My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law.Richard Rorty
A recently declassified CIA document has revealed that members of the intelligence agencies of France, the United Kingdom and West Germany discussed how to establish “an anti-subversive organization similar to [the CIA’s Operation] Condor” in their own countries. Described by the CIA as “a cooperative effort by the intelligence/security services of several South American countries to combat terrorism and subversion,” Operation Condor was a campaign of state terrorism originally planned by the CIA that targeted leftists, suspected leftists and their “sympathizers” and resulted in the forced disappearances, torture and brutal murders of an estimated 60,000 people, as well as the political imprisonment of around half a million people. Around half of the estimated murders occurred in Argentina.
A bevy of lawmakers in Congress alarmed by soaring deficits are calling yet again for a constitutional amendment to balance the federal budget — but this time it’s Democrats.
The so-called Blue Dog Coalition of moderate Democrats on Tuesday endorsed an amendment that would require Washington to balance the budget except in case of war or recession....Are they for the return of the gold standard, too?
Modern Monetary Theory, or MMT, is almost never mentioned specifically by members of Congress who negotiate budget and appropriations measures, but it is working its way into the mainstream political debate. Now, it’s gotten some Democratic lawmakers’ attention as the party considers big-ticket policy priorities. That includes House Budget Chairman John Yarmuth (D-Ky.), who will decide over the next few weeks whether to produce a fiscal 2020 budget resolution that maps out the caucus’s fiscal vision for the future.
“It sounds like there is a lot of validity to it,” Yarmuth told reporters in February. “The problem I see with it is that ultimately it all could work until it doesn’t. And when it doesn’t, it would take congressional action to correct it, and that’s far from guaranteed.”…The alternative? Stick with something already shown not to be working? Is it really being prudent to stick with the devil we know rather than take a chance on the devil (maybe) we don't know?
The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear. — Antonio Gramsci (c. 1930)In terms of the historical dialectic, the old wave has crested and is breaking while the new wave is rising behind it to replace it as the dominant moment (Zeitgeist) that brings a fresh mindset, yet also influenced by hysteresis so not entirely new.
After they won their primaries, some young progressives curbed their pro-Palestine rhetoric. Now they are in Washington getting oriented. Next up: early test votes in the new year sponsored by the pro-Israel lobby, writes As`ad AbuKhalil.
No, this won’t be on the table until 2021 at the earliest. But the party’s candidates need to offer some solutions.Bloomberg Opinion
Norman Solomon, national coordinator for the progressive advocacy group RootsAction.org, which had lobbied on behalf of superdelegate reform, said he was skeptical that the power structure of the party would actually move on the issue.MMT not far behind. Look for Stephanie Kelton to be playing a much more influential role in advising candidate and office holders."But it moved in a big way today — because of grassroots power," Solomon told Common Dreams in an emailed statement just after the measure passed. "The sustained groundswell of progressive outrage, agitation, activism and organizing since 2016 forced corporate forces at the top of the party to confront a tough choice — either surrender on the superdelegate issue or deepen the justified distrust among people who believe in the principle of one person, one vote."The DNC leadership has realized, he added, "that it won't be possible to defeat Republicans unless progressives are strongly on board. Faced with the choice and undergoing such sustained pressure from the grassroots, the corporate forces of the party have retreated about superdelegates. Of course there will be huge battles ahead for progressives. We have got to keep the pressure up and keep moving to make the party and the country live up to the democratic rhetoric that so routinely rings hollow."...
Click this link. Data For Progress decided to ask people about policy proposals which very serious centrists consider way too far left for America. American voters respond differently.
As should already be clear from existing polls (click and search for “fair”), there is strong support for egalitarian populist redistributive public policy. At Data For Progress, they chose to emphasize the positive — four proposals with overwhelming support, but I think it is just as striking that opinion is almost equally split on a top marginal income tax rate of 90% (2% more oppose than support) and universal basic income (2% more oppose than support)....
Ocasio-Cortez’s socialist message is not an incidental part of a larger demographic story. And her socialism shouldn’t be treated as a virus opportunistically riding the vector of her Latina form. Socialism is inextricable from Ocasio-Cortez’s success because it’s the secret behind her ability to do what the Democratic party has long failed to do — articulate a holistic progressive vision for America.
Socialism is a framework that supports a belief that a country in which everyone can live with dignity is not the stuff of fantasies, of “ponies” — nor is it the selfish dream of a “privileged” populous who want something for nothing. It’s a socialist conception of the world which emboldens Ocasio-Cortez to aver, on a popular late night show, that “in a modern, moral and wealthy society, no person in America should be too poor to live.”
Socialism reveals that capitalism — a system which privileges markets over community — is not a natural truth, but a political choice to which there are alternatives. It shows that Jeff Bezos’s wealth cannot be understood as unrelated to the plight of Amazon’s workers, but is a consequence of their hardships. It reveals one man’s merit to be another woman’s wage theft, and challenges society to value humans outside of our ability to toil. It’s what sets up Ocasio-Cortez to talk about human dignity as non-negotiable. Where Nancy Pelosi quips, “we’re capitalists, and that’s just the way it is,” socialism says that’s not good enough....
Ocasio-Cortez put it best: “At the end of the day, I’m a candidate that doesn’t take corporate money, that champions Medicare for all, a federal jobs guarantee, the abolishment of ICE, and a green New Deal. But I approach those issues with the lenses of the community that I live in. And that is not as easy to say as ‘identity politics.'”
