Well, yes. Wouldn’t a leftish ‘progressive’ electoral coalition including BlackLives activists be a lovely way to assure that the Rabble Class achieve economic, educational, social, and civil rights justice? Why the fooque then, can’t those sassy women quit interrupting Bernie with their angry tirades at largely white Bernie gatherings? ‘Middle class jobs will be good for black lives!’ ‘Bernie has plenty of history of voting for helpful programs for people of color!’ Just imagine the nerve of Tia Oso and Patrisse Cullors standing up and demanding that Sanders and O’Malley tell the room what they would do to stop the rampant killing of blacks by police! ‘They made no friends that day’, we hear. ‘Everyone suffers from militarized police!, not just blacks; let’s unite!*’ ‘They made sure they’re seen as whiny idiots from here on!’
*Well, except for these fact, of course. According to the Guardian’s ‘The Counted‘, 711 US citizens were killed by police since Jan. 1; per million, whites were killed at a rate of 1.73, blacks at 4.4, Hispanics/Latinos 1.87. 184 of the 711 were black; 8 were Native American. Cities with most deaths: Los Angeles (12), Houston (10), Phoenix (8), Oklahoma City (7), and San Francisco (6). Given that ‘race’ is a modern social construct, those numbers might be hard to determine, especially with mixed-race citizens.
To be sure, the #BLM activists don’t seem aware that other classes of disenfranchised citizens are being assassinated and brutalized, as well: First Americans, the mentally ill, the homeless, Hispanics in ABQ and LA…and it will be good when they wake up to that fact, of course. But for blacks, especially those of the Rabble class, stopping the killing has reached the emergency level.
Chris Savage of electablog had an epiphany during the event:
“At times he plunged on, talking over the protesters as if they weren’t there. While he is largely a supporter of civil rights and is, in general, right on the issues of the Black Lives Matter movement, he came across as a self-important know-it-all who has better things to do than to listen to uppity black kids who are disrupting HIS speech. In the end, he took off his microphone and left the stage without as much as a wave to the audience.
pouting Bernie
Sitting in the middle of this maelstrom was a fascinating experience. I, like many of the others there, was initially irritated by the protestors. I was there to hear the candidates and was frustrated that they weren’t being heard. Even a bit angry, in fact. “These are your allies,” I thought. “Why on earth are you attacking them? Why are you disrupting an event where the people there are sympathetic to your cause?”
Frustration. Anger.
Being silenced.
Frustration.
Anger.
Silenced.
Talked over.
Ignored.
Every single one of these emotions that ran through my white privileged brain in the first few moments of the protest until I was slapped across the face with what I was being forced to confront. Every single one of these emotions are felt acutely and painfully every single day by racial minority groups in our country. But, instead of being inconvenienced by not being able to hear a politician speak, they face them in the context of being slaughtered in the streets by the police officers who are tasked to protect them, incarcerated in astonishingly disparate numbers, and blamed for not being able to escape from the prison of poverty that holds far too many of them in bondage.”
How fine it is that Savage jettisoned so much of his white privilege to finally hear the young women’s plaintive cries. Poverty also often means that blacks sit in jail for minor offenses since they can’t afford bail; Riker’s Island stats on that are horrendous, as of course they have been in Ferguson, Baltimore, and many other communities.
How much ink has been spilled by now in answer to Angry Black Lady’s (Imani Gandy) retorts to Bernie post-Netroots Nation in Phoenix? Yeah, she was rude and crude. And furious, but that’s her brand, and why she named herself ABL, for cripe’s sake. She’s asking: So what if ya marched with MLK in the 60s if ya storm off the stage when confronted with hard questions about Black Lives?
It’s a good question, especially if we note how easy it is to mouth Great and Inspirational Words later on, after preparation, to gain votes.
The movement, of course, is not monolithic, and various longer-term committees have formed to decide on ways to proceed. Justice Together (hasn’t decided, it seems), Hands Up United, Ferguson Action Team, Bay Area Solidarity, CCR’s Law4blacklives, and apparently even a semi-official #BlackLivesMatter group, for instance.
Now on one of Kevin Gosztola’s ‘Bernie’ diaries, a few apparent Sandernistas (h/t Jeffrey St. Claire) claimed that the Black Women Bernie Interrupters at the Seattle Medicare and #BLM itself are funded by George Soros, and have attacked Sanders (poor Bernie) and not Clinton because of it; I have no idea, and really: so what? Blacks voting for her is a ludicrous proposition, imo, given her record before she became a populist, ha; but then anyone who’d vote for her…(well, never mind).
But I will say that many of the movement’s Tweeters (no, I won’t name names) are expressly Democrats, which does boggle my mind. They praise Eric Holder (wth?), Obama, and now Bernie, and seem thrilled that after the Interruptions in Seattle, he hired a young black woman as his press secretary, woot!
Also heard on those threads were charges that they don’t want white allies! Well sure they do, and Asians and Latino/as and more…but some folks have laid down some ground rules; this is the best list I’ve seen, from Bay Solidarity. The first rule amounts to ‘quit telling us what to do!’, though much more polite and reasoned. As for charges that ‘the movement’ doesn’t know get just how interrelated economic justice is to their oppression, one fairly comprehensive list comes from the Ferguson Action Committee’s ‘Our Vision for a New America’.
He is a fast learner, our Bern, I’ll give him that, and post-Netroots, made some great comments at the SCLC conference in Baton Rouge at the end of July. He’d gathered names, positions and solutions that would help black lives, and even implied that MLK would approve of his candidacy, since: MLK was all about alleviating poverty before he was assassinated. True, but the candidate seems to have blown right by Radical Dr. King’s speeches against capitalism, militarism, and Imperical foreign wars. In fact, Bernie’s website doesn’t even have *any* categories for foreign policy, the surveillance state, or the military budget on the Issues page, speaking of disconnects. That he fails to have those as Issues may indicate his recent decisions to not be an AIPAC puppet, or that he’s a US Imperialist at heart, but certainly, he is a reformist capitalist. Had he chosen to run on a third party ticket as a Democratic Socialist, even….but no; he’s running as a Democrat.
His new ‘Racial Justice’ page is great of course, save for a few quibbles I have with it. Does he say in his town halls: “The police must stop the killings and abject brutality”? I hope so, but again, he seems to be pretty late to that party considering what’s been going on for so long in the various stop the police from killing us and brutalizing us movements.
Bruce Dixon of BAR has weighed in on the #BLM movement as captured by the Democratic Party:
“Why doesn’t the #BlackLivesMatter movement, supposedly focused upon the unique needs of people of color, have any critique of the black political class, almost all Democrats, who have been key stakeholders in the building of the prison state, in gentrification and school privatization from New Orleans to Detroit and beyond, and who helped peddle the subprime mortgages to black families which exploded and cut black family wealth by nine-tenths? Have they even noticed that a black president has closed and privatized more public schools than any other in US history? For all the big words they use, do they ever mention the word “capitalism”?
He quotes Alicia Garza on the radio waxing happy about their effects on the Democrats at NetRoots:
“So I feel really proud of our team for pulling back the curtain, right? You saw that as a result of those actions what happened was every single one of those candidates scrambled to release statements to be closer aligned to the program the vision and the demands of the black lives matter movement.”
But as far as Capitalism itself acting as a major, if not the major, force that’s behind the ever-burgeoning police state and milking the Rabble for all they’re worth (which includes mass incarceration, of course), I can’t think of one radical black Leftist who doesn’t name it as The Prime Culprit, can you? Protecting property over people, a well. Or this horrific bigotry: ‘NYPD union introduces vagrant-shaming photos to address quality-of-life issues’. Yes, they should find homes and not detract from our city’s ‘quality of life’. Grrrrr.
Victory declared. Pretty low bar, and where have we heard these rousing stump speeches before? The only true thing Obama ever said was that Ronald Reagan was his favorite transformational President ever, as far as I can remember.
