Eternal Ramnation wrote:

eat the rich youtube…

————–
Nice vid.

I’ll tell ya though, people always want to talk about
the ‘middle-class’ and helping the middle-class. Politicians
just love talking about the MC. But I’d prefer it
if they’d talk more about the flat-out-Poor.

The emphasis on the MC kinda suggests the poor
dont ‘deserve’ help but the glorious middle-class does.

• This reply was modified 10 years, 6 months ago by wv.

bnw wrote:

“When the rich wage war it’s the poor who die.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Le Diable Et Le Bon Dieu

Amen.

————–
I thought you would agree with that one 🙂

I am totally in favor of helping small-independent-businesses, btw, bnw.

What do you think of the old Marine Colonel Smedley Butler’s speech:

The following is an excerpt from a speech he gave in 1933: Smedley Butler
“War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses.

I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else. If a nation comes over here to fight, then we’ll fight. The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag.

I wouldn’t go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket.

There isn’t a trick in the racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to. It has its “finger men” to point out enemies, its “muscle men” to destroy enemies, its “brain men” to plan war preparations, and a “Big Boss” Super-Nationalistic-Capitalism.

It may seem odd for me, a military man to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to. I spent thirty- three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country’s most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle- man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.

I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service.

I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.
During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.”
————————

bnw wrote:

Given Clinton’s lust to kill the coal industry I’m surprised she received as much of the vote in WV as she did.

————-

Let me ask you a general, political-philosophical question. Maybe Ozone will chime in too. No heat or rancor involved here — just a good-natured question. Now, without quibbling about the algebra, I think we can agree
that in America today, the top one percent owns a gazillion times more
than the bottom 50 percent. And the top one percent has way more power. Political and Economic power. And then there’s the bottom fifteen or twenty percent of Americans who are in a very dark hole. And i dont even wanna try and describe how bad the bottom five percent have it. (Its a wonder to me that, that group hasn’t just started running around on a mad killing spree)

So we have this really bad Inequality. And its got nuthin to do with who works hard. I mean, the poor people who work at Walmart work a lot harder than Donald Trump or George Soros, right?

And this Inequality is growing, in America. The top one percent are getting richer and more powerful by the day. And the bottom ten percent is literally fighting for its life everyday.

Now my question is — does this situation bother you? And if it does, why wouldnt you want to support policies that redistribute some of that wealth? (that of course would mean supporting leftist policies)

w
v

From the article Ag posted:

“…Joiner was the forerunner of the modern “slot ninja.” Standing 5’11” and weighing 188 pounds, Joiner didn’t have the height of his teammates. He was explosively quick, ran precise routes, had great hands and was tough enough to absorb hits from linebackers and safeties in the heart of the NFL’s steroid era….”

So, maybe the number one trait that separates a slot guy
from an outside guy is… ‘toughness’. A slot guy
has to be fierce and tough to absorb so much contact.
Its not really size but toughness. Yes? No?

w
v

Zooey wrote:

I agree with you and Reed on this. Being in favor of civil rights is what defines being liberal these days, and that’s about the extent of it. One is progressive if one is in favor of allowing 0.3% of the population to urinate in their bathroom of choice.

You can’t find any discussion of class anywhere in the mainstream media, and that is certainly the fault of the Democrat party which hasn’t mentioned class in the past three decades.

————–

Thats how i see it.

The ability/critical thinking skills to even conceive of, let alone make, A systemic examination of why there are poor-people in America doesn’t exist in the mainstream-media.

All you ever hear from the media is ‘socialism failed’ riffs, and ‘blame the poor’ riffs, and “gee aint it awful that poor people have bad water,” etc.

No critical examination of corporate-capitalism is even conceived of.
I think its not just ‘not permitted’, i think mostly its ‘they cant even conceive of’ a critique of Amerikan-capitalism.

