#nostalgia for trump administration
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Four years ago today (March 13th), then President Donald Trump got around to declaring a national state of emergency for the COVID-19 pandemic. The administration had been downplaying the danger to the United States for 51 days since the first US infection was confirmed on January 22nd.
From an ABC News article dated 25 February 2020...
CDC warns Americans of 'significant disruption' from coronavirus
Until now, health officials said they'd hoped to prevent community spread in the United States. But following community transmissions in Italy, Iran and South Korea, health officials believe the virus may not be able to be contained at the border and that Americans should prepare for a "significant disruption."
This comes in contrast to statements from the Trump administration. Acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf said Tuesday the threat to the United States from coronavirus "remains low," despite the White House seeking $1.25 billion in emergency funding to combat the virus. Larry Kudlow, director of the National Economic Council, told CNBC’s Kelly Evans on “The Exchange” Tuesday evening, "We have contained the virus very well here in the U.S."
[ ... ]
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called the request "long overdue and completely inadequate to the scale of this emergency." She also accused President Trump of leaving "critical positions in charge of managing pandemics at the National Security Council and the Department of Homeland Security vacant."
"The president's most recent budget called for slashing funding for the Centers for Disease Control, which is on the front lines of this emergency. And now, he is compounding our vulnerabilities by seeking to ransack funds still needed to keep Ebola in check," Pelosi said in a statement Tuesday morning. "Our state and local governments need serious funding to be ready to respond effectively to any outbreak in the United States. The president should not be raiding money that Congress has appropriated for other life-or-death public health priorities."
She added that lawmakers in the House of Representatives "will swiftly advance a strong, strategic funding package that fully addresses the scale and seriousness of this public health crisis."
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer also called the Trump administration's request "too little too late."
"That President Trump is trying to steal funds dedicated to fight Ebola -- which is still considered an epidemic in the Democratic Republic of the Congo -- is indicative of his towering incompetence and further proof that he and his administration aren't taking the coronavirus crisis as seriously as they need to be," Schumer said in a statement.
A reminder that Trump had been leaving many positions vacant – part of a Republican strategy to undermine the federal government.
Here's a picture from that ABC piece from a nearly empty restaurant in San Francisco's Chinatown. The screen displays a Trump tweet still downplaying COVID-19 with him seeming more concerned about the effect of the Dow Jones on his re-election bid.
People were not buying Trump's claims but they were buying PPE.
I took this picture at CVS on February 26th that year.
The stock market which Trump in his February tweet claimed looked "very good" was tanking on March 12th – the day before his state of emergency declaration.
Trump succeeded in sending the US economy into recession much faster than George W. Bush did at the end of his term – quite a feat!. (As an aside, every recession in the US since 1981 has been triggered by Republican presidents.)
Of course Trump never stopped trying to downplay the pandemic nor did he ever take responsibility for it. The US ended up with the highest per capita death rate of any technologically advanced country.
Precious time was lost while Trump dawdled. Orange on this map indicates COVID infections while red indicates COVID deaths. At the time Trump declared a state of emergency, the virus had already spread to 49 states.
The United States could have done far better and it had the tools to do so.
The Obama administration had limited the number of US cases of Ebola to under one dozen during that pandemic in the 2010s. Based on their success, they compiled a guide on how the federal government could limit future pandemics.
Obama team left pandemic playbook for Trump administration, officials confirm
Of course Trump ignored it.
Unlike those boxes of nuclear secrets in Trump's bathroom, the Obama pandemic limitation document is not classified. Anybody can read it – even if Trump didn't. This copy comes from the Stanford University Libraries.
TOWARDS EPIDEMIC PREDICTION: FEDERAL EFFORTS AND OPPORTUNITIES IN OUTBREAK MODELING
Feel free to share this post with anybody who still feels nostalgic about the Trump White House years!
#covid-19#coronavirus#pandemic#public health#donald trump#trump's incompetent response to the pandemic#covid state of emergency#2020#trump recession#51 days of trump pandemic dawdling#obama pandemic playbook#2010s ebola outbreak#nostalgia for trump administration#republicans#election 2024#vote blue no matter who
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The roblox election
#USA#america#trump#Elction#joe biden#roblox#roblox games#biden administration#roblox nostalgia#WTF#wtf is going on#ROBLOX
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Music Posting
Some time ago someone asked me about my taste in music - it's not something I usually think about with respect to blogging, in part because I've found that individual musical tastes don't seem to line to either personality or even political beliefs all that much.
Music is experienced as of its time, however. The late Obama era saw the emergence of the Future Funk genre with its tremendous sense of nostalgia for a past Japan that probably never quite existed.
As we entered into the Trump era, we saw the emergence of synthwave, and I've previously discussed the dark synthwave master Carpenter Brut.
If you still want that dark synthwave feeling, but you want something a bit less intense, there's another band to listen to: GUNSHIP. They've leaned into the dark cyberpunk future not only in aesthetics, but also themes - while managing to keep it cool.
Gunship have a new album coming out, and if their most recent collaboration with Carpenter Brut - DooM Dance - is any indication, it's going to be another good one.
Dark All Day
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Art3mis & Parzival
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Monster in Paradise
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You like vampires and VR, right? There's even a song seemingly inspired by Altered Carbon, one of the best sci-fi series streaming during the Trump Administration.
For those looking for more variety, but still plenty of darkness, dubstep musician Kill The Noise has released a new album which seems to consist of a lot of collaborations with different musicians, leading each song to have a somewhat different style.
The animation is ultra-violent.
Mirage
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Paper Moon
But what if you liked 2019's City Girl - Endless Artificial, which in some sense represents the lighter, more pastel half of electronica in the Trump era culture compared to synthwave's recalling of the 1980s, and just wanted it to be 30% dubstep?
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Why the nostalgia for the <b>Trump</b> administration? | CNN Politics
New Post has been published on https://www.google.com/url?rct=j&sa=t&url=https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2024/04/06/smr-nostalgia-for-trump-administration.cnn&ct=ga&cd=CAIyGjUzM2UwMTY5ZmFhZTIwMGQ6Y29tOmVuOlVT&usg=AOvVaw17w8SN73iRT68UwyMKi_AU
Why the nostalgia for the Trump administration? | CNN Politics
According to polls, says CNN’s Michael Smerconish, when compared to Biden’s administration, America seems nostalgic for the chaotic Trump years …
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On Ferality
A ramshackle meditation on anarchy, civilization, and in going goblin mode
Aren’t you tired of being nice?
Shitposter extraordinaire and cultural podcaster @JUNIPER (now, sadly, deactivated for her crimes against our horrible South African overlord) tweeted out a fake headline that she cooked up for a goof about the then-current and still ongoing Kanye West implosion, noted musician and antisemite. Since then, the ubiquity of the phrase “goblin mode” has become a matter of cultural immersion, to the point that it won the 2022 Oxford English Dictionary Word of the Year.
Clearly, @JUNIPER was onto something. People latched onto the phrase online, and now it has become simply a part of the common vocabulary. However, I think it is more than simply a passing phase or a fad. I think there is something going on in people that is hard to grasp in its totality. It is partly an abandonment of decorum and civility, partly a desire for a more authentic life. I speak of the desire to take on the goblin mode, and become, in a word, feral.
There are many groups on Facebook of which I am a part that live into this ferality. Some aspiring to the goblinoid aesthetic, some simply embracing the eternal and ever-shifting id that lies beneath our conscious minds. It all simply points to the zeitgeist of my generation, Millennials, and the ascendant Gen Z. We are tired of being nice. We do want to go apeshit.
There are many reasons for this, of course. Goblin mode came out of 2022, a year that was when the powers of liberal democracy decided that, since there was a COVID-19 vaccine freely available, there was no reason for adherence to mask mandates or health precautions anymore. However, for many, we had spent the better part of a year and a half in our homes, or otherwise cautious about being in public places for too long unprotected. That isolation we felt, along with the relaxation of social norms and requirements, loosened something within us. Additionally, the requirement to “come back to the office” and resume capitalism as normal, despite the pandemic still going on around us, but us all being told to just ignore it, has driven not a few of us in the disabled and immunocompromised community up a wall.
Then again, the pandemic was just the latest in a long line of social cohesion coming unglued. Since the 2016 election, and throughout the Trump administration, every day felt like it came with another psychic assault upon the world. Four years of sustained detachment from reality has lasting effects, not the worst of which being the Q-anon apocalypse cult. Then, as we spent a year and change in our houses, we... let things go. We gave up on some things. Perhaps we didn’t get dressed as nicely as we used to. Perhaps we spent less effort in looking presentable. We took that business meeting wearing a nice shirt and gym shorts, because who was going to look at the lower half of our bodies anyways? We began to understand that civility is but a thin veneer, a fragile structure that isn’t always necessary and sometimes crumbles at the barest whiff of resistance.
Yet I think this desire to be feral has endured, and it’s not necessarily because of any one thing. Many of us reignited our love for nature, and natural wonder. We grew enamored with a world we thought we lost in childhood. Not a few of us lost ourselves in naturalist nostalgia, and nostalgia in general is big business these days. But nature is a difficult thing to capitalize upon and resists our commodification. Along with this, though, we realized just how constrained we really are in the world.
For many, working from home made people realize just how much we sacrificed for our jobs. Hours of life wasted on commuting. Stress of open office plans, constant meetings and interruptions. A good portion of the population realized just how little we needed our central offices, and skyscrapers began to be left unfilled and empty. Real estate for office space saw real and drastic losses, because how much money, time, and life was wasted in these places? And people have resisted returning to the old pre-pandemic status quo. For their part, I am excited, because people have realized just how much freedom we could have, and just how much our occupations take from us.
As for me, well, I work in the service industry currently. I’m still working in hospitality, a job that does require physical presence. Academia never recovered, most institutions becoming hybrid class spaces, and I barely am required to be in person with any of my meetings or classes. Life has changed a great deal in a short amount of time. More than that, life seems to resist our structures and systems. And people are tired of trying to keep up.
Something has changed in younger generations that the older ones don’t quite grasp just yet. There has been a resurgence in not simply disenchantment with neoliberal democracy, but a sense within younger folks that the system no longer does what it we were told it would do. Rather, we are beginning to see that the system is working as intended, and it is in its most extreme form. As a result, we are seeing more and more the America that we were told we could be a part of no longer exists, if it ever did. We are talking to each other, learning that we don’t have the same reverence for “the way things are” that our parents did.
Enter the internet. Enter academia. Enter meme culture. Enter social media. Enter a reclamation for classical Marxist analysis. Enter class consciousness. Enter anarchy.
What I am about to say here as perhaps another “coming out” of a sort, but not much of one if you’ve paid attention to the kind of person I have been most of my life. This is, naturally, when things get political. I am personally drawn to a kind of pacifist Christian anarcho-communism. What this means is I am
Disenchanted with all unjust hierarchical structures in society, including those of racism, classism, cis-hetero-patriarchy, and so forth.
Believe in a communal, decentralized, socialist egalitarianism, free from the dominance of capital as the driving force in society, and in favor of a more just and fair society that prioritizes the needs of all rather than the freedom and power of the few over others
Am resistant to violence and would like to work towards a world where violence is no longer necessary, understanding that in certain cases force is a necessity but not an inevitability
Believe that the way of Christ and the Reign of God/Kingdom of God/Kingdom of heaven is what the ideal society ought to strive towards, and that society looks a lot like one that is free from violence and unjust hierarchies.