And when Davey asked about forming or joining a third party, apparently Garza said a lot of words, but never answered the question.
Paul Street asks:
“…why does Sanders have nothing to say about the recent significant positive social democratic, poverty-reducing, and egalitarian accomplishments of governments that have taken an historic Left turn in Latin America – Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Uruguay, and Argentina – or about the remarkable poverty-reducing accomplishments of the Cuban Revolution? Among the many explanations for Sanders’ silence on the noteworthy achievement of Latin American populism and socialism (achieved over and against U.S. opposition and intervention), we cannot discount race – a stubborn white reluctance to acknowledge that Uncle Sam might have anything to learn from his supposedly inferior, non-white neighbors in South America.”
Yes.
Now from where I sit, principled social movements often die when they’re turned into electoral machines instead of keeping the pressure on from outside the system. One recent cautionary tale was the massive activist response to the Walker government’s ending collective bargaining, and the abject failure of the movement to unseat those in power; they now seem to believe that they have a mandate to Screw the People of the state, and their portion of the planet as well.
So I would hate to see the movement falter and turn to electoral politics instead. Weighing on the issue at TRNN are BAR editor Glen Ford and founding member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation Eugene Puryear discussing ‘Voting and Civil Rights Acts Won Not With Votes, But Through Struggle’. It’s by no means a barn-burner of a discussion, and Puryear seemed all over the map, but I’ll bring a snippet or two.
Ford:
“Well of course there’s a value in understanding one’s history. In terms of elections in the United States, nothing takes place outside of the purview of monopoly capital. It’s interesting, until the passage of the Voting Rights Act, and related developments, there was one, only one party of capital in the South, and that was the Democratic party. And much of the civil rights movement was concerned with integrating that Democratic party, with getting rid of the all-white Democratic primary.
Once we had the Voting Rights Act, and three years later Richard Nixon, a Republican, puts in effect his Southern strategy, we see the movement of right people out of the Democratic party and the concomitant result among black folks that today not only are almost all black elected officials Democrats, but virtually all of the major black organizations are also annexes of the Democratic party. I’m talking about the NAACP and the National Urban League, virtually all of the leadership conference on civil rights. Certainly Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, basically all of them. And when this black political class calls a summit meeting, as they pompously sometimes do, what it really turns into, what it really is, is a meeting of black Democrats.
And that means that this leadership class, entirely Democratic, is absolutely incapable of speaking up for the interests of the masses of black folks against the forces of Wall Street who really control the Democratic party apparatus. These folks, these black Democrats, collaborate every day with the ruling class. This wedding of, this absorption in of the Democratic party has meant that the last two generations there’s been no independent black politics in the United States, and we’re not going to see any independent black politics in the United States until the advent of a new mass, grassroots black movement. That’s where the leadership will come from.”
Ball asks why Johnson signed the voting rights act, no matter what he said behind the scenes.
Ford:
“Well, it was a black movement of masses of people in the street. [snip] And that had the powers that be quite nervous about what kind of America was being born out of this discussion within the black community and with our allies. And of course, cities were burning with some regularity.
And so of the measurement of black political power, if it’s limited to just voting power, it really sells short our capabilities in this country. There’s much more to politics than just voting. And in fact that’s one of the tools that the rulers use to keep voters feeling powerless, is to say that, it’s to define all politics as being going to some polling, some polling booth every two or four, six years.”
You may enjoy reading Bree Newsome’s ‘When Oppression Is the Status Quo, Disruption Is a Moral Duty’.
And for your (chortle) amusement: Sam Huseini’s ‘New Mural in D.C.: Shooting the “War Thug” Presidents in the Balls’
“Some good citizen of Washington committed an act of street justice against the most fearsome gang of thugs imaginable: 11 U.S. presidents. The mass-killers-in-chief were hit with a fusillade of paint balls to the imperial crotch – a low blow to the low-lifes who have terrorized humanity from the White House.” Splat!
At NetRoots Nation, they sang:
davidly
Greyson Smythe
LeMoyne
juliania2
ohiobarbarian
stephenadavis1
wendyedavis
café babylon 
i’d totally missed this story from august 5 at the Guardian: (analysis of results from a new FOIA request)
‘Chicago police detained thousands of black Americans at interrogation facility; Special report: Guardian lawsuit reveals overwhelming racial disparity at Homan Square, where detainees are still held for minor crimes with little access to the outside world, despite police denials that site is an anomaly’
“At least 3,500 Americans have been detained inside a Chicago police warehouse described by some of its arrestees as a secretive interrogation facility, newly uncovered records reveal.
Of the thousands held in the facility known as Homan Square over a decade, 82% were black. Only three received documented visits from an attorney, according to a cache of documents obtained when the Guardian sued the police.
…an independent Guardian analysis of arrestees’ records, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, shows that Homan Square is far from normal:
Between September 2004 and June 2015, around 3,540 people were eventually charged, mostly with forms of drug possession – primarily heroin, as well as marijuana and cocaine – but also for minor infractions such as traffic violations, public urination and driving without a seatbelt.
More than 82% of the Homan Square arrests thus far disclosed – or 2,974 arrests – are of black people, while 8.5% are of white people. Chicago, according to the 2010 US census, is 33% black and 32% white.
Over two-thirds of the arrests at Homan Square thus far revealed – at least 2,522 – occurred under the tenure of Mayor Rahm Emanuel, the former top aide to Barack Obama who has said of Homan Square that the police working under him “follow all the rules”.
“For all the big words they use, do they ever mention the word “capitalism”?”
Maybe Soros is funding a colored anti-revolution.
what an odd thing to light on, comrade x. wot; no Om today? ;-)
but then it was odd that he said that the #blm folks use ‘big words’, too, but how BIG a word is ‘capitalism’? maybe miz garza had during the two interviews he’d mentioned?
but nice play on ‘color revolutions’.
I wish Dixon and Street would bare today’s ways and means of the moody tyrant, crapitalism. How could Soros resist using NGO’s inside the empire?
i think you would have had to follow along with both of them, as well as the radical black left altogether. street has a new piece up that counterpunch grabbed” ‘Why Bernie Sanders is No Great White Hope for Black America’ (and hilariously, there are a number of pro-bernie columns there as well.
but he says this along the way, and while not directly accusative of capitalism, tra la la:
“Sanders is right when he says that racial inequality in the U.S. cannot be meaningfully addressed without also taking on the question of economic inequality across the entire society. History, however, suggests strongly that the racial problem is far more complex. Racial inequality actually deepened while overall opportunity, jobs, government benefits for working people and the poor rose expanded like never before and while poverty and inequality fell like no time before during a “golden age” – at the height of the long New Deal era’s “[corporate-] liberal [and Keynesian] consensus” – that was far more golden for white Americans than for Black Americans. At the same time, it is also true, today as in previous eras, that the United States’ shockingly high and persistent racial disparities cannot be meaningfully addressed and overcome without specific struggles against the very specific racial oppression experienced by Black Americans – oppression that has always been written into the national DNA of American capitalism and class rule. Social-democratic economism will simply not do the trick.”
he adds a whale of a lot of context.
on further reflection, i’m not entirely sure that soros has funded the ‘offishul’ blm movement, although there does seem to be one. but he did co-opt occupy by creating ‘move to amend’ (the constitution saying that corporations are not people). fie on my disintegrating memory, but i believe one of the originators said something about ‘millions’. but they now say ‘offishully’ that they are not endorsing candidates (contra glen ford’s newest post).
http://blacklivesmatter.com/ ‘for immediate release aug. 9’
pressure seems to be on, at any rate.