Which makes the Bernie phenomenon all the more…surreal.

w
v

“… I have to engage feminism because that becomes the vehicle by which I project myself as a female into the heart of the struggle, but the heart of the struggle does not begin with feminism. It begins with an understanding of domination and with a critique of domination in all its forms. I think it is in fact, a danger to think of the starting point as being feminism. …I think we need a much more sophisticated vision of what it means to have a radical political consciousness. That is why I stress so much the need for African Americans to take on a political language of colonialism…. to frame our issues in a larger political context that looks at imperialism and colonialism and our place as Africans in the Diaspora so that class becomes a central factor….” bell hooks
————
“There is a lovely feature of the American psyche which rejects the notion that there are victims. In America, attitude is a magical elixir that cures everything. People are supposed to believe that they create their realities, and are solely responsible for every aspect of their lives. Everything is because of a choice you made somewhere. Somehow, you were supposed to not only be equipped to make the right choice at all times, despite your circumstances, but to know exactly what the outcome of every choice you made would be. This is all very convenient for the people at the top of our economic system with all the money and the power. Keeps the rest of us trying.”
― Carl-John X. Veraja
——–

“…I see a hunger, especially among Black youth, for more sophisticated answers. Unfortunately, right now, it’s narrow nationalism, narrow forms of Afrocentrism, that are mostly addressing that hunger. Our leading people buy into utopian fantasies of liberation, when in fact our liberation should come from a concrete struggle in the workforce, no fantasies about ancient Africa, and kings and queens. Not that we don’t need to know about ancient Africa to address the biases of Western education.
People forget that the militant struggles of the 1960s were profoundly anti-capitalist. Even Martin Luther King reached a point, before his death, in A Testament of Hope, when he was saying we must be anti-militarist; we must critique capitalism. That has somehow gotten lost in the mix, and I think that this embracing of capitalist ethic of liberal individualism has done more to diffuse Black people’s capacity to struggle for freedom, than any other factor.” bell hooks

zn wrote:

An integral element of that moral economy is displacement of the critique of the invidious outcomes produced by capitalist class power onto equally naturalized categories of ascriptive identity that sort us into groups supposedly defined by what we essentially are rather than what we do. As I have argued, following Walter Michaels and others, within that moral economy a society in which 1% of the population controlled 90% of the resources could be just, provided that roughly 12% of the 1% were black, 12% were Latino, 50% were women, and whatever the appropriate proportions were LGBT people.

There’s some truth to that…and also a lot of bs to that.

For his argument to work there have to be a lot of people with fixed, one-note political visions. So for example if you’re into LGBT issues you can’t notice class, or capitalist power structures.

Well I know so many people who defy that one-note idea that all I can do when I read statements like that is roll my eyes.

The problem isn’t “identity politics,” it’s what he thinks it is. The problem is his overly categorical perceptions. I routinely rub elbows with people who just don’t reduce to his simple categories. Really—I mean for me, that’s an everyday thing.

…

…

—————–

Well, i have no doubt that what you rub-elbows-with is true.

But i can tell you that I rub elbows with the people he is describing all the time. Routinely. Very common here. Identity-politics-one-noters.
And why would that be surprising? Corporate-capitalism gets
poured into their heads from day one. Maybe Portland Maine is different than West Virginia.

w
v

• This reply was modified 10 years, 6 months ago by wv.

Mackeyser wrote:

I mean, ideologically, she’s more aligned with the Republicans of the late 80s than Democrats of 2016, but she’s now trying to pass herself off as a PROGRESSIVE…

How is that not a laughable notion???

She stood up in front of God and everybody and all, but endorsed John McCain for his “experience” over Obama because all he had was…a “speech”.
…
But her rise as well as Trumps is more a function of our reduction into a retarded tribalism.

—————-
When did she support McCain??

I think she may very well think of herself as a ‘progressive’ Mack.

Coz nowadays, people think so much in terms of “identity politix” that if you support the right for people to go into a whatever
bathroom they want, you are considered ‘progressive.’

