Listen to a reading of this article:
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The empire’s information war against the left has been so successful that people don’t even know where “the left” is anymore. Most have it confused with things that are tangential like having pink hair and saying your pronouns, or outright right-wing like the Democratic Party.
Convincing everyone that communism is bad and unions work against your interests was just the first step. The next step was to confuse and muddy the waters of the political landscape so much that nobody even remembers where it was the left had been trying to get to — namely fighting and winning the class war that’s being waged upon the working class by the capitalist class, dismantling capitalism and imperialism, and creating a just and equitable society for everyone.
Now if you tell your average westerner to point to “the left”, they’ll point at “woke” hashtags and at political parties that are designed to support and protect the capitalist class. They didn’t just sabotage and destroy the left, they burnt the blueprints for how to rebuild it.
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The true left emphasizes the interests of marginalized communities with the goal of class solidarity. The fake left emphasizes the interests of marginalized communities with the goal of class division. You can sort out which is which by simple naked eye observation over time.
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Friendly reminder that no extremist group in the modern world is killing, oppressing and tyrannizing anywhere near as many people as the so-called moderates of the US-led world order.
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Find someone who loves you the way Americans love criticizing foreign governments that are far less murderous and tyrannical than their own government.
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Whenever I say the US is quantifiably the most murderous and tyrannical regime on earth, I always get a deluge of replies saying “Yeah well I’d rather live there than China!” Like where you live is the only issue that matters, not mass military slaughter. And I think that just says so much.
It genuinely never occurs to them that the people dying from military explosives being dropped on their homes and starving to death from economic sanctions are real human beings whose lives matter. All they can think of is what country they’d rather be using their smartphones in.
The fact that the US happens to export most (though certainly not all) of its murderousness and tyranny overseas does not make it less murderous or tyrannical than the governments the media have trained you to hate. The people it kills and terrorizes are just as human as you.
It says so much about how propaganda-addled that population is that the lives of foreigners don’t even register in their assessments of a government’s murderousness and brutality, skipping instead to the fact that they’re allowed to call the president “Brandon” on social media (which,as we’ve discussed previously, is not even a real measure of freedom anyway).
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Love how it’s almost universally agreed that Biden is knowingly starving people in Afghanistan for no valid reason and it’s still just happening anyway:
Shameful. People are dying from hunger in Afghanistan and this is not our money, it's theirs. https://t.co/QNDECUfS5t
— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) August 15, 2022
Virtually everyone who knows anything about the issue wants Biden to stop starving people in Afghanistan, even people who stand to benefit materially from their starvation. And he still just won’t:
Wow
Families of 9/11 victims urge Biden to direct $3.5 billion worth of frozen assets to the Afghan people. 'This is their money, not ours,' they argue.https://t.co/ww1SiuUUGl
— Dave DeCamp (@DecampDave) August 17, 2022
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There’s a night and day difference between someone who wants the US to stop bullying and dominating the world and someone who wants the US to stop bullying and dominating some parts of the world so it can focus on bullying and dominating China. They’re really nothing alike.
Faux populists on the right oppose some aspects of the US war machine, but they support other aspects and don’t oppose the empire itself. Faux populists on the so-called left provide little or no resistance to the empire, they just want the empire to give them healthcare.
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Wealth is meaningless if everyone is wealthy. Power is meaningless if everyone has power. The kings of our day have a vested interest in keeping everyone poor and powerless, because if everyone is king, then no one is king.
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Imagine wanting to be a cop as a kid, wanting to grow up and get into the police academy so you can fight crime and bad guys, and then you get to the police force and you find out the whole job is writing tickets and destroying homeless encampments.
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Question mainstream politics and they’ll tell you to support the lesser evil. Question capitalism and they’ll say it’s better than any other system. Question the empire and they’ll say it’s better the US rules us than risk anyone else. It’s all lesser evilism, in support of evil.
Every time you point to the dysfunctional nature of our systems you’re told “Well it has to be that because otherwise it would be something far worse!” Oh yeah? Anyone benefiting from your believing that? Any powerful people pouring energy into mainstreaming that idea, perchance?
It’s like the abuser who says “Go on, leave! No one will ever love you like I do. You’ll fail and you’ll come crawling back!” And the victim stays out of fear of what’s on the other side of the unknowns inherent in that blind leap. But at some point you’ve got nothing to lose.
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Humanity is still being born. As a species, we’re just barely crowning.
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32 responses to “They Demolished The Left And Burned The Blueprint: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix”
richard wolff is more optimistic regarding the left. he thinks the working-class is becoming aware of the detoriation of their material circumstances caused by the ruling class.