BLM seems like a very good investment for Soros. I shouldn’t knock Street and Dixon. However, the crapitalist world’s deceit is beyond their grasp.
i wonder if you might let me/us know which anti-capitalists do grasp the deceit of capitalism.
you may also like this; i love langston hughes, and hadn’t understood this poem’s twists, turns, and voices. ‘“Let America Be America Again” — Again? Thoughts on Langston Hughes Poem in the Wake of Bernie Sanders Bumping heads with #BLM’ by Joseph G. Ramsey
Sourpuss does! Ha ha ha ha ha.
Close to the mark, except that “element of universality” is tricky, as Hughes usurpation of libertarian Freedom, is. Note that, to compare Hughes’ poem to the BLM disruption, Ramsey first likens the interrupted speaker to Sanders but later admits that Sander’s program sounds like that of the interrupting speaker:
So Hughes’ yeomen’s freedom is today’s deception. Do BLM agitators have a propaganda of the stars?
Cut ’em off at The BILL$. indeed (but left out the Nuking FUT$’ epitome, “Truman”). As far as the visual and vocal artists’ target audiences for revolution; well … you know:
no truman, but the den mother in the center is ‘ Mama Ayesha, who founded the restaurant that is now named for her: Mama Ayesha’s, just near the Duke Ellington Bridge in Adams Morgan. It was originally labored over by Karlisima Rodas.
The recent transformation involves someone having apparently paint-balled all the presidents, shooting them in the balls with red paint. Or, trying to. Whoever did this seems to have been richer in inspiration than in sniper skills, which may on balance be a good thing. It’s a bit messy, but the intent is fairly clear: Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton I, Bush II and Obama — all shot in the balls. Scrawled on the side is “The War Thugs.”
This is an apparent reference to Obama’s comments in April calling protesters against police killings who resort to property destruction “thugs.”
As USA Today reported: “President Obama doesn’t regret using the term ‘thug’ in describing the violent rioters in Baltimore this week, spokesman Josh Earnest said Wednesday.
“‘Whether it’s arson or, you know, the looting of a liquor store … those were thuggish acts,’ Earnest said.’
One could imagine the augmented muralist going a bit further, perhaps giving us a lingering blot where Truman’s crotch would be were he in the picture. That would be all too appropriate given that Truman gave rise to our “National Security State” and nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki exactly 70 years ago this week.
…………………………….
i must not have seen caddyshack; that dude looks positively deranged, though. wonder if the mural’s still alive by now?
TRNN in Ferguson: 1 Year After the Killing of Mike Brown, What’s Changed?
The Real News speaks to defense attorney Leslie Broadnax, Dr. Marva Robinson, and local rapper Lil Will. – August 12, 2015
the transcript.
The idiots who jumped the stage with Bernie Sander represent absolutely NOBODY and they aren’t even worth discussing.
now i dunno in which venue, seattle or phoenix, but if you’re speaking of these two “outside agitators” women in seattle, you may have a bit of a point; i’ve read that they’ve even disavowed themselves to an extent. ;-)
but forcing ‘feel the bern’ (a new slogan) to articulate his beliefs after being so insanely stumble-footed in phoenix is a worthy endeavor. they certainly seem to be worthy of a hella lot of discussion, including…here. i was especially touched by chris savage finally perceiving his white privilege and being jolted into seeing the motivations behind ‘their rudeness’.
what besides heckling and protests and shuttin’ shit down is left when the killing is continuing apace? and the leaders of this nation pretend to care, but fail to stop it, jacob freeze?
some time, somewhere, hecklers may need to provoke him into policy positions on militarization, foreign wars, and other key issues, not that i’d believe him by then, of course.
as i asked a man who emailed a dissenting opinion of this post just now: did you read it? if not, i hope you will.
Marissa Janae Johnson admits to being child of tea-partiers and a devout evangelical Kwistian who would love her some Soros money.
well, she helped provoke ‘the bern’ enough that he hired a black press secretary just after seattle, doggone it! ;-)
Oh my goodness, doesn’t that trigger a little twinge of recognition?
‘Trenton 14-year-old was unarmed when shot 7 times by police, family’s lawyer says’
“Radazz Hearns, 14, remains in stable condition at Capital Health Regional Medical Center in Trenton after being shot five times in the right leg, once in the left leg and has a bullet lodged in his pelvis, said the lawyer Samuel A. Anyan Jr.
“He’s lucky to be alive,” Anyan said, speaking out on behalf of the family for the first time since the shooting. “We’ll be seeking justice. This appears to be an unjustified shooting.”
Two State Police troopers and a Mercer County sheriff’s officer were responding to a report of shots fired at the Prospect Village apartments when they encountered three males walking along Louise Lane, according to the Attorney General’s office, which is investigating the shooting.
The three officers got out of their vehicle to question the trio and the 14-year-old ran, authorities said. Witnesses told authorities they saw the teen reach for his waistband before one of the troopers and the sheriff’s officer opened fire, the Attorney General’s office has said.”
He ran away while black, indicating his guilt. The po-po found a gun under some car 12 hours later; hadda be his.
‘Indianapolis Police Shoot and Kill Unarmed 15-Year-Old Child‘, August 13, 2015
“Andre Green was shot and killed by Indianapolis Metropolitan Police officers Sunday night after police say he “drove a vehicle” towards them.
This fatal shooting makes Green the youngest person to be fatally shot by police since Tamir Rice was killed last November.
In a press conference on this shooting, which the Indianapolis Police held on Monday Assistant Chief Lloyd Crowe said that the car “matched the description” of a vehicle that had been “carjacked” earlier.
We asked the Indianapolis police if in fact the red Nissan that had been carjacked earlier that evening was the one in question that was being driven. They refused to answer this key question.
Moreover, at least one eye-witness to the shooting, Allon Eaton, 29, told local reports from the Indianapolis Star that he could clearly see the entire incident, from the corner across the street, and that the child did not try to hit the police whatsoever.
Instead, he describes a scenario where the police gunned down a fleeing teenager for simply not stopping.
Green was pronounced dead at the scene of the police killing.”
There are more; the Guardian will have to keep updating their count.
It has been quite educational, for those who care to listen and learn, to see what the reactionary, mostly White, mostly male, Liberal left truly represents. Even Tovarich has joined the Sexist Pig spittle flecked attempts to reinflate ,with noxious emissions, the Bernie balloon. The attacks on these brave women have been just as Patriarchal, sexist and even racist and bigoted as what you would expect from the Right.
It’s hilarious how easily a few radical Black women could expose Bernie as a Democrat windup toy who can only repeat what is on his prerecorded and preapproved tape-loop.
White Liberal rubes, of a certain age and class, will continue to flock to their White Moses because he represents the best hope for their Middle Class White Privilege, all others must demonstrate their willingness to be wood haulers and water carriers before their needs are recognized even as secondary issues.
The most important thing that young people can learn from this exhibition of intolerance and rage is that there is no place in our warped political system for the advancement of liberty and equality or even equal protection.
Watch out comrade, I think you’ve got the rabies.
wordpress just ate my long comment; i’ll try to reconstruct it after a bit of rest.
yes to all of this for now, and it’s hard not to feel a bit bitter about the vast plains between the present ‘worlds’ and daily experiences.
i was trying to paste in a bit of langston hughes poem at the end, spoken with utter irony, as ‘america never was’ for him.
“O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the land where every man is free.
The land that’s mine—the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME—
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.”
When Sanders got the endorsement of National Nurses United here are his unscripted remarks on the issue:
The prepared remarks from Sanders site have no mention of the issue – perhaps it was in the Q&A. The NNU leadership said only Sanders scored 100% on their candidate questionnaire but they were surprised by the level and vehemence of support by the members for Bernie. Is the NNU membership wood haulers and the leadership the water carriers or is it the other way around? Instead consider that Bernie has been chopping and toting issues they care very much about for years: Universal single-payer health system, NO to TPP and getting the money out of politics.
