If you have opinions about the subject matter of posts on this blog please share them. Do you have a story about how the system affects you at work school or home, or just in general? This is a place to share it.
I am sharing this from a Post by David Muir on Facebook. I think it’s a powerful statement on the state of Israeli society the sickness and brutality of it. It is "A viral thread in Hebrew circulating in Israel by a man called Tom Zandman." The video is yet another confirmation of the war crimes the Israeli army is committing in Gaza and it exposed once again Israeli lies about that event. The US supports and backs it. Biden laid waste to Gaza and Trump wants to build a casino there. They too are war criminals. Richard Mellor
************
“I want you to remember who funded and supported the mass murder of the Palestinians and dressed it up as "self-defence".
"If you are reading this, know that it really happened."
I don't know where or when you're reading this. I'm writing from my home in Jaffa, Israel. The date is April 9, 2025, and the time is 13:00.
For years upon years, we said that "Gaza needs to be flattened." Well, Gaza is flat now. But not because it needed to be flattened - because we wanted to. We wanted to flatten Gaza, and we did.
We did it to the sound of loud applause. The country is filled with victory cheers for every collapsed building and every obliterated family.
We say we did it because of the massacre on October 7, 2023, to free those who were kidnapped that day, or to ensure that such a massacre never happens again. I don't know what story will ultimately become the accepted explanation for Gaza's destruction, but those are lies. We did it because we wanted to.
We destroyed an entire region. At this point on the timeline, I still don't know what will become of its more than two million residents. We have already killed at least fifty thousand - probably far more.
As for the living, I know that their present is as terrible as a human existence can be, and their future is shrouded in uncertainty.
There is no future in Gaza. It cannot sustain life in its current condition, and any reconstruction will take many years and massive investment. At this stage, we are blocking every proposal for reconstruction, every external actor who wishes to take the Strip under its care, while we continue our campaign of destruction and killing.
There is no past in Gaza. There was life there, there was a civilization - but we destroyed every trace of it. Universities, museums, mosques, cemeteries. We didn't need to destroy them, but we wanted to.
We wanted to erase any sign that life ever existed there.
The Western world supported the destruction, or stood by. The United States financed and armed it.
In Israel, all the institutions of the state played their part. Academia, the press, the courts, the cultural sphere — all supported and legitimized it.
We all wanted it.
The internal opposition was marginal and negligible, and we denounced the dissenters as traitors. The police forbade expressing opposition to the destruction, and the public supported this silencing. The destruction of Gaza became the national mission, and we carried it out with devotion and joy. Those who took an active part in it were granted the status of heroes.
We knew what we were doing. We knew the unimaginable suffering we were causing. We knew the crimes we were committing — in real time. We knew, and we declared before the whole world that this is what justice looks like, this is the face of morality.
I don't know what I could have done differently. If there was anything I could have done to stop it, I didn't know what it was. I wanted to resist, and I didn't know how. This writing has no value other than to testify to what happened, and to express my helplessness in the face of it.”
Photo by Wally McNamee/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images
With the ousting of Joe Biden as
the Democrat nominee for the presidency, the corrosion of democratic
norms that began with Donald Trump’s baseless claims about the 2020
election and his stoking of the January 2021 assault on Capitol Hill has
entered a new phase. In the US,
as in all other countries, constitutional niceties are disregarded when
the regime is endangered. An America not altogether different from the
one against which liberals warned in a second Trump administration has
come into being.
In important respects, the US has ceased to be a functioning liberal
democracy. Democratic government works only when rivals for power
consent to be ruled by the winners. In the US, both parties regard the
contest for the presidency as an existential struggle in which the
future of the American republic will be decided. Neither of them will
accept the outcome that is announced in November as legitimate.
American government is in the throes of a far-reaching crisis, and
here there may be parallels with the final years of the former Soviet Union.
An informal American politburo composed of Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi
and others dislodged Biden from running again, leaving the state under
the nominal command of a leader whose evident senility they denied weeks
before. They have appointed as his successor Kamala Harris
who has been abruptly transformed by compliant media from a
vice-president commonly acknowledged to be barely competent into an
uplifting national leader. While these machinations continue, the ruling
progressive ideology is rejected by large sections of the population.
The concept of late Soviet America has some resonance. Mikhail
Gorbachev emerged from the party oligarchy promising to rejuvenate the
Soviet system. Obama, the enigmatic power-broker behind the vacant
throne, is America’s Gorbachev, attempting to stabilise the regime in
the face of Trump’s populist challenge.
Like Gorbachev, Obama aims for continuity. Under the guise of the Green New Deal, Biden ditched Obama’s neoliberalism
for Hamiltonian protectionism (named after Alexander Hamilton, first
secretary of the treasury during George Washington’s presidency and a
strong supporter of tariffs) and Keynesian intervention in industry and
infrastructure. Harris goes further, proposing to ban “price gouging” on
groceries and other key goods. Price controls rarely achieve much
beyond creating shortages in the commodity that is being rationed. It is
not surprising that the proposal has been attacked as economically
illiterate, nor is it likely that it will be implemented. As a political
gambit, on the other hand, it is inspired. By mimicking populist
economics, Harris is appropriating one of Trump’s chief electoral
assets. Unless he can re-energise his campaign, the operation to instal
her in the Oval Office could well succeed.
Yet Obama cannot renew the legitimacy of American government any more
than Gorbachev could preserve the decomposing Soviet state. A Harris
victory would likely trigger civil disorder of a kind more protracted
and more lethal than the riots seen in Britain recently. If Trump wins
and uses federal government to exact revenge on his enemies as he has
threatened to do, the reaction will be little different.
As in the last days of the USSR, when the Soviet bloc fragmented,
internal weakness translates into geopolitical retreat. A ubiquitous
view has it that the US aims to run down its engagement in the Middle
East and Europe in preparation for confronting China. There is
undoubtedly a constituency in Washington that would like to extricate
America from the conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine. But there is
no way the US can prevent the absorption of Taiwan or counter Chinese
expansion in the Indo-Pacific. Alongside building the world’s largest
navy, Xi Jinping is stockpiling oil and gas, rare metals, computer chips
and food supplies in readiness for a long siege. At the same time, he
is insulating China from Western economic sanctions by shedding US
government bonds and buying gold.
Contrary to a misleading trope, this is not Cold War Two. The West is
much weaker than it was then. The Soviet Union did not dominate global
markets as China does today. The American and European manufacturing
base was not depleted by offshoring and green deindustrialisation. The
US retains a formidable array of military hardware, and in some areas a
technological edge. But its ability to wage prolonged war on any of the
three fronts on which it is exposed – Ukraine, Taiwan and the Middle
East – is doubtful. The West will be fortunate if it survives this
global challenge as a coherent force capable of concerted action. For
most of humankind, watching the carnivalesque contest for the
presidency, an American-led international system is already history.