“Class” discussions are off the table. Race, sex, and gender stuff now make you a ‘progressive’.

w
v

w
v

http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Antiracism.html

The limits of anti-racism by Adolph Reed Jr.

Antiracism is a favorite concept on the American left these days. Of course, all good sorts want to be against racism, but what does the word mean exactly?

The contemporary discourse of “antiracism” is focused much more on taxonomy than politics. It emphasizes the name by which we should call some strains of inequality—whether they should be broadly recognized as evidence of “racism”— over specifying the mechanisms that produce them or even the steps that can be taken to combat them. And, no, neither “overcoming racism” nor “rejecting whiteness” qualifies as such a step any more than does waiting for the “revolution” or urging God’s heavenly intervention. If organizing a rally against racism seems at present to be a more substantive political act than attending a prayer vigil for world peace, that’s only because contemporary antiracist activists understand themselves to be employing the same tactics and pursuing the same ends as their predecessors in the period of high insurgency in the struggle against racial segregation.

This view, however, is mistaken. The postwar activism that reached its crescendo in the South as the “civil rights movement” wasn’t a movement against a generic “racism;” it was specifically and explicitly directed toward full citizenship rights for black Americans and against the system of racial segregation that defined a specific regime of explicitly racial subordination in the South. The 1940s March on Washington Movement was also directed against specific targets, like employment discrimination in defense production. Black Power era and post-Black Power era struggles similarly focused on combating specific inequalities and pursuing specific goals like the effective exercise of voting rights and specific programs of redistribution.

Clarity lost

Whether or not one considers those goals correct or appropriate, they were clear and strategic in a way that “antiracism” simply is not. Sure, those earlier struggles relied on a discourse of racial justice, but their targets were concrete and strategic. It is only in a period of political demobilization that the historical specificities of those struggles have become smoothed out of sight in a romantic idealism that homogenizes them into timeless abstractions like “the black liberation movement”—an entity that, like Brigadoon, sporadically appears and returns impelled by its own logic.

Ironically, as the basis for a politics, antiracism seems to reflect, several generations downstream, the victory of the postwar psychologists in depoliticizing the critique of racial injustice by shifting its focus from the social structures that generate and reproduce racial inequality to an ultimately individual, and ahistorical, domain of “prejudice” or “intolerance.” (No doubt this shift was partly aided by political imperatives associated with the Cold War and domestic anticommunism.) Beryl Satter’s recent book on the racialized political economy of “contract buying” in Chicago in the 1950s and 1960s, Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America, is a good illustration of how these processes worked; Robert Self’s book on Oakland since the 1930s, American Babylon, is another. Both make abundantly clear the role of the real estate industry in creating and recreating housing segregation and ghettoization.

Tasty bunny

All too often, “racism” is the subject of sentences that imply intentional activity or is characterized as an autonomous “force.” In this kind of formulation, “racism,” a conceptual abstraction, is imagined as a material entity. Abstractions can be useful, but they shouldn’t be given independent life.

I can appreciate such formulations as transient political rhetoric; hyperbolic claims made in order to draw attention and galvanize opinion against some particular injustice. But as the basis for social interpretation, and particularly interpretation directed toward strategic political action, they are useless. Their principal function is to feel good and tastily righteous in the mouths of those who propound them. People do things that reproduce patterns of racialized inequality, sometimes with self-consciously bigoted motives, sometimes not. Properly speaking, however, “racism” itself doesn’t do anything more than the Easter Bunny does.

Yes, racism exists, as a conceptual condensation of practices and ideas that reproduce, or seek to reproduce, hierarchy along lines defined by race. Apostles of antiracism frequently can’t hear this sort of statement, because in their exceedingly simplistic version of the nexus of race and injustice there can be only the Manichean dichotomy of those who admit racism’s existence and those who deny it. There can be only Todd Gitlin (the sociologist and former SDS leader who has become, both fairly and as caricature, the symbol of a “class-first” line) and their own heroic, truth-telling selves, and whoever is not the latter must be the former. Thus the logic of straining to assign guilt by association substitutes for argument.