All of that is just kind of a brief outline of the things I believe. I want to also say that I’m primarily an ethicist, and not a political philosopher, and by no means should this be taken as a coherent or comprehensive political platform. What I am, however, is deeply moved by my theological beliefs, and it is out of these theological beliefs that we ought to strive towards a political reality that more closely mirrors the Reign of God. Make of that what you will.
The point of me saying all of that is when I express this political sentiment, I am far from alone in doing so. More and more people my generation and younger are growing more aware of the harsh, restrictive systems that capital has put us in thrall to, and we are chafing at our chains. We were told to stay loyal to our companies and work organizations and were laid off despite it all. We are told to “just get a better job,” but the better jobs no longer exist, and all of us are saddled with too much debt to ever escape it in one lifetime. Buying housing is largely growing to be a goal out of reach, and even rents are skyrocketing. The cost of living has ballooned since the pandemic began and has not evened out or reduced as we were assured it would. Companies are more profitable than ever, and workers are being exploited more each day. We are tired of our world as it is and yearn for a better one. Socialism, communism, anarchism (NOT anarchocapitalism, aka libertarianism), all of these proclaim that a better world is possible, but only if we act together.
Beneath it, though, is an unbridled desire to stop living in the status quo. To reject the civility and norms of the world as it is, because that world doesn’t exist anymore. We long to be feral, unburdened by the expectations of our capitalist system, and more authentic to ourselves and to each other. We are isolated, and long to be in community with each other. We are frustrated, and long for release.
To paraphrase Antonio Gramsci: The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of goblins.
(Frank Frazetta)
Civility and civilization are flimsy things, and only as strong as we desire them to be. The desire for freedom from its bonds is not new, either. Robert E. Howard famously expressed this brittleness in his Conan stories, as evidenced by quotes like, “Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.”1 Howard often concluded that the “civilized” people of the world were simply putting civility as a self-delusion, that we had progressed beyond “savagery” as embodied by Conan. Howard was writing in an era in which such terms were common parlance and are now rightly called out as racist/xenophobic, especially when talking about indigenous/native peoples. However, there is also an argument to be made that Howard’s work was entirely critical of the entire dynamic, that in writing about Conan, he was trying to reveal that we were not nearly as “civilized” as we purported to be, and that there was little separating us from those we deemed “savage” save for culture and power. Conan stories are pulp, popular fantasy fiction, but fantasy is a great way to examine real dynamics in our culture. For all their lurid salaciousness, Howard’s writings put a mirror up to us and our advancements, our cultures, our fancy dress, and reveal that the emperor has no clothes, and we are all goblins now.
I write all of this as a way of expressing the deep angst I am experiencing, but also the collective angst of the moment. I am tired. All my friends, family, and society are tired. We long to collect shiny rocks on a forest path, make noisy music with our friends, cook a big pot of stew, play silly games, and tell stories. We indulge in fantasy and science fiction as an escape, but the escape only reveals the truth of our dystopic society. We are in a fail-state. Our political choices are 1) a fascist and 2) and vain bureaucrat who is at the very least is not a full-on fascist but that is really his only selling point at this point, who aids and abets genocide and allows our country to fall into greater disrepair. We are told to accept this, and more of us are deciding to opt out, to fight for a better world, to organize, to resist the lie that “civilization” has sold us. We are savage. We are angry. We are messy. We are noisy. For along with our organizing, we recognize that humanity is inherently disorganized, disorderly, feral, and messy. This messiness only points towards our greater humanity than is allowed by our current system. We are going goblin mode because being human has not worked out for us thus far, and we need something different.
I write this to expiate some of my own inner struggles, my demons, my rage and anxiety. I am worn out and beyond burnt out by the grind that must continue. What happens when there is no longer anything to grind? What happens when people collectively get tired of being ground into a fine paste, and have that paste sold back to us at ever more unaffordable prices? The society we built is a meat grinder, and buddy, that grinding noise does not sound good. We ought to resist the meat grinder. Why did we even build that grinder in the first place? It seems like it was a bad decision to build it, because all it ever did was grind humans into meat, and we ought not do that.
Perhaps all this is pointless. I am but one person, writing alone in the middle of the night to an audience of like-minded people. I have little time to do a lot of the organizing that I might desire, and even less talent for organizing people as a general principle. People are mercurial and illogical things, and tend to go for gut instinct as opposed to reasoned arguments. But this is not a reasonable argument, is it? This is a primal scream. This is a guttural howl into the abyss, into the frozen and bloody plains of a battle that has been raging since long before I was born. I am tired of pretending that just because we wear nice clothes and hide behind a desk that our battles don’t have real impacts, that the coffee I might buy here isn’t grown and cultivated by people enslaved far away, out of sight, and therefore out of mind? Our convenience, our civilization, is built out of blood and bones, and I’m not supposed to get mad about it or even think about it? I have benefitted from the subjugation, pain and misery of others, and I’m just supposed to be okay with it?
(Ippolito Scarsellino)
I’m supposed to be okay, when Jesus himself, God incarnate, saw the cruelty of our systems and got so upset, he made a whip and threw tables over it all? That’s right, I’m saying it here, Jesus went goblin mode on the moneychangers. He got righteously angry and upset everything that was “civilized” in his society. The people in power saw this was a threat and had him crucified as an example to any other rabble-rousers. Jesus started an anarcho-communist movement, and I want us to reclaim this tradition today. Loving your neighbor is a radical position. Liberating the prisoner is a radical position. Caring for the widow and orphan is a radical position. Working towards healing is a radical position. Putting on a towel and washing your student’s feet is a radical position. Breaking your body and pouring out your blood for your friends is a radical position. We are his followers, but we are too afraid of breaking away from our comfort and our convenience to follow him.
Take this as your invitation to go goblin mode, to embrace ferality. Civilization is a beautiful lie that we tell ourselves so we can go to sleep easier. Well, I’m not getting much sleep as it is, so I might as well break out of the comfortable lie.
So, I will ask you one final time: aren’t you tired of being nice? Don’t you want to just go apeshit?
#goblin mode#religion#anarchy#anarchocommunism#socialism#communism#civilization#conan the barbarian#juniper
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Americans Looking For Someone To Blame
Listening to some talking heads in the US there seems to be a collective downer across this once great nation. The diminishing American hegemony has quite a few gnashing their teeth and crying ‘poor me’. Of course, the Trump cult has this populist blowhard claiming he can arrest the slide by closing the borders and deporting people. Donald the compulsive liar is hoping to pout his way back into the White House. Americans looking for someone to blame for their less than stellar place in the world is putting their nation on a civil war footing.
#UNGA President Donald J. Trump by National Archives and Records Administration is licensed under CC-CC0 1.0
Trump’s America Is Populist Blaming
The Republican Party has become home to radical populists all pointing the finger at the usual suspects. Blacks, foreigners, liberals, socialists, and women who don’t know their place. When times are tough weak people always look for someone else to blame. Trump is raging against those that, in his opinion, poison the blood of America. White supremacist rubbish. The truth is that China has outworked America. American bosses outsourced manufacturing to China and other developing countries. These CEOs were content to see the US become the financing and Intel property rights global landlords. Well, a select few Americans would derive massive wealth from these offshore moves. However, it would leave America vulnerable when global supply chains were threatened.
“A leading American progressive said Donald Trump was using “horrific … dehumanising and fascist rhetoric”, after the former president told supporters immigrants were invading the US and “poisoning the blood of our country”.”
- (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/dec/18/trump-immigrants-rally-congress-reaction-pramila-jayapal)
Photo by Sharefaith on Pexels.com
Great American Fictions
It is interesting to observe how invested people become in this idea of national identity. It is a fiction really; it is not real this idea of being American or Australian. It is another fiction like so many of the things we all consider very real. Religion – a belief in a certain conception of a God. A supernatural entity that science has found no evidence for over millennia’s. Money – not linked to a gold standard and, therefore, just another fiction we all buy into. Our lives are so invested in these fictions and people regularly die for them.
You could say that these three things are most important to Americans. Money, God, and blaming the other guy for their woes.
The Politics Of Division
American politics has a history of negative campaigning. Indeed, it has written the book on pointing the finger at villainy. Americans are the experts on selling stuff. Long ago they discovered that people buy things based on feelings and not on facts. Politics is all about cultural values and identity. Americans sell sentimentality. These days the GOP is selling nostalgia – remember the good old days? Before America was wrecked by all those immigrants, blacks, greenies, commies, degenerates, and pushy women. The GOP is promising to turn back the clock to make America white again. Of course, this can never be achieved, it is political tom foolery.
Photo by J SWING on Pexels.com
Playing The Blame Game
The blame game has no happy ending for anyone. Populist governments when elected are invariably found to be riddled with corruption and cronyism. Incompetence results because these folks have no commitment or training to deliver good government for all Americans. On Trump’s last watch in the presidency nearly a million Americans died from the Coronavirus pandemic. In the richest nation on earth Trump’s administration couldn’t get the job done and protect its people. The fault lines in American society were exposed by the pandemic.
Ideological BS prevented the nation acting like a nation. Communities suffered because there wasn’t an overarching community spirit.
Photo by Edgar Colomba on Pexels.com
Populists Fail The People In The End
If you elect presidents and governments based on division and populist finger pointing that is exactly the kind of country you get. Americans looking for someone to blame is a failure to begin with. What did JFK say, something about not asking what your country can do for you but rather what you can do for it – I paraphrase. Well, one thing you can do is stop looking for easy answers to complex questions and trying to blame others for your situation. Charity begins at home. Look at yourself and take some responsibility. Only by working together in a spirit of unity will you overcome major challenges.
What is demanded right now is inclusivity. Community spirit. Stop looking for a fight and work together for a better America. It may be a fiction but you could make it a good story for your children to believe in.
Robert Sudha Hamilton is the author of Money Matters: Navigating Credit, Debt, and Financial Freedom.
©MidasWord
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Last night Trump made the long-anticipated announcement that he was running for president again in 2024 and Cenk has some thoughts about it. Cenk Uygur discusses on The Young Turks. Watch LIVE weekdays 6-8 pm ET. http://youtube.com/theyoungturks/live Read more HERE: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/15/politics/trump-2024-presidential-bid "CNN — Former President Donald Trump, aiming to become only the second commander-in-chief ever elected to two nonconsecutive terms, announced Tuesday night that he will seek the Republican presidential nomination in 2024. “In order to make America great and glorious again, I am tonight announcing my candidacy for president of the United States,” Trump told a crowd gathered at Mar-a-Lago, his waterfront estate in Florida, where his campaign will be headquartered. Surrounded by allies, advisers, and conservative influencers, Trump delivered a relatively subdued speech, rife with spurious and exaggerated claims about his four years in office. Despite a historically divisive presidency and his own role in inciting an attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, Trump aimed to evoke nostalgia for his time in office, frequently contrasting his first-term accomplishments with the Biden administration’s policies and the current economic climate. Many of those perceived accomplishments – from strict immigration actions to corporate tax cuts and religious freedom initiatives – remain deeply polarizing to this day." *** The largest online progressive news show in the world. Hosted by Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian. LIVE weekdays 6-8 pm ET. Help support our mission and get perks. Membership protects TYT's independence from corporate ownership and allows us to provide free live shows that speak truth to power for people around the world. See Perks: ▶ https://www.youtube.com/TheYoungTurks/join SUBSCRIBE on YOUTUBE: ☞ http://www.youtube.com/subscription_center?add_user=theyoungturks FACEBOOK: ☞ http://www.facebook.com/TheYoungTurks TWITTER: ☞ http://www.twitter.com/TheYoungTurks INSTAGRAM: ☞ http://www.instagram.com/TheYoungTurks TWITCH: ☞ http://www.twitch.com/tyt 👕 Merch: http://shoptyt.com ❤ Donate: http://www.tyt.com/go 🔗 Website: https://www.tyt.com 📱App: http://www.tyt.com/app 📬 Newsletters: https://www.tyt.com/newsletters/ If you want to watch more videos from TYT, consider subscribing to other channels in our network: The Damage Report ▶ https://www.youtube.com/thedamagereport Indisputable with Dr. Rashad Richey ▶ https://www.youtube.com/indisputabletyt Watchlist with Jayar Jackson ▶ https://www.youtube.com/watchlisttyt TYT Sports ▶ https://www.youtube.com/tytsports The Conversation ▶ https://www.youtube.com/tytconversation Rebel HQ ▶ https://www.youtube.com/rebelhq TYT Investigates ▶ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwNJt9PYyN1uyw2XhNIQMMA #TYT #TheYoungTurks #BreakingNews 221115__EL02CenkReactionTrump by The Young Turks
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Will Butler: "I think of the record as a complex and satisfying stew"
"I'm at the crime scene," Will Butler conveys. "I don't know that I am – I didn't murder anyone," he elaborates, "but I am at a crime scene. I'm there, and the evidence is all around us. So what do I do?" This setting is the backdrop to Will Butler's new album, 'Generations'. It's a setting that seems to resonate through society as a whole. We're in the throes of a global pandemic. There's a worldwide cry of pain and of outrage in the wake of the murder of George Floyd that needs to be heard. Meanwhile, Trump is campaigning for a second term as US president. The evidence, as the musician describes, is all around us.
"The general shittiness and desperation of the last four years, three-and-a-half years, is the swamp from which a lot of these emotions took their shape," Will portrays of the record. "I was trying to show some dimensions of that." Drawing from his life, the New York neighbourhood he calls home, and their place in the world at large, these songs might not have been written in the current climate, but their dissatisfaction with the state of the world around them is an emotion that feels unshakably prevalent.
In the five years since the release of his debut album 'Policy', Will Butler has toured, released a live record, toured some more, released a record with Arcade Fire, toured again, and somehow found the time to earn a mid-career masters degree in public administration. It seems safe to say that a lot has changed since then. "The first [album] was kind of like trying to make a market fresh meal," he portrays. For this new record, he wanted to do things differently, diverting from the "fast and furious" pace of his debut to take the time to let the songs grow. "This was a bit more like, okay, what do we do if we're making a world class stew?" he poses, laughing.
Born out of a process he describes as "boiling the bones and the onions and the carrots and everything," with 'Generations' Will Butler explores the history – specifically his family history – that brought him to where he is today, and wrestles with a keenly-felt desperation for something better in the future. "There's a nostalgia, but for a different present," he portrays. "It's not 'I wish we were back here,' it's 'I wish now we had made another choice back then.' It's a nostalgia for an alternate future." It's an energy that prevails far beyond the context of this album. "Right now's like, 'I wish it was 2019, except 2019 was just utter shit, so I want it to be 2025, but only if in 2025 we've actually fixed a couple of things,'" he offers with a grim chuckle. "It's this whole mess of emotions."
This is the energy that flows through 'Generations', a record that balances between the realism of the moment and hopefulness for the future. "It's been a batshit crazy world the last four or five years," Will expresses. Speaking from his home in Brooklyn, New York, he might crack jokes about dreading a second Great Depression (if you can't laugh… etc.) but the musician is in high spirits. "There's something about hope, about being hopeful, about being oriented towards something – like being oriented towards a better future," he enthuses, "while keeping your eye out and seeing all the shit that's going to destroy you before you make it to your goal…"
"I think the head and the heart are in different places," he distils. "You've got to know those things, but you've got to point your soul in that direction." He pauses, thinking his words over. "You don't have to," he amends, "it's just hopeful to point your soul in that direction." That's exactly what 'Generations' strives to do, shining a light to illuminate the shitshow of a situation we find ourselves in while offering hope for whatever comes next. "It's a fine place to begin by acknowledging your power or lack of power and your position within the world," Will conveys, "and then move forward from there." As he sings on 'Bethlehem', "how does it feel to know the torch is in your hand?"
"Dark," he offers in response to his own question, referencing events like the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017 as an explanation as to why. "It's embarrassing and shitty and terrifying, and you are probably doing something horrible." He pauses and clarifies, "the 'you' is me in this." The lyric – and song – in question is inspired by the (misquoted) poetry of William Butler Yeats. As he talks Will searches for one poem in particular – 'In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markievicz' – and pauses to read the last stanza aloud: "The innocent and the beautiful have no enemy but time; Arise and bid me strike a match and strike another till time catch."
"There's something in that moment, this desire to burn it all down, and then this idea of striking the match and blowing it out," he expresses. "Are we going to burn this shit down? Are we going to blow out the torch?" he asks. "It's that moment now." There are no answers. No one knows what the future holds. Instead, with 'Generations' Will Butler explores where he's come from and where he hopes we'll go from here. "I keep saying, it's a weird moment we're living in right now," he conveys. "It's a powerful moment, but deeply bizarre."
When he isn't looking forwards on 'Generations' he's looking back, delving into the history that brought him to where he is today. "My great grandfather was the last son of a pioneer, a homesteader in Utah," he describes. "He made his children be in a band. They'd drive across the desert – before there were roads in the desert – and play music in churches. Those kids grew up to be musicians in a jazz vocal group. My mom grew up in that musical family, playing music and playing shows." Performing in Arcade Fire with his brother, Win, and now readying to release his second solo record, it seems that music is in Will Butler's blood.
This sense of tradition is most keenly felt on album closing track, 'Fine'. "In some ways, it's trying to be like a Kanye West folk song or something," he laughs, quickly explaining that it isn't hip-hop but rather "talking about important things in a crass way." "There's a genre of hip-hop where it's like 'I got rich selling drugs'," he describes. "I'm like, 'I got rich because my grandfather ran a small business'," he laughs. "I got rich because generations of American policy have been oriented towards providing white men with a high standard of living that would be better than the generation before them," he declares with a mock flourish. "How do you like me now?"
More than just reckoning with his family history, 'Generations' sees the musician trying to find his place in it in the now. "I'm kind of the oldest millennial," he states. "I'm born in 1982: I'm not 40, but I feel like an old man. People that are six years younger than me, I see them through a glass darkly," he laughs. "Something about being a millennial who remembers the Soviet Union," he chuckles. "It neither has the standing to be an 'OK, boomer' person, nor the standing to be like, 'I've got my shit together, I'm a youth'." Exploring the tension of bloodlines and identity – and where that goes from here – is the river that runs through 'Generations'.
"I think of [the record] as a complex and satisfying stew," Will describes, in another culinary-inspired metaphor that gets more difficult to follow the longer he continues, "based off of some old family recipe that you did every goddamn step to make it into this very nourishing, very layered, uh, goulash." He abandons that train of thought with a laugh. "My brain is so broken these days." As for where Will Butler will go from here, your guess is as good as his [we mentioned there are no answers, right? – ed].
"Even before the pandemic I was like, 'I'm putting out a record this fall, I'm going to play shows in America a month before the election, I'm going to go around the world, meet people and figure out what's going on and provide some release'," he enthuses, plans which are currently just not possible at the moment. He has hopes for being creative with ways of sharing the record ("I'm curious to see if I get better at it, living on the internet") and for making a new Arcade Fire record ("God willing, pandemic permitting"). The rest is open to possibility. "For people that care about music, music feels very important right now," he asserts. "Music is so nourishing and comforting by its nature that it feels good to be engaged in that, as weird as it is."
Taken from the October issue of Dork. Will Butler's album 'Generations' is out now.
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#public_review
#part One
My dear friends my dear readers,
I am happy to be here with you tonight after an absence, I find that I long to write in glorious Arabic, and I am drawn to the nostalgia for the high-ranking language of the Arabic language.
Times have passed by dragging them on the reality of the world today, time did not speed up as it does today, and the “rapids” of news did not speed up as it speeds up today, the world is changing rapidly around us, and people are accustomed or almost, until they are no longer stopped by nothing but the greatness of the news, as for its young ones, I became accustomed as if it was an evening talk.
I am writing to you today while I am in a different position and with a new responsibility that requires effort, time, arrangement and more accuracy, so I took some time, due to its tightness and urgency, to arrange my office and its shelves, and reorganize what I have to do with my new reality at the head of the “National Security Institution” The strategic “for a great old great new line is the line of the noble gentlemen, Ahl al-Bayt.
Our ancestors in the past were not absent from the reality of life and the world of this world in presence, attention, care and presence, that is hidden or less, hidden or apparent, announced or facilitated according to time and space and the necessities of the total existence of an honorable race that is destined to be the safety of the people of the earth, even if it is absent. The value of his existence for many of the people of the earth.
Since our grandfather Adam we have been on this earth and our existence continued throughout the period of our grandfather Idris, Noah, Abraham, Ismail, Jacob, Isaac, Yusuf, Yunus, Hod, Moses, David, Solomon, Jesus, the seal of the prophets, Muhammad, his guardians and the guardians of his lineage, peace be upon them.
We have been here since our grandfather Adam, peace be upon him, descended to this earth, and we will remain until God authorizes us to return to the motherland after the world is filled with justice and equity, as the oppressors “Satan and his evil descendants” filled it with injustice and aggression.
We were here, entrusting the one who is going to the next with the reins of the honorable existence on this earth until he comes who is the first and the last in the order of the immortal ones.
We were here, and we will remain here until God permits us to return to our homes. The land is ours, glory is ours, and woe to those who give us refuge.
This is the compass of existence for us, the people of the house of prophecy and the message, the houses of honor and the king.
Today, and close to the days of God, the world witnesses events that were transmitted by our ancestors, Kabra, from Kaber, they told us and they told all people, including what reached these generations healthy and unharmed from the forms of distortion, fraud and deception, and some of them were obtained by the hand of treachery, so I changed what I changed to People lose sight of the road and lose their compass.
Our mission on earth is to establish the pillars of the House of Glory so that God will be worshiped knowingly and people may live in safety, knowledge, security and prosperity, and coexist with nations and other creatures in harmony and peace. Satan wants to mislead people far astray, and his party wants to avoid the path of God and They abandon the teachings of Heaven, people fight and kill each other, diseases and injuries spread, and people live in distress, distress and anxiety, fighting over the small and despicable thing.
This is the battle of life that the world and the inhabitants of the earth live in today.