The dethroning of Joe Biden will be followed by other regime shifts.
Robert F Kennedy Jr’s endorsement of Trump suggests the game is not
over, but a Harris presidency would be transitional in any case. As the
intractably divided country threatens to slide into disorder,
authoritarian demagogues more disciplined than Trump will appear on the
right and the left. And as in the former Soviet Union, geopolitical
retreat will surely be followed by nationalist self-assertion. Whatever
the outcome of this election, America will rise from the wreckage of the
post-Cold War global order as a post-liberal great power.
Richard Mellor Afscme Local 444, retired HEO/GED 8-22-24
I was cooking and had the urge to speak, a rare thing for me. I was going to post my thoughts to Tik Tok but after I finished it, I realized it was horizontal and not vertical so I will have to do it again for Tik Tok.Don't buy the narrative, there is a lot of politics on Tik Tok.
I was at a meeting of some other workers earlier in the week, mostly folks in the UK and they are very interested in what's happening in the US, after all, what happens here affects the entire world. The carnage in Gaza would not have lasted anywhere this long were the US and the two political parties that dominate our lives, not financing and arming it.
So this and other issues made me think about it a bit and what someone should do if they didn't want to vote for the Genociders.
So after I sliced the onion I got this urge to express myself and here it is in this video. It's just some ideas. Maybe others have views.
The
stage is seen in the Fiserv Forum on the day before the Republican
National Convention (RNC) on Sunday in Milwaukee. / Photo by Joe
Raedle/Getty Images
It's Democratic National Convention time and thus time for another fun and informative lunch
with Tom Frank, who surely is America's most lucid chronicler of the
political process today—and someone with a heavy-hitting collection of
t-shirts. Last week his luncheon attire promoted Olathe, Kansas, a
suburb of Kansas City where Tom grew up and where, so I gather, he got
his first taste of the importance of working-class America and… the
Populists. In his widely praised 2020 book, The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism,
he described populists as those who look to ordinary people, and not
those who admire highly educated people, to make the right decisions on
our behalf.
How has relying on the elites turned out, Tom asks?
Our
lunch took place in a restaurant in Bethesda, Maryland, that promotes
healthy food. I ordered a modest salad and he? A Korean BBQ pork
sandwich.
He has a wonderful laugh. We got into it right away.
SEYMOUR HERSH: You went to the recent Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. How did it go?
THOMAS
FRANK: The convention was very well organized this time. I also went to
the last one they did in 2016. They didn't have one in 2020. In 2016 it
was a shambles. The party was not completely on board with Trump, its
presidential candidate. There was a lot of dissent and a lot of
technical things went wrong. The convention was just a mess. I was there
at one point when they booed Ted Cruz so much and so loudly it wrecked
his speech.
Cruz was giving this long, very typical
Republican speech about law and order or whatever, and he refused to
endorse Trump in the course of the speech. You remember, the two hated
each other at the time. Anyhow, the audience started screaming at him
and yelling at him. It was a kind of disruption you never see at
conventions anymore. Well, this year he opened his speech by saying...
I'm not going to get the quote right but you could look it up. He opened
his speech by saying, "God bless Donald J. Trump" and thanking God for
protecting Trump.” He's such a bootlicker.
TF:
Well, he's an opportunist, in my opinion. Both parties are filled with
these opportunists, of course, so he's a very familiar character. He's
certainly not a man of principle or anything. But Trump sat there… at
conventions, the presidential candidate generally does not show his face
until the very end when he comes out and accepts the nomination and
gives a speech. Trump was there every day. They had a special chair for
him where he would sit and watch the speeches. The whole performance was
for him, and he was the audience. When they would flatter him from the
dais or whatever you call it, the platform, when the speaker would
flatter him… there are these jumbotrons all over the auditorium.
Whenever they would flatter him, the camera would go to Trump. The image
would go to Trump, and you would see him and he would mouth the words,
"Thank you." You know? You would be watching the speaker flatter Trump,
and also watching Trump accept the praise.
None of
the previous Republican candidates or presidents were there this time.
There was no representative of the Bush family, at least not that I saw.
No Mitt Romney. No members of the McCain family. No Cheneys. Well, Bob
Dole has died.
SH: Was there something noticeably different about this Republican convention from the others?
TF:
I got the feeling that there was not a big media presence this time. I
mean, there were a lot of reporters, of course, but not anything like
the numbers in the past. In the old days, the reporters would outnumber
the delegates. I doubt if that was the case this time. I’ll give you an
example of what I mean. My credentials are pretty low in the pecking
order. And yet I was able to get credentials to go on the floor on the
last day and watch Trump's speech. I was about 20 yards away from Trump
while he spoke. I was just standing right there. That never happens.
Another
thing missing was the street carnival. Other conventions, both
Republican and Democratic, have these areas of the host city that are
open to the public where all kinds of vendors set up shop, and there are
restaurants and all kinds of crazy protests and demonstrations that go
on all day long. There was very little of that in Milwaukee this time
around.
But the important thing about that convention was that
everyone assumed Trump was going to win. It was the week after somebody
shot at Trump and hit him in the ear. You remember, he had this
incredible moment where his face is covered with blood, and he's waving
his fist in the air. His name is defiance. That image was everywhere at
the convention. It was on T-shirts. It was on the Jumbotron all the
time. And you’ve got Biden still as the Democratic candidate, after
giving this extremely weak performance in the debate.
So the
Republican National Convention was absolutely and utterly convinced that
Trump was going to win. That was the essential condition about it.
Everybody was convinced he had this thing in the bag. Then the Democrats
pulled the switcheroo on him. You can say what you want about Kamala
Harris, but that was kind of a brilliant political move. They did it
right at the end of the convention, so instead of getting a bounce out
of the convention, all of a sudden nobody's talking about Trump at all.
Nobody's talking about someone taking a shot at him. They're all talking
about her.
SH: Given what you've written and your
attitude, and your skepticism, what does it tell us that Trump is so in
our lives? Why is he still here? Are we so lacking in people?
TF:
It is fascinating to me the way discontented people of every stripe
seem to project their discontent onto Trump. He's not necessarily
sympathetic to their feelings or their views. Well, some of them he is,
of course. But whether he shares their discontent, there's this whole
cult around him, that it's Trump or it's nothing. I mean, we've talked
about this before, but if you had told me that when I was young that the
Republican Party would fall into the grip of this guy, I would never
have believed it.
Seymour
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SH: He's not Ronald Reagan.
TF:
No, although he steals phrases from Reagan all the time. But no, Reagan
was competent, whatever else you say about Reagan, and I really
disliked Reagan. I was a punk rocker in those days, and I really
disliked Ronald Reagan, but he was competent. He had been governor of
California. He knew how to get things done. He appointed competent
people, and he changed this country.
