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Rio Grande Valley Republicans
SHORT
CUTS
Rio Grande Valley Republicans
Expecting 2008,
Democrats got 2016 again, an unnervingly close
election that Joe Biden appears to have won by
razor-thin margins in a few states. If the blue wave
has proved almost as illusionary as the blue wall four
years ago, it is because centrist Democrats, as Bernie
Sanders and Elizabeth Warren constantly warned during
the primary debates, have refused to learn the lessons
of 2016. Biden’s campaign was only a tweaked version
of Hillary Clinton’s failed playbook.
This was illustrated
most forcefully by Republican gains among Latino
voters in several states. It is not particularly
surprising that wealthy Cuban and Venezuelan exiles,
screeching about communists on the doorstep, managed
to cut deeply into into the Democratic margin in
Miami. But what happened in the seven major Texas
border counties whose population of 2.6 million is 90
per cent Mexican in origin (Tejanos)?
The national party has many neglected or abandoned
constituencies, including Puerto Rico, Indian Country
and Appalachia, but southern Texas has a unique
strategic significance. This was acknowledged two days
before the election when the chair of the Democratic
National Committee, Tom Perez, visited the McAllen
area, at the southernmost tip of the state. ‘The road
to the White House,’ he declared, ‘goes through South
Texas. Remember, Beto lost by about 200,000 votes in
2018. We can make up these votes alone in the Valley.
If we take Latino turnout from 40 per cent to 50 per
cent, that’s enough to flip Texas.’
But the Biden
campaign failed to pave the road to power with
campaign resources or to pay attention to local
issues. Continuing a long tradition of electoral
negligence, the national Democrats were confident that
Biden would enlarge Clinton’s winning margin in the
region even if they didn’t divert funds or personnel
from the all-important suburban battlefields. The
border, after all, is one of the poorest regions in
the country, with a population routinely vilified in
Republican propaganda as aliens and rapists. In any
case, the polls were predicting historic Democratic
victories; a blue wave along the Rio Grande was
assured.
As the fantasy of
great gains in Texas dissipated, Democrats were
stunned to discover that a high turnout had instead
propelled a Trump surge along the border. In the three
Rio Grande Valley counties (the agricultural corridor
from Brownsville to Rio Grande City), which Clinton
had carried by 39 per cent, Biden achieved a margin of
only 15 per cent. More than half of the population of
Starr County, an ancient battlefield of the Texas
farmworkers’ movement, lives in poverty, yet Trump won
47 per cent of the vote there, an incredible gain of
28 points from 2016. Further up river he actually
flipped 82 per cent Latino Val Verde County (county
seat: Del Rio) and increased his vote in Maverick
County (Eagle Pass) by 24 points and Webb County
(Laredo) by 15 points. The Democratic congressman
Vincente Gonzalez (McAllen) had to fight down to the
wire to save the seat he won by 21 per cent in 2018.
Even in El Paso, a hotbed of Democratic activism,
Trump made a six point gain. Considering South Texas
as a whole, the Democrats had great hopes of winning
the 21st Congressional
District, which connects San Antonio and Austin, as
well as the 78 per cent Latino 23rd Congressional
District, which is anchored in the western suburbs of
San Antonio but encompasses a vast swathe of southwest
Texas. In both cases, the Republicans won fairly
easily.
The explanation? As
Congressman Filemón Vela (Brownsville) was quoted as
saying in the Valley
Morning Star, a Harlingen newspaper, ‘I think
there was no Democratic national organisational effort
in South Texas and the results showed. The visits are
nice, but without a planned media and grassroots
strategy you just can’t sway voters. When you take
voters for granted like national Democrats have done
in South Texas for forty years, there are consequences
to pay.’
In the end it was the
economy that sunk hopes of a Democratic landslide. It
was a gigantic mistake to make the election a
plebiscite on Trump’s bungling of the pandemic without
making an all-out effort to convince voters that a
Biden administration would sustain family incomes and
small businesses until Covid was defeated. The 2.2
trillion dollar relief bill passed by the House should
have been the basis for an aggressive campaign, but
the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, allowed the
Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, to take it
hostage and Biden, mumbling through the two
presidential debates, never really crusaded to free
it. Meanwhile, the third-quarter employment figures,
however misleading, gave Trump an unexpected boost;
they were proof, he claimed, of the shining future
ahead. A new national lockdown would send that
‘recovery’ to hell. The Democrats underestimated the
resonance this argument had with the shop-owning and
entrepreneurial middle classes facing extinction or
digestion by Amazon. It wasn’t so hard to convince bar
owners, building contractors, franchise managers,
small manufacturers and the like that closures were a
greater evil than half a million more Covid deaths.