So, let's get out of this language of abstraction to the language of today's reality, and let us speak the language of analyzes and use the propane of strategies so that our language is in the language of our people, so that the Arab and the non-Arab alike can understand you.
#The reality of the Arab region
#sham_events
Do any of you remember “Donald Trump” today, surely many people today no longer remember him?
“Donald Trump” is the pre-current US president who acquiesced to the “Sheldon” project and thought that “the deal of the century would grant him a second presidential term, and when he felt that he would lose that in favor of the American Calvary Movement candidate, he mixed the papers of the region in a strange way outside the established decisions to make the days of his successor black.” in judgment.
Let me speed up the details so that we can go through what is hardly mentioned in the "media today except for a little bit."
#Salt_hospital events
Do you remember what happened then??? a
I think that many have forgotten, except for those sitting in the corridors of the "Jordanian Intelligence".
The answer received by "the Jordanian monarch" at the time, along with the Jordanian strategic depth in Salt Hospital, was a "rude response" from "Netanyahu" to not authorizing his plane to pass over the airspace of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.
Yes , it was a " rude response " that embarrassed even the " Emiratis " who were appalled that a " special force " belonging to the Gladio operating under the command of " Netanyahu " would commit this heinous act .
In order to do so, it will be planned to strike members of the royal family against each other and prepare the ground for the assassination of Prince Hamzah and accusing His Majesty King Abdullah of this until the Hashemite family’s contract is broken and Jordan disintegrates in the face of the weak social and economic situation in which it is living due to “brazen planning” since the time of the nineties, after the assassination of “Isaac Rabin” at the hands of “Gladio” himself, and then work is done to establish a republican regime under popular pressure that will be a puppet in the hands of “Netanyahu” and his team, and had it not been for the grace of God and the intervention of the Jordanian strategic depth in harmony with the general strategic depth in the region and the world, the world today would be witnessing the birth of A new Gladio regime under the name of the "Republic of Besan" is ruled by "Fertoot", similar to the famous banana states.
What can be said today regarding Jordan has been said, and the last word that must be said as clearly as possible is that the security of Jordan is all of Jordan, the people of Jordan, all the people of Jordan, and the security of the Hashemite royal family, the entire Hashemite royal family, and that His Majesty King Abdullah and the order of government In Jordan, the security of all the nobles of the world will not be allowed to be threatened at all, and this saying applies to every royal family of honorable origin in Arab, Islamic and even global geography and does not stop at the borders of Jordan only.
I hope that "Netanyahu" and his team are well aware of this, I hope so.
And I hope again that the Arab peoples will realize the following:
Through the “gladio agents” who are everywhere in the joints of administrative, political, economic, educational, media, governmental and other life, political action in every country and system is underestimated, and sabotage is done from within in order to strike peoples with their systems and plunge them into wars of attrition. absurd interior, until it is exhausted well in stages, then the stage of total overthrow comes with multi-use revolutions, even if one system falls after another until the whole world falls prey to the absolute demonic control of the systems and then the peoples are lost to be completely enslaved.
Of course, not all the policies of the Arab regimes are bad, and not all of them are good. As a result of the complexities of daily management and the intended mistakes of domestic agents, the efforts of states are underestimated and the moral existence of the state and the regimes as a whole is undermined.
Let us remember the recent past then,
When the Ottoman Empire fell, the citizens of the state dispersed and states appeared by virtue of "Sais-Pico", then the monarchies began to disappear in the Arab and Islamic world and the world in general, then "Gregory" took control of Europe and most of the governments of its regimes, in turn, in favor of emerging republican regimes, most of whose leaders are from lineages Overwhelmed, it looks at the ruling as a gain and not a debtor, so competition and then hatred increases among the parties to the competition greedy for power, so the poor of yesterday overcome the strong of today, who are supported by the forces of the “Gladio” and plunder what they are able to achieve, then the nation becomes dwarfed and its existence weakens whenever the ruler is overpowered by the people. They do not know their origin and they do not have a covenant of satiation, and here personal interests prevail over the higher interest of the nation, and the likes of “Netanyahu” and Netanyahu’s godfathers, who, of course, have nothing to do with their personal interests, do not represent a religion, a belief or a principle.
And when Gregory overthrew the Shah’s regime in Iran, another “problem” appeared for the region, which many think was an “opportunity.” Gregory wanted it to be a “religious problem with the taste of Shiism” so that people would be alienated from religion and from the love of the people of the Prophet’s house May God’s prayers and peace be upon him and his family, just as he took advantage of “the persecution of the Jews of the world” and their longing for a state that would gather them from the diaspora and protect them within the land of their ancestors, according to the “interpretations” of some rabbis of the prophecies of “Prophet Daniel” as explained by “Maimonides” in his books about the day of the end of time, in order to These people hit these people under religious names, in the midst of everyone forgetting that religions came and emerged through the prophets who were truly sent from God, and that politicians seeking interests did not establish them even if they were wrapped in black turbans or even black pants.
Neither those in the new “Iran” represent the Muhammadan religion in the same way as a Shiite, nor do those in “Israel” represent the Mosaic religion or the teachings of the tribes.
Simply put, "Netanyahu" is a politician even if he is a Jew by religion, and "Khamenei" is a politician even if he is a Shiite Muslim.
It is simpler than this..is that when he comes “who is to send” the final tribe of the Prophet, with whom the nations will gather, then people from all the heavenly religions follow him with their doctrines on the truth that he brought, and this is what the “Satan” and his followers do not want and cannot stand… That's why I said at the beginning #we were here and we will stay here the earth is ours the home is ours the mountain the plain the river is ours
#Our_We_The_Sons_of_Adam_And_Noah_Ibrahim_Muhammad_Khatem_of_Prophets.
#us_not_to_the_devil_nor_the charlatan_of_Samaria
#us_we_the_people_of_the_old_house
point, full stop
Therefore, all the peoples of the region and the world should be well aware of what is being woven and not fall into the traps of demons and their snares.
The first part is over
My respect and appreciation to all
#Princess_Shams_Aslan_Noor Al-Huda
#Princess_Shams_aslan_noralhoda
#National_Security_Advisor to the nobles_Ahl_al-Bayt
_______
This article was published on facebook in arabic on the page official of the princess Shams aslan Noralhoda. ( 30/05/2021)
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Ten months sober, I must admit, just because you’re clean don’t mean you don’t miss it
This is not about drugs or alcohol.
It’s been ten months to the day since I told First Boyfriend not to contact me again, and I’ve been listening to the Taylor Swift song “Clean” lately, which is where I got the title of this post, and I decided to post about that whole thing now rather than (or honestly maybe in addition to) posting about it at the one-year mark.
I’m not going to tell the full story here. I have something like that in my Google Drive, and it’s 12 pages single spaced and still feels like it’s mostly just the highlights. Here’s what I will say:
We were in the same first grade class. The first time I remember interacting with him was during recess in fifth or sixth grade, when he and a couple of his friends walked up to my friends and me, and he tackled me silently. I got up, brushed myself off, and kicked him in the shins; he tackled me again and walked away. This whole thing occurred without a single word being spoken. My khakis got grass stains. I misspelled his last name when I wrote about it in my diary.
We got close in eighth grade. This was the year after my mom had almost died, and I felt different from all my friends and classmates. He was different, too. (I later found out we’re both autistic. That explains a lot.) Our different-ness was part of what drew us together. So, too, was my sense that he wasn’t okay. When my mom had been at her sickest, I’d had a purpose, briefly, taking care of my sister, but now my mom wanted her job as our parent back and I was looking for other sources of meaning. Taking care of him was one of them.
Two of my friends and I threw him a surprise 14th birthday party in the spring of eighth grade. All three of us had crushes on him at that point. The birthday party was a smashing success and honestly still a memory I treasure, mostly because of the massive water balloon fight.
On October 5 of our freshman year of high school, he was at his then-girlfriend’s swim meet, and our mutual best friend was there with him. He told her he was seriously thinking of killing himself that night. She tried to talk him out of it but didn’t make much progress, so she called me, sobbing, and then handed the phone to him, and I talked him down. It was the first time he and I said “I love you” to each other. Seeing him at school the next morning was the biggest, most visceral relief I’ve ever known.
His girlfriend broke up with him in late November. Five days later, upstairs in a dark hallway during our mutual best friend’s Hanukkah party, he kissed me twice on the jaw line. I knew he’d hurt himself if I let on that I hadn’t wanted it, so I very carefully asked him not to do that again.
A week later, I asked him out. (I know.)
We dated for a little over a year before my parents, especially my father, started telling me that a year was too long for a high school relationship; that since I wasn’t going to marry him, it made no sense to continue. I caved to the pressure, even though I didn’t want to break up with him.
I hadn’t cried since my mother’s cancer diagnosis three years earlier, but the breakup broke me. I cried daily for the first two weeks, and it took under a month for me to become suicidal. I called him--I’d talked him out of suicide, so it felt fair--and he talked me down. I knew I wouldn’t be able to bear hearing “Don’t” or “You can’t.” That those things would make me say, “Watch me.” He told me, “It’s your choice, but I hope you don’t, and this is why I didn’t.”
We started flirting during the second month of the breakup, and it was more fun than we’d ever had together before. We got back together after ten weeks apart and things got easier.
We stayed together for nearly two years this time. It went better the second time; he lied less and was mostly better about consent. (If those phrases seem concerning, they should.)
I broke up with him the second time because I watched series three of Sherlock and realized that Mary’s behavior, all the lying and the double life, seemed totally normal to me. I don’t want to go into the details of his lies because I’m embarrassed for having believed him, but suffice it to say he was rarely honest about anything, and eventually I realized I wanted trust to be part of my relationships.
The first month after the second breakup was awkward (we had classes together, and we competed in the state math tournament together, and we rode the same tour bus halfway across the country with the rest of the school’s music department), but after about a month there was a night when I wound up in his lap, sobbing and promising that I didn’t hate him or want him out of my life but that I’d just needed the romantic part to be done. Things got much less awkward after that.
We went to college on opposite ends of the same state. We saw each other on breaks. He kept kissing my forehead until I told him not to. When studying abroad went miserably for me, I told him I never wanted to go another day without hearing the words “I love you,” and he said he could make that happen. He texted me “Much love” every day for over three years after that.
It took six and a half years after breaking up with him for good to realize that what he’d done to me was wrong. (And I still don’t know how to tell the story that way, coherently, largely because of the fake double life he made up that I’m embarrassed for having believed in.) But ten months ago, at my first appointment with my current therapist, I read aloud the 12 pages of chronological narrative I have about him, plus the three pages about the time he pushed past my boundaries most dramatically, right after we turned 15. My therapist confirmed that what had happened was abuse, and I texted him to let him know I didn’t want him to contact me anymore.
He got engaged last month, which I know because I’m in occasional contact with his now-fiancée, mostly because I want her to know someone will believe her if she ever wants out. It’s weird to know he’s going to get married. It’s weird to think of him being with someone other than me, even though he’s been with his fiancée for almost four years now. For all the fucked up parts, he was still my first love.
I chose to start this with the quote from “Clean” because I miss him. When Mary Louise Kelly got cussed out by that Trump administration official last fall, I wanted to talk to him about it, because we both listen to a lot of NPR and no one else in my life does, other than my parents. When my mental health took a dip in early June, I wished I could call him, because he was absolute magic when it came to talking me out of a bad headspace. When my mom and I played Scrabble a couple weeks ago, I wanted to text him a picture of the board, because he’s so good at Scrabble and we played it a lot.