23 August 2022
The FBI’s Gestapo Tactics: Hallmarks of an Authoritarian Regime
By John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead
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“We want no Gestapo or Secret Police. FBI is tending in that direction.”—Harry Truman
***
With every passing day, the United States government borrows yet another leaf from Nazi Germany’s playbook: Secret police. Secret courts. Secret government agencies. Surveillance. Censorship. Intimidation. Harassment. Torture. Brutality. Widespread corruption. Entrapment. Indoctrination. Indefinite detention.
These are not tactics used by constitutional republics, where the rule of law and the rights of the citizenry reign supreme. Rather, they are the hallmarks of authoritarian regimes, where secret police control the populace through intimidation, fear and official lawlessness on the part of government agents.
That authoritarian danger is now posed by the FBI, whose love affair with totalitarianism began long ago. Indeed, according to the New York Times, the U.S. government so admired the Nazi regime that following the second World War, it secretly and aggressively recruited at least a thousand Nazis, including some of Hitler’s highest henchmen as part of Operation Paperclip. American taxpayers have been paying to keep these ex-Nazis on the U.S. government’s payroll ever since.
If the government’s covert, taxpayer-funded employment of Nazis after World War II weren’t bad enough, U.S. government agencies—the FBI, CIA and the military—adopted many of the Third Reich’s well-honed policing tactics, and have used them against American citizens.
Indeed, the FBI’s laundry list of crimes against the American people includes surveillance, disinformation, blackmail, entrapment, intimidation tactics, harassment and indoctrination, governmental overreach, abuse, misconduct, trespassing, enabling criminal activity, and damaging private property, and that’s just based on what we know.
Compare the FBI’s far-reaching powers to surveil, detain, interrogate, investigate, prosecute, punish, police and generally act as a law unto themselves—powers that have grown since 9/11, transforming the FBI into a mammoth federal policing and surveillance agency that largely operates as a power unto itself, beyond the reach of established laws, court rulings and legislative mandates—to its Nazi counterparts, the Gestapo—and then try to convince yourself that the United States is not a totalitarian police state.
Just like the Gestapo, the FBI has vast resources, vast investigatory powers, and vast discretion to determine who is an enemy of the state.
Today, the FBI employs more than 35,000 individuals and operates more than 56 field offices in major cities across the U.S., as well as 400 resident agencies in smaller towns, and more than 50 international offices. In addition to their “data campus,” which houses more than 96 million sets of fingerprints from across the United States and elsewhere, the FBI has also built a vast repository of “profiles of tens of thousands of Americans and legal residents who are not accused of any crime. What they have done is appear to be acting suspiciously to a town sheriff, a traffic cop or even a neighbor.” The FBI’s burgeoning databases on Americans are not only being added to and used by local police agencies, but are also being made available to employers for real-time background checks.
All of this is made possible by the agency’s nearly unlimited resources (President Biden’s budget projections allocate $10.8 billion for the FBI), the government’s vast arsenal of technology, the interconnectedness of government intelligence agencies, and information sharing through fusion centers—data collecting intelligence agencies spread throughout the country that constantly monitor communications (including those of American citizens), everything from internet activity and web searches to text messages, phone calls and emails.
Much like the Gestapo spied on mail and phone calls, FBI agents have carte blanche access to the citizenry’s most personal information.
Working through the U.S. Post Office, the FBI has access to every piece of mail that passes through the postal system: more than 160 billion pieces are scanned and recorded annually. Moreover, the agency’s National Security Letters, one of the many illicit powers authorized by the USA Patriot Act, allows the FBI to secretly demand that banks, phone companies, and other businesses provide them with customer information and not disclose those demands to the customer. An internal audit of the agency found that the FBI practice of issuing tens of thousands of NSLs every year for sensitive information such as phone and financial records, often in non-emergency cases, is riddled with widespread constitutional violations.
Much like the Gestapo’s sophisticated surveillance programs, the FBI’s spying capabilities can delve into Americans’ most intimate details (and allow local police to do so, as well).
In addition to technology (which is shared with police agencies) that allows them to listen in on phone calls, read emails and text messages, and monitor web activities, the FBI’s surveillance boasts an invasive collection of spy tools ranging from Stingray devices that can track the location of cell phones to Triggerfish devices which allow agents to eavesdrop on phone calls. In one case, the FBI actually managed to remotely reprogram a “suspect’s” wireless internet card so that it would send “real-time cell-site location data to Verizon, which forwarded the data to the FBI.” Law enforcement agencies are also using social media tracking software to monitor Facebook, Twitter and Instagram posts. Moreover, secret FBI rules also allow agents to spy on journalists without significant judicial oversight.
Much like the Gestapo’s ability to profile based on race and religion, and its assumption of guilt by association, the FBI’s approach to pre-crime allows it to profile Americans based on a broad range of characteristics including race and religion.