(This is, of course, a global phenomenon: just look at
the role played by hysterical small business owners in
the violent protests against new lockdowns in Western
Europe.)
As for working
people, forced every day to choose between income and
health, Biden’s vow to put science in charge of the
pandemic was easily spun by Republicans as proof of a
economic apocalypse overseen by the dread Dr Fauci.
The Democratic counter-response was weak, in part
because the union movement had even less prominence in
the campaign than in 2016. The uncontrolled spread of
Covid restricted the door-to-door canvassing that has
always been the contribution of union members to
electoral battles. The Biden campaign did give greater
emphasis than Clinton to workers’ rights, collective
bargaining and the $15 minimum wage, but it broadcast
the same empty messages about job creation and the
future of work. ‘Millions of green energy jobs’ is an
abstraction that utterly fails to connect to the
concrete circumstances of Rustbelt and inner-city
communities. Mainstream Democrats have had more than a
generation to respond to the simple question: what
will you do to increase job opportunities here in Erie
(or Warren, Dubuque, Lorraine, Wilkes-Barre and so
on)? They have never offered a serious response.
Concrete solutions would involve geographically
targeted public investment, control over capital
flight and financial outflows, and, above all, a
massive expansion of public employment. These are
avenues most Democrats are too terrified to go down.
Since Reagan,
Republicans have always fought to turn institutional
power against the Democrats, pushing them onto
unfavourable terrain and disorganising their base. In
winning the House Speakership in 1994, Newt Gingrich
introduced the ruthless style of political combat and
absolute oppositionism that McConnell has so
exquisitely refined. The election of 2010 was an even
more important turning point. That year the
Republicans mobilised the full power of the network of
billionaire donors, regional policy centres and
political action committees that they had been
building for thirty years to storm state legislatures
and governors’ mansions across the heartland and
sunbelt. They won 700 legislative seats and flipped
twenty state legislative chambers, numbers that grew
during the Obama years. Since in most states
legislatures remain responsible for redistricting, the
Republicans ruthlessly gerrymandered state and
congressional seats to enshrine their majorities.
That’s why winning back state legislative majorities
in this census year should have been the highest
Democratic priority after the White House and Senate.
The most important target was Texas, where Democrats
were confident they could take the nine additional
seats needed to control the House. In the event, they
didn’t win any, so Republicans will be free to conduct
a new gerrymander.
The United States, as
pundits hourly remind us, is now cleaved into two
almost equal-sized political universes. But power
abhors stalemates and clearly in the present world the
evolution is towards differential experiments in
post-fascist oligarchy and pseudo-democracy. A weak
and court-enchained Biden-Harris White House, built on
the betrayal of progressives and subservient to a
donor class of Silicon Valley and Wall Street
billionaires, will face a new depression without the
wind of popular enthusiasm at its back. Where does
this point except to total destruction in the 2022
midterm and the further triumph of the new darkness?
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Among the Ruins of Victory - Regeneration Magazine
The goal of moving the Democratic Party
to the left is a mirage conjured up from the fevered mind of those
dying of thirst. There’s absolutely no incentive for the Democrats
to embrace a progressive agenda after this election. Why would
they? They were barely able to squeak through with a moderate at
the top of the ticket. Electorally, the left is a liability for
them. There’s no substantial evidence on behalf of the claim that
Bernie would have won: it is a fervent wish offered up to the
universe, substituting itself for a dispassionate assessment of
the balance of forces. The Democrats have perfected the act of
housebreaking their internal opposition in a way the Republicans
never could. Worse, due to the razor-thin margins likely to be
involved going forward, liberal pressure against “spoilers” and
dissidents to the neoliberal line will only be ratcheted up from
here on out. Don’t vote for the neolib? You’re a traitor.
https://regenerationmag.org/among-the-ruins-of-victory/
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Videos: NYC Erupts In Cheers After Biden
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» How Could 70 Million Still Have Voted for Trump?
Media pundits and others
have been deeply perplexed as to why so many Americans in this
election–70 million in fact– nonetheless voted for Trump.
But it’s not all that
difficult to understand. There are 3 major explanations: One
economic. One health. And the third, and most important, a matter
of culture and racism manipulated by clever politicians for the
past quarter century at least.