Dick Cheney was right: deficits don’t matter. If only Democrats would learn.…
Attempting to balance a commitment to deficit reduction alongside a theoretical responsibility to protect and expand public programs, Democrats end up imposing false limitations on themselves and neutering their own supposed political agenda. One wonders if the party, increasingly reliant on an elite capitalist donor class, is actually using deficit reduction to weasel out of the responsibility to make life better for the working-class majority of their constituency. The GOP inevitably spends every penny the Democrats save; the difference is that they spend it advancing right-wing policies, not left-wing ones, and lining the pockets of the rich, not the rest of us. The Republicans may be hypocrites, but the Democrats are either suckers or they’re throwing the game.
Incessant Kremlin-baiting of President Trump is risking a Cuban missile–like crisis that he, unlike JFK in 1962, may not be permitted to resolve peacefully.The Nation
The US Democratic Party has lost its right, in my view, to attract the progressive vote.
The CBO Report, which I will discuss in technical terms tomorrow, really just estimated that the latest policy shift under Trump will increase the US fiscal deficit and public debt ratio.
The main game should have been on debating whether the the composition of the US fiscal deficit was beneficial to all Americans or not, rather than running a hysterical political response about the need to cut deficits and stop the public debt sacrificing the prosperity of future generations.
It should also attack the public debt issuance in terms of its corporate welfare aspects and the fact that the US government spending is not reliant on raising revenue from either taxes or debt-issuance.
Unfortunately, the Democrat leadership do not seem to know any better than just mouthing the neoliberal refrain.America is an excellent example of the ability of a narrative to influence the public mindset, and why control of the narrative is essential for the ruling class.
It is clear that the political arm of the Party, at least, is infested with neoliberal mantras, which only perpetuate everything they claim to oppose.
All this talk of “wealthiest 1 per cent” and “massive tax breaks to the largest corporations and wealthiest Americans”, the Democrats have been instrumental in ensuring policy is biased towards these groups.…
An extraordinary number of former intelligence and military operatives from the CIA, Pentagon, National Security Council and State Department are seeking nomination as Democratic candidates for Congress in the 2018 midterm elections. The potential influx of military-intelligence personnel into the legislature has no precedent in US political history.
If the Democrats capture a majority in the House of Representatives on November 6, as widely predicted, candidates drawn from the military-intelligence apparatus will comprise as many as half of the new Democratic members of Congress. They will hold the balance of power in the lower chamber of Congress.First the banks, and then the military and spooks. Democrats?
Unfortunately, we've seen, even before this indictment, that 82% of democrats, according to a CNN poll, believe that Facebook ads, Twitter ads by a Saint Petersburg troll farm were decisive in swinging the election in Donald Trump's favor. They're just swallowing this narrative whole. This is the same crowd that now has a favorable impression of George W. Bush. We can call them the George W. Bush Resistance.They are all deep in denial. This is a psychological aberration.
After 18 months, the James Comey-Robert Mueller FBI investigation into the hacking of the DNC and John Podesta emails has yet to produce evidence of collusion.
Yet we do have evidence that a senior British spy and Trump hater, Christopher Steele, paid by the Hillary Clinton campaign and DNC to dig up dirt on Trump, colluded with Kremlin agents to produce a dossier of scurrilous and unsubstantiated charges, to destroy the candidacy of Donald Trump. And the FBI used this disinformation to get FISA Court warrants to surveil and wiretap the Trump campaign.
Why is this conspiracy and collusion with Russians less worthy of Mueller’s attention than a troll farm in St. Petersburg?Inquiring minds want to know.
"If you’ve enjoyed the The War on Terror … you’re going to love The War on Dissent."Russia Insider
And this is just the beginning, folks. If you want to get a glimpse of our dystopian future, read this recent piece in The Atlantic. It’s by Representative Will Hurd, of Texas, but it conveys the sentiments of the corporate ruling classes and their loyal servants in government, generally. I won’t spoil it for you, but here’s one quote:
“To address continued Russian disinformation campaigns, we need to develop a national counter-disinformation strategy.
The strategy needs to span the entirety of government and civil society, to enable a coordinated effort to counter the threat that influence operations pose to our democracy.
It should implement similar principles to those in the Department of Homeland Security’s Strategy for Countering Violent Extremism, with a focus on truly understanding the threat and developing ways to shut it down.”The emphasis is mine. The Orwellianism is Hurd’s. The message couldn’t possibly be clearer.
The indictment is nothing more than a rancid puff pastry. It pretends to have a mountain of evidence of evil doing by the Russians. But if you simply ask probing questions about the underlying proof of the misdeeds you will quickly discover that this document is a piece of political theater rather than an actual listing of criminal deeds. What do I mean?..
This case is far from a slam dunk for the Mueller team. If it ever did come to trial there are significant gaps and vulnerabilities in the indictment that a competent defense attorney could savage. Nope. This is not about punishing lawbreakers. This is political theater designed to feed the meme promoting anti-Russian hysteria....
Will every critic of our government policies soon be indictable?The Unz Review
Greenwald is no longer invited on MSNBC, and he’s portrayed in the Twitter fever swamp as a leading villain of the self-styled Resistance. “I used to be really good friends with Rachel Maddow,” he says. “And I’ve seen her devolution from this really interesting, really smart, independent thinker into this utterly scripted, intellectually dishonest, partisan hack.” His view of the liberal online media is equally charitable. “Think about one interesting, creative, like, intellectually novel thing that [Vox’s] Matt Yglesias or Ezra Klein have said in like ten years,” he says. “In general, they’re just churning out Democratic Party agitprop every single day of the most superficial type.” (Reached for comment, none of these people would respond to Greenwald.)Couldn't agree more. But perviously to this, Maddow's silence when Cenk left MSNBC because he refused to parrot the party line was an early tell.