My position is—and I can’t count the number of times I’ve said this bluntly, yet to no avail, in response to those in blissful thrall of the comforting Manicheanism—that of course racism persists, in all the disparate, often unrelated kinds of social relations and “attitudes” that are characteristically lumped together under that rubric, but from the standpoint of trying to figure out how to combat even what most of us would agree is racial inequality and injustice, that acknowledgement and $2.25 will get me a ride on the subway. It doesn’t lend itself to any particular action except more taxonomic argument about what counts as racism.

Do what now?

And here’s a practical catch-22. In the logic of antiracism, exposure of the racial element of an instance of wrongdoing will lead to recognition of injustice, which in turn will lead to remedial action—though not much attention seems ever given to how this part is supposed to work. I suspect this is because the exposure part, which feels so righteously yet undemandingly good, is the real focus. But this exposure convinces only those who are already disposed to recognize.

Those who aren’t so disposed have multiple layers of obfuscating ideology, mainly forms of victim-blaming, through which to deny that a given disparity stems from racism or for that matter is even unjust. The Simi Valley jury’s reaction to the Rodney King tape, which saw King as perp and the cops as victims, is a classic illustration. So is “underclass” discourse. Victimization by subprime mortgage scams can be, and frequently is, dismissed as the fault of irresponsible poor folks aspiring beyond their means. And there is no shortage of black people in the public eye—Bill Cosby and Oprah Winfrey are two prime examples, as is Barack Obama—who embrace and recycle those narratives of poor black Americans’ wayward behavior and self-destructive habits.

And how does a simple narrative of “racism” account for the fact that so many black institutions, including churches and some racial advocacy organizations, and many, many black individuals actively promoted those risky mortgages as making the “American Dream of home ownership” possible for “us”? Sure, there are analogies available—black slave traders, slave snitches, “Uncle Toms” and various race traitors—but those analogies are moral judgments, not explanations. And to mention them only opens up another second-order debate about racial authenticity—about who “really” represents the black community. Even Clarence Thomas sees himself as a proud black man representing the race’s best interests.

My point is that it’s more effective politically to challenge the inequality and injustice directly and bypass the debate over whether it should be called “racism.”

I do recognize that, partly because of the terms on which the civil rights movement’s victories have been achieved, there is a strong practical imperative for stressing the racially invidious aspects of injustices: they have legal remedies. Race is one of the legal classes protected by anti-discrimination law; poverty, for instance, is not. But this makes identifying “racism” a technical requirement for pursuing certain grievances, not the basis of an overall political strategy for pursuit of racial justice, or, as I believe is a clearer left formulation, racial equality as an essential component of a program of social justice.

Anti-Marx

I’ve been struck by the level of visceral and vitriolic anti-Marxism I’ve seen from this strain of defenders of antiracism as a politics. It’s not clear to me what drives it because it takes the form of snide dismissals than direct arguments. Moreover, the dismissals typically include empty acknowledgment that “of course we should oppose capitalism,” whatever that might mean. In any event, the tenor of this anti-Marxism is reminiscent of those right-wing discourses, many of which masqueraded as liberal, in which only invoking the word “Marxism” was sufficient to dismiss an opposing argument or position.

This anti-Marxism has some curious effects. Leading professional antiracist Tim Wise came to the defense of Obama’s purged green jobs czar Van Jones by dismissing Jones’s “brief stint with a pseudo-Maoist group,” and pointing instead to “his more recent break with such groups and philosophies, in favor of a commitment to eco-friendly, sustainable capitalism.” In fact, Jones was a core member of a revolutionary organization, STORM, that took itself very seriously, almost comically so.

And are we to applaud his break with radical politics in favor of a style of capitalism that few actual capitalists embrace? This is the substance of Wise’s defense.