None of that nostalgia means I should let him back into my life. I know that, and I’m not going to get in contact with him. I don’t trust him and I don’t think there’s anything in the world that could change that. I deserved honesty from him, especially when we were dating. I deserved not to have my boundaries pushed during intimacy. I deserved not to be used as an alternative to therapy when he could afford therapy and was just choosing to use me instead. I deserved these things, but I did not get them. He should have done better.
Ten months sober, I must admit, just because you’re clean don’t mean you don’t miss it. Ten months older, I won’t give in. Now that I’m clean, I’m never gonna risk it.
#alcohol tw#drugs cw#not really but the quote at the beginning mentions sobriety so#him#him and me#suicide tw#mine#abuse#tw: abuse
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The kleptocracy which has gripped this country under Trump has got to go. Greed is no longer good. Getting extraordinarily rich at the expense of the American people must stop.
Instead of making life difficult for global kleptocrats, the Trump administration is facilitating American kleptocracy. Apparently its thinking is: If you can’t beat them, join them!
The freewheeling US economy of the 1950s was made possible by high tax rates on the filthy rich and by more observant regulation of financial services. The rich lived comfortably and could profit from sound investments. But it was much harder for them to engage in sleazy financial transactions.
You can have widespread prosperity or you can have a clique of kleptocrats and oligarchs running the economy -- but you can’t have both.
More broadly, the Reagan-style mantra of deregulation and endless tax breaks for billionaires has only led to increasing inequality and soaring debt for tens of millions of Americans. Trump-era kleptocracy only exacerbates the problem.
It’s time to finally drive a stake through the heart of supply side economics. George H.W. Bush used to correctly call it “voodoo economics” -- until he became a convert to it to be Reagan’s VP.
And what supply siders call “deregulation” really means an economy operating without umpires or referees so that the rich can perpetually get richer without feeling any obligation to the country or workers who made them rich. Without referees, rules can be broken any time with impunity.
Biden can accurately style his progressive reforms as Eisenhower-era economics while undercutting Trump’s efforts to evoke a mindless 1950s nostalgia. The only part of the 1950s which Trump has actually brought back is the white supremacism by those who were actively resisting the civil rights movement.
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MamaCat Has Been Sick of This Conspiracy Theory Crap Since Before This One Existed
Yea, though I stagger through the final bloody chaotic days of the Trump “presidency,” I shall fear no evil, for the Constitution is with me. Kamala and Joe, they comfort me.
On the real though: scared shitless of the evil.
Rightfully so, for here is the welcome some of our fellow Americans have for the incoming Administration. Almost makes ‘em seem... un-American. May these creeps fail mightily and may Inauguration Day be free of violence.
“‘He has an obligation to them’: Attorney for ‘QAnon shaman’ asks Trump to pardon rioters,” says Politico. “He felt like his voice was, for the first time, being heard,” Watkins said. “And what ended up happening, over the course of the lead-up to the election, over the course of the period from the election to Jan. 6 — it was a driving force by a man he hung his hat on, he hitched his wagon to. He loved Trump. Every word, he listens to him.”
Ugh. There it is. The continental divide between objective reality and Trumpism reality. “Every word, he listens to him.” I saw a classic strongman dictatorship rising, somebody else saw Jesus. I saw my least favorite showman in my lifetime doing his best P. T. Barnum a la Mussolini, somebody else saw the only plausible leader for troubled times.
Perhaps as many as a few thousand of those somebodies attacked our Capitol, and I am not over it. Some more of those somebodies, who knows the actual number, are contributing to online chatter about setting loose further chaos in the next five days.
It’s literally insane, and a lot of it is attributed to the Q conspiracy phenomenon. Two crazy ladies who buy into it have been sent to Washington, D.C., as elected representatives (rollcall.com).
A week after the attempted coup, as the wheels of a second impeachment were grinding over his legacy, the Dear Leader of those who used to watch “The Apprentice” delivered a disingenuous, if carefully-worded, video. In it he denounced the violence. He also employed the No True Scotsman argument, perhaps my favorite of the logical fallacies.
I didn’t buy it, but it wasn’t for me. No, it was for his base, and for his attorneys. Whether he made the attorneys happy is not for me to say. Allegedly Rudy Giuliani is his attorney, and allegedly Rudy’s not getting paid.
No, it’s the latest iteration of Q nonsense on my mind this snowy morning. That video? I saw a beaten man, a would-be Caesar, out of options, doing as he was told for once. Somebody else saw a Q message. Go on over to secondnexus.com and check it out, I’ll wait. You’ll enjoy the screenshotted tweets.
Adding to MamaCat’s recent attack of nostalgia, one learned recently that a former lover, a very bad boyfriend from days of yore, had passed on. Big, strong, handsome, witty, fantastic in bed, cruelly abusive, and possessed of sketchy background, he was champion and nemesis to me in those bizarre days of the mid-90s, when (among other things) I experienced a noticeably short second marriage and met some conspiracy theorists. May he rest in peace. I, for one, am actually relieved. Talk about smart women making foolish choices. I got a million of ‘em. But the mind will cast its glance backwards at such moments.
Wait till you’re old and crochety, kids, your stories may be wacky and bizarre one day too!
So there was this couple, both my late problematic boyfriend and my second husband knew them, so in the course of things I came to know them too. They seemed like a pretty cool couple, we had interests and friends in common. Then one evening at their house, they began to explain, very carefully and for my own good, about Area 51, Ancient Astronauts, and why the income tax is illegal. Why I should read Ayn Rand, become a Sovereign Citizen, and stock up on guns & ammo.
I was insecure enough in the first place, so at the time, it seemed like the polite way to avoid confrontation was just to listen and not argue too much. I was at their place, without my own car, thinking maybe this won’t go on all night, how can I change the subject to Star Trek… but when we got to the taxes portion of the presentation, I just couldn’t stop myself.
“What about the roads and bridges?”
There was a lot of incoherent babbling about per-use fees and private property and so forth. And as I sat listening, politely, hoping my ride was about ready to go, I was thinking, “They don’t understand how any of this works. They’re grown-ass adults, regurgitating faulty reasoning, telling me mad re-interpretations of what the 1st and 2nd Amendments mean, and they really don’t know how little they know. It’s like an alternate reality. I want to go home.”
(Think about it. The Internet barely existed yet. This was mainly spread face to face and via phone trees at the time.)
That friendship didn’t blossom much after that. Nice enough folks on the face of it, but the crazy talk kept returning to the word, “militia,” and I was not a fan. At that time in my life, I was actually a pretty decent shot, with a number of different firearms (not an owner, though). I let go of this friendship, and not long after, I let go of guns. What I couldn’t let go of was the nagging sense that if this sort of conspiratorial thinking were to get out of hand, become somehow mainstreamed, the only logical outcome would be eventual violence. You can’t combine hatred for the notion of government itself, with fantasies about actual extraterrestrials, with disdain for taxpayer-provided goods and services, with guns and ammo and militia identity, without eventual violence.
And for just a moment, late last night, it felt like the intervening 20 -25 years had never happened. In my actor’s imagination, I could see it like a film cut, from the sepia tones of that living room in New Mexico so long ago, to the craziest damned January in American memory. Nonexistent voter fraud, Q, rightwing hate media; these lie along a straight line from that Sovereign Citizen baloney my friends served for dinner that night. A straight, incredibly white, line.
I really, really hope that the Biden administration comes on like gangbusters in the first hundred days. I hope people’s lives improve drastically, quickly, especially for people who think we voted in Stalinism or something. I really hope we can raise the standard of living across the board (below, say, $250k/annum, you $250k+ guys are actually fine up there). I really, really hope we can address the pandemic. I don’t see any way to controvert the conspiracy-based thinking, unless we just take this opportunity to actually govern for a change, and lift everybody up.
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Clifford Wagner, an 80-year-old Republican in Tucson, Arizona, never cared for President Donald Trump.He supported Jeb Bush in the 2016 presidential primary race and cast a protest vote in the general election for Gary Johnson, the Libertarian nominee. An Air Force veteran, Wagner described the Trump presidency as a mortifying experience: His friends in Europe and Japan tell him the United States has become "the laughingstock of the world."
This year, Wagner said he would register his opposition to Trump more emphatically than he did in 2016. He plans to vote for Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, and hopes the election is a ruinous one for the Republican Party.
"I'm a Christian, and I do not believe in the hateful, racist, bigoted speech that the president uses," Wagner said, adding, "As much as I never thought I'd say this, I hope we get a Democratic president, a Democratic-controlled Senate and maintain a Democratic-controlled House."
Wagner is part of one of the most important maverick voting groups in the 2020 general election: conservative-leaning seniors who have soured on the Republican Party over the past four years.
Republican presidential candidates typically carry older voters by solid margins, and in his first campaign Trump bested Hillary Clinton by 7 percentage points with voters over 65. He won white seniors by nearly triple that margin.
Today, Trump and Biden are tied among seniors, according to a poll of registered voters conducted by The New York Times and Siena College. And in the six most important battleground states, Biden has established a clear upper hand, leading Trump by 6 percentage points among the oldest voters and nearly matching the president's support among whites in that age group.
That is no small advantage for Biden, the former vice president, given the prevalence of retirement communities in a few of those crucial states, including Arizona and Florida.
No Democrat has won or broken even with seniors in two decades, since Al Gore in 2000 devoted much of his general election campaign to warning that Republicans would cut popular programs like Social Security and Medicare. In 2016, Trump, now 74, seemed in some ways keenly attuned to the political sensitivities of voters in his own age group. As a candidate, he bluntly rejected his party's long-standing interest in restructuring government guarantees of retirement security.
But Trump's presidency has been a trying experience for many of these voters, some of whom are now so frustrated and disillusioned that they are preparing to take the drastic step of supporting a Democrat.
The grievances of these defecting seniors are familiar, most or all of them shared by their younger peers. But these voters often express themselves with a particularly sharp kind of dismay and disappointment. They see Trump as coarse and disrespectful, divisive to his core and failing persistently to comport himself with the dignity of the other presidents that they have observed for more than half a century. The Times poll also found that most seniors disapproved of Trump's handling of race relations and the protests after the death of George Floyd.
And as the coronavirus pandemic continues to sweep the country, putting older Americans at particular risk, these voters feel a special kind of frustration and betrayal with Trump's ineffective leadership and often-blase public comments about the crisis.
The president has urged the country to return to life-as-usual far more quickly than the top public health officials in his own administration have recommended. Some prominent Republican officials and conservative pundits have even suggested at times that older people should be willing to risk their own health for the sake of a quicker resumption of the business cycle.
In The Times poll, seniors in the battleground states disapproved of Trump's handling of the coronavirus pandemic by 7 points, 52% to 45%. By a 26-point margin, this group said the federal government should prioritize containing the pandemic over reopening the economy.Former Rep. Carlos Curbelo of Florida, a 40-year-old Republican deeply versed in the politics of the retiree-rich swing state, said many seniors were disturbed by important aspects of Trump's record and found Biden a mild and respectable alternative who did not inspire the same antipathy on the right that Clinton did in 2016.
Regarded by much of his own party as bland and conventional, Biden's nostalgia-cloaked candidacy may be uniquely equipped to ease a sizable group of right-of-center seniors into the Democratic column, at least for one election.
"He's not ever been known to be a radical or an extreme leftist or liberal, so there is certainly a degree of comfort there," Curbelo said. He added: "This public health crisis is so threatening, especially to seniors, and because the president hasn't earned high marks in his handling of it, I think that has also been a factor in Biden's improving numbers."Biden and his allies have expressed growing excitement about the political possibilities that the shifting senior vote could create in the fall. That is true not only in Sun Belt retirement havens but also in Midwestern states where Biden is currently running well ahead of Clinton's 2016 performance with a range of conservative-leaning constituencies, including older white people.
In Iowa, former Gov. Tom Vilsack, a close Biden ally, said the former vice president had closed a substantial deficit in the state through his response to the coronavirus, his connection with older rural voters and his ability to empathize. "Part of it is the demeanor he has projected during the course of this pandemic," Vilsack said, before acknowledging, "As much as Joe's doing, it's probably as much or more what the president has done or failed to do." He cited an ad from a group of anti-Trump Republicans that cast Trump's approach to crisis as erratic and selfish, unlike past presidents who have confronted national tragedies like the Challenger disaster and the Oklahoma City bombing.
"Each of those presidents was able to connect emotionally to the feelings of the nation," Vilsack said. "This president has had a really, really hard time doing that.
"Trump's ineffective response to the coronavirus weighed on the thinking of many older voters surveyed in the poll, including Patrick Mallon, 73, a retired information technology specialist in Battle Creek, Michigan.Mallon said he was a registered Republican who had long been unhappy with Trump but mindful that he was presiding over a strong economy. The pandemic set Mallon firmly against Trump's reelection.
"The main reason is Donald Trump saying, 'Don't wear a mask, this thing is going to go away, we can have large gatherings,'" he said. "Everything he says is incorrect and dangerous to the country.
"When young people contract the coronavirus, Mallon added, "most of them will survive, but they're going to give it to their parents, their grandparents -- and I'm sorry, we're just as important as that younger generation is.
"The abandonment of Trump by older voters is far from universal, and he still has a strong base among older white men and self-described conservatives. Nationally, the oldest voters approve of Trump's handling of the economy by 12 points, more than double the figure for voters of all ages.
And in the battleground states, Trump has a 10-point lead over Biden with white men over the age of 65, even as Biden has opened up an advantage with white women in the same age group. Nonwhite seniors in the battleground states currently support Biden over Trump by a huge margin, 65% to 25%.
Even among some seniors supportive of Trump, however, there is an undercurrent of unease about the way he approaches the presidency.
Karen Gamble, 65, of Reidsville, North Carolina, said that she was dissatisfied with the overall government response to the coronavirus outbreak and echoed many popular complaints about Trump's persona. She said she wished, for instance, that Trump "wouldn't be such a bully and would conform to being in a regal-like position, as our presidents have always been.
"Gamble said she was planning to support Trump in the election all the same, describing Biden as too old and too compromised on matters related to China. But Gamble, who said she has a "severe lung problem," expressed hope that Trump would change his approach to the pandemic. "We can't blame him for this -- how many presidents could really do any better than what he's done?" Gamble said, before adding: "I just wish he wouldn't let the country open up as much as it has. I see all these teens and young people at the beach, and I fear for them because now they're getting sick."
In Tucson, Gerald Lankin, a more forceful Trump supporter, said he would back the president mainly as a vote "against the Democrats." Lankin, 77, said he found Trump's personal manner offensive but agreed with him on most issues and saw Democrats as "much, much, much, much too far to the left."
"He hasn't really done anything that I can say I'm against," Lankin said of Trump. "I think what he's doing is the best he can. But, boy, he is tough to take. He is a tough guy to take."There may be time for Trump to regain his footing with seniors, along with several other right-leaning groups that have drifted away during the bleakest months of his presidency. His ability to do so could have far-reaching implications not just for his chances of winning a second term, but also his party's ability to keep its hold on the Senate.At the moment, Trump's unpopularity with older voters appears to be hindering other Republicans in states including Arizona and Michigan.
Gayle Craven, 80, of High Point, North Carolina, said that while she was a registered Republican, she had not voted for Trump in 2016 and would reject him again this year. She said she saw Biden as an "honest man."
"Trump is the biggest disappointment," she said. "He has made America look like idiots. I think he's an embarrassment to my country."
Other older voters leaning toward Biden cautioned that they could still change their minds, like Frederick Monk, 73, of Mesa, Arizona, who said he had voted for Trump but quickly came to see him as "incompetent." Still, Monk said his mind was not fully made up. If Biden chooses an overly liberal running mate, he said he could cast a vote for Trump and hope his second term is an exercise in futility. "Hopefully the Democrats retake the Senate and make his next four years miserable, if he lasts that long," Monk said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2020 The New York Times Company
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In the end, not even the Progressive Bernie Base showing up for Hillary in larger numbers than her own supporters did for Obama in 2008, could prevent the inevitable. A massively flawed candidate who failed to electrify the Democratic base and make the case to Rust Belt voters- why she is the better option than the Populist candidate spraying out anti-trade rhetoric.
Blame whatever you want. The blame rests squarely on all of us. But there is so many lessons to learn from the 2016 Primary and General Election. Populism and Progressive policy became the central topic. Healthcare is a right. The ultra-rich are KING in America, and they must be reigned in. Primary process should be more fair. Flowery platitudes aren’t enough to generate excitement for the poor to turn out, etc.
Literally ZERO of these lessons were learned. Even in the face of an ACTUAL Corona-virus pandemic, with over 30 million unemployed, more and more uninsured at the time of writing this- the Democratic party has done nearly nothing to fix the problems from 2016. Actually, in all my shock- they’ve made them worse. The Democratic party pulled every string it could. Bent over backwards to not only stop Bernie Sanders, but stifle Progressives and our policy agenda. All in an orchestration to crown their nominee just years after a 2016 lawsuit said the DNC can meddle how ever they like in their own “Democratic process”. All to push a man who did next to no campaigning in any states past South Carolina. A man who didn’t actually work for your vote, but instead- coasted on “Hope and Change” establishment nostalgia, for when times weren’t so chaotic.
So for pragmatism sake, let’s push all that aside for just one moment. We can debate all day about how “fair” Joe Biden’s path to the Democratic Nomination has been. But let’s view Biden on his own merits for his candidacy’s sake. What’s the incentive for Progressives to vote for Joe? Well- unless you’re sticking to the concept of the very first paragraph of this article, the answer is: There isn’t one.
If Hillary Clinton were a flawed candidate, Biden may just be the worst nominee in history. A long history of terrible behavior including coddling racists, racist behavior, repeated threats at slashing the safety net, warmongering for a devastating Iraq war that’s helped kill endless innocent civilians all based on a lie, the nomination of Justice Thomas and controversial treatment of Anita hill, the Obama administration’s failure to even pass a Public Option with a Super Majority government, while pushing a healthcare plan that was little more than barely a small step in the right direction.
Now- Biden stands as the presumptive Democratic Nominee, and with a sizable Progressive Bernie Base up for grabs, what has Joe Biden done to earn our vote?
Answer: Nothing. Well, at least nothing significant.
Three items come immediately to mind on what Joe Biden is doing to “reach left”.
1: Joe wants to lower the Medicare age to 60. By comparison, Hillary Clinton wanted to lower it to as low as 50.
2: Joe Biden wants to eliminate student debt for those making under $125K. By comparison, Bernie Sanders wanted to eliminate it universally.
3: Nebulously- Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders have created “working groups” on various policy issues focusing on education, criminal justice, climate change, immigration, the economy, and health care policy. As of yet, nothing has come of these “groups” on policy.
As the Primary was coming to a close, I as a Progressive- was completely open to Joe moving (not reaching) left on policy positions.
Overwhelmingly, if you ask Sanders supporters what they care about most, it’s Policy.
What will you do for the underprivileged working class people of America?
What will you do for my children and grand children facing a Climate Change future?
What will you do for your Mass Incarceration mess, ending the drug war, legalizing Marijuana, and freeing non-violent drug offenders?
What will you do for the upwards of 45K people who die each year because health care is not affordable?
The 67% of American bankruptcies being due to health care costs?
BUT. Sanders supporters also believe in principle. Consistency. History. Fighting for change. Decency. Human rights. We’re also majority young people (a group Joe Biden did not do well with). Perhaps these things could be talked out. But now there’s a bigger elephant in the room. One that establishment Democrats and Joe’s supporters are ignoring.
Joe Biden was credibly accused of rape.
Democrats spent months yelling about “Believing Women” during the Kavanaugh Confirmation hearings. Rightfully fighting for Christine Blasey Ford’s story to be heard- knowing it would be a fruitless task at the hands of a twisted Senate Republican majority. Now, establishment Democrats are making the media rounds with Biden campaign talking points with denials and every attempt to downplay Tara Reade as not a credible accuser, even as several corroborations of her story have surfaced, 1 of which was an archive video of who Tara Reade alleges is her mother discussing the issue with Larry King on CNN in 1993. Meanwhile, Joe Biden’s campaign has it’s surrogates and supporters on news networks shielding Biden. Nancy Pelosi downplays the accusations, Kirsten Gillibrand (who helped cancel Al Franken) is downplaying the accusations. Alyssa Milano, prominent #MeToo voice, who made a performative appearance at the Brett Kavanagh hearings, now wants to “change the rules” on the movement in favor of a sort of ‘Due Process’- a process that many perpetrators cancelled by #MeToo never got, in favor of protecting Joe Biden.
What this means to me is that Democrats think it’s perfectly fine to be selective on who and who doesn’t deserve to be heard and taken seriously, based on who’s on your team. As if it should be that easy to just shed your principles like Snake skin, hypocritically protecting one predator, while gunning for another that doesn’t fit with you politically.
In 2016, I was perfectly fine voting for the “lesser evil”. Now that the party has loudly stated that not only does my values, principles, and policy demands for the poor and sick of America, not matter- I should fall in line with a candidate that has helped endless innocent people die overseas with America’s imperial military reach, helped endless people die at home because they cant afford a doctor, said that he has “no empathy” for young people- the same young people that have to live and suffer under the conditions of Climate Change while he’s dead and gone, sexually assaulted and violated multiple women, said that nothing will fundamentally change for the same rich people who are now gaining BILLIONS under pandemic conditions while their workers get sicker, if they’re even employed at all.
Moderate establishment Democrats and voters tell me that Trump is the number one threat. That we need to “vote blue no matter who”. Just how “blue” is Joe biden? Just how dissimilar is Joe Biden and his supporters from Trump and his following? For all of the cries of the “angry Bernie Bros” online, I see countless accosting and abusive discourse examples from Biden supporters calling any dissenters “Russian Bots”, or “MAGA Hats”. Being told that I’m somehow a Trump voter by default, for not immediately supporting Biden. All this when all I’ve ever seen from “the Bernie Bros” is aggressively holding smear artists to facts and truth in a thick environment of misrepresentation of Bernie Sanders and his platform.
So- Why shouldn’t Progressives vote for Joe Biden?
This Democratic party doesn’t give a damn about you. Nor does it care about Progressive policy. The party and its supporters spend all this time, smearing Sanders and his base as “Not democrats”, angry “socialists who want free stuff”, “How are you gonna PAY for it?!” etc etc, all while claiming to support SOME form of our policy, and then dropping it the second it doesn’t feel politically advantageous. This party threw everything it could into stopping YOU. With tactics like voter suppression, using a silly app suspiciously funded and supported by shady actors in Iowa, taking WEEKS to give final results, running Super PACs against Bernie and our movement, fear-mongering about Bernie when he did win states, gas lighting the public on “elect-ability”, using a literal pandemic against Bernie to guilt him into dropping out while attempting to blame him for continued spread of COVID-19, while they sent voters to the polls and we didn’t.
And after zero policy concessions, zero good will, repeated demands we fall in line after more than a year of being slammed and disrespected, showing up for Hillary Clinton and then being blamed for her loss anyway, which is inevitable again if Joe loses? Are we just going to keep allowing that? Just how long do we have to hold our noses, voting for Moderate do-nothing lite Republicans who would sooner see you die, than provide you affordable and universal healthcare, because a Billionaire would stand to lose money. Even NOW, during a Pandemic this party has done next to NOTHING to secure the livelihoods of American citizens, as more and more die, get furloughed, and cant pay their bills. All while Trump and Republicans take credit for pitching more common sense plans (even though they want to send us all back to work/school to feed the machine).
This- is the “resistance” party? THIS is the best we can do? Performative rage against a fascist clown while propping up an accused rapist warmongering corporatist with cognitive decline and previous racist tendencies? THIS is what the party keeps telling us we better support or be shamed as somehow supporting the “bad guy”?
Listen, #NotMeUs- this will never stop. This party will NEVER stop using us as a prop for our ideas and passion, then throwing us under the bus when they think they no longer need us. They cannot continue to be allowed to drag us further to the right with guilt trips and shaming. They will NEVER take you seriously unto you take serious action. We’ve been preaching about “action” this whole campaign. Why should that “action” stop in the ballot box? Have some foresight for just a moment and envision how this plays out in future elections, unless you stand up and make them WORK for your vote.
I, for one will not vote for Joe Biden. But I wont shame you for your vote, no matter who it’s for. Why? Because the party did a terrible job at earning -your- vote. I’d maybe only criticize you if you don’t show up at all. There’s so many down-ballot candidate who need support. Even if you leave the President box unchecked, at least show up for the other races.
But consider: There are other options that have been stifled for way too long. Perhaps its time we give them a shot, no? Green Party is running Howie Hawkins and a platform that is much closer to our principles that Biden would ever try for. Justin Amash just jumped into the race if you’re a little more on the Libertarian side. Jesse Ventura is also discovering running on the Green ticket as well. Just imagine Jesse ‘The Body’ Ventura on the debate stage with Donald Trump? Popcorn for DAYS.
In order for us to be taken seriously, we must prove that we’re capable of holding the party accountable. Not voting for them is the ultimate accountability, and you get to keep your principles intact.
Now- to the ultimate argument you’d inevitably get: “You would be helping Donald Trump secure 4 more years”.
My response? You don’t have to bare the blame for that. You wont be at fault for Joe Biden losing any more than those who chose not to vote at all. It’s on the party to earn these votes. That’s how elections work. If you hate the candidate and don’t feel good about them as a person, why is it your responsibility to put them in office? To me- one of the most personal things a person has, is their vote. Not their dollars, or their Tweets. It’s checking a box for the person YOU chose to represent you. If that person doesn’t believe in hardly anything you personally believe in- why is it that they deserve your vote, again? How is it that they’re are somehow entitled to that vote? They don’t, and they aren’t. I’m looking at you too, Republicans.
In closing…
Progressives, I’m sorry to break it to you but- Medicare For All is not on the ballot. Taxing the rich is not on the ballot. Ending corruption and crooked politicians is not on the ballot.
But- ending a terrible two-party system IS on the ballot. Taking your personal vote back, IS on the ballot. In my opinion- the only wasted vote, is the one you were demanded in giving up to what you don’t believe in.
-LZ
https://medium.com/@legacyzero/why-sanders-supporters-should-not-vote-for-joe-biden-a9146bee189b
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The decade of socialist revolution begins
3 January 2020
The arrival of the New Year marks the beginning of a decade of intensifying class struggle and world socialist revolution.
In the future, when learned historians write about the upheavals of the Twenty-First Century, they will enumerate all the “obvious” signs that existed, as the 2020s began, of the revolutionary storm that was soon to sweep across the globe. The scholars—with a vast array of facts, documents, charts, web site and social media postings, and other forms of valuable digitalized information at their disposal—will describe the 2010s as a period characterized by an intractable economic, social, and political crisis of the world capitalist system.
They will note that by the beginning of the third decade of the century, history had arrived at precisely the situation foreseen theoretically by Karl Marx: “At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or—what is but a legal expression for the same thing—with the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed.”
What, in fact, were the principal characteristics of the last ten years?
The institutionalization of unending military conflict and the growing threat of nuclear world war
There was not a single day during the last decade when the United States was not at war. Military operations not only continued in Iraq and Afghanistan. New interventions were undertaken in Syria, Libya, Yemen and Ukraine. Even as 2020 is just getting under way, the murder of Iranian Major General Qassim Suleimani, ordered by President Donald Trump, threatens all-out war between the United States and Iran, with incalculable consequences. The involvement of an American president in yet another targeted killing, followed by bloodthirsty boasting, testifies to the far-advanced derangement of the entire ruling elite.
Moreover, the adoption of a new strategic doctrine in 2018 signaled a vast escalation in the military operations of the United States. In his announcement of the new strategy, then defense secretary James Mattis declared: “We will continue to prosecute the campaign against terrorists that we are engaged in today, but great power competition, not terrorism, is now the primary focus of U.S. national security.” The new doctrine revealed the essential purpose of what had previously been called the “War on Terror:” the attempt to maintain the hegemonic position of American imperialism.
The United States is determined to maintain this position, whatever the financial costs and the consequences in terms of human life. As the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) states in its recently released Strategic Survey: “For its part, the US is not likely voluntarily, reluctantly or after some sort of battle, to pass any strategic baton to China.”
All the major imperialist powers escalated, during the past decade, their preparations for world war and nuclear conflict. The trillion-dollar military budget adopted in 2019 by the Trump administration, with the support of the Democratic Party, is a war budget. Germany, France, the UK, and all the imperialist countries are building up their armed forces. The targets of imperialism, including the ruling elites in Russia and China, alternate between threats of war and desperate efforts to forge some sort of agreement.
The institutions developed in the aftermath of World War II to prevent another global conflict are dysfunctional. The Strategic Survey writes:
The trends of 2018–19 have all confirmed the atomisation of international society. Neither ‘balance of power’ nor ‘international rules-based governance’ serve as ordering principles. International institutions have been marginalised. The diplomatic routine of meetings continues, yet the competing exertions of national efforts, too rarely coordinated with others, matter more—and most often they are erratic in both execution and consequence.
The end of a “global rules-based order”—i.e., one dependent on the unchallengeable dominance of US imperialism—sets into motion a political logic that leads to war. As the Strategic Survey warns: “Law is made and sustained by politics. When law cannot settle disputes, they are shunted back to the political realm for resolution.” To understand the “realm” to which the IISS is referring, one must recall Clausewitz’s famous definition of war as politics by other means.
And what would a modern world war entail? The IISS calls attention to new plans for the use of nuclear weapons. “Meanwhile, the US and Russia are modernizing their arsenals and changing their doctrines in ways that facilitate their use, while the dispute between India and Pakistan over Kashmir remains a potential flashpoint for the use of nuclear weapons.” The recklessness, bordering on insanity, that prevails among policy makers is indicated in the growing conviction that the use of tactical nuclear weapons is a feasible option. The IISS writes:
All that can be said with reasonable certainty is that a limited, regional nuclear exchange, under some circumstances, has severe global environmental effects. But under other circumstances, the effects could be minimal. [emphasis added]
The movement toward a Third World War, which would threaten mankind with extinction, cannot be halted by humanitarian appeals. War arises out of the anarchy of capitalism and the obsolescence of the nation-state system. Therefore, it can be stopped only through the global struggle of the working class for socialism.
The breakdown of democracy
The extreme aggravation of class tensions and the dynamic of imperialism are the real sources of the universal breakdown of democratic forms of rule. As Lenin wrote in the midst of World War I: “Imperialism is the epoch of finance capital and monopolies, which introduce everywhere the striving for domination, not for freedom. Whatever the political system the result of these tendencies is everywhere reaction and intensification of antagonisms in this field.”
Lenin’s analysis is being substantiated in the turn of the ruling elites, during the past decade, toward authoritarian and fascistic methods of rule. The rise to power of such criminal and even psychopathic personalities as Narendra Modi in India, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in Egypt, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Donald Trump in the United States, and Boris Johnson in the UK is symptomatic of a systemic crisis of the entire capitalist system.
Seventy-five years after the collapse of the Third Reich, fascism is making a comeback in Germany. The Alternative für Deutschland, which is a haven for neo-Nazis, emerged during the past decade as the main opposition party. Its rise was facilitated by the Grand Coalition government, a corrupt media, and reactionary academics, who whitewash with impunity the crimes of Hitler’s regime. Similar processes are at work throughout Europe, where the fascist leaders of the 1930s and 1940s—Petain in France, Mussolini in Italy, Horthy in Hungary and Franco in Spain—are being remembered with nostalgia.
The decade saw the resurgence of anti-Semitic violence and the cultivation of Islamophobia and other forms of national chauvinism and racism. Concentration camps were constructed on the US border with Mexico to imprison refugees fleeing from Central and South America, and in Europe and North Africa as the frontline of the anti-immigrant policy of the EU.
There is no progressive tendency to be found within the capitalist parties. Even when confronted with a fascistic president, the Democratic Party refrains from opposition based on the defense of democratic rights. Employing the methods of a palace coup, the Democrats seek Trump’s impeachment only because he, in their view, has undermined the US campaign against Russia and the proxy war in Ukraine.
The attitude of the entire bourgeois political establishment to democratic rights is summed up in the horrific treatment of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and whistleblower Chelsea Manning. With the support of both the Democrats and Republicans, Assange remains confined in Belmarsh prison in London, awaiting extradition to the US. Manning has been imprisoned for nearly a year for refusing to testify before a grand jury called to indict Assange on further charges.
The persecution of Assange and Manning is aimed at criminalizing the conduct of constitutionally-protected journalistic activity. It is part of a broader suppression of dissent that includes the campaign of internet censorship and the jailing of the Maruti-Suzuki workers in India and other class-war prisoners.
The preparations for war, involving massive expenditures and requiring the accumulation of unprecedented levels of debt, snuff the air out of democracy. In the final analysis, the costs of war must be imposed upon the working people of the world. The burdens will encounter resistance by a population already incensed by decades of sacrifice. The response of the ruling elites will be the intensification of their efforts to suppress every form of popular dissent.