I am sure that the coprocratic [intentional mis-sp] Democratic leadership would like to co-opt what Bernie is building but their favorite sHill stands a good chance of being swept aside by it, despite their dog-whistles (He’s a kooky socialist!) and consistent talk of inevitability. Relating this to the main topic, I must say that calling Bernie a “Democrat windup toy who can only repeat what is on his prerecorded and preapproved tape-loop” is another form of
hilarioussad disconnect.‘listen and learn’ seems to require an empathy that too few feel, sadly, and an awareness of what white privilege entails. the charges that this is ‘too narrow a movement of identity politics’ nails that meme down, doesn’t it? one detractor to this post said in email that he was “too busy fighting the “regular people vs. the corporate fascist structure controlled by the power elite” battle. well, if this police state against the Rabble class blacks, first americans isn’t exactly that, given why and where the first ‘police departments’ were formed, i dunno what is. slave patrols, and dangerous induns, exactly the two groups enslaved by capitalist oligarchs, and continues to this day.
some postulate that one day some uppity pece-mongers may be so rude as to heckle Bernie about not having anything on his website about FP, militarism and the budget, and other themes that are crucial to the poor and disenfranchised. luckily dave swanson wrote about it, although not in quite those terms.
http://davidswanson.org/node/4864
ah, i’ve forgotten what else i’d said, but that’s close enough. oh: and i’d ask: were the insulted liberals the ones being killed and brutalized, would they simply wait for the electoral process to play out in hopes that a Bernie would set them free? and would they give him pass after pass for not doing so as they have obama? ‘recalcitrant congress’, and all that jazz?
who’s ‘Tovarich’?
on edit: actually, buffy said it right:
There is a great post at CP, ‘In defense of heckling’ that recalls some early Uppity Women and argues that heckling these political poseurs may be all that is left of democracy.
Tovarich = Comrade X or is it Comrade Y?
here it is, an it’s fun, but this: ” But is it likely, without the embarrassment caused by BlackLivesMatter women in Phoenix and Seattle, that his campaign would have started talking about structural racism?” is what i meant about his having his Come to Jesus Moments too late for my respect.
there’s another one there i’d read by a black woman who pretty much said the same thing. q. fulton?
one of the bay area hecklings i loved was the ‘Wake Up Libby’ ones (as in oakland mayor) quite early in the mornin’.
all sorts of bern supporters are pissed that folks haven’t ‘interrupted’ hillary. well, she out-smarted them in new hampshire (some might say co-opted them as obama has often done,or tried to), although reviews were mixed. this? oy; hope you can see the comments under it.
Here’s a black life that really really matters, and an eye-opening account of his ordeal.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/08/13/why-is-rev-edward-pinkney-in-prison-another-case-of-political-persecution/
(Apologies if you’ve already discussed this case, wendye – I don’t get around as much as I should these days. Family getting themselves sorted though, so things are looking up!)
actually, i hadn’t known his tragic story, juliania. but i was interested to read of a black man whose life ‘really really mattered.’ ;-) i’d offer that they all should, but i know that’s not what you really meant.
it’s good to hear that your family members are sorting themselves out’ i’m trying to learn to adapt to the ways ours aren’t.
Yes, I definitely wasn’t suggesting this as an alternative, but as a positive supporting example to those who are saying the BLM folk don’t have a program – I simply felt that there is indeed a program, epitomized by the example of the many behind the scenes toilers in the black community Reverend Pinkney is an example of, who themselves are targeted and victimized.
Those ladies are very vocal and in your face but they stand on the shoulders of giants, so I was a bit disappointed in the Real News interview with Black Agenda folk, though I usually am edified by hearing from them. The protests give emotional expression to the huge crimes that lie behind the veneer of ‘business as usual’ politics, and that surely needs to happen. It’s like the Greek ‘oxhi’ – listen, you bubble politicians: we are out here!
Else, what is a political campaign season all about?
ha! “listen, you bubble politicians: we are out here!” wonderful.
but in a nutshell, during the trnn interview w/ dixon and ford below, they show how anxious that they are about the ‘movement’ being co-opted further by the Dems. ford finally addressed the fact that he gets that the #BLM hashtag is just one of the franchises of the national movement (with some global alliances), although i’m not sure that dixon actually had twigged to that.
but when various ‘leaders’ of the either leaderless or leaderful movement get invited to the white house, it’s likely very heady stuff. and now some have met with hillary, and many are frank about helping to create new and improved Dems (so far, bernie and hillary). so i do take their concerns to heart. ball had asked if as the Old Guard, they weren’t riskingsounding condescending toward the next gen activists. good on him.
another thing i hadn’t know was that benton harbor had the fisrt ’emergency managers’; i’d thought it was detroit, then…falling dominoes.
Thanks for the reminder juliania. I’m quite sure wendye has covered Rev. Pinckney’s political prosecution. Makes for a good question to ask Sanders: Would you pardon still incarcerated political prisoners who were persecuted and prosecuted for standing up for their racially oppressed community like Rev. Pinckney and Leonard Peltier?
Similarly, but different, would you pardon people already out of prison, but still stained for their principled stands like Tim DeChristopher, Thomas Drake and John Kiriakou?
Correcting the most egregious
mistakesexamples of racial and political oppression of the past is a clear way to say ‘I am taking a new direction into the future’.And will Bernie or any politician on the national stage stand up and say,
That’s the key issue, and that is the issue every single one of them runs away from.
What part of “Stop Killing Us?” is so very hard for politicians to understand?
The imperative mood.
+++ Agreed. On the right the response runs from actual fighting – i.e. Trump press conference where he said ‘I don’t know if it would be me doing the fighing or someone else, but that’s not gonna happen to Trump!’ to patronizing and pivoting to black-on-black violence or personal responsibility. The Dem spectrum seems to begin at patronizing and run almost nowhere to broad-minded or technocratic policy prescriptions.
3 hrs ago
;-)
I think your list of political prisoners could be easily expanded but it is a pipe dream to think any politician would do anything but ignore your pleas.
I do have to take exception with you including that CIA wetworker, con-man Kiriakou in your otherwise excellent list.
Haven’t yet been able to write, much less write coherently about the many real effects of the Seattle action and the often disturbing reaction which obscured
– the Ferguson anniversary itself (ok, ok, blame the media)
– the continued repression there
– the appearance of white militias(!!!)
– Sanders pre-planned release of his racial justice issues and stances
Although I had my “WTF are they doing?” moment, I think it is plain that the coverage and the reaction and the coverage of that reaction, not the original disruption, placed essentially all of the smoke and mirrors in front of this…
Seattle introduction of Symone Sanders as his national spokesperson and MC of Bernie’s left coast events.
And this…
One of the big examples of pseudo-post-racialism in Seattle that has gotten next-to-zero mention in ALL of this is Yesler Terrace. In March, Laura Flanders and GritTV showed the trailer for Even The Walls after interviewing Alicia Garza one of the founders of Black Lives Matter. From eventhewalls.com/yeslerterrace (emphasis mine)
SubUrban
renewalgentrification of what looks like functional public housing … cripesit’s good you’re contributing to the discussion, lemoyne.
heh; i was musing earlier that soon we’ll be hearin’ from rebecca solnit again: “Oh, rancid left! such purists you are! no candidate can ever meet all our needs!” (the oldest chestnut on the tree.) what left, i ask? what used to be considered Left is now…radical Left, imo, and darned few of them.
I give. Totally yield the point – Sanders seems to be between Henry Wallace and FDR yet appears to the mainstream like he is from Mars. So, even though his avowedly ‘democratic socialist’ program sounds a bit like a radical version of Eisenhower and the rest of the developed world has already implemented every bit of it somewhere, many reactions are between ignorance and indignance.
But I will still take it gladly – the US Overton window is feeling the Bern and eyes will be opened. It’s nice to get at least a few slices of political bread after years of Maseca™ spiced with pure vitriol.