The agency’s biometric database has grown to massive proportions, the largest in the world, encompassing everything from fingerprints, palm, face and iris scans to DNA, and is being increasingly shared between federal, state and local law enforcement agencies in an effort to target potential criminals long before they ever commit a crime. This is what’s known as pre-crime. Yet it’s not just your actions that will get you in trouble. In many cases, it’s also who you know—even minimally—and where your sympathies lie that could land you on a government watch list. Moreover, as the Intercept reports, despite anti-profiling prohibitions, the bureau “claims considerable latitude to use race, ethnicity, nationality, and religion in deciding which people and communities to investigate.”
Much like the Gestapo’s power to render anyone an enemy of the state, the FBI has the power to label anyone a domestic terrorist.
As part of the government’s so-called ongoing war on terror, the nation’s de facto secret police force has begun using the terms “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist” interchangeably. Moreover, the government continues to add to its growing list of characteristics that can be used to identify an individual (especially anyone who disagrees with the government) as a potential domestic terrorist. For instance, you might be a domestic terrorist in the eyes of the FBI (and its network of snitches) if you:
express libertarian philosophies (statements, bumper stickers)
exhibit Second Amendment-oriented views (NRA or gun club membership)
read survivalist literature, including apocalyptic fictional books
show signs of self-sufficiency (stockpiling food, ammo, hand tools, medical supplies)
fear an economic collapse
buy gold and barter items
subscribe to religious views concerning the book of Revelation
voice fears about Big Brother or big government
expound about constitutional rights and civil liberties
believe in a New World Order conspiracy
Much like the Gestapo infiltrated communities in order to spy on the German citizenry, the FBI routinely infiltrates political and religious groups, as well as businesses.
As Cora Currier writes for the Intercept: “Using loopholes it has kept secret for years, the FBI can in certain circumstances bypass its own rules in order to send undercover agents or informants into political and religious organizations, as well as schools, clubs, and businesses…” The FBI has even been paying Geek Squad technicians at Best Buy to spy on customers’ computers without a warrant.
Just as the Gestapo united and militarized Germany’s police forces into a national police force, America’s police forces have largely been federalized and turned into a national police force.
In addition to government programs that provide the nation’s police forces with military equipment and training, the FBI also operates a National Academy that trains thousands of police chiefs every year and indoctrinates them into an agency mindset that advocates the use of surveillance technology and information sharing between local, state, federal, and international agencies.
Just as the Gestapo’s secret files on political leaders were used to intimidate and coerce, the FBI’s files on anyone suspected of “anti-government” sentiment have been similarly abused.
As countless documents make clear, the FBI has no qualms about using its extensive powers in order to blackmail politicians, spy on celebrities and high-ranking government officials, and intimidate and attempt to discredit dissidents of all stripes. For example, not only did the FBI follow Martin Luther King Jr. and bug his phones and hotel rooms, but agents also sent him anonymous letters urging him to commit suicide and pressured a Massachusetts college into dropping King as its commencement speaker.
Just as the Gestapo carried out entrapment operations, the FBI has become a master in the art of entrapment.
In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks the FBI has not only targeted vulnerable individuals but has also lured or blackmailed them into fake terror plots while actually equipping them with the organization, money, weapons and motivation to carry out the plots—entrapment—and then jailing or deporting them for their so-called terrorist plotting.
This is what the FBI characterizes as “forward leaning—preventative—prosecutions.” In addition to creating certain crimes in order to then “solve” them, the FBI also gives certain informants permission to break the law, “including everything from buying and selling illegal drugs to bribing government officials and plotting robberies,” in exchange for their cooperation on other fronts.
USA Today estimates that FBI agents have authorized criminals to engage in as many as 15 crimes a day. Some of these informants are getting paid astronomical sums: one particularly unsavory fellow, later arrested for attempting to run over a police officer, was actually paid $85,000 for his help laying the trap for an entrapment scheme.
When and if a true history of the FBI is ever written, it will not only track the rise of the American police state but it will also chart the decline of freedom in America, in much the same way that the empowerment of Germany’s secret police tracked with the rise of the Nazi regime.
How did the Gestapo become the terror of the Third Reich?
It did so by creating a sophisticated surveillance and law enforcement system that relied for its success on the cooperation of the military, the police, the intelligence community, neighborhood watchdogs, government workers for the post office and railroads, ordinary civil servants, and a nation of snitches inclined to report “rumors, deviant behavior, or even just loose talk.”
In other words, ordinary citizens working with government agents helped create the monster that became Nazi Germany. Writing for the New York Times, Barry Ewen paints a particularly chilling portrait of how an entire nation becomes complicit in its own downfall by looking the other way:
In what may be his most provocative statement, [author Eric A.] Johnson says that ‘‘most Germans may not even have realized until very late in the war, if ever, that they were living in a vile dictatorship.’’ This is not to say that they were unaware of the Holocaust; Johnson demonstrates that millions of Germans must have known at least some of the truth. But, he concludes, ‘‘a tacit Faustian bargain was struck between the regime and the citizenry.’’ The government looked the other way when petty crimes were being committed. Ordinary Germans looked the other way when Jews were being rounded up and murdered; they abetted one of the greatest crimes of the 20th century not through active collaboration but through passivity, denial and indifference.
Much like the German people, “we the people” have become passive, polarized, gullible, easily manipulated, and lacking in critical thinking skills. Distracted by entertainment spectacles, politics and screen devices, we too are complicit, silent partners in creating a police state similar to the terror practiced by former regimes.
Had the government tried to ram such a state of affairs down our throats suddenly, it might have had a rebellion on its hands. Instead, the American people have been given the boiling frog treatment, immersed in water that slowly is heated up—degree by degree—so that they’ve fail to notice that they’re being trapped and cooked and killed.
“We the people” are in hot water now.
The Constitution doesn’t stand a chance against a federalized, globalized standing army of government henchmen protected by legislative, judicial and executive branches that are all on the same side, no matter what political views they subscribe to: suffice it to say, they are not on our side or the side of freedom.
From Presidents Clinton to Bush, then Obama to Trump and now Biden, it’s as if we’ve been caught in a time loop, forced to re-live the same thing over and over again: the same assaults on our freedoms, the same disregard for the rule of law, the same subservience to the Deep State, and the same corrupt, self-serving government that exists only to amass power, enrich its shareholders and ensure its continued domination.
Can the Fourth Reich happen here?
As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, it’s already happening right under our noses.
*
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“Humanity is still being born. As a species, we’re just barely crowning.“- the truest thing you have ever written. You speak regularly of a great spiritual awakening, it’s probably 10,000 years away at least. To which someone might reply, “ but we’ll kill probably kill ours selves well before then”, to which i reply “ i know, won’t it be exciting?!”
Quite likely it has happened before. And for anyone appeal to a benevolent god to intervene lets remeber the reasons for the biblical flood, how that can to be and why
The Afghan war for the USA was perfectly executed in Afghanistan before the USA intervened It was an amazing country albeit it was socialist and secular but is was a good country where woman could be woman and there was free health care and free education and woman dominated parliament and were encouraged to be part of the administration of society they wore mini skirts as it was fashionable at the time they dressed as they liked…. The USA did not want a successful socialist country to compete with capitalism so they did what they do best they created a war please read Major General Smedely Butler war is a racket or scan William Blum book killing hope to understand the US obsession with over throwing governments that do not capitulate to the US empire they left Afghanistan recently they took the nations money with them but left a religious dictatorship behind with close to 100 billion dollars of US made military hardware abandoned for the hardened religious nutters to make sure socialism and secularism does not return and that was all the US wanted when they started that war and yes the war economy in the US also thrived do the research and you will find the truth as for the left stuff thats a class war distraction ,,it is to make people look side ways for problems like horizontal you know left or right but the real trouble comes from up above its vertical its the people that rule your life from above….
The 1990s rise of Neocon-ism (looking for any excuse it could find, then, to make the U.S. Def. Industry remain profitable in a post-Cold War world) decided (mainly due-to the machinations of Kristol’s “think tank”: Project For a New American Century) to get the U.S. so entangled into Israeli “security affairs” (which, the old guard of George H.W. Bush-generation Republicans wisely never thought the U.S. should take sides in)…that, it created the military dynamic of using Israel as a proxy provocateur (in Russia’s backyard sphere: the SAME mindset the U.S. war machine has had toward the Levant region since the 1957 resolution to the Suez Crisis) to drag Russia into a conflict over Iran and/or Syria. They (U.S./NATO) tried to do this over Ukraine (but the corrupt-as-hell narrative is crumbling now for all it was ever advertised as) once Trump was out of the way; however, rest assured: they’ll be right-back to the “Iran-nuclear-Muslim-bogey man-terrorist” storyline (unfortunately) by Fall. Bet on it. All this has done (post-9/11, Iraq, Afghanistan) is condition American society into accepting a dystopic surveillance-heavy culture (ironically, no surprise, mirroring Israel’s); while destabilizing the rest of the World into being a paranoid nuclear tinderbox orchestrated out of Washington (where, in fact, the mere decorum anymore of diplomacy is now automatically shouted-down by U.S. propaganda claims of either “disinformation”/”trolling”/etc.).
The only thing worth praying for at this point in history is, for the entire literally sick and evil foundation of such a place to collapse. I do. There is not one iota of American material anything for sale on this planet with any truth or humanistic value belonging to it.
A left-leaning friend of mine, successful chairman of a company he created, once gave me the best definition I’ve heard of right and left saying: “With the right, you’ve got to recount your fingers every time you shake hands. With the left, you’ve got to call five meetings to buy a box of staples”.
The right is made of ruthless go-getters, alpha males and females with cavemen mentalities and the welfare of very small units in mind rarely exceeding at best a small family circle.
The left has empathy for mankind’s sufferings. They’re kind-hearted people in essence, which is why there’s so much romanticism linked to the label in spite of the horrors attached to the Democrats who market themselves as the left in spite of inventing the Ku Klux Klan and the CIA, dropping an atom bomb on Hiroshima and starting the disastrous Vietnam war, inter alia.
Now, in the old days, in Europe, when the left was born out of the disastrous side-effects of the industrial revolution, the working class was numerous, lived in squalor and promiscuity leading to the spread of diseases like tuberculosis and syphilis, worked endless hours six days a week for peanuts, was illiterate and had an average lifespan of about forty years.
There was a large margin of progression and an incentive to overcome personal differences to unite and fight for a better life, sometimes at the risk of one’s own.
That’s how these modern crusaders got trade unions, better housing, free healthcare, free education for all, better working conditions, week-ends, paid leaves, maternity leaves, child benefits, retirement pensions etc.
Everything changed in the 1970s with the rise of globalism when factory work was outsourced to the Third World. The working class ended up on the dole most of them and the kind-hearted people had to find something else to invest their kind hearts in. The ruling left (which is automatically on the right because power is a right-wing value) had a solution to propose to replace social claims that nobody could pay for anymore anyway: societal claims.
The working class left became a bourgeois left and started dealing in extenso with racism and sexism, speaking as an endless stream of minority victims (woman, black, brown, homosexual, bisexual, fill-the-blank…) in an increasingly narcissistic and individualistic culture where pink-haired transsexuals would throw a tantrum on social media because they were prohibited to use biological women’s bathrooms in a remote area nobody had ever heard of.
Then came globalist authoritarian psychopaths calling themselves antifas and everyone else fascists, financed by the rich elite class to push division, willing to kill everybody for a good cause (to “build back better”) and ironically bordering on the cavemen mentality of the right that they therefore hate obsessively.
That’s how the left was demolished and the blueprint burnt. It’s a thing of the past and cannot be revived because the socio-economic conditions have changed. The romantic appeal remains though, thanks to a Guinness level media hypocrisy, but how long will it be able to resist the impact of reality?
And I forgot the neocons, who stemmed from Trotskyism like the antifas and have kept the notion of global domination while dropping that of socialism and cashed checks from the MIC instead. Just global domination will do fine, thanks… It’s popular with both the right and the left as Victoria Nuland is demonstrating who worked for Clinton, Bush/Cheney, O’Bomber and now Sleepy Joe, having only skipped Orange Man Bad because he was not one of the boys. Neoconservatism is a bridge between Mammon’s two rotten apples :o)
The Left — at least, the traditional Left — is not a theory, it’s a sensibility. It’s cardinal principles are freedom, equality, peace, and autonomy, as opposed to the cardinal principle of the Right, which include power, authority, status, honor/repute, and so on. Both are responses to the fundamental problem for any willful being, of working its will in a world of other willful beings who usually don’t want just the same things. The simplest response is force, hence, the sensibility of the Right. The idea that one can do better than force though cooperation requires thought so it’s more complicated and thus less popular. The Left generally destroyed itself during the 19th and 20th centuries by imitating the Right, as for instance by urging forceful revolution. The most efficient configuration of force is the state, hence the use of force leads to the sensibility of the Right and its perfection in the state.
do you consider yourself a centrist?
Geo-politics perhaps to some extent but to tell the truth, it has to do with Afghanistan’s not being Europeans like the Ukrainians and also not being in close proximity to some enemy of the US which could be bribed to ‘weaken their neighbor’. For the elitist rulers of the empire, it is a serious mistake not to ‘look like us or to think like us’. It hoses out money to corrupt regimes and individuals who can be used to achieve what the empire craves. Also, the empire hates you if your happen to be of another faith or if you don’t profess any faith at all. To it, it is ‘my will be done everywhere as it is in the empire’. We mustn’t forget that the empire has always stolen from the weak to spend it all on its gluttony and the thirst for more innocent blood.
Capitalism did an excellent job of turning the national leadership of many old, legacy unions; they now serve the capitalists more than the workers. Happening again right now with the railroad workers in the US. Best hope for unions is the ones forming at places like Starbucks, Trader Joe’s, etc.
By design, US schools teach very little to anything about labor history in this country, let alone world wide. How many people know a socialist newspaper was published for decades in Girard, KS?
https://www.kshs.org/p/socialism-history-collection/14117
The Repubs like to rant about cultural Marxism, aka wokeness. Looking back, the switch to cultural from class Marxism started…..wasn’t it not long after Occupy Wall Street? A movement of the working class standing up for their class and financial interests against the 1%? Think back on how the MSM, academia and the Dems began steering the conversation away from class and to race, gender, sexual orientation, etc not long after that in a big way.
Benefit the working class across the board, and people of all colors, genders etc benefit. But the 1% would have to give up some of their massive wealth, and for them, that is unthinkable.
It’s even worse. With the fiat money system we’ve had since the 1970s, we do not need to claw back money from the rich to take care of the poor and the planet. We need only the political will. What keeps so many progressives from grasping the obvious truths of MMT? Perhaps the same kind of divisive top-down manipulation Caitlin talks about in other contexts.
“What keeps so many progressives from grasping the obvious truths of MMT?”
A very good and incredibly vexing question. For instance, how is it that here I am on a website run by a socialist, and MMT is not a topic of daily discussion? Yet day after day, month after month, if MMT comes up at all, more often than not, it is to trash it.
To be quite truthful, what is happening should be a theorectical impossibilty, but it is happening.
If you’re a socialist, and you are not in favor MMT, the only other system available, outside of bartering (hey, I’ll trade you 7 potatoes for a gallon of gas), is debt-based private banking for the capitalist clas – and a socialist in favor of that would be bit of contradiction, now wouldn’t he?*
One of the reason I keep bringing up China (200 times now?). Forget the nation’s “style” of governing, over the last three decades China has achieved the greatest econcomic miracle in history, it has no parallels, especially if we take into consideration how equitably all the new found wealth has been distributed, and they’re doing it by practicing MMT at scale, meaning, at the nation-state level.
Yet there seems to no interest at all in China’s monumental Socialist success here at CaitlinJohnstone.com.
Now some of what I would the “woke issues” as it relates to China when viewed through a socialist lens, like is China really as oppressive and imperialistic as they’re made out to be?
Well, China does seem to be defended in here almost as much as it gets blasted. But the economic stuff, the class warfare stuff, the stuff that socialism’s dreams are made of, nary a fucking peep.
*Or she.
Lost in the narrative. Two words that have no meaning because they have too many meanings are Socialism and Democracy. Around these are a. bundle of equally meaningless words that explain nothing and yet everything their users wish them to mean – words like Left and Right, Capitalism and Free Enterprise or Free Markets.
Does anything described by such words actually exist. I suggest only in the minds of those who put out or receive these words and with so many meanings who knows what each actually means either way.
Max424 is correct I believe in observing what is a miracle of anytime we can refer to in what China as a nation has achieved in the last 30 years. We should be looking at that reality for what it tells us about how it was achieved.
What we may not see however is at what cost to the nlife of any one man or woman in the Chinese population and there we risk getting lost in the narrative as we throw words with too many meanings around trying to describe what we think was happening.
I laugh when I her people using words with so many meanings they have none, words like Left or Right, Socialism or Communism and Free Markets etc. Left in the US is something else than LEft almost anywhere else. No Communist economy has ever existed as a national economic system and probably never will. Capitalism means self centered wealth accumulation which means a built in imbalance is unavoidable. Markets are almost never ‘FREE’ as it is impossible to guarantee perfect balance and impartiality.
So what is Socialism? An indefinable hodge podge of whatever you want it to mean, not Communism and not Capitalism. And ALL these miss a simple reality – NONE OF THEM WORK IN PRACTICE or accurately describe reality.
Mussolini spelled out the reality. When private interests and governance are working as one it is called Fascism. That is what a Monarchy is, what Capitalism means, and Communism corrupts into when attempted. But Fascism is what we have only ever known in one form or the other. There has to be a better way and it is not ANY of these so I laugh when people want to solve the problem by reviving or recycling meaningless words that describe nothing that exists or can function.
Intent is the most powerful word perhaps in resolving motivation hence why it is critical in criminal law. It is also critical in philosophy, politics and morality andn in ALL interaction between living entities, man to man, woman to woman, man to woman. What is your intent – when I know that I know you and you know me.
There are other systems besides the two proffered. In particular, work based currency. It was the system which helped pull a flattened 1920s Germany up by its bootstraps to solvency and then the ability to be a world class belligerant in so short a time. Work based currency arrows fear into the black hearts of the oligarchy.
Did not 1920’s Germany benefit from a US Presidential oredered team of Wall St bankers led by the then President of the Fedral Reserve bank New York that resructured and ntook over most of the war debt foisted on Gernany after WW1 by none other than US bankers? Deal was to aloow foreign investment in Germany and hey presto in rolled GM (Opel), GE (AEG), Ford and Standard Oil who were still involved until well nearly forever it seems. for at least some of them.
There is FAR FAR more to the story of Germany than the history books most read will ever tell us. That’s what they are there for – to obscure reality. .
That too. When pointing one thing out there’s always something else. There is a name which eludes me, but it is the electronic registry of work among members of a community that is given value that may be exchanged for other work or goods. Popularizing alternative systems is frowned upon, ask Muammar Gaddafi.
Its not the wealth, ie money or even assets they worry about. It is the control they fear losing, the control money and wealth buys them to keep sitting on that wealth.
The 1% have more than they need of money, wealth beyond pleasure, but the control of everything is secured by having that excess.