By the way, remind me to talk
about that, because I wrestle with the subject, which one is more
consequential? Was it Reagan or was it Clinton? When I was younger, I
would have said, "Well, of course it's Reagan.” He was the mastermind of
the great turn to the right, the living spirit of the 1980s. But I’m
not so sure anymore. I think that Clinton’s role in the big right turn
was maybe even more important than Reagan’s.
SH: You did say that Clinton was very interesting to you, because he was sort of a new generation.
TF:
You were asking why Trump keeps going. Because there is massive... I
mean, it's too big. There's massive dissatisfaction with American life
in all sorts of different ways. I’m talking about the way people
experience their everyday lives and are unhappy about all sorts of
things great and small. Their towns or regions are in a state of
permanent hard times. There’s inflation. There are lots of homeless
people. Lots of immigration. People feel disrespected, they get insulted
on social media, they hate the news, they feel like the TV insults them
all the time.
We could talk about this all day, but
the thing is that there's many different streams of dissatisfaction,
sometimes deep dissatisfaction that doesn't go away, even when the
economy improves, even when the economy is doing well. And all of this
stuff gets projected onto Trump, the permanent outsider, the champion of
the disgruntled.
SH: In good times and bad times, still there's dissatisfaction?
TF:
Only once in my lifetime has there been a sense of general satisfaction
in America. It was in the nineties. We can read in history books about
the Great Society and the Affluent Society and the days of the universal
middle class. But for us, there’s only been one brief moment where we
actually experienced that stuff. Remember the internet bull market of
the nineties? The New Economy, they called it. There was this idea that
everybody was participating in the prosperity, which of course turned
out to be false, turned out to be a bubble. That's the only time in my
life that I can remember when there was that feeling of universal
prosperity. I tried to write about it, years ago, that sense of
universal contentment which then turned out to be hollow or false.
If
you look at the economic facts on paper, Biden's done pretty well. The
recovery since the pandemic has been pretty good, and yet people are
deeply unhappy about the whole thing. That’s largely thanks to
inflation, but there's also a kind of permanent anxiety out there that
never goes away.
SH: About the political process or the future?
TF:
I think both. When you're in a place like this which is booming—we're
in Bethesda, Maryland, we're sitting at a restaurant on Wisconsin
Avenue. If you walk down this street after lunch, it looks like Midtown
Manhattan. They're putting up tall buildings. It's crowded. It's busy.
But if you go out to western Maryland, or if you go out to West
Virginia, or if you keep going and you go to a small town in the former
steelmaking regions of Ohio, there are people watching their way of life
crumble and disappear. There's no politician that has any intention of
doing anything about it, or has a plan for doing anything about it. I
mean, Biden probably comes closest, of anyone in our era, with the CHIPS
and Inflation Reduction Acts. But those are ultimately small potatoes.
And for whatever reason, the underlying anxiety gets projected onto
Trump, onto this cranky New York billionaire.
SH: What do you mean by ‘that anxiety gets projected onto Trump’? Why isn't it projected onto the Democrats?
TF:
Well, it should be, right? They're the traditional bearers of the
popular spirit. They’re the traditional voice of the hard-done-by. But
by and large they’ve left those traditions behind them. I want to leave
Biden out here because I think Biden did some genuinely good things on
the domestic front.
SH: The clever timing aside, what did you think of the decision to replace Biden at the top of the ticket with Kamala Harris?
TF:
I will almost certainly wind up voting for Kamala Harris this fall, but
even so, I have to say I really don't like the way that they made her
the candidate without any input from the public. It's just a handful of
guys who chose her.
SH: I think she was the only one who was able to step in.
TF:
Of course, that's right. They had no choice. It was too late to do
anything else. But Biden should have dropped out a long time ago, and
there should have been a primary. A real primary. Harris is now the
candidate but we don't really know what she stands for. She seems like a
nice person. She laughs. She has a sunny disposition.
SH: I suspect that she's not going to be able to get away without talking about Gaza and Ukraine.
TF: Well, so far she has.
SH: I know, but that's going to end.
TF:
She's in a honeymoon period now where people are so relieved, after
that disastrous debate, to have Biden replaced by somebody who can speak
in complete sentences and who can stand on their own and argue with
Trump.
SH: She has a certain amount of charm. There's
no question about that. But eventually, somebody's going to have to
start talking about the massacre, this international trauma, this horror
show that's going on.
TF: Or is it possible that
we'll elect her president without her ever taking a stand on anything? I
mean, it could happen. Purely as a rejection of Trump. The Democratic
Party will have to have a platform, of course, but platforms, they don't
mean anything anymore, as you know. I understand why she's the
candidate, and she might even turn out ot be a great candidate, but I
still don't like the process. I would have liked to have had a choice,
find out where the different candidates stand, you know, democracy.
SH: There is no process.
TF:
Exactly. Some democracy. Again, a country of 300 million people, Sy
Hersh, a country of 300 million people and the presidential candidate
for one of our two major parties was chosen by maybe eight guys.
President
Joe Biden pauses while speaking at the 115th NAACP National Convention
at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center on July 16 in Las Vegas. / Photo
by Mario Tama/Getty Images.
In late 1967,
as the Vietnam War was raging and President Lyndon B. Johnson was
becoming increasingly unpopular, I was recruited to handle the press and
write speeches for Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, the only
Democrat gutsy enough to run against the Democratic president.
Months
later, working round the clock in a cluttered suite in a New Hampshire
motel, I was curious about a courier from New York City who flew up most
nights on the last Eastern Airlines flight. The courier would dash to
the suite with a canvas bag attached to his wrist and turn it over to
one of the campaign’s richest and most enthusiastic benefactors. The guy
was a multi-millionaire who ran a major stock market fund but was happy
to sit in the suite I was then sharing with Richard Goodwin, a real
political pro—unlike me and the college brats on the campaign—and just
watch and do the various errands that needed doing.
One night I
asked the millionaire what was in the bag. He threw it to me, with a
key. I unlocked it and found myself staring at dozens of shiny packages
of 100 dollar bills. I had no idea then or now whether the funds were
properly reported and did not ask. So that’s how it works, I thought,
and I tossed the bag back. I knew then I was not long for the world of
presidential politics.
It’s not surprising that the long overdue
unraveling of President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign happened when
it became impossible to keep his increasing impairment covered up. It
was the big-time money backers of the Democratic Party who called off
the game of see no evil, hear no evil, after Biden’s shocking
performance in his June debate with Donald Trump. They balked at
continuing to give millions of dollars to the party now that there was
evidence that the president is not always there.