Besides, my reading of the so-called Sanders weak tea leaves me saying he’s got the inside track to win with his burgeoning small donor funded campaign against money in politics. There is no other candidate that hasn’t bathed in PAC money their whole career except Trump and he will FeelTheBern quite directly if it comes to that.
i’m glad that you’re glad, lemoyne. how odd to think that fdr’s new deal was a response to failed unregulated capitalism (much like today),and the pressure from union labor and strikes. yes, even the robber barons seem to have been happy to pony up higher taxes for social welfare programs because: trickle up…kinda worked. ;-).
earlier, i was thinking about private police (still extant), and especially the pinkertons hired to break strikes. as i remember it, their employees were pretty much given a license to kill, maim, whatever worked. yes, that infuriated especially miners and their families, and all hell broke loose around the turn of the century. in fact, ‘which side are you on?’ was written by the wife an organizer for the unite mine workers in the ’30s.
how odd to think that history keeps repeating itself, no?
Not at all odd: I am a fan of the idea of 80 year 4 generation cycles.
People Forget!
People Forget!!!
sleep well, dream well. 2 pooped 2 participate here. ;-)
jeezum crow; how sad is this? accidentally cavalier, or the reverse?
Or perhaps exposure of how drugs are scammed off Rx between pharmacy and dispensary? I saw oxycodone on the list…
wendyedavis, you slithy tove, having referenced my supposed dissenting opinion twice in this comment thread, albeit w/o naming me, t’would mayhaps seem to the paranoidally suspicious that you might have had a purpose to bait me into this discussion. Mission accomplished, fiend. ;-)
As with most cases where we find ourselves sounding dissonant notes, the difference seems to me to be more about tactics than heart. If we each had the power to remake the whole world according to our ideals, the end product would look the same regardless of which hands did the crafting.
You know full well that I cannot believe, as a purely pragmatic matter, that the fascist regime that we have permitted to get a stranglehold on the country (soon the world) will ever be overthrown w/o weaponry (and the fear/deterrence they make possible) being part of the solution. And I know we will always disagree about that. So, my personal interest in these “inside baseball” type of discussions will always be limited, and no disrespect to you involved, just a different view of how the world works. I know we would like the final product to look just the same.
I think the only real power “regular people” have is our numbers, so focusing a tactic on only 12% of the population, on an issue that can also fairly be seen to affect the vast majority (EVEN white regular people like myself), seems to me to be a shortsighted and self-defeating way to go. In fact, as a “regular” white person who has been abused many times by the police, I kind of resent that nobody wants to talk about how I now feel I better always keep my head down when cops are visible.
Getting into Bernie’s skin (I don’t expect him to be anybody’s savior, either), he has no power now, and risks losing wider support if seen to be endorsing the narrow demands of only the BLM activists, so it’s a poor political strategy for him to adopt now, better perhaps to get him some power, and THEN pressure him to do something about police and criminal justice issues, maybe even over-emphasize black issues (who’s more likely than him to be agreeable?). BUT ONLY AFTER HE HAS SOME POWER.
(Plus, I can’t help but note that even with Bernie’s prompt response by hiring the approved black spokeswoman, he STILL gets zero respect from you, so really, why should he make these concessions and risk being perceived as overly deferential to black radicals?)
Bigger picture, the political dynamic traditionally employed by the left has yielded some strange fruit in the last half-century, IMO. Women succeeded in advancing their interests by getting the rest of us to sympathize , focus, and support. Then the gays did the same. Recently the transgenders seem to be adopting the same playbook. And now, here come the BLM and their similars. And maybe, for these particular groups, the results are good. Yay for them.
BUT, what has happened to the rest of us, to the country and the world, while we have focused our limited energies on supporting these groups as they asked and demanded? We have lost our civil liberties, the rule of law, accountability for corporations and big players of all stripes, and have generally allowed corporate fascism to build and implement a foundation so strong that it now seems to be a pipe dream to think that those forces will not control the entire future of the planet.
Personally, I would rather have seen us concentrate on cutting the heads off the snakes a long time ago. Now, as you know, I am beyond any type of actual warriorhood, and I understand all the implications of that, so I can’t get too worked up over particular esoteric tactical discussions that don’t even get within sight of anything that I can believe in as a serious way to change the path we are on.
For me, “regular people vs. the fascist corporatocracy” still makes the most sense as an overall framing.
yes, i used your quotes, but many from other sites as well, especially (the accursed) dagblog.com. i didn’t so much want to drag you here, as to answer your theorizing in public, given its prevalence, and not spend time i don’t have answering via email. but i love your addressing me as ‘fiend’; some days can feel like that. ;-)
i did address above that this movement hasn’t quite acknowledged the other Expendable Rabble groups being oppressed above, and i do believe that it was ABQ citizens who really ramped up this iteration of push-back on police brutality, but we’ve had that conversation here numerous times.
given that for blacks and native americans this shit has been going on forever, and is getting worse, not better, yes, many blacks feel that they are fighting for their lives. i even quoted the numbers above, even though they don’t speak to the fact that many blacks now are beaten almost to death for…nothing but the wrong word spoken, or ‘failure to obey’ fast enough, or what.ev.er. and are imprisoned at horrific rates for long periods without being convicted of crimes, or are simply unable to pay ‘fines’.
i also wanted to make sure that folks know that there are plenty of white, asian, latina, latino allies contra many accusations to the opposite, and to me, that’s what the larger movement should be about. being horror struck that so many journalists, both msm and citizen, are being jailed for…covering the actual public events in real time.
well, blow me down: no, i give bernie zero props for hiring a black spokesperson; that’s just a craven way to polish his brand a bit, as is his new Racial Justice page. so…he wants to run as that person, contra your notion that he wants to wait until he has the power?
(i’m gonna submit this; i lose long comments far too often.)
pt. II
now not a few radicals call the democratic party ‘a criminal organization’, which construction is worthy, imo. but again: bernie chose to run as a Dem, rather than third party. a few things i hadn’t known before are included in this interview with dixon and ford (BAR) i found at naked capitalism this morning. ( i went there after having seen at the guardian that the hellenic parliament just passed the new MoU with the troika.)
i’d also say that the democratic party is where the best social and financial justice movements go…to die, so i don’t like dems (including black ngo’s trying to coopt the larger movement.)
Aug 10, 2015: Executive editors at BlackAgendaReport.com Glen Ford and Bruce Dixon discuss the latest and potential future of Black Lives Matter
Yves smith posted the transcript.
DIXON: It’s worth noting, too, that Marissa Janae, one of the two women in Seattle who disrupted the Bernie Sanders thing, in her Facebook page the day after she said she did it because Bernie had neither offered an apology for his previous conduct, nor had he put forward a program of criminal justice reform like President Obama. Who in fact, of course, has been the very opposite of a reformer on criminal justice and police violence. So apparently there are leadership people in Black Lives Matter who think that President Obama is the example of what we should want in terms of criminal justice reform.
So there really needs to be some internal discussion that’s public among the members and leading people of Black Lives Matter so that they can kind of straighten that out.”
after ball mentioned that on TRNN alicia garza had said that the three were seasoned activists and Marxists:
DIXON: The reality is in my last Black Agenda Report article I called Ms. Alicia Garza, quote, a brand-savvy Democrat, because she talked like a Democrat, she called the Democratic party the progressive movement, which is what you always–which is what brand-savvy Democrats call the Democratic party these days. She said that the main focus of Black Lives Matter now was to help select the Democratic field of candidates and influence that field. She even offered the old and traditional advice that Democrats have been offering at least since the ’70s in my ears, that says that we need to know that no candidate is going to be perfect and no candidate is going to do everything we want, but these are our choices that we’ve got to make.”
Ford’s demand is black community policing, but even with his past descriptions of it, i wonder what it would really look like if it ever came to pass.
Uh-oh; are we shocked? ‘Ferguson police chief hit with claims of fraud, abuse‘ ‘interim’ police chief, and yes: he’s black.
but i am so glad you stopped by, reality checker; feel to rebut at will. lemoyne seems to be enjoying doing so. ;-)
I don’t know if Bruce is just getting old or old and resentful. I think that Janae was referring to OMalley’s criminal justice reform proposals not Obama’s.
When I first read these attacks on BLM I thought Dixon had more information that would expose or connect them to unseen forces of the PTB but now it seems to be just jealousy and arrogance because they aren’t following his prescriptions for a properly directed Movement. They also have a large following and exposure something BAR never enjoyed.
BAR has produced some great stories but it is an extremely marginal site with few comments until these attacks began and at least some of these new commenters are pushing back at this strange aggression.
BLM needs good analysis and criticism as any new insurgency does but condemning them for not jumping on the Third Party handcart is ludicrous.
i can’t say whether she meant obama’s or o’mally’s, but it would be hard to believe in any major change from him, given his history as mayor of baltimore policing the black community (essentially broken windows and more. well, except the easiest ones that pretty much have bi-partisan support.
o’malleys reform page came after one of those events, obama’s came three weeks after he gave the eulogy for reverend pinkney in south carolina. smooth peanut butter, imo, after seven years, eric holder, et.al.
third party ideas are ludicrous? slow, for sure.
I think you’re missing the context of Janae’s statement, she seemed to be pointing out the foot-dragging of the supposedly Progressive Sanders not praising O’ Mally’s or Obama’s response just using it to hector Sanders.
I could be defending an illusion and BLM will fold into the Black Hole of the Dem Party but I hope and have reason to believe the energized grassroots of this insurgency will not allow that to happen.
Unless you are referring to Trump, Third Party politics in the US is a slow boat to nowhere, Jill Stein’s .04% of the vote should have made that reality glaringly evident. No Party Politics or Glorious Leader will save Mother Earth or us naked apes who are destroying it and ourselves.
this is you often noting how easy it is to hack diebold voting machines, making voting less than worthless: a con? imo, changing third party votes would reap glorious results to maintain the duopoly tina theme.
it was you who’d been correcting her as to whose ‘justice reforms’ she wanted sanders to equal, yes?
i tried to say in the OP that BLM is only one of the groups/franchises; there are many i missed, too. please: here’s ford:
FORD: “As I said, movements are defined by their demands. There has to be a broad-based conversation about what the demands of this movement are. And remember, Black Lives Matter with the hashtag is an organization. People keep on using that same term to describe this whole emerging movement. I think that as we develop this movement and a politics of the movement further, the movement will find its own name and it will be a name that has something to do with its demands.”
Exactly.
——————
—————–
It’s not just Dixon and Marxists.
Here, though, Patrisse Cullors makes a key point:
Can proles align themselves with their most victimized? Maybe, but Marissa Janae Johnson is not disciplined by the same concerns as Cullors, a BLM founder:
Rejecting manipulation of prole cohesion is necessary, but MJJ, drawn in to the agitation drama, is losing the ideological cohesion and discipline; Muntaqim should be heard.
I was impressed how gently MJJ responded to the paternalistic if loving critique from a member of a failed male dominated movement of the past.
The continuing denigration of Occupy because it would not submit to outside demands to adopt failed ideology and politics just shows how difficult it is for some people to escape their training. Politics, as defined by out system, is a dead end and old New Left dogmas about cohesion and discipline don’t offer anything useful in what some people are calling our post-ideology era.
Capital rules nearly unopposed and doesn’t need the ‘ism’ to convince anyone of its superiority and control, it is just a fact of life now. Recognizing this fact shows that new means of engaging people in struggle are necessary. The old isms and dogma can inform the new culture but it won’t and shouldn’t lead it. In fact spokespersons are needed but Leaders should be shunned until there are shown to be unneeded.
You’re incoherent, WayOut. a) Muntaqim is not white. b) you label “alternate” strategies dogmas as if “post-ideology” is vaild; in fact, as can be seen in the above BLM contradiction, your post-ideology looks rather suspicious. c) If the spokespersons of a “chaos storm” are inter-non-coherent, as the above are, then their theoreticians should be lecturing them.
I should have been more clear about the ‘failed male dominated movement’ being the Panthers but it also applies to the White Left of that era.
Again old training and dogma leave you unable to appreciate the educated young Black women’s approach to the future of resistance.
I didn’t read Pattrisse Cullor’s statement as being a contradiction or non-coherent but more about avoiding White cooptation while embracing the non-reactionary White resistance, if it can be found.
Your Left authoritarian tendencies are evident in branding BLM as a ‘chaos storm’ in need of a firm, probably male, hand. Ideological cohesion and discipline sounds more like top down control with a submissive following which is what this insurgency and Occupy worked to overcome. These young people certainly shouldn’t be subjected to lectures from anyone, they are at the forefront of the insurrection and are teaching, with their actions, anyone who is willing to listen.
I’m willing to learn from these young people and support them until I have a real reason to withdraw that support, why can’t you at least give them conditional support as they develop their own future?
Hate it when I do that …
From the interviews with several of The Interrupters on Colorlines and an initial tv interview with MJJ of Seattle on MSNBC, it seems #BlackLivesMatter decries the entire system as so corrupt as to be useless so they don’t care about voting so they don’t care about candidates and yet they want to influence them. Furthermore, outside their home turf (if you will) they appear willing to only act to disrupt candidates who would be their allies. Tough sell. There are inherent contradictions in all that which only gets worse when they say their political aims are clear.
“Smith”: “It’s easier to attack external enemies, whether they are correctly identified or not, than root out the traitors in your own ranks.” Ah, a sober, tame analysis. BLM’s external allies, solicitous Democratic poseurs, want BLM to ignore those “traitors”. Does this make BLM compradors too?
Not really a rebut, just a re-emphasis that when any one group or person emphasizes their own desire to the exclusion of everyone else’s, it may feel good to the emphasizer’s momentary feelings but it creates a lot of unsympathetic feelings from everyone else, so the worst sin of all is committed, namely, ineffectiveness.
Hugs to you, fiend (not a typo lol).
Ah, the giants begin to raise their heads! This is an important contribution, wendye, which I obliquely referenced above, and welcome, welcome realitychecker1, with your clarity of mind expressing the entire worldargument in a nutshell, even in your nom de plume – you knew even way back when what the cogent, feet on the ground, analysis has to be.
Pro and Contra – it’s needed, and you each express the dynamic so well. realitychecker1, for the first time I begin to see Bernie’s role in what you say. Now, if like Tsipras, (winning and perhaps then failing to carry forward) he will continue to say loudly what must be done while clearly pointing out the remorselessness of his foes, (not, as Obama has done, embracing them) there may be accomplished the inner workings of the necessarily vocal protest movement within the polity. Might that not accomplish what both you and wendye (and me) are seeking? Not in our lifetimes perhaps, but for our kids and kids’ kids?