There are only a few of them and then there are the many. As Caitlin wrote recently, it is how much violence is both threatened and will be used that decides in the end.
We are still in the jungle because people as a speicies has not crawled far from the primeval swamp.
‘Best hope for unions is the ones forming at places like Starbucks, Trader Joe’s, etc.’
I can’t agree. Those jobs are unskilled low wage jobs and the people who work them are subsidized in some way. Students by parents. By a spouse who makes big bucks. Old people on social security.
I have one of these jobs. A coworker lives out of his van. He is not subsidized.
Capitalism can’t allow retail to unionize. If retail jobs paid a living wage prices would be high. Nobody wants that.
If unionization were possible I would support unionizing efforts, but groundwork must be laid first and there is no socialist party of significant membership east or west of the Mississippi. Going after the minimum wage makes more sense to me.
Tell me what you think.
https://chasingthesquirrel.com/
K-Dog, I feel for you. I do not intend to be rude or mean when I say you possibly do not geel like you live in the land of the free where you can form a union of fellows if you wish well anytime – except all the union members will be instantly out of a job, any job.
Any politician who supports or fails to respond to correct that occuring in the community they represent is not representing that community or any other except the super elites who enslave at every level.
A correction is coming.
It’s downright farcical the way the disenfranchised worker drones of America have all been trained by their media neocortical scrubbers to condemn all that is wrong with America’s governance on some phantasmagorical “left.” In reality there is nothing left of the “left.” It was beaten down, stunned with a pneumatic piston to the head, dismembered like Jamal Khashoggi into cuts of meat, and totally dissolved–bones and all–with a concoction of hot alcoholic KOH before release of the resulting alkaline brown slurry into the city sewerage system. As the deed was talked up roundly by the legacy fascistas in the GOP as necessary to freedom and democracy, it was in actuality eagerly carried out by the likes of the Deceitful Duo Act of the Lying Clintonistas; the Bait and Switch Ringmaster himself, the self-professed “moderate” Rethuglican Bear-ack! Obomber; and “What me worry?” Clueless Joe Biden, America’s current beloved carnival barker. And in between, the Punch and Judy Show starring Dubya Shrub, as the Nitwit, and NYC’s favorite Don, as “Putin’s Puppet!” Hope you were entertained while being screwed, blued and tattooed. Just be patient, your reward will come in heaven, not on this earth. At least that’s what the big wigs and their televangelists say.
THE LARGEST GROUP ON TH LEFT WAS THE MARIJANA UNDERGROUND.Their economy was destroyed by clever fascists in clever ways. They are regrouping. They are silent–not in the media. The media lets bourgeois types speak as leftists, but no bourgeois type is a leftist. On a number of platforms ideological leftists do speak besides Caitlin:Here’s a short list:Alexander Mercouris,Russel Brand,Jimmy Dore, The New Atlas, Redacted, Emil Cosman, Chris Hedges, Patrick Lancaster,Graham Phillips, The Duran, The grey Zone, Alex Christoforou, Cyrus Janssen, World Wide Socialist Website, Professor Wolff. There are many others and their messages are clear and lucid and comprehensive. The rise in a push fro unionizing is pure leftism. Young people seeking sexual satisfaction to escape repression constituute a whole new batch of leftists. A person who knows and likes orgasms will not choose to pick up a gun for the fascist state.
The point, both by Caitlin and myself, is that the politicians, the political office holders, may talk the talk, may “posture” as “leftists,” “liberals” or “progressives,” but they are NOT that. Jimmy Dore and the others you mentioned are merely mouth pieces, talking heads, not part of the political power base. In fact, Jimmy (love him for what he does) mostly makes a living by bashing pols like Bernie Sanders (whom he used to idolize) for being a phony on the political spectrum. Talk is cheap. The politicians will change their tune on a dime as the polls change. No one in the congress is part of a real “left.” They sometimes call themselves “liberals” or “progressive,” but all that is just weak tea or, actually, quite deceptive. Fer chryss sake, Hillary Clinton calls herself a “progressive” when expedient and that’s a load of cow pies. The best the “left” can muster these days is someone who is not quite so conservative as the hard Republican right. Ever hear the term “Republican Light?” That’s essentially all of the Democratic Party these days. “Obamacare” was not socialised medicine, it was a windfall for the insurance companies. Lord Biden’s latest tax reform plan that just passed, hits the middle class, leaves the corporations and their mogul owners largely untouched. The GOP would never have voted for it otherwise. Democratic senators and representatives merely posture as something liberal, something different from the GOPers, but off the Capitol floor they are thick as fleas with the Republicans, they are their chronic enablers. If they ever truly voted in keeping with their campaign promises we would all drop dead from the shock. What the existence of some media figures dispensing mild liberal promises, or simply alternatives, to the public means that the public may desire a more leftist turn in government policies, but they ain’t gonna get it because the public does not own the congress. The oligarchs do. They pay these people, one way or another–with money, inside information, or job promises, and they order them how to vote on all bills.
Part of the problem, perhaps a bigger part than we might imagine, has to do with the shift from the real world of action and events to the virtual world of image and the video screen. Our heroes today are largely talkers and posers, people who take moral positions as opposed to acting morally, acting sacrificially, taking dangerous risks…and suffering the very real consequences. It used to be that taking a moral stand might get you killed. Now it means you might get de-monitized. Arrange is a blend of both, which makes him a genuine hero–one of the few oppositional figures with existential weight.
Assange, of course. Forgive me.
Bernie used Eugene Debs to give credence to his own views. Debs advocated the workers own their place of work. No unions needed. Bernie ain’t as much as a pimple on Debs’ derrierre.
I am a working class U.S. citizen. The U.S. Government does not represent me. They wage war against me. I do not support or condone most of their actions nor do as far as I can see most U.S. citizens… there is just nowhere that you will be able to here that from us. Because the Oligarch class waging war against us controls the media, military, our govt, and much of the sources we need for our survival.
It is a very sad state of affairs. I see them demand our taxes and they audit the working class and NOT the rich, because the rich can afford attorneys so they never pay up. The IRS admitted it themselves. So essentially the Oligarchs extort money from us and then use it to wage the agenda on the world.
I think they believe they are saviors of humanity, yet all of their so called solutions to the challenges we fact involve feeding their addiction for MORE Money, Power & Control(how convenient). They have sense of how absolutely sick, twisted, and insane their actions are, much like addicts can be oblivious to the insanity and damage they are inflicting on others.
And this is where we are. I watch as from my country Oligarchs are working hard to destroy and feel grateful that Russia, China, and others stand up to them and tell them how full of sh*t they are. A small satisfaction as I ponder what, if anything I can do today that can help at all.
Luckily America saved Afghanistan from communism. Except for the people who live there.
Some decades ago My family and I went to Washington and then drove down the eat coast to Orlando so the kids could one time go to Disneyland. I visited the US all over the place repeatedly on quick working trips for near on 21 years from Denver to Florida, from Las Vegas to Philly, Seattle to SanJuan. Many of those places I can walk of drive around without a map.
I also visited many other places in the world, east and west Africa, Egypt, India and on and on. The Point? Finding the America, that great land of Hollywood and countless serials on TVis dammed difficult to near impossible even when I took buses (there are a few here and there) or even rarer trains just to look for it.
Then there are Americans, now with the majority overweight, not truly healthy and swallowing a bunch of pills each day. And politically they think their Left is the extreme left when in reality it is far to the right of many countries which mush better living standards, free healthcare for far healthier people and much higher education outcomes – Oh but they are Socialist which to most Americans equates to extreme Communism though there has NEVER been a true Communist economy functioning in any country – not even Cuba (which I also visited often).
The American dream is a myth, free enterprise is not free either, it all a total fantasy and the evidence of social inequality is writ very large in the land of the not-free. And Americans seem almost totally blissfully ignorant of the foreign actions of ‘their’ government and the consequences of those actions for the ‘other people’ who inhabit this earth. No wonder a young woman from a US military family complained about being berated by the taxi driver in Hamburg over American foreign actions. Confronted with some truths she could and would not reconcile with ‘her vision’ she was outraged that a taxi driver would talk to her that way – he should be sanctioned (his family probably already was at home). He is free because of us she bleeted, how so I asked?
Years ago I stated one big fear of mine was what will happen when the Americans wake up to how they have been conned. And then I came home to find Australia so Americanised and the Sheeple mentally suffering a terminal lobotomy with only rare exceptions.
I am not depressed, just saddened by it all and so grateful to be wide awake and aware I can feel life to the core.
It seems that the US system was founded by aristocrats for their benefit and it has continued to serve those interests, e.i. robber barons, oil barons, tech and pharma billionaires. Unions became strong but labor was broken by outsourcing. The FBI crushed any socialist movement. Robotics are on the way. I don’t think communism will sell here despite the advancements in China. We need a political project to ‘fix’ democracy that everyone can get behind, like abolishing the Senate, Supreme Court, gerrymandering, the security state, lobbying, military adventurism, etc., and add healthcare, life support and sustainability to the preamble. Without structural change, we will continue with this Kabuki theater of suffering and Dr. Evil world domination.
The US is not a democracy. It’s a constitutional republic. On paper. It is none of those things currently. Start at the beginning.
It is popular to denigrate the founders by pointing out their high place in the social order. But there was a noblesse oblige that has entirely ceased to exist other than for showtime. There were good intentions in them for us which were undoubtedly being subverted before the ink of the Constitution was dry. But more tellingly, they had risked their very lives. Compare that to Trump slithering out the back door of the White House after the stolen election.