You’d think it would be a vigilant press corps, led by the New York Times and the Washington Post,
who first broached the issue of Biden’s impairment, but those papers
missed the story. The first significant report came in early June from
the Wall Street Journal, whose consistently brilliant news section—considered suspect by the Times and Post
and many readers because of the paper’s conservative editorial page and
the fact that it is part of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp—broke the story
on the front page under the headline, “Behind Closed Doors, Biden Shows
Signs of Slipping.”
The White House press office
quickly responded that both of those quoted in the story were
Republicans who are supporters of Trump. The strategy somehow worked.
Fear of Trump took priority over doing the right thing. Ditto for CNN
and MSNBC, whose panels of former White House officials often can be fun
to watch, especially while chewing lots of cotton candy. Viewers of the
equally biased Fox News undoubtedly had similarcandy to crunch.
Who
in Washington didn’t know that Biden was failing? We all did, up to a
point. I had learned months earlier from a federal official that those
in the front rows of university events where Biden was speaking were
warned not to move if the president tripped while walking to the podium.
Secret Service agents were on hand to pick him up immediately. There
would be no front-page photos of a college valedictorian helping the
president climb to his feet.
The American public could see Biden’s slow decline. The Journal
reported that nearly three-fourths of those polled thought Biden was
“too old to seek another term.” Cabinet meetings in the past few years
largely disappeared or turned into rote sessions, as recorded by the
C-SPAN, which faithfully televises all White House events. Biden would
join the seated Cabinet heads and read from a prepared text, with each
page covered with a plastic sheet. It was far from vibrant television.
After
the debate, there was mounting pressure on Biden to drop out. The White
House and the president himself denied that he was suffering from
anything more than a bad day, a cold, and jet lag. There were newspaper
stories about Hunter Biden, the president’s convicted son, keeping by
his side and warning all White House staffers that anyone who even
hinted at the truth would be fired. That message quickly was leaked to
the press. Soon the White House press corps suddenly discovered that
they were being misled by the president’s press secretary. There were
lots of tortured questions and broken hearts, but the message was the
same: the president is in good health and is going to run for
re-election this fall and carry on serving for four more years after he
defeats Trump.
On Monday, July 15, Biden took off on Air Force One
on a campaign trip to Nevada, a tossup state that Biden won in 2020 by a
little more than 30,000 votes. On Tuesday he gave the keynote address
to 5,000 members of the NAACP at its annual convention. The next day,
the president, apparently stricken while campaigning with a
yet-to-be-revealed illness, broke from his schedule and made a police
escort race to Air Force One after initially telling police they were
heading to the nearest emergency room.
A series of blog posts, local police reports, internet messages, and report in the Daily Mail
disclosed further details of Biden’s trip to Las Vegas and his abrupt
return home to Delaware. I went over these reports this week with a
senior official in Washington who helped me fashion an account of a
White House in complete disarray, culminating in the president’s
withdrawal from the race. It’s a story not unlike Seven Days in May,
the Cold War thriller in which a colonel played by Kirk Douglas foils a
coup staged by a general played by Burt Lancaster. None of what you
read below comes from an official account by the White House.
At that point, according to Emily Goodin, a Daily Mail
reporter who was in the traveling press pool, the president was
“deathly pale” and Air Force One flew at maximum speed to Delaware,
where the president has a weekend retreat at Rehoboth Beach. The press
pool was told that Biden had COVID. Nothing more was said on Air Force
One. After Biden’s return to Delaware, the White House told the public
that Biden had contracted a COVID infection and would be in isolation.
He was said to have upper respiratory symptoms, a runny nose, a cough,
and was fatigued.
That was the last straw for a core group
of Congressional leaders, government officials and some senior Biden
funders who were withholding huge amounts of committed contributions.
“There was pressure on donors to come across on their pending
commitments,” the official told me. “It was understood that Biden had a
physical problem in Las Vegas and the family was saying no” to continued
pressure from donors and senior Democrats in Congress to withdraw from
the presidential campaign. Initially, the president could not be
reached.
By Saturday, July 20, former President Barack Obama was
deeply involved, and there was talk that he would place a call to Biden.
It was not clear whether Biden had been examined or just what happened
to him in Las Vegas. “The Big Three,” the official said, referring to
former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Charles
Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, continued to be
directly involved. “On Sunday morning,” the official told me, with the
approval of Pelosi and Schumer, “Obama called Biden after breakfast and
said, ‘Here’s the deal. We have Kamala’s approval to invoke the 25th
Amendment.” The amendment provides that when the president is determined
by the vice president and others to be unfit to carry out the powers
and duties of his office, the vice president shall assume those duties.
“It
was clear at this point,” the official said, “that she would get the
nod”—that is, the support to run for the presidency in the November
election. “But Obama also made it clear,” the official said, “that he
was not going to immediately endorse her. But the group had decided that
her work as a prosecutor would help her deal with Trump in a debate.”
One
possible drawback, I was told, was Harris’s sometime disdain for the
work of the US Intelligence Community. She is known not to be especially
interested in the President’s Daily Brief, a highly classified summary
of current intelligence that is prepared overnight by the Office of the
Director of National Intelligence and delivered by hand to the most
vital offices in Washington, including the vice president’s. The
document, which includes signals intelligence, is to be read by the
addressee in the presence of the delivering intelligence officer. I was
told that Harris often showed little interest in reading the document
and at some point asked the agency to stop delivering it to her. Now, as
a presidential candidate, she is being kept up to date on all
significant intelligence matters.
A key factor in the decision to
force Biden out of office by invoking the 25th Amendment was a series of
increasingly negative polls on the president’s standing against Trump
that had been commissioned by the funders, the official said. “The
downward slope was increasing.” Polling would also be important for the
vice president, I was told, and it was agreed that if the polls did not
continue to show her gaining traction, other options would be
considered, including an open convention. I was unable to learn if
Harris was aware of such considerations or whether she intends to abide
by them.
The official, who has decades of experience in
fundraising, told me that Obama emerged as the strongman throughout the
negotiations. “He had an agenda and he wanted to seek it through to the
end, and he wanted to have control over who would be elected.”
A
few days after we talked, with Harris getting off to a solid start,
Obama and his wife announced their endorsement of Harris and told her,
over the phone in a staged TV event, that they would do all they could
to campaign for her and to support her.
Makes Neville Chamberlain Look Pretty Good. At Least He Didn't Hug Hitler
Richard
Mellor Afscme
Local 444, retired HEO/GED 7-22-24
Facing
intense pressure from donors and big wigs in the Democratic Party, Joe Biden
has finally withdrawn from the U.S. presidential race. “While it has been my intention to seek
re-election,...” he wrote,“…I believe it is in the best interest of my
party and the country for me to stand down and focus solely on fulfilling my
duties as president for the remainder of my term,” The response has been
immediate.