This sort of thing only deepens my suspicions about antiracism’s status within the comfort zone of neoliberalism’s discourses of “reform.” More to the point, I suspect as well that this vitriol toward radicalism is rooted partly in the conviction that a left politics based on class analysis and one focused on racial injustice are Manichean alternatives.

Devolutions

This is also a notion of fairly recent provenance, in part as well another artifact of the terms on which the civil rights victories were consolidated, including the emergence of a fully incorporated black political class in the 1970s and its subsequent evolution. By contrast, examining, for example, the contributions to historian and civil rights activist Rayford Logan’s 1944 volume What the Negro Wants, one sees quite a different picture. Nearly all the contributors—including nominal conservatives—to this collection of analyses from a broad cross section of black scholars and activists asserted in very concrete terms that the struggle for racial justice and the general struggle for social and industrial democracy were more than inseparable, that the victory of the former largely depended on the success of the latter. This was, at the time, barely even a matter for debate: rather, it was the frame of reference for any black mass politics and protest activity.

As I suggest above, various pressures of the postwar period—including carrots of success and sticks of intimidation and witch-hunting, as well as the articulation of class tensions within the Civil Rights movement itself—drove an evolution away from this perspective and toward reformulation of the movement’s goals along lines more consonant with postwar, post-New Deal, Cold War liberalism. Thus what the political scientist Preston Smith calls “racial democracy” came gradually to replace social democracy as a political goal—the redress of grievances that could be construed as specifically racial took precedence over the redistribution of wealth, and an individualized psychology replaced notions of reworking the material sphere. This dynamic intensified with the combination of popular demobilization in black politics and emergence of the post-segregation black political class in the 1970s and 1980s.

We live under a regime now that is capable simultaneously of including black people and Latinos, even celebrating that inclusion as a fulfillment of democracy, while excluding poor people without a whimper of opposition. Of course, those most visible in the excluded class are disproportionately black and Latino, and that fact gives the lie to the celebration. Or does it really? From the standpoint of a neoliberal ideal of equality, in which classification by race, gender, sexual orientation or any other recognized ascriptive status (that is, status based on what one allegedly is rather than what one does) does not impose explicit, intrinsic or necessary limitations on one’s participation and aspirations in the society, this celebration of inclusion of blacks, Latinos and others is warranted.

We’ll be back!

But this notion of democracy is inadequate, since it doesn’t begin to address the deep and deepening patterns of inequality and injustice embedded in the ostensibly “neutral” dynamics of American capitalism. What A. Philip Randolph and others—even anticommunists like Roy Wilkins—understood in the 1940s is that what racism meant was that, so long as such dynamics persisted without challenge, black people and other similarly stigmatized populations would be clustered on the bad side of the distribution of costs and benefits. To extrapolate anachronistically to the present, they would have understood that the struggle against racial health disparities, for example, has no real chance of success apart from a struggle to eliminate for-profit health care.

These seem really transparent points to me, but maybe that’s just me. I remain curious why the “debate” over antiracism as a politics takes such indirect and evasive forms—like the analogizing and guilt by association, moralistic bombast in lieu of concrete argument—and why it persists in establishing, even often while denying the move, the terms of debate as race vs. class. I’m increasingly convinced that a likely reason is that the race line is itself a class line, one that is entirely consistent with the neoliberal redefinition of equality and democracy. It reflects the social position of those positioned to benefit from the view that the market is a just, effective, or even acceptable system for rewarding talent and virtue and punishing their opposites and that, therefore, removal of “artificial” impediments to its functioning like race and gender will make it even more efficient and just.

From this perspective even the “left” antiracist line that we must fight both economic inequality and racial inequality, which seems always in practice to give priority to “fighting racism” (often theorized as a necessary precondition for doing anything else), looks suspiciously like only another version of the evasive “we’ll come back for you” (after we do all the business-friendly stuff) politics that the Democrats have so successfully employed to avoid addressing economic injustice.

Adolph Reed Jr. is a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania.