—Ann Coulter
Coulter: Who would have thought that this woman would one day be talking more sense than legions of unhinged liberals?
A system so dangerously troubled that its dominating minority is losing control fast enough to warrant radical message changing to its subjects thereby causing irrationality to rule more blatantly than ever before.
Decent people have always known that poverty is an aspect of reality that should be changed but market forces, god and whatever other supernatural powers could be blamed made it impossible so the only thing to do was to be kind to the poor, maybe pray for them and send an occasional check to charity and all would be as well as possible. But the appalling and growing inequality rampant in a capitalist dominated market system has made poverty so frighteningly obvious among a former middle class sinking dangerously close to that status itself that the information flow must reflect excuses that explain away the social conditions.
Sun spots were once used as a potential rationale to explain the economic forces of a stock market and as such were no more or less logical than the religious-scientific belief in the buying and selling that relies on investments made by a tiny segment of a population, all of which would ultimately create the best possible world for almost everyone. Alleged primitive people who danced around a fire to bring rain or wore animal bones to ward off illness were more in touch with the universe and the powers of nature than many civilized types sporting degrees in quantifiable spectroscopic economic scat gathering who pose and are accepted as experts in market analysis. Living in a time which has seen the inequality gap between humans grow wider than ever in fairly reliable history while trillions of dollars of wealth are spent on warfare and hundreds of billions on pet care is likely to provoke more thought than usual about the alleged wisdom of such a system. Thus, reality tv, american politics, marvel comics and other fantasy productions to keep the remaining solvent sector occupied with the status of special identity groups and kept divided from one another enough to protect the wealthiest from any chance that unified democratic action might threaten their dominating role.
A generation ago conservative anti-Russian-communist fanatics made some liberal types smirk at their backward and narrow-minded political stance but that has now been adopted by progressive anti-Russian-capitalist fanatics swept up in the farce called Russiagate. This dementia-based view finds an American oligarchy of billionaires ruling a minority of the electorate into voting for the capitalist party with two slightly differing factions and calling that “our democracy”. At beating our minds into such mush it now claims that Putin and Russia are somehow responsible for the electoral college and alienated just enough Americans in a disintegrating system to be swept up in fervor for things facebooked next to photos of our dogs, cats and lunch that allegedly “meddled” in our sacred electoral process. A handful of bumbling Russian financial hustlers picked up dumb items from anti-social American media and furthered their entry into semi-empty American heads. OMG! To think that any foreign power in our wonderful globalized economy would have an interest in another nation’s political economic life is so far fetched it makes American meddling in foreign politics seem, uh, fictional? The Russian wino who led that nation into near disaster was a creature of American foreign policy and the Putin regime has led that nation from capitalist total disaster to only regular capitalist disaster, which is far more than can be said about the present American gang and its recent predecessors.
It’s as though the sinking Titanic crew and passengers were forced into concentrating on who the captain was and how many gay Latinos, Jewish transsexuals, white supremacists or black female impersonators were working in the kitchen while the water approached their lungs and all lifeboats had already left. We may not have reached that moment yet but at the rate things are moving and the near complete vanishing of a real American anti-capitalist left, it could be here sooner than anyone might wish. Opposition to Trump is important but really no more so than opposition to any CEO of a major corporation could be, but the business is the problem and not its chief clerk, bookkeeper or toilet cleaner, no matter how personally pinheaded, egomaniacal or TV famous. And Trump is opposed by the ruling power oligarchs of America and was never supposed to be able to gain his position as powerful figurehead with less power than the figures who own him. But as long as this “new left” takes on the work of the “old right”, the conditions of capitalist America will get worse and bring on material tragedies much bigger than a single oaf, or a single oafish identity group, might be able to fathom. Stop Trump’s worst possibilities, of course, but the worst possibilities of murderous, anti-human and perversely anti-social capitalism are far bigger problems for humanity and must be dealt with by a movement that goes far beyond celebrity leadership personalities and deals with political economic substance by creating radical systemic change. At this sad point, what passes for an American left is a major part of the problem and hardly anywhere near offering a solution.
email: fpscott@gmail.com
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Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found
In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” -- acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump -- a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.— Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report
4 comments
Being “center-left” or “liberal” or “progressive” no longer means anything at all. It no longer contains any ideology. It’s just allegiance to one’s tribe, and opposition to all other tribes. Still, I see a silver lining in this cloud, though admittedly it may be just wishful thinking on my part.
There are, or were, some liberals and progressives who did actually believe in some ideology. George Lakoff tried to identify liberal ideology in his 1996 book “Moral Politics.” In a speech around a decade later, he got it down to just one word: He said that =empathy= was the heart of the progressive worldview. Around that same time, Paul Waldman came up with a very appealing one-sentence summary: a progressive is someone who believes “we’re all this together.”