The first
explanation—economics—is that the red states (Trump’s base) did
not ‘suffer’ as much economically from the recession as have (and
are) the blue states and big urban areas. The red states shut down
only in part and for just a couple weeks then quickly reopened as
early as May. A few hot spots in New Orleans and Florida were
quickly contained. By reopening quickly they economically
minimized the negative effects of the shutdowns and quarantines.
They would eventually pay the price in health terms for early
reopening, but they clearly chose to trade off later health
problems for early economic gains. At the same time they quickly
reopened, the red pro-Trump states still received the economic
benefits of the March-April Cares Act bailout that pumped more
than a $trillion into the economy benefitting households
directly–i.e. this was the $670 billion in small business PPP
grants, the $350 billion in extra unemployment benefits, the
$1,200 checks, and other direct spending on hospitals and health
providers. The Trump states got their full share of the bailout,
even if they didn’t need it as much after having reopened early.
Finally, if Trump supporters lived in the farm belt sector of Red
State America, they additionally got $70B more in direct subsidies
and payments from Trump that was designed to placate the farm belt
during Trump’s disastrous China trade war. That’s 3 main sources
of added income the red states as a general rule received that the
blue states, coasts, big cities elsewhere did not get. In short
the economic impact of this recession was therefore far less
severe in the geographic areas of the greatest concentration of
Trump’s political support.
https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/how-could-70-million-still-have-voted-for-trump/
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Donald Trump Lost the Election. He’s Losing His Party, Too. | The New Republic
https://newrepublic.com/article/160126/donald-trump-lost-2020-election-losing-republican-party-tooDonald Trump Lost the Election. He’s Losing His Party, Too. The Republicans’ retreat from the president isn’t happening for the right reasons. But it is happening. Let’s be clear about what we are seeing. President Trump is doing all that he can to prevent ballots against him from being counted in an election he has now lost. He and his surrogates are encouraging his supporters, some of whom are armed, to disrupt the final stages of the electoral process. Though his actual legal cases being brought in defense of his claims are weak, his surrogates are directly urging judges he has he appointed to back him anyway. If it were another country, few would hesitate to call this what it is: an attempted coup. But spirits are a bit higher than one would expect given the situation as understood in the abstract: Some protesters have taken to the streets to defend the count, yes, but far more people have contented themselves with roasting the president on the internet and on television, rightfully confident that the coup will fail. Why won’t it work? Part of the answer is that the president and his immediate political circle are comically lazy and inept. By their own recognition, they lack even a James Baker–like figure among themselves who might competently manage the administration’s lawsuits; they simply don’t have it in them to pull off what would be one of the most extraordinary swindles in American history. But a larger part of the answer is that the president’s party and its officeholders in state and local governments are uninterested in materially helping him. Those who’ve spent the last four years breathlessly awaiting the moment the Republican Party would meaningfully retreat from Trump should sit up and pay attention. This is it. It is here. It’s not happening as visibly and dramatically as many imagined it might, or for the reasons many hoped it would. But it is happening. In the past few days, condemnations of Trump’s claims about voter fraud or defenses of the electoral process have come not only from Trump critics like Senators Ben Sasse, Susan Collins, and Mitt Romney, but figures who’ve generally been more defensive of the president like former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, as well as swing state governors Doug Ducey of Arizona and Mike Dewine of Ohio. Senator Mitch McConnell, who’s on the cusp of returning to the chamber as majority leader in January, has also pushed back. “Claiming you’ve won the election,” he told reporters on Wednesday, “is different from finishing the counting.” And in Pennsylvania, where President-elect Joe Biden’s lead is growing and conspiracy theories are flying, the state Senate’s Republican majority leader, Jake Corman, shut down fears that the legislature might circumvent the voters’ wishes and award the state’s electors to Trump. A different and more fascinating story is playing out within conservative media. As one might expect, plenty of figures are taking to Fox News to defend Trump’s claims that shenanigans are afoot. “What we’ve been saying the last three days is outrageous,” Senator Ted Cruz told Sean Hannity in an interview Thursday. “By throwing the observers out, by clouding the vote counting in a shroud of darkness, they are setting the stage to potentially steal an election.” In another, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich talked up sending unnamed conspirators to prison. “My hope is that president