingenuously these messages may have been deployed, he talked a lot about bread-and-butter issues many working-class Americans care deeply about and feel that Democratic and Republican politicians alike have been ignoring for decades.
(…)
I collected all available Trump campaign statements and speeches from 2015 until election day on November 8, 2016. I then identified the number of times Trump mentioned key words and phrases to capture different policy bundles and rhetorical styles.
(…)
But even in these speeches, Trump spent as much time connecting immigration to the economic well-being of American workers as he did demonizing undocumented workers per se, as in a June 2016 speech when he claimed that “Hillary’s Wall Street immigration agenda will keep immigrant communities poor and unemployed Americans out of work. She can’t claim to care about African American and Hispanic workers when she wants to bring in millions of new low-wage workers to compete against them.” Regardless of whether Trump’s controversial claims were empirically true or false, the point is that his remarks framed immigration in terms of protecting American workers, not in overtly bigoted terms based on the condemnation of an entire class of people.
(…)
However, many past and likely future Trump voters saw something unique in his brash economic populist message and rewarded him for it. Progressives can and must compete for these voters by making the same kinds of economic appeals. But in sharp contrast to President Trump, they must deliver on that rhetoric by implementing policies that will actually help workers rather than the 1 percent.
It’s been eight years since Trump first won the presidency. If progressives want to keep him out of office, they should start by taking his working-class appeal seriously — right now — before it’s too late.
(…)”
I am not sure in how far this “analysis” of speeches helps but it´s not a long read and addresses some of the here talked about problems.
Of course I do have my doubts about the last four words: before it’s too late.
Something appears extremely exaggerated about that.
p.s. I am not sure if Trump really does say “will knife you in the face.”
And I remember learning part of why the DNC was so thoroughly “with Her” in an article reported by none other than Lois Lane!
https://www.counterpunch.org/2016/04/01/how-hillary-clinton-bought-the-loyalty-of-33-state-democratic-parties/
(Okay, Margot Kidder — but that was some real investigative journalism!)
Funny thing: Kidder was Walter Kirn’s mother in law. There are odd similarities in their political views, come to think of it…. (and the fact that Kirn is now a resident of Montana and Kidder lived in Montana in the last years of her life).
Thank you for the intensifiers of the experience!
At least the author is emerging from the Denial Phase.
I would describe Common Dreams, DNow! Counter Punch and other so-called left outlets as center, middle-of-the road, if we compare the political spectrum of the past. To use old-fashoned Marxist language: they are bourgeois-liberal: they basically accept the status-quo and go along with the lesser evil nonsense. In some cases, powerful “donors” like the Ford Foundation appear to call the shots on content.
I just laugh when I hear terms in public discourse like “far left”, “Marxist”, “communists” as if Joe McCarthy were still around. There is no left in the USA; the most ‘leftist’ members of Congress:AOC and Bernard Sanders tell us to Vote Genocide! I don’t hear anyone calling for the overthrow of the capitalist state and the abolition of private property, like the old-school left did.
Politics in the USA is a giant Freak Show. It’s like a bunch of zombies on LSD, freaking out over illusions and hallucinations.
As the article points out: there is no choice. It is sad to see the Plebs fight among themselves while we fund Genocide, provoke nuclear war, exacerbate the health care crisis, environmental crisis, housing crisis, distribution of income and wealth crisis, infrastructure crisis…. But these things are not important, only superficial and emotionally-charged issues are allowed into public discourse.
I don’t think it’s obvious how dangerous is team Biden-Harris. Statements like, Israel has a right to defend itself, calling for a ceasefire and peace are not policies.
Biden-Harris have made it clear that they will “always” provide Israel with the military support it needs even though Israel, under Netanyahu’s leadership, is an apartheid state and engaged in genocide.
More importantly, the Biden-Harris refusal to restrain Israel and impose a ceasefire soon after 10/7 has led to the continuing Gaza genocide and likely a much greater disaster will unfold. The responsibility lies with Biden-Harris.
If you put yourself in the shoes of other people and world leaders, and noting the US ignores the ICJ, as well as its own laws about sending weapons to countries committing human rights violations, whether you’re in the Kremlin, Tehran, Paris, or Berlin you’re going to be extremely worried about what the US has become and they will plan accordingly.
In contrast, I think it’s obvious to most readers that the technology in war, especially drones, has changed dramatically in the previous 5-10 years. This makes unconditional support for Israel much more costly and dangerous. And I’m not even talking about Ukraine, China, or US domestic problems.
Harris says she wants a ceasefire and peace but Israel has other plans. A ceasefire is not a policy but it provides an opportunity to implement your plan. Leave aside that the US is negotiating a settlement while the US is totally on the side of Israel, the Palestinians are in no position to negotiate anything, and the Israel lobby interferes. Thus, what is the plan for Gaza and the Palestinians?
The author easily describes Trump as a putrid psychopath and monster, yet has team Biden-Harris abdicated their responsibility to the Constitution in favor of protecting and defending Zionists?
I doubt that Trump would change course in occupied Palestine.
He already implied that he would not.
I can’t vote for Trump, Harris, or Kennedy.
What you think somebody else “would” do is very different than what somebody is actually doing and which includes violation of int’l and domestic laws and showing no inclination to stop doing it.
I think everybody should vote their conscience and if the candidates are unacceptable, so be it.