Neither of those men has ever seen himself as a socialist, as far as I am aware. But empathy is not far from solidarity. And Waldman’s sentence is not far from the Wobblies’ “an injury to one is an injury to all.”
Unlike Lakoff and Waldman, most liberals and progressives were not abstact thinkers; they could not have articulated a basic belief system. Nevertheless, they mostly agreed to the same policies as Lakoff and Waldman, and I believe they were still influenced by shared attitudes. To some degree, I think that Lakoff and Waldman were just articulating what a great deal of the center-left were feeling.
And now it is gone. Obama and Clinton have trampled all over those feelings. Sanders was at least partly a progressive, but Obama and Clinton trampled all over him too. Still, I don’t believe that the cynics of the DNC have destroyed all hope. They have merely gotten it lost.
And now the center-left is lost. It is groping around blindly, trying to figure out where it belongs. I have hope that some of it will find a place in the true left.
Many people have given definitions of “liberal,” but I like Peter Camejo’s best. He said a liberal “likes capitalism, but not what capitalism does.” I’m not certain what Camejo had in mind, but here is my interpretation: Liberals have empathy for their fellow human beings, but they have been fooled by capitalist propaganda. They like the things that they mistakenly believe capitalism does; they do not like the things that capitalism actually does. So their heart is in the right place, but they’ve got their heads up their asses.
And what I’m hoping is that, now that they’re wandering around lost, some of them may finally be getting their heads into the right place. So I’ll keep preaching to them, hoping to lead some of them into the light.
ERIC SCHECHTER HAS SENT THE FOLLOWING COMMENT:
Being “center-left” or “liberal” or “progressive” no longer means anything at all. It no longer contains any ideology. It’s just allegiance to one’s tribe, and opposition to all other tribes. Still, I see a silver lining in this cloud, though admittedly it may be just wishful thinking on my part.
There are, or were, some liberals and progressives who did actually believe in some ideology. George Lakoff tried to identify liberal ideology in his 1996 book “Moral Politics.” In a speech around a decade later, he got it down to just one word: He said that =empathy= was the heart of the progressive worldview. Around that same time, Paul Waldman came up with a very appealing one-sentence summary: a progressive is someone who believes “we’re all this together.”
Neither of those men has ever seen himself as a socialist, as far as I am aware. But empathy is not far from solidarity. And Waldman’s sentence is not far from the Wobblies’ “an injury to one is an injury to all.”
Unlike Lakoff and Waldman, most liberals and progressives were not abstact thinkers; they could not have articulated a basic belief system. Nevertheless, they mostly agreed to the same policies as Lakoff and Waldman, and I believe they were still influenced by shared attitudes. To some degree, I think that Lakoff and Waldman were just articulating what a great deal of the center-left were feeling.
And now it is gone. Obama and Clinton have trampled all over those feelings. Sanders was at least partly a progressive, but Obama and Clinton trampled all over him too. Still, I don’t believe that the cynics of the DNC have destroyed all hope. They have merely gotten it lost.
And now the center-left is lost. It is groping around blindly, trying to figure out where it belongs. I have hope that some of it will find a place in the true left.
Many people have given definitions of “liberal,” but I like Peter Camejo’s best. He said a liberal “likes capitalism, but not what capitalism does.” I’m not certain what Camejo had in mind, but here is my interpretation: Liberals have empathy for their fellow human beings, but they have been fooled by capitalist propaganda. They like the things that they mistakenly believe capitalism does; they do not like the things that capitalism actually does. So their heart is in the right place, but they’ve got their heads up their asses.
And what I’m hoping is that, now that they’re wandering around lost, some of them may finally be getting their heads into the right place. So I’ll keep preaching to them, hoping to lead some of them into the light.
“Alleged primitive people who danced around a fire to bring rain or wore animal bones to ward off illness were more in touch with the universe and the powers of nature than many civilized types sporting degrees in quantifiable spectroscopic economic scat gathering who pose and are accepted as experts in market analysis.” – Spot on the money!
We remain irrationally tied to collective mythologies that posit nonsense such as: “the miracle of the market,” “the invisible hand (of the market) that raises all boats,” “unchecked individual greed promotes collective good,” “unlimited economic expansion can exist on a finite planet,” and essentially enshrining “the divine rights of corporations.” Reading and interpreting today’s “stock market numbers” is essentially the modern equivalent of predicting the future by “reading chicken entrails” or “tea leaves.” Capitalism is a vastly destructive mythology who time must come to an end if a habitable planet is to survive.
The *true* left has been intentionally marginalized for decades now, as the only potential force which could bring the capitalists to their knees, and then capitalism to its grave. “It’s not ‘the left’ trying to take over the world and shut down free speech and all that other bad stuff – it’s ‘the right’!!” –
http://www.rudemacedon.ca/vgi/backgrounders/collectivist%20plot%20omg.html