Biden’s
decision was, “one of the most
stunning acts of patriotism of my lifetime” tweeted Norm Eisen, a former
diplomat, while Barack Obama called Biden a, “patriot of the highest order” and his decision a “testament” to “his love of his country” and an, “historic example of a genuine public servant once again putting the
interests of the American people ahead of his own…”
Nancy Pelosi, another multi-millionaire like all of them,
concurred, “President Biden is a
Patriotic American who has always put our country first.” She writes.
“An act of selfless
grace” is the title of David
Smith’s, commentary in the UK Guardian today. Smith is the Guardian’s
Washington DC bureau Chief. John Stewart, the comedian, tweeted one word, “Legend”. They’re all being dishonest.
The
outpourings of praise is nauseating as we witness what is not only a collective
sigh of relief, but a cacophony of lies and falsehoods. Joe Biden’s decision
was not selfless, courageous, or sacrificing his own interests for three
hundred million Americans. That’s not a part of the job description. As of
yesterday (7-21-24), 36 congressional Democrats had
called on Biden to withdraw while an ABC/Ipsos Poll found that60% of Democrats felt he should end his campaign and that“Three in four Democrats (76%) would be satisfied with Harris as the
party's nominee.” Among those still supporting the sinking Biden ship were
Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez who once stated that “only in America would she be in the same
party as Biden.
I think it’s fair to say that Biden, who only a day or two
earlier was adamant about continuing and claiming he had the ability to lead,
had no alternative but to quit; the writing was on the wall.
The whole episode along with the disastrous foreign policy
Biden has pursued has revealed the political crisis that has engulfed US society.
And not only the Democrats. The Republican Party is equally diseased. We are
witnessing the continued decline of the two parties of capital that have
dominated US economic and political life for over a century and consequently
the influence of US imperialism on the global stage. Ukraine is one foreign
policy disaster but Biden’s embrace of the fascist Netanyahu and the unwavering
support and arming of the Zionist genocide in Gaza and Palestine in general has
done irreparable harm to the U.S. image internationally. Apart from the
Apartheid Zionist regime, the US has no ally in the Middle East.
Biden will go down in history as the US president that could
have stopped the mass murder of thousands of unarmed civilians, mostly women
and children but refused. The picture of him hugging Netanyahu is worse than
Neville Chamberlain’s embrace of Hitler and the betrayal of the Czech’s.
Chamberlain’s actions never led to “peace
in our time” and neither will Biden’s. The truth is that within the
framework of the capitalist system, peace is never possible. Never ending wars
and conflict are an integral aspect of the capitalist system of production wars
and crisis.
I raise these points about Biden not in defence of the
serial sexual predator and degenerate Trump, but to point out that these events
reflect the decline of a social system, its institutions and political parties,
not simply the character flaws of its leading figures. That the best the Democrats
could field was Biden is an example of this decline. Trump is a particularly distasteful
character but how anyone can refer to Biden as a “moral” or “decent man”
and other such complimentary terms is beyond belief given his love affair with
the Zionist regime that is committing mass murder and genocide in real time.
Don’t whine to me about Germans not stopping Hitler and the
Nazis.
Perhaps the worst of all the deception is the politicians
and the mass media covering for Biden knowing he was losing his mental
capacity; “For months Biden’s decline had
been mostly concealed from the public.”, Smith writes. Perhaps the worst example is Kamala
Harris, the former Oakland prosecutor and quite possibly the next president of
the United States who sent many working class, overwhelmingly black youth in to
the California prison system euphemistically referred to as
“correctional Centers”.
After Biden’s disastrous showing during the debate with
Trump, Harris said that Biden was “clear” in his messaging, had a “slow start” but “thought it was a strong finish.”“In a real leader, character
matters more than style,” she added. Biden was out of it, he was
confused, blank. That’s not style. Does Kamala Harris think the public never watched the debate? What an insult.
They know the conclusion the electorate
drew from that debate but their goal has been to obscure, it and to sow
confusion among the electorate. The competition between two capitalist parties
in a bourgeoisdemocracy for which
one gets to plunder society for the established period of time is but one long
deception. A political party represents sections of society, it is not an empty
vessel. Both parties represent big business which means working people must pay
for the crisis of the system not them. But they can’t campaign on such a
program so they lie.
So attacking Trump on the basis that he is a liar, which he is and he lies
without any concern for the truth at all, doesn’t
make any headway; they are all liars.
No matter which party is in the
driver’s seat working class people will have to pay for the crisis of
capitalism in its end days; our material well being will deteriorate no matter
which party is in power. Both parties will defend the system of exploitation
and its march toward the abyss one way or another, it’s not a choice in that
sense. A looming environmental catastrophe and the end of life as we know it is
a serious consequence of this crisis, possibly the prime factor assuming a
nuclear conflict is avoided.
I have commented in previous posts that
the heads of organized labor bear much of the blame for us arriving at this
point. But there are others. Bernie Sanders could have played a different role
over the past period. Then we had the election of Alexandria Ocasio Cortez
along with Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib. These women have courage.
Ilhan Omar has faced repeated threats for her political positions which are
left of center. Sanders could have led a left faction toward building a left
alternative to the Democratic Party.Much of his reform program was supported by millions of working class
and middle class people.But Sanders
refused to break from the Democrats and supported the hated Hillary Clinton.
At the same time, after Sanders
betrayed many of his supporters (not for the first time) and supported Clinton
which was no surprise to people like me, thousands of Bernie supporters joined the
Democratic Socialists of America, (DSA) a fairly small group in the left wing
of the Democratic Party that grew to be the largest socialist organization in
the US. Some of the left of center Democrats elected to Congress are DSA
members. But they’re “socialist” in
name only just like Bernie has been all these years.s
But like Sanders, the DSA leadership
refused to take that path. Many of the influential figures in DSA are also
Labor Notes officials and staffers. Many of them were or are labor officials in
the lower ranks of the labor bureaucracy. Labor Notes while producing decent
material at times and being capable of organizing large meetings drawing many
rank and file union members, also refuses to launch a real campaign among
labor’s rank and file against the concessionary and business oriented policies
of the present hierarchy let alone a serious campaign for a labor or workers party. DSA, Labor Notes, in conjunction with the politicians
I mention above could have taken a different road and led a left split from the
Democratic Party. This would have inspired million of workers both inside and
outside organized labor. Instead, that train has left the station and another
opportunity for a break from the status quo was missed.
Now we’re in for some real battles
ahead. But sometimes it’s worth reminding ourselves how things actually change,
we have won precious little from the ballot box. Our unions weren’t built by
voting for the right candidate. Just look at what’s happened in Bangladesh. The
Bangladesh Supreme court has just reversed a controversial court decision that
gave 30% of government jobs to relatives of those that fought in the war of
Independence in 1971. This caused an outcry and masses of youth and there have engaged
in mass protests. In response, the Bagladesh Supreme Court just reversed that
decision and now 93% of those public sector jobs will be opened to candidates
on merit.
by: Jason O'Neal Many people living in the United States will probably have to think for a moment to recall the last time political violence at the presidential level was seen here at home. This weekend’s events in Pennsylvania may come as a shock to some, but they can’t be much of a surprise for those of us who know that leaders throughout history have, at times, paid their political debt with their own lives. Violence against elected officials is nothing new in the United States, it’s just been at lower levels or nonexistent for a little while. Now that it has awakened from its slumber we must recognize it for what it is–an indication that a social system is in crisis.
My initial response to the news was one of general disinterest. I had not been near a television or radio for some hours and had only found out when I opened a social media platform. One of my contacts had shared a post made by someone stating disappointment in the marksmanship skills of the shooter. I had no reaction and a couple of hours later I was asked by someone, in person, if I had heard. I was even asked to share my opinion about it and that’s where I find myself now. Contemplating the significance of this one event and its potential impact on the very near future.
As a historian, I have to view the event in isolation and then see how it is connected to current events. I then try to place it in its appropriate context in relation to the events which precede it. Finally, before offering a suitable list of possible outcomes, I must look for instances in the past when a similar event took place. I will not dare to presume that I could know what will happen next and I will not try to make any predictions. What I can state is the following: When any government has lost the trust of the governed it inevitably must be reformed, reinforced, or replaced. Control of the system will then be given to the group best suited to return society back toward a passive state. Rarely, are the power brokers behind the scenes ever replaced unless the masses of the impoverished and exploited classes from below seize control for themselves. That hasn’t really happened in the United States, but other changes to the structures allowed to govern society have taken place.
I also want to take the time now to state openly that I have never voted for either of these candidates, nor their major party opponents in previous presidential elections. I have voted for a third party since 2013. I recently moved and have not registered to vote at my new address and I do not plan on voting in the upcoming election. I see myself as a disinterested party in the outcome of the pageantry of the group spectacle that we all are allowed to participate in. I must also state that I have been a registered voter in both major political parties during my lifetime and was even an elected official at the state level of a minor party. I have come to realize that the interests of the average worker in the United States are not represented by any of the current political options and it is because of this conclusion that I have decided not to vote.
In spite of my best efforts, I still can not avoid the bombardment of news, advertisements, telephone calls, social media posts, and random online personalities trying to tell me how important the next election is going to be. For weeks I’ve heard nothing but vitriol from supporters on both sides of the contests and their infectious propaganda have only cemented the wedge between tens of millions of hard-working folks who can’t see that they’ve been lied to for so long that they are unaware of a reality outside of the status quo.
Extremists of many factions on both sides have taken the opportunity to control some of the narrative and they will stop at nothing until their opponents are destroyed. People living in the United States have witnessed one election season after another marked by tabloid-style news stories aimed to rally supporters or ridicule detractors. All the while, opinion polls remain unmoved by decisions in court cases or non-stop scripted arguments designed to resemble heated debates by television personalities. Logic and reason have disappeared and they’ve been replaced with mythology and tribalism. People are scared and have begun to turn on each other. Millions of Americans are searching for answers to problems that our society has ignored for decades. The time is ripe for a strongman to step in and promise peace and order while restoring the glory of the years gone by. It is from this perspective that I share my ideas about what may come.
In less than 24 hours, we’ve seen a variety of stories and possible motives. This has led many of the usual conspiracy theorists to begin peddling their version of events that some people will treat as absolute fact. This happens during every newsworthy event and too often these dens of deception are fueled by the desires of a few relatively new players in the entertainment industry as they try to find consumers, entertain current ones, and search for potential funding sources. Even more so in our current climate of ad-driven streaming platforms and the cheap availability of user-friendly technology. These newcomers are bypassing the old guard of news and entertainment organizations which have kept the public docile and unresponsive to social movements since the 1968 Democratic National Convention signaled to the people what the state was capable of doing in response to mass protests.
In a similar fashion, the oldest faction within our society never misses the chance to tie shocking events to some mystical force. They will have you believe that this power has either become very angry at society and seeks to punish it, or it has intervened in some divine way to protect its chosen few, or their selected prophet, from everyone else. Online buzz has already flared up with people from this particular group posting about sharing prayers, or asking for prayer chains, so that society can find favor with a cosmic deity. Ironically, this is the same section of the population that ridicules other groups who have chosen to believe a different set of stories about where humans come from and where we go when we die. Unfortunately, nearly half of all people in the United States identify as belonging to one of any number of various sects of this group. Is it any wonder why fundamental truths about our planet and the universe are consciously ignored by people who in any other setting might actually be considered intelligent folks?
On the government front, the current representatives of the existing system will speak out to denounce the events and remind folks that the system is supposed to work better than it is and that everyone is supposed to continue to follow the rules. Of course, this isn’t to say that the political mechanism will voluntarily step aside and give up control to ensure the system can work again. It is usually a ploy to remain in charge and it is a message given as a sign that they are still able to rule society and remain loyal to the power brokers who put them in place. They are telegraphing their loyalty and saying that they can be trusted to not upend the balance of power in our society. At times they may be allowed to concede here and there, but only in the face of an organized and militant opposition from below.
One side will win in the struggle for the reigns of control over the people. Which side has yet to be determined, but a few things should be on the horizon. The impoverished and the working poor will either be coddled into remaining passive as their lives become harder, more expensive, and less secure. Or, they will be beaten into submission with crippling debt, a diminishing standard of living, and a fear of financial ruin. Both sides are at risk of eventually becoming motivated to fight back. One much quicker than the other. The trick will be in bringing all sides together as a unified front against the power structure that has been growing fatter by the efforts of them all. This will more than likely coincide with some movement to tighten control over society and prevent an organized resistance from developing.
As far as things go for us on the bottom, not much will change for the better. We are exactly where we are because we have played into the hands of racism, sexism, nationalism, and selfishness. Every time progress was to be made as a class, we have been separated by one or more of these wedge issues. In less than 70 years, the United States worker has witnessed a downward economic spiral, of a non-unionized, multi-income household with no retirement pension, savings account, or available credit. A husband and wife working today with a college educated child living at home has a lower standard of living than a young man with a high school diploma working in a factory in the 1960s. Both parties are to blame for this decline because they've both had multiple chances to do something about it. Both major political parties have shown that they no longer care about the lives of the working class in this country.
Throughout the course of my life I have witnessed many of these changes firsthand. I was born in 1975, some would say just two short years after the zenith of the quality of life for those living inside the American Empire. This was also three years before the de-industrialization of the modern Rust Belt states. Many of those good-paying unionized jobs went overseas, or were relocated to Sun Belt states with lower wages for employees. I was the only child of a 20 year old retail store worker with a high school diploma–the first in our family up to that point. Her only escape from guaranteed economic serfdom in Houston, Texas was to enter into a common-law marriage of forty years with my stepfather. He was a highschool dropout working at the lower levels of petroleum production in the American Southwest. We moved ten times between five states from the time I was three years old until I turned eight. He was also a violently heavy drinker who held antiquated views about race, women, immigrants, labor unions, and he believed wholeheartedly in the John Wayne version of American history.
When I hear of the average blue collar white male from the Baby Boomer generation in the United States, I think of my stepdad. Many of them today still cling to the same beliefs he had to explain why he died living his last years in a travel trailer on social security having never accumulated any real wealth or property. In his mind it was because of people of color and immigrants that he wasn’t able to succeed in life. His problems never had anything to do with his compulsion to spend time drinking with friends and choosing to drive company-owned vehicles under the influence. Outside of his anti-union views on labor, I don’t ever recall him having many opinions about politics.
I was just six years old when, in 1981, a newly inaugurated Ronald Reagan was struck by a bullet from a gun in the hands of a would-be assassin. Anyone under the age of 40 won’t know about this unless they’ve actually read about it. My dad was actually a little stunned that a less than stellar Hollywood actor could become the leader of the free world. Before Reagan, there were the Days of Rage of the 1970s. A decade long reaction to the violent suppression of many of the groups who had experienced newfound freedoms of the Civil Rights Era. Participation in the political system, advances made by workers on the job, and access to education, housing, and healthcare were all met with assassinations, a new political regime, militarized police forces, and the reinstitution of business as usual.
The legitimate use of violence by the state, encouraged by the “Silent Majority” (and later the moral majority) was met with small bombings of persons, cars, and buildings. Even Gerald Ford, who had assumed Richard Nixon’s hot seat by the end of 1974, had survived two attempts on his own life. In a way, it was the bullet that nearly killed Reagan that resulted in the complete shift to the beginnings of the current political economy that we are watching implode in real time today. This corporate dominated expansion into the vacated markets of the fallen Soviet Union, at the expense of workers at home, has witnessed the United States conquer the globe as the lone superpower. China and a restructured Russia are a distant second and third, but this supremacy has come with a hefty price tag.
Reagan was the final signal the power brokers needed for a return to greatness and a green flag for the move back to the way things were before. Hell, he was even re-elected by one of the widest margins in presidential election history and there were many so-called Reagan Democrats who championed his administration's policies. An agenda which increased spending in the sectors keeping him in power and a decrease in taxes for those very same sectors.
During the tail end of the Cold War, Reagan inherited a national debt of about 3.5 billion dollars short of a full trillion. That is with a “T” and it comes after millionaire and billionaire. A trillion is 1,000 billions and it is represented by a “1” followed by twelve zeroes (1,000,000,000,000). By the time he left office, Reagan’s national debt increased by 186% or about $1.86 trillion. It has never stopped growing with every president since and today it sits at almost $35 trillion. That amount is equal to more money than is needed to give every single person living in the United States a check for one hundred thousand dollars. Where did all this money get spent?
If you have ever tuned into any number of radio stations, television shows, and now podcasts or simulcast via the internet, you may have heard that the money is all going to social welfare programs and undocumented migrants. What is absent from almost all of them is any admission of taxpayer bailouts for large industries and their financial backers. Spending on domestic agriculture, oil and energy production, construction projects, automobile manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, and some healthcare has steadily increased. That stated, there is still no industry as heavily subsidized as the weapons manufacturers. The United States spends more money on its military than the next thirteen largest countries combined. With a yearly cost of close to $900 billion, the U.S. spends more than three times as much as China, and nearly ten times as much as Russia, invest in their own militaries. The defense industries which support them are eagerly seeking new markets overseas to sell their surplus stockpiles of weapons to. Ukraine is just the latest casualty from a long list of rather brutal regimes from around the world who agreed to buy guns stamped “Made in America.”
Agriculture has gone overseas as well. U.S. producers trade our staple crops, livestock, and dairy to foreign countries in exchange for the good stuff like fruit, sugar, coffee and tea. Many of the trading partners like guns, too. And oil!
All of this money moving around the globe and a whole bunch of people are feeling left out. Internationally, people are either suppressed by force or violently revolting against the system. In some cases the warfare has bled over into neighboring countries and terrorist warlords have taken control. They are a much more difficult opponent to beat because they are forced to fight a much larger and far superior organized military unit in an unorthodox fashion. And for anyone who may have forgotten, that was the same tactic used by George Washington during the American Revolution against the last world empire. Imagine what Washington could have done if he had to balance the demands of an internal surveillance force of the National Defense Authorization Act, with NATO expansion across Eastern Europe, and a twenty-first century scramble for land and resources in Africa and South America.
Would he be able to buy off enough support from the public with a promise of better jobs, better pay, and better working conditions? Or, would he, being the richest man in Virginia, choose to help himself and his buddies with acquiring more land and money? Just rewinding the expansion of the United States across the continent and following the transfer of wealth and power will allow anyone to see that this path taken by the new nation was all done with a calculated violence and brutality that has often gone unnoticed. A few times the government system in place has faced some turmoil. Sectionalism and civil war, isolationists and imperialists, capitalism and fascism, workers and big business have all escalated to violence before. Some of those conflicts ended with sitting presidents assassinated and others pushed the problems down the road by renegotiating the bargain.
Violence in the history of the United States must be recognized as a major role in events that are taking place around the world and on the streets of our cities and towns. People are migrating to urban centers for a chance to earn money while millions of others are living unhoused in the streets of the very same cities. Addiction to drugs and alcohol are prevalent and other violent crimes will surely follow. There is also the contingent of military veterans suffering from PTSD and other injuries who are accompanied by people suffering from untreated mental illness. Meanwhile, 2 out of every 5 people in the U.S. don’t have an extra $500 in cash available to them. Worse yet, 3 out of 5 couldn’t handle a one thousand dollar emergency. Most Americans are just a couple of paychecks away from joining those living in their cars or tents on the street. The role of poor health and the opioid crisis has many of them in no shape to survive. Police are shooting citizens in cold blood, criminals are killing victims for property or sheer pleasure, and children are shooting each other in schools all over the country. Violence is already here because violence has never left. The fact that it has taken so long to return to the biggest circus show of all time is what really has me puzzled.
This is it folks. Francis Fukuyama's Triumph of Liberal Democracy Source
Richard
Mellor
Afscme
Local 444 retired
HEO/GED
7-4-24
Here we go
again. It’s another national election for US President that takes place every
four years and costs hundreds of billions of dollars. As I pointed out on this blog a few
weeks ago, here in
the US we have the best democracy money can buy and even a former functionary
in the Obama Administration admits (in the pages of Foreign Affairs that few
workers will read) that, “…the
most important thing that America can do in the world is detoxify its own
democracy” He knows the mood out there and feels the need to tap in to it, but doesn’t want to broadcast his dissent too
widely----give people the wrong ideas.