Trump will lead the millions of Americans who understand exactly what’s going on,” he said. “The Philadelphia machine is corrupt, that the Atlanta machine is corrupt. The machine in Detroit is corrupt, and they’re trying to steal the presidency and we should not allow them to do that. First of all, under federal law, we should lock up the people who are breaking the law.” But all this huffing and puffing is happening alongside some careful triangulation on the part of Fox’s hosts themselves. On Friday, Laura Ingraham made a pass at calming Trump and his backers down. “I’m not conceding anything tonight, by the way,” she said. “But losing, if that’s what happens, is awful. But president Trump’s legacy will only become more significant if he focuses on moving the country forward. And then, the love and respect his supporters feel for him? It’s only going to grow stronger.” And in an opening monologue Thursday, Tucker Carlson ventured out on the same middle path most Republicans will probably go down rhetorically. Whether or not they’ve actually stolen the election, he argued, arrogant Democrats, the media, and social media companies have given Trump supporters ample reason to doubt the integrity of the counting process and the legitimacy of Biden’s victory. “If you cared about the country and its future, you wouldn’t force Donald Trump’s voters to believe this,” he said. “You wouldn’t force them to take you on your word. Instead, you would show them, you would convince them. You would pull back. You’d resist hasty calls. You’d make certain that we got to the bottom of any credible claim of fraud. Not all the claims are credible, but some are and you’d care.” Of course, as Carlson neglected to mention, the figures in the media Trump and his supporters have accused of making hasty calls include the coastal elites at Fox News. The network called Arizona remarkably early for Biden, which shocked Trump’s camp enough that Rupert Murdoch was phoned immediately and asked to have the network reverse the announcement. He refused. And that refusal tells us all we might want to know about where things stand between Trump, the establishment of the Republican Party, and the conservative press. The powers that be know, on some level, that Trump is finished absent a set of belated miracles. The task now is winding things down without acknowledging that Trump failed and alienating his base. The advantage of the Carlson approach is that it marks Trump’s rhetoric on fraud as valid without explicitly endorsing his specific claims, allowing Republicans who want to preserve a veneer of respectability after he’s gone. Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson is among those showing the rest of the party how it’s to be done. “It’s very unfortunate that no matter who wins, the other half of America is not going to view this as a particularly legitimate election,” he told reporters on Friday. “That’s a real problem. I’m not saying it’s legitimate or not. I’m saying this process has been set up where people are not going to view it as legitimate. And that’s a real problem.” But it’s clearly a “problem” many Republicans don’t intend to do a real thing about. And that has Trump’s circle visibly alarmed. “Where are Republicans!” Eric Trump tweeted Thursday. “Have some backbone. Fight against this fraud. Our voters will never forget you if your sheep!” He’s not wrong. It seems like a certainty that where candidates stood this week on alleged fraud and how vehemently they defended Trump in general will be major issues in Republican primary contests moving forward, especially if Trump sticks around the political scene to whine about his supposed mistreatment. But the fact that the party appears to be moving forward at all is a grim reality for Trump. As Republican ambivalence about shoring up his campaign with more coronavirus relief already suggested, Trump’s services are no longer required. The GOP is ending his term with a 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court and conservative justices up and down the rest of the federal judiciary, a massive tax cut, an end to Obamacare’s individual mandate, years of regulatory rollbacks, and an infusion of reactionary energy. They evidently don’t expect much more than this from a Republican presidency. Trump failed to articulate a sizeable second term agenda over the course of his campaign, and the conservative movement’s leading lights and intellectual institutions didn’t make a real effort to articulate one for him. They’ve already gotten what they needed, and anxieties about Democrats sweeping their gains and power away with a progressive agenda under Biden have been quelled substantially by the Republican victories in the Senate. That’s not to say Republicans are set to spend the years ahead in a state of relaxed contentment. Things are about to get messy internally. Moderates hoping that the party can be rehabilitated in the eyes of centrists and winnable Democrats will want to turn the page from Trump. An ambitious cadre of reactionary populists would like to seize his mantle. Both factions have an interest in Trump fading away; to their certain disappointment, neither he nor his biggest fans in the Republican electorate are likely to. But Trump is on his way out of the White House. Whether he realizes it or not, his party has already packed his bags.
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(posted to FB by Cedric Bedaitsch.)