Say what we may about Bernie, he is at least a survivor, and that’s no mean accomplishment.
and yet you’d mentioned several affinity groups that made a ruckus, and won some gains. (lgb coalitions promised to withhold $ from obama and Dems, very potent dare, imo). and ask: “BUT, what has happened to the rest of us, to the country and the world, while we have focused our limited energies on supporting these groups as they asked and demanded?”
i don’t see them as related; in which venues did we expend our limited energies? unless you mean that the aforementioned groups were also captive to the Dem party, then i’d agree. as they by and large have gone full-tilt fascist on War, Inc., support cuts to the social safety net, the 54% of the total budget for the military, allow reproductive rights to disintegrate, don’t address any true jobs programs (even of the neo-keyensian kind), yada, yada, then Yes.
i will say that the many diaries i did on indigenous issues at my.fdl usually had the least amount of comments. not only did i loathe seeing what hideous plights were being wrought on their lands, toxic dumping, water thefts, and more…but i also tried so hard to have people imagine that *their positions as third-worlders* would soon be our own. and we are getting there.
it’s been both the black liberationists and the indigenous on turtle island and the global south who showed me that the need for debt peonage and resource stealing of The Expendables is built into capitalism itself, not that i profess to know ‘what’s next’. but there’s no evidence whatsoever that capitalism can be reformed now Since Obama and his cohort, nor is there for reforming the D side of the corporatist duopoly.
these two themes seemed conjoined to me: “I kind of resent that nobody wants to talk about how I now feel I better always keep my head down when cops are visible.” and “regular people vs. the fascist corporatocracy”
the first, of course, is your story to tell, although whiteness comes with a certain amount of privilege, unless complicated by homelessness, mental illness, or ‘driving with a black friend (tweaking chris rock).
but i’d submit that black activists against The Machine are ‘regular people’, just more freaked out, and acting up against it, as with “ShutItDown” direct actions.
yes, given your initial (i assume) Shakespearean insult, i figured it was no typo, thou impertinent beetle-headed coxcomb!
Well said, wendye. I see a dialogue restarting that reflects the one housed in my old favorite, ‘Dr. Zhivago’ (I’m sure realitychecker1 won’t mind my image of him as the hero of that work – ‘Zhivago’ being rootly related to the Russian word for ‘life’.) And my image of wendye is definitely the movie Lara who is blond but not blond in the book as I remember.
Not to get carried away by those delightful images, in my world of future happenings I am consoling myself that somehow we’ll all be able to observe, be part of, assimilate into what happens after we shake off this mortal coil, and turn to one another (well if octopi can do it, why not – and hey, how neat is it that ‘octopi’ is so close to ‘occupy’?) in whatever tight place we find ourselves, and say:
See, I told you so!
ha; why would RC mind being cast as the hero, or I at being cast as his concubine who waved good-bye from the sleigh while leaving the iced-over place at Varykino, and leaving him to his fate? ;-)
(RC might cast me as the fiendish komarovsky, of course.
“See, I told you so!”
I’ve already ordered the headstone, darling juliania.
Please have a care not to encourage my head to swell, my brain already seems to rattle around loosely inside it. ;-)
We can’t blame Shakespeare for everything, dear one. Try Lewis Carroll.
“impertinent beetle-headed coxcomb”–I’ll take that as a compliment (alas, I receive so few these days). ;-)
ack! of course: ’twas brillig’; however did i forget? take you me for a sponge now?
figured ya’d like Coxcomb silly, you scullion! you rampallian! you fustilarian! I’ll tickle your catastrophe!
Do forgive me for introducing levity into the mixture of ongoing important discussion – blame it on the mini heatwave indoors which probably put bubbles of something inebriating into my brain – ’twas lovely to laugh a bit, though, headstones and all, and no disrespect intended (well, not much, that is.)
Carry on! The heat has broken! Icebergs ahoy!
Reblogged this on Nevada State Personnel Watch.
On the contrary, fuck “ex”-teaparty, evangelical nutjobs.
Report above from http://www.cbtu.org/ – thanks Comrade X
I like to say it this way: Loose cannons are more likely to damage the people that fire them than the people they are being fired at.
Or: The most beautiful tactic will eventually always fail if it is against the strategy or devoid of any strategy. And strategy itself is meaningless with out clear goals and vision of what it looks like when you win.
The left has been hopeless without a vision fo’evah. Sole focus on mere protest and disruption becomes complaining about losing or a self-fulfilling prophecy of despair.
And the MOTU love to play that drum… now Time is all concerned that Bernie Sanders is ignoring Black Lives Matter. Time-Warner is concern-trolling Sanders on behalf of #BLM, while Sanders initial racial justice plan appears stronger and more complete than the #BLM national demands. In July, racial [in]justice beginning with Native American genocide was at the climax of Bernie’s stump speech just before his conclusion with a positive vision of solidarity. (at least in Phoenix, Houston and Dallas).
The motivation of Time’s concern for #BLM is left as an exercise for the reader.
A not so clever bit of profiling and guilt by association LM. A woman writer at Time writes an excellent piece of journalism and gets it published outside her normal parenting column and instantly she represents the MOTU’s attack on the White Moses.
Now that the ‘Bernie is under attack’ by everyone meme is stirring the paranoia among the White Victims of Black Power the gloves are coming off and the plan is to shout down any protesters with the rather lame ‘ We Stand Together’ yell which coming from a mostly White group sounds much like ‘All Lives Matter’.
Watching people behave like knuckleheads and destroy any credibility they may have had on racial justice or any justice should be appalling but is becoming almost humorous.
sorry to be so far behind that i’ll never catch up; i had to be a burrito factoryfor much of the afternoon.
i will say (not that it matters one whit) that my long time conviction has been that third world women would lead us out of this morass. at one time, i’d reckoned that the nonviolent revolution had been started by Idle No More. once theresa spence came out of her hunger strike from her tipi, yet no: stephen harper had come to her tipi, the movement seemed to fade a bit.
while i honor the young women who’ created the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter, and as especially they were all lgbt, which issue was slow to dawn on the males in ‘the movement’, what is clear to me is that the movement is NOT monolithic, but contains many other affiliated groups who are working toward similar ends, if not identical.
the sands are shifting with so many different comments and ‘statements’ from jannae, mizes garza and cullors; clearly they are heeding some of the comments in the online communities, and rethinking, re-expressing their visions, or positions.
but how funny it is that we’re (ahem) discussing various black takes on ‘what the #blm movement’ might find its way forward, and again: theirs is ONE part of the larger movement that may coalesce, and find a new framework…and name. (glen ford)
(i find keegan and rebelutionary_Z the least full of themselves in the larger movement in the Twittersphere.)
“how funny it is that we’re […] discussing various black takes on ‘[how] the #blm movement’ might find its way forward”
Not funny; identity politics is minefield.
i’d meant funny/odd, given the title, and most of us are…white. i just found this on twitter; perhaps you can parse it:
@suey_park Aug 13
(PS I’m defining identity politics under neoliberal multiculturalism, which depoliticizes identity via flattening construction of diversity)
also as to christians and the movement, a friend just sent me a version of this this via email. rev sekou and brother west do some barn-burner sermons in the black prophetic tradition.
The 1st step – jumping over the barricades. By the end of it, we seized the entrance of the St. Louis DOJ. #Ferguson
Not odd, either, as this means of fragmentation is well practiced (by a variety of identifiers). Not surprising that a fucking “ex”-tea-partist wingnut is drawn to non-politics:
Perhaps that’s what Ms. Park means by depoliticization: a politics that obliterates politics. Otherwise, comrade, twitter does not deserve exegesis. This of hers was amusing: “When people tell me to just believe in myself I pretend I don’t understand English.”
Don’t you know any perverse evangelists, comrade? MJJ has herself whipped into a fervor, and WayOut is doing his fire and brimstone schtick.
Say, doesn’t taking a barricade in a cassock look a little dangereux?
well, yeah; billy graham and his odious son for two. but i had to look up the term to answer. it seems to me that pushback has spiked a lower learning curve for this woman, if indeed she is the person you indicate she is.
i admit that i’m not grasping either the konkin passages, nor the conversation between you and he, and to the same extent, wayoutwest’s and lemoyne’s back and forth on the Time woman’s piece.
yes, communications that require 146 character or less…fail to be instructive in the main, although monitoring a few accounts are where i find many police brutality and murder stories to explore. i’ve forgotten already who’d RTed miz park, but other one you found is hilarious. and quite self-deprecating, to boot.
yes, agorism. oh, the free market! (again) ‘without crushing others’ values’, etc. i suppose they call it Statesmanship?