A comment like that from a prominent US bureaucrat reveals
just how deep the crisis is when it comes to US foreign policy.
The same could be said of domestic politics. The Democratic
Party is in disarray as its candidate for president is the incumbent Joe Biden,
AKA Genocide Joe,Butcher Joe, or the somewhat less
offensive but a name only Joe himself could dream up, Worker Joe. The degenerate sexual predator Trump is his opponent. Biden’s performance in the last debate was so poor, major
Democratic Party donors have called for him to step down. He certainly gave
credence to the accusations that he has dementia and is unfit to govern.
I read today that the Service Employees International Union
(SEIU) is launchinga massive drive and spending, “$200 million to help President Biden win re-election.”
“This
election, workers are going to vote for candidates up and down the ballot
who’ve got their back,” says SEIU Vice President Rocio Sáenz.
And
UNITE/HERE is attempting to repeat a successful 2020 campaign that provided,1,700
volunteers to canvass for Biden in swing states. “Our convention delegates are marching through Midtown Manhattan, on
their way to Trump Tower with a message: We're ready to do whatever it takes to
defeat Donald Trump!” Unite/HERE posted on X, formerly Twitter.
Swing states are those states that can go either way. The US
election cycle is such that Democrats have some states wrapped up and
Republicans have others wrapped up which is very good as they don’t have to
spend resources campaigning there and they concentrate on the few states that
will decide who the next president will be.
Neither party appeals to the millions of registered votersthat are so disgusted with the
political situation and the two capitalist parties that they have abandoned the
electoral system completely.
Over the decades literally billions of dollars have been
given to candidates and parties that represent Wall Street and US big business
by the trade union leadership. It’s important to recognize though, that Michael
Bloomberg, one of the world’s richest men who spent $1 billion----described as “his own money”-----trying to get the
Democratic Party nomination in 2020 donated
$20 million to Biden in June of this year.
This massive infusion of money from big business dwarfs
labor’s contributions and is the norm; it has been going on for a long time.
After all, the Democratic Party, as Nancy Pelosi once reminded one naïve young
DSA member who was a little carried away by the rise of Bernie Sanders, is a
capitalist party and “we are
capitalists”. His question though was an appropriate one, simply asking Pelosi if the Democrats could adopt a more "populist" approach like the right have. Good questionand he got his answer.
While we may not grasp as yet what we can do about it,
abstaining from the electoral process is in itself a protest vote. My view is
that many workers voted for Trump in 2016 as a protest as sickened as they are
by the whole affair and also as a F you
to the process in general, but, as I said, almost 100 million refused to vote
for any of them. Also, the absence of any serious left or reformist opposition
or alternative along with the extreme wokeness, in a negative sense of being
woke, of the Democratic left, has pushed many workers to the right. If a
genuine working class left opposition in the form of a party of our own does
not fill the void; the right will and that’s what’s happening.
My national union, AFSCME provided 40,000 volunteers for
Mondale back in the 1980’s. The union hierarchy urge us to vote for every
Democrat, with rare exceptions just to keep the Republican out and that has led
to this present situation where we continue to lose ground, we continue to lose
interest in the process and so on.
We cannot beat big business and Wall Street at the lobbying
game, they have more money than us and both parties represent the interests of
capital not labor.What we do have is
numbers and we occupy key roles in the economy, in the production of society’s
needs, the cogs that make society run. The potential rail strike last year
scared the crap out of them and they used their political power to stop it.
It’s not just cash that the labor hierarchy gives to their
friends and our enemies.
There are the thousands of volunteers, the precinct walking,
the phone banking and so on. We have the resources, the labor hierarchy
controls them at this point, to provide an alternative to this status quo. An
alternative to the two parties that are both the same when it comes to the
basics, jobs, housing, health care, transportation, the environment and think
Palestine Ohio or the BP spill that devastated life in the Gulf of Mexico.
And we have the structure in place. I don’t have the time or
space but check it out. There are thousands of union locals and union District
Councils and other union offices throughout the country.There are Central Labor Councils in most if
not all states. The Alameda Central Labor Council here in Oakland ran the 1946
Oakland General Strike. The SF Labor Council the 1934 San Francisco one.
In a recent Gallup Poll, Seventy-one percent of Americans now
approve of labor unions. The highest Gallup has recorded on
this measure since 1965. With figures like this, it is clear a real offensive by organized labor fighting for real gains that considerably improved workers' lives, would draw in the millions of workers outside organized labor and kick off a movement that could transform the balance of class forces, and therefor e the mood in US society.
Here in California some 2 million workers are affiliated to
the California State Labor Federation, there are 800,000 workers in the LA
Labor Federation alone and 300,000 teachers in the California Teachers
Association which is affiliated to the National Education Association, the
largest union in the US with 3 million members. This is real potential power.
We are not weak, we just need to overcome the obstacle of our own leadership
and take control of our organizations that workers died building. It is the leaderships’
world view and their strategy that flows from it that holds us back, that
prevents the potential of 14 million organized workers from bringing its weight
to the game.
While I sympathize with those that do not vote, and it’s
important to recognize we’ve won, precious little through the ballot box, we must defend that right as we won it from
these bastards. I will not vote for Biden (I couldn’t look a Palestinian in the
face if I did) and certainly not the sexual deviant and con man Trump. I will
likely vote Green and Jill Stein. But write in anything, I used to write in
labor Party. Write your own name whatever. Don’t let them drive you out of the
game.
Lastly I feel the need to mention this. Of course there are
differences with the two capitalist parties and they have changed over the past
period as the unravelling of US capitalism hastens; but not on the basics, food
shelter, housing etc. I was admonished for abandoning women as the assault on
women, which occurs though various approaches of both parties is more acute with
Republicans. But I would argue this, I’ll bet there are more women and children
that die through inadequate or no health care. And pregnancies that fail due for
the same reason.There are more black
folks die due to lack of health care than are shot by police and so on. They
kill us in many ways.
I am convinced that whether it be Trump or Biden and as the
capitalist offensive continues under both of them, that their increased efforts
to drive us back 150 years will be met with a ferocious resistance; read labor
history. Unions weren’t build by lawyers. The gains of the Black Revolt came
from the streets not the courts, the courts derailed them.
The anti-working class propaganda in the US is intense. The
trade union leaders refuse to combat it and many workers still refer to ourselves
as middle class. But this will
change. I used to say at work that our greatest organizer is the bosses; they
won’t stop their assault on working people.
And, if history is anything to go by working people won’t put
up with it forever. We can only rely on our own strength on the job and
politically through our own political party, which I think will inevitably arise in the
period ahead as a movement will seek to find organized political expression.