This is a long post and probably should have been in a blog, but here it is. Read it or not; it's your choice! In my view, Trump represented a fraction of American capital that had it's base in capitalists whose primary source of accumulation lay in the domestic market: this included small businesses as well as larger real estate enterprises, developers, hospitality operators, retailers, residual manufacturers for local consumption - but mainly in the commercial / trading sectors. This fraction - once described by the sociologist Oliver Cromwell Cox as "Main Street" has always been nativist, socially reactionary and isolationist. Their focus is inward, their political heritage runs back to the "Know Nothing Party" of the early nineteenth century. Conspiracy theory (because it is an effort to appropriate some of the insights of class analysis without admitting the - to them - scandalous insights of class analysis) has been their ideological mainstay, as documented in Richard Hofstader's old but excellent study of the paranoid in American politics. Since the GFC [global financial crisis] this has steadily merged with overtly fascist ideological currents to become a form of American fascism which has a lot of similarity to the kind of Herrenvolk democracy of settler states like the old Apartheid South Africa. (No surprise really, because the underlying historical fact of the US is it's founding as a settler and slave colony and its settler decolonisation as opposed to decolonisation by the conquered - a very similar history to South Africa). Since the GFC the world has seen a remarkable and deeply disturbing reappearance of fascist ideology and tendencies. These tendencies have only been partially successful in gaining and holding power (except to date in Brazil), although they have exerted ideological influence on the more 'traditional' conservative regimes and parties. But the presence of proto - or neo - fascist in office in the US is and was of enormous significance and encouragement to these forces of reaction. The only reason that liberal democracy remains in place - although much weakened and enervated compared to say the 1970s - is that the larger capitalist class (more on them below) still see more advantages in it's continuation and in neo liberalism than the kind of protectionist beggar your neighbour economics of the fascist alt right. I consider fascism an enormously dangerous and reactionary trend and I am overjoyed to see them get a kick in the goolies with the vote going against Trump. That said, I don't think it is over. I have always argued that Trump will not go quietly and do his utmost to stay in on. This includes the string of legal challenges, a never ceasing media publicity campaign of refusing to admit defeat and questioning the validity of the election. It doesn't matter is these are silly, poorly conceived and defeated. He has increased his support base to 70 million people. And they will believe him. At some point he will call on them to act - for the 'militias' and other armed thugs to take to the streets. These are dangerous people. It may happen earlier in conjunction with pressure to override the popular vote by the college. Indeed if enough chaos can be caused and the college frightened enough into some electors being 'faithless' it could still end up in the supreme court. And an argument could be made there that unrest and chaos necessitate a quick decision to calm the situation would aid an awarding of the election to Trump. My point is that it's not over yet. This may not happen in the immediate future. It may only happen after the inauguration of Biden as a rebellion against what is perceived as an illegitimate government. Indeed even if Trump does go sullenly, it still won't be over. 70 million supporters won't melt away. The election loss will become their version of the "stab in the back" myth of the German right during the 1920s - the moment when their victory was 'stolen' from them by "November criminals". It will produce an intransigent, increasingly violent, increasingly irrational and revanchist force in US politics that will poison the well for years to come. Ideologically, it will be populist - taking on the anti imperialist language of the left, opposing the awful establishment of globalists, liberals and everyone they literally hate and want dead - and thus attract support. Conspiracy theory was always the socialism of fools and this will be no different. One of the interesting features of this American form of fascism is it's anti establishment rhetoric. In international affairs Trump has been quite happy to tear up alliances, or use them in huckstering fashion to extract money from allies, to reduce troop presences, to deescalate tensions with the so called enemies of the US (Russia, North Korea for example), to not intervene militarily, to cut back on the drone murder campaign. These actions all have their origins in the isolationist tendencies of the US right, as mentioned above. They have of course been welcome to some on the anti imperialist side of politics; and I have met a number of intelligent and well informed people with strong anti imperialist heritages who have been swayed by these facts to become Trump supporters. Often this has then been coupled with another anti imperialist heritage - deep and abiding suspicion of the actions and accountability (more correctly non-accountability) of the US intelligence and security agencies, Sadly this crosses over easily into the conspiracy theory of the "Deep State" and from there to an acceptance of the 'stolen election' theory. Which brings me to the question of how that cross over is possible. Once again I go back to an analysis of the composition of the US capitalist class. I mentioned the domestic market aligned fraction that underpins Trumpism above, and mentioned Cox's description of them as "Main Street". Well, Cox also made the point that "Main Street" was often in conflict with "Wall Street" which in his analysis was that fraction of capital with much stronger ties to the world-market - large export manufacturers (which still exist as US headquartered multinationals, although the actual manufacture occurs elsewhere), finance and banking, and the transportation and logistics sector. These sectors are all tied to extracting surplus value along the entire lengths of the world spanning commodity chains, intent on standardising economic regimes to average down the costs of movement, processing and marketing while preserving strong differentials in wages. This is the fraction of capital that champions globalism, neo liberalism and when necessary imperialist adventures. And their interests in the US have been championed in the modern era by the Democratic Party, more so than the Republicans. So it is easy to see how a principled political opposition to US imperialism and neo liberalism can - in the absence of a strong political movement that is able to articulate and fight for working class interests using a proper class analysis of domestic and international events (and I most emphatically do not mean the kind of 'tankie-ism that pervades most left sects in which geopolitics substitutes for class analysis , and state regimes for classes, as was evident in the tragic betrayal of the Syrian people by so much of the 'anti imperialist' western left) - become absorbed in the neo fascism of Trumpism. So while I rejoice in the potential booting of the fascist Trump, I take no pleasure in the election of Biden who represents a return to US imperialism, military interventionism, drone murders and global neo liberalism.
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US election: women, the young, the working class, the cities and ethnic minorities get rid of Trump – Michael Roberts Blog
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Jim Brash
The Green Party received just under 400 thousand votes to my knowledge so far, while the Libertarian Party received 1.2 million votes. So the party of AnCaps, conspiracy theorists, hyper-neoliberals, and former GOPers received 3 times as many votes as the greens and was on all 50 state ballots. They faced no challenges to their ballot access, while the greens were kicked off of a couple of ballots and didn't have what it takes to get themselves back on those ballots successfully. Those states where they were kicked off were battleground/swing states.
No one expected the greens to reach the promised land of 5%, but this showing by Hawkins/Walker was piss poor. I think they might have done as well as Stein 2012 and slightly better than McKinney 2008. When the high-water mark for the organization remains Nader 2000, who was on fewer ballots than Stein 2016, there needs to be a critical analysis of where you've been and where you're headed as an organization. One former organizer for this year's campaign said to me through Twitter that their campaign was mismanaged almost from the start. The person heading the campaign has been a polarizing figure within the GP for years.
The Greens are not good at recruiting people of color (as a cofounder and former co-chair of the GPNJ Black Caucus, I would have some insight). It is also not good at recruiting workers outside of its environmentalist/ecosocialist circle. It's done much better with recruiting from the LGBTQIA community and white women, but not women in general. As a former green candidate and registered green, I think it's time to build something different.
Been having discussions with a few folks about an all-Black or all-people of color formation in New Jersey's big cities. Also, I've had a few conversations about a new progressive party at the local level. Something has to change, be it how membership is defined, possibly modifying the decentralized structure of state/local parties, changing the leadership at the national level, for me to believe the Green Party is salvageable after this. There are over 500,000 elected officials in the United States this year. The Greens have had under 200 throughout its entire existence. And most of those have been in California and a few other states.
Not sure how you should measure the success of a left third party in the US in the 21st century.
In solidarity,
Jim Brash
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Re: ‘This isn’t over!’: Trump supporters refuse to accept defeat
I think comrade fkalosar's use of the term "mackerel-snapping" is a
deeply offensive anti-Catholic slur. In my opinion, it's not what
Marxists should be doing.
[As a working-class Catholic kid on scholarship to Yale many years
ago, that's where I first heard the term, coming from the privileged
mouths of the ruling-class assholes being groomed for leadership. It
was only one of many reasons why I abandoned Yale and the
scholarship after two years.]
Mike
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Re: Trump can issue pardons
I hope he pardon Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, but I doubt he will. More likely that he will step down before January 20th if he can be pardoned by Pence.
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Re: ‘This isn’t over!’: Trump supporters refuse to accept defeat
Sorry -- I think even members of the "non-existent" left have to push hard to move the government in the right direction --- think of what occurred between 1954 to 1965 in terms of improving life for black Americans --- NEITHER political party wanted to deal with this issue [Taylor Branch's book PARTING THE WATERS makes clear how much John Kennedy resented being pushed by black activists] but they were forced to ....We don't need to watch Biden fail to make important changes (in fighting COVID, in cushioning the blows on the working class from the economic downturn) --- we need to be part of the coalition pushing ....
Maybe when that mackerel-snapping corrupt parasite Biden tries to cozy up to his beloved "good Republicans" at the expense of the Left, these shitsniffers will tell him and them where to stuff it. This could lead to the upsetting of any number of Establishment applecarts--not good news for the nonexistent left, but maybe fun to watch as the blood runs slowly out of one's veins into the warm bath.
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Re: Is marxmail a good forum for basic questions about Marxism?
John's comments were completely convincing -- perhaps one of the most interesting ways to make this clear is to think about Professional Athletes who are (in many cases) millionaires themselves.
Consider NBA or Major League Baseball super stars --- the television contracts mean that the REVENUE FLOW dwarfs the incomes of those "millionaire" players. When Major League Baseball was on strike, President Bill Clinton issued a "plague on both your houses" statement that obscured how much surplus value the MLB players produced for the owners --- calling the strike a "fight between two groups of millionaires" --
First of all, there are (younger, not star) MLB players who are not (yet) millionaires -- but more importantly, the owners are BILLIONAIRES not Millionaires ---
A lot of Major League Baseball teams "report" losses --- Andrew Zimbalist in BASEBALL and BILLIONS has shown that this is the result of FANCY accounting tricks --- in Maxist terms, MLB players produce astronomical amounts of surplus value for the owners.
(MIke Meeropol)
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Re: Did the United States use biological weapons?
don't know what NIcholson says since don't have access to Globe & Mail
but this source may be of interest:
The United States and Biological Warfare: Secrets from the Early Cold
War and Korea
by Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman
Indiana University Press, 1998
toggle quoted messageShow quoted text
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Replace:
"Much hope had been invested in the Latin American ‘Pink Tide’ but it faded after Hugo Chavez’s 2013 death."
By:
"Much hope had been invested in the Latin American ‘Pink Tide’ but it suffered major setbacks after Hugo Chavez’s 2013 death. In Venezuela the Maduro government survives, but is under
enormous pressure from the US economic blockade, which causes severe hardship to the people. In Bolivia the Movement Towards Socialism has returned to government through an election after being overthrown by a coup, but will also face severe pressure from
US imperialism and its local allies."
Chris
Slee
toggle quoted messageShow quoted text
From: marxmail@groups.io <marxmail@groups.io> on behalf of Patrick Bond <pbond@...>
Sent: Sunday, 8 November 2020 5:00 PM
To: marxmail@groups.io <marxmail@groups.io>
Subject: Re: [marxmail] What Next?
(For an obscure article about BRICS subimperialism, two Brazilian comrades and I were just trying to quickly sum up the probable shift; does this capture it?)
Joe Biden’s election as U.S. president brings respite from a world threatened by Donald Trump’s climate-denialist, dictator-coddling, xenophobic, racist, misogynist, rules-breaking regime, at first blush. On second thought, 2021 will also initiate an unwelcome
restoration of legitimacy to Western imperialism akin to Barack Obama’s rule. Biden’s (2020) recent
Foreign Affairs article began by stressing how since 2017, “the international system that the United States so carefully constructed is coming apart at the seams.” In reconstructing imperialism, Biden may draw upon a legislative and public-advocacy record
dating to the 1980s based upon consistent service to several internationally-ambitious circuits of U.S. capital:
· financial, e.g. through supporting bankruptcy ‘reform’, austerity in social programs, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act deregulating Wall Street, and unprecedented financial sector bailouts;
· merchant and agri-corporate, when promoting trade and ‘investor rights’ deals;
· technology, through unleashing Big Data surveillance;
· medical and insurance, when favoring Intellectual Property and opposing public healthcare financing;
· fossil fuel, given that his climate policy will resurrect Obama’s, based on insufficient emissions reductions, ongoing oil and gas drilling and pipeline transport, a refusal to pay the U.S. climate debt, and renewed reliance upon carbon markets; and
· the Military Industrial Complex – for Biden supported every war since the 1980s, leading the authoritative insider journal Defense One to celebrate: “Biden may not radically change the nation’s military, deviate from the era’s so-called great power
competition, or even slash the bottom line of the Pentagon’s $700 billion budget” (Benjamin and Davies 2020).
What will stand in opposition to a Biden-administration imperialism, whose toxic ideology only replaces Trump’s ‘paleoconservative’ nationalism with the Obama-style fusion of neoliberalism and neoconservatism? Much hope had been invested in the Latin American
‘Pink Tide’ but it faded after Hugo Chavez’s 2013 death. Since, then, notwithstanding serious crises, the Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa (BRICS) network has been of central interest in 21st century international political economy.
ETC ETC
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Re: Trump can issue pardons
He could pardon himself, one supposes.
I doubt if that will be necessary--Biden will no doubt offer him a blanket pardon for all offenses with which he might ever be charged anywhere ever, if only he'll agree to leave the White House quietly. Then we'll be treated to the spectacle of the US Atty General's Office--probably headed by the unspeakable frmr Gov Cuomo--fighting for Trump against Cy Vance in court. Reconciliation, don't you know? Bringing us all together? So Christian.
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Re: Are knowledge workers part of the proletariat?
As a lifelong knowledge worker--mostly a technical writer, only marginally a software developer, though also, at times, God forgive me, a Systems Analyst, Media Manager, and (sob!) a Business Analyst --I'd love to know the answer to that one.
I've been informed by one self-identified "communist revolutionary" that I'm not a "politically unreliable petty-bourgeois intellectual element" but rather a "concerned citizen"--apparently OK with the RCP back in the oughts; and more recently by an even more exalted World's Revolutionary Answer-All Eight Ball that I am a "bullshit worker" who must be eliminated.
My conclusion: everybody's an asshole. It's too bad. Capitalism is headed for the bit-bucket. Socialism would be such a good idea.
Actually, I really liked the "concerned citizen" thing, and was heartbroken to learn it's been dialectically transformed of late into a death sentence. Such are the stern imperatives.
Keep your powder dry.
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(For an obscure article about BRICS subimperialism, two Brazilian
comrades and I were just trying to quickly sum up the probable
shift; does this capture it?)
Joe Biden’s election as U.S. president brings respite from a
world threatened by Donald Trump’s climate-denialist,
dictator-coddling, xenophobic, racist, misogynist, rules-breaking
regime, at first blush. On second thought, 2021 will also initiate
an unwelcome restoration of legitimacy to Western imperialism akin
to Barack Obama’s rule. Biden’s (2020) recent Foreign Affairs
article began by stressing how since 2017, “the international
system that the United States so carefully constructed is coming
apart at the seams.” In reconstructing imperialism, Biden may draw
upon a legislative and public-advocacy record dating to the 1980s
based upon consistent service to several internationally-ambitious
circuits of U.S. capital:
· financial, e.g. through supporting bankruptcy ‘reform’,
austerity in social programs, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act
deregulating Wall Street, and unprecedented financial sector
bailouts;
· merchant and agri-corporate, when promoting trade and
‘investor rights’ deals;
· technology, through unleashing Big Data surveillance;
· medical and insurance, when favoring Intellectual Property
and opposing public healthcare financing;
· fossil fuel, given that his climate policy will resurrect
Obama’s, based on insufficient emissions reductions, ongoing oil
and gas drilling and pipeline transport, a refusal to pay the U.S.
climate debt, and renewed reliance upon carbon markets; and
· the Military Industrial Complex – for Biden supported
every war since the 1980s, leading the authoritative insider
journal Defense One to celebrate: “Biden may not radically change
the nation’s military, deviate from the era’s so-called great
power competition, or even slash the bottom line of the Pentagon’s
$700 billion budget” (Benjamin and Davies 2020).
What will stand in opposition to a Biden-administration
imperialism, whose toxic ideology only replaces Trump’s
‘paleoconservative’ nationalism with the Obama-style fusion of
neoliberalism and neoconservatism? Much hope had been invested in
the Latin American ‘Pink Tide’ but it faded after Hugo Chavez’s
2013 death. Since, then, notwithstanding serious crises, the
Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa (BRICS) network has been of
central interest in 21st century international political economy.
ETC ETC
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Who's beating the drum for the Dems?
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Re: ‘This isn’t over!’: Trump supporters refuse to accept defeat
Maybe when that mackerel-snapping corrupt parasite Biden tries to cozy up to his beloved "good Republicans" at the expense of the Left, these shitsniffers will tell him and them where to stuff it. This could lead to the upsetting of any number of Establishment applecarts--not good news for the nonexistent left, but maybe fun to watch as the blood runs slowly out of one's veins into the warm bath.
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Re: Is marxmail a good forum for basic questions about Marxism?
Comrade,
If someone takes part of what you earn and/or you can be fired then you are a member of the working class, Doesn't matter how much or how little that you make. Here is Marx on this description of who are working class as not defined by amount of income::
Or when speaking of merchants he is even clearer about how class is not determined by the quantity of one's income but of its qualitity, i.e. how is it that this income is obtained:
“In order to share in the mass of
surplus-value, to expand the value of his advance as capital, the
commercial capitalist need not employ wage-workers. If his business
and capital are small, he may be the only worker in it. He is paid
with that portion of the profit which falls to him through the
difference between the purchase price paid by him for commodities and
their actual price of production.
But, on the other hand, the profit realised by the merchant on a
small amount of advanced capital may be no larger, or may even be
smaller, than the wages of one of the better-paid skilled
wage-workers.” Vol 3 p290. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch17.htm
Here from another source c'est la meme chose:
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