The degradation of the environment
The last decade was marked by the continued and increasingly rapid destruction of the environment. Scientists have issued ever more dire warnings that without urgent and far-reaching action on a global scale, the effects of global warming will be devastating and irreversible. The deadly inferno engulfing Australia, as the year ended, is only the latest horrific consequence of climate change.
In November, 11,000 scientists signed a statement published in the journal BioScience warning that “planet Earth is facing a climate emergency.” It noted that over the course of four decades of global climate negotiations, “with few exceptions, we have generally conducted business as usual and have largely failed to address this predicament…
The climate crisis has arrived and is accelerating faster than most scientists expected. It is more severe than anticipated, threatening natural ecosystems and the fate of humanity…. Especially worrisome, are potential irreversible climate tipping points and nature’s reinforcing feedbacks that could lead to a catastrophic ‘hothouse Earth,’ well beyond the control of humans. These climate chain reactions could cause significant disruptions to ecosystems, society, and economies, potentially making large areas of Earth uninhabitable.
Earlier in the year, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported that 821 million people, who were already suffering from hunger, face starvation as agricultural regions are impacted by global warming. Hundreds of millions could lose access to fresh water, while many more will be affected by increasingly severe weather patterns: flooding, drought and hurricanes.
Climate change, and other manifestations of environmental degradation, are the product of a social and economic system that is incapable of organizing global production in a rational and scientific manner, on the basis of social need—including the need for a healthy environment—rather than the endless accumulation of personal wealth.
The aftermath of the 2008 crash and the crisis of capitalism
Underlying all other aspects of the social and political situation is the malignant growth of extreme social inequality—the inevitable and intended consequence of all the measures adopted by the ruling class following the economic and financial crisis of 2008.
Following the financial crash, which occurred on the eve of the 2010s, world governments and central banks opened the spigots. In the United States, the Bush and particularly the Obama administrations engineered the $700 billion bailout of the banks, followed by trillions of dollars in “quantitative easing” measures—that is, the purchase by the Federal Reserve of the worthless assets and securities held by financial institutions.
Overnight, the federal deficit of the American government was doubled. The assets of the Federal Reserve rose from under $2 trillion in November 2008 to $4.5 trillion in October 2014, and the figure remains at more than $4 trillion today. With a new $60 billion a month asset purchase program, initiated in late 2019, the balance sheet is expected to surpass post-crash highs by the middle of this year.
This policy has continued under Trump, with his massive corporate tax cuts and demands for further reductions in interest rates. The New York Times noted, in a January 1 article (“A Simple Investment Strategy That Worked in 2019: Buy Almost Anything”) that the value of almost all investment assets jumped sharply over the past year. The Nasdaq rose by 35 percent, the S&P 500 by 29 percent, commodities by 16 percent, US corporate bonds by 15 percent, and US Treasuries by 7 percent. “It was a remarkable across-the-board rally of a scale not seen in nearly a decade. The cause? Mostly a head-spinning reversal by the Federal Reserve, which went from planning to raise interest rates to cutting them and pumping fresh money into the financial markets.”
All the major capitalist powers have pursued similar measures. The allocation of unlimited credit and money printing—and this, in the final analysis, is what quantitative easing is—intensified the underlying crisis. In trying to rescue themselves, the ruling elites enshrined parasitism and raised social inequality to a level unknown in modern history.
Benefiting from the limitless infusion of money into the market, the fortunes of the financial elite rose during the past decade to astronomical heights. The 500 richest individuals in the world (0.000006 percent of the global population) now have a collective net worth of $5.9 trillion, up $1.2 trillion over the past year alone. This increase is more than the GDP (that is, the total value of all goods and services produced) of all but 15 countries in the world. In the US, the 400 richest individuals have more wealth than the bottom 64 percent, and the top 0.1 percent of the population have a larger share than at any time since 1929, immediately preceding the Great Depression.
The social catastrophe confronting masses of workers and youth throughout the world is the direct product of the policies employed to guarantee the accumulation of wealth by the corporate and financial elite.
The decline in life expectancy among workers in the US, the mass unemployment of workers and particularly young people throughout the world, the devastating austerity measures imposed on Greece and other countries, the intensification of exploitation to boost the profits of corporations—all this is the consequence of the policy pursued by the ruling elites.
The growth of the international working class and the global class struggle
The objective conditions for socialist revolution emerge out of the global crisis. The approach of social revolution has already been foreshadowed in the mass demonstrations and strikes that swept across the globe in 2019: in Mexico, Puerto Rico, Ecuador, Colombia, Chile, France, Spain, Algeria, Britain, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Kenya, South Africa, India and Hong Kong. The United States, where the entire political structure is directed toward the suppression of class struggle, witnessed the first national strike by auto workers in more than forty years.
But the dominant and most revolutionary feature of the class struggle is its international character, rooted in the global character of modern-day capitalism. Moreover, the movement of the working class is a movement of the younger generation and, therefore, a movement that will shape the future.
Those under 30 now comprise over half the world’s population and over 65 percent of the population in the world’s fastest growing regions—Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and South and Southeast Asia. Each month in India, one million people turn 18. In the Middle East and North Africa, an estimated 27 million young people will enter the workforce in the next five years.
From 1980 to 2010, global industrial development added 1.2 billion people to the ranks of the working class, with hundreds of millions more in the decade since. Of this 1.2 billion, 900 million entered the working class in the developing world. Internationally, the percentage of the global labor force that can be classified as peasant declined from 44 percent in 1991 to 28 percent in 2018. Nearly one billion people in Sub-Saharan Africa are expected to join the working class in the coming decades. In China alone, 121 million people moved from “farm to factory” between 2000 and 2010, with millions more in the decade since.
It is not only Asia and Africa that have seen a growth in the working class population. In the advanced capitalist countries, large sections of those who would have previously considered themselves middle class have been proletarianized, while the wave of immigrants from Latin America to the United States and from North Africa and the Middle East to Europe has added millions to a highly diverse workforce.
From 2010 to 2019, the world’s urban population grew by one billion, creating a network of interconnected “megacities” that are both hives of economic productivity and social powder kegs, where inequality is a visible fact of daily life.
And these workers are connected with each other in a manner that is unprecedented in world history. The colossal advances in science, technology and communications, above all the rise of the internet and the proliferation of mobile devices, have allowed masses of people to bypass the fake news of the bourgeois media, which function as little more than mouthpieces for the state and intelligence agencies. More than half of the world’s population, 4.4 billion people, now have access to the internet. The average individual spends over two hours on social media each day, largely on handheld devices.
Workers and youth can now coordinate their protests and actions on a global scale, expressed in the international movement against climate change, the emergence of the “yellow vests” as a worldwide symbol of protest against inequality, and the solidarity of auto workers in the United States and Mexico.
These objective changes are producing major shifts in social consciousness on the central question of social inequality. The 2019 United Nations Human Development Report explains that in almost all countries, the percentage of people demanding greater equality increased from the 2000s to the 2010s by up to 50 percent. The report warned: “Surveys have revealed rising perceptions of inequality, rising preferences for greater equality and rising global inequality in subjective perceptions of well-being. All these trends should be bright red-flags.”
The role of revolutionary leadership
The growth of the working class and the emergence of class struggle on an international scale are the objective basis for revolution. However, the spontaneous struggles of workers and their instinctive striving for socialism are, by themselves, inadequate. The transformation of the class struggle into a conscious movement for socialism is a question of political leadership.
The past decade has provided a wealth of political experiences demonstrating, in the negative, the critical role of revolutionary leadership. The decade began with revolution, in the form of the monumental struggles of Egyptian workers and youth against the US-backed dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak. In the absence of a revolutionary leadership, and with the assistance of disorientation introduced by the petty-bourgeois organizations, the masses were channeled behind different factions of the ruling class, culminating in the reestablishment of direct military dictatorship under the butcher of Cairo, al-Sisi.
All the alternatives to Marxism, concocted by the representatives of the affluent middle class, have been discredited: The “apolitical” and neo-anarchist Occupy Wall Street movement in the US in 2011 was revealed to be a middle-class movement whose call for a “party of the 99 percent” sought to subordinate the interests of the working class to those of the top 10 percent.
New forms of “left populism” were promoted in Europe, including Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain. Syriza came to power in 2015 and for four years implemented the dictates of the banks. Podemos is now a governing party, in coalition with the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE), which is committed to a right-wing, pro-austerity program. The “Five-Star Movement,” presented as an anti-establishment insurgency, ended up in political alliance with the Italian neo-fascists. Corbynism, which peddled the illusion of a revival of the Labour Party as an instrument of anti-capitalist struggle, proved in the end to be synonymous with political cowardice and prostration before the ruling class. Were Sanders to make his way to the White House, his administration would prove no less impotent.
In Latin America, the “left” bourgeois nationalism that was part of the “Pink Tide”—Lulaism in Brazil, the “Bolivarian Revolution” of Chavez in Venezuela, and Evo Morales in Bolivia—has been shipwrecked by the crisis of world capitalism. Their own austerity and pro-corporate policies prepared the way for a sharp shift to the right, including the rise to power of Bolsonaro in Brazil and the US-backed military coup against Morales in 2019.
The trade unions, which have long served as mechanisms for the suppression of the class struggle, have been exposed as agents of the corporations and the state. In the United States, the struggles of auto workers have been waged in conflict with the corrupt executives of the UAW, under indictment or investigation for taking bribes from the companies and stealing workers’ dues money. The UAW, however, is only the clearest expression of a universal process.
A vast political and social differentiation has taken place between the working class and an international tendency of politics, the pseudo-left, which is based on sections of the affluent upper middle class who purvey the politics of racial, gender and sexual identity. The politics of the upper middle class seeks access to and a redistribution of some of the wealth sloshing about within the top 1 percent. They wallow in their obsessive fixation on the individual, as a means of leveraging “identity” into positions of power and privilege, while ignoring the social interests of the vast majority.
The tasks of the International Committee of the Fourth International
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In his final State of the Union, President Obama discussed the need for our nation to have a “new politics”. He said, “We the People, our Constitution begins with those three simple words, words we’ve come to recognize mean all the people.”
As I sat listening to him, I asked myself “When? When did we decide ‘We the People’ meant All the People?” The Founding Fathers, who owned slaves, referred to Natives as “savages” and never allowed women to vote, did not believe We the People meant all the people. Abraham Lincoln, whose administration enacted atrocities like the hanging of the Dakota 38, the Massacre at Sand Creek and the Long Walk as he ethnically cleansed the states of Minnesota, Colorado and the territory of New Mexico of Native peoples to make way for the Transcontinental Railway, did not believe that ‘We the People’ meant all the People.
As good as the Civil Rights movement was, it did not get us to We the People meaning all the people. President Trump definitely does not believe that We the People means All the People. And Joe Biden, who last week reaffirmed the dehumanizing worldview of the Doctrine of Discovery when he stated that “the most important roles the federal government plays in rebuilding the nation-to-nation relationship is taking land into trust on behalf of tribes”, does not believe that We the People means All the People.
The problem is that our country has never collectively decided that we want to be a nation where We the People includes everyone. And to prove it we continue to nominate candidates who peddle nostalgia. However, in a nation built on racism, sexism and white supremacy, the past is only nostalgic for white, land-owning men.
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