As if, to a Korean, the Englisch nonsense, “just believe in yourself” would make no sense; that makes the joke piquant.
XXXOOO
The more I read about the women of BLM the more I like them and if their past is strange it just shows people can evolve and grow unlike many of their detractors who are as ossified as dinosaurs.
Our political system is vulnerable to destruction and with 80% of young people shunning the voting pens and the PTB spending billions of dollars to lure them back, without much effect, the Revolution may already be underway.
I don’t think politics can be destroyed, it’s in our nature, but politicians certainly can be, they are Fair Game, and it is now Open Season so let the hunt continue with no bag limit. Women with guns, even metaphorical guns, really does frighten the Patriarchal Statists especially it seems the Liberal variety.
Those who worship the State are the zealots with fire in their eyes and brimstone on their breaths, the only peace they seek is through submission or death as we see almost daily in the occupied territories patrolled by the Police State.
Ha ha ha ha. “Our political system is vulnerable to destruction” but “I don’t think politics can be destroyed [’cause it’s in our nature]”. And nothing to say about playing into the hands of tea-partists and wingnuts? You’ve read that Koch is in for prison reform, I’m sure.
Isn’t “Natural politics” an obliterated politics? Sounds like the revolution has been subverted.
BTW, with real guns, one must be very careful. With toy guns, apparently one can be very stupid.
i dunno; i just watched the msnbc interview with mmj lemoyne posted down thread. she said that ‘a parent’ (garbled) was a tea partier, and that she’d changed, or close to that. some of her verbiage was funny, but nerves may have accounted for it. “politicians should match their rhetoric to their words (sic) and actions’.
luke russert? ‘who let the dogs out’??? gadz, i was just reminded why i don’t watch NewsOTainment.
Nope, both ‘rents. Plus a Palin supporter. Nom de Tweeter of “rissaofthe way”.
Nauseating.
MJJ practiced in responding to “shut the fuck up”.
She’s a caricature.
the backlash seems to have earned her a lot of street cred in the movement twittersphere.
Yeah. I and two others were being driven to an academic competition by a fellow teammate @90 mph. Told him to slow down. Moron #2 says the highway was designed for this speed. Moron #1, the driver, takes the exit ramp too fast and destroys the steering linkage of his ‘rents car on the curb. Fortunately, no other injuries. After being driven by the cops to the garage, moron #3, however, felt moron #1’s PTSD should be soothed by counseling that he did nothing wrong.
What an education!
are you still referring to the three who created the hashtag designation and website, cullors, garza, and oso, if memory serves? well, i guess the seattle women interrupters were the seattle chapter, weren’t they?
http://blacklivesmatter.com/about/
there are just so many legs and arms in the overall movement… but i han’t even given much of a thought to liking or not liking them. yes, they are indeed a part of the movement that *might* be the start of a revolution, though of which sort i’m not seeing yet, especially given that more people will need to wake up and witness, and be outraged by, what’s afoot with the police state murders of, and deadly other across-the-board oppressions, toward blacks and other easy disenfranchised targets. people power based on shared humanity.
i did get an email today offering a similar opinion to yours, that ford and dixon are bitter old me angry because the young uns aren’t choosing the targets they’d like to see, namely the black misleadership class.
as i said in the OP, i am gobsmacked that so many of them keep praising holder, obama, lynch, et.al., even while trying to have a bit of sympathy that they just cannot diss or believe that a black leader can be the author of their ongoing immiseration.
several of the Interruptors seem to have indicated in the last couple days that they weren’t really trying to make better Dems; i hope that’s so, and that they *don’t* get co-opted into the D political machine. i will say that of the dozen and half or so regulars whose Twitter accounts i watch, far too many of them…seem to be. (not that they’re necessarily representative.)
I don’t follow twitter so I’m referring to what was printed here about some of the BLM women’s statements. The other comments I’ve read by BLM and associated people are diverse as they should be and I may not agree with all of them but I’ll withhold judgment while I try to understand why some of them still praise Obama Inc or any of the Black Misleadership Class.
I might first ask the question, as a White guy, why so many seemingly intelligent educated White people support criminals such as the Clintons or any other politician just because they have a D after their name. Could it be that they see that they have limited options and these crooks and liars offer the best available means to insure their present class position. There could much baser reasons for this support but I won’t go there.
Why should Black people have to live up to a higher standard when no one who is more righteous is anywhere near the reigns of power and besides there is the racial pride that even Black misleaders bring after their real righteous leaders were assassinated, imprisoned or marginalized.
That seemingly blind support may be breaking down with the ending of the Obama era and the BLM insurgency may play an important part in that awakening, time will tell.
you seem to have answered your own question as to “seemingly intelligent educated White people support criminals such as the Clintons or any other politician just because they have a D after their name” but i’d submit that apart from intelligence and education not conferring *wisdom* or seeking information past the teevee news, and having been indoctrinated that the Ds are “the peoples’ party”, yeah, they must be comfortable enough with the status quo.
and like you, the ‘uncomfortable ones’ have heard forever that a third party is not a viable choice, and is wasting one’s vote, except the polling on that belies that meme.
let me try to untangle this paragraph if i can:
“Why should Black people have to live up to a higher standard when no one who is more righteous is anywhere near the reigns of power and besides there is the racial pride that even Black misleaders bring after their real righteous leaders were assassinated, imprisoned or marginalized.”
first: because their lives and futures depend on it, don’t they? it would seem elementary, then, for them to tune into who their enemies actually are, even though “it’s the whole system that’s rotten” as is often heard, and it is. but the system is run by actual people who appoint judges, build prisons with mandatory ‘filled beds’ provisions built in; hire police chiefs, allow payday lenders, gentrify inner cities and boot out Negroes and other rabble…well the list could go on forever.
danger often sharpens one’s attention, is the larger point i’m trying to make, and attention could mean just that in terms of trying to find out who and what is the author of one’s bleak future. i’m not even sure how many of the young uns DO know the history of those who came before and were assassinated, although i did see a certain amount of learning going on about malcolm x in the Twittersphere recently. perhaps that’s where many of them hang out, on a tool owned by the oligarchs (facebook, too), although it may be a bit of a two-edged sword, as some of them know those and instagram are all monitored by DHS, fbi, etc., and that their smart phones locators are easily pinged.
but shoot, the movement is now what, a couple years old now? at least ferguson and a couple other places. yeah, i’d be looking more deeply at Ds.
heh, having seen your comment via email, i looked around at a few accounts to see who might not be buyin’ the vote D shtick, went to the left coast ones that i consider the most militant, and found the blackoutcollective RTing a van jones piece at cnn urging millions of Negroes to vote…D. there was some pushback to the BLM boston (was that it?) i put up yonder: “hillary wants to work with us”, but it was really only about the prison complex money she gladly takes, and bill’s record, which…sad to say, isn’t the half of it.
what i did see was that the seattle interrupters were called all sorts of racist and other names by some sanders supporters; wow.
I don’t think we can expect any real systemic change from this growing insurgency and shouldn’t lay that responsibility on them, because it is White society that must change. The actions of BLM has already affected some attitudes, good and bad, and may even produce some superficial reform but its most lasting effects may be among young people who are getting more education about the limits and futility of party politics and our rotten systems in general.
Beyond that the best we can hope for is that some of these young people internalize the lessons about self-direction and rule just as Occupy was teaching. because they will be invaluable tools when they face the inevitable collapse of Industrial Civilization.
This different way of thinking may improve peoples chances of survival after the collapse because the Cops will be the first to run followed quickly by the Leadership Class.
In the mean time some encouragement for the rebels.
‘Hitch up your pants. The road we must follow is defiance’
—General Emiliano Zapata
an excellent comment, wayoutwest. one of the differences between now and the 60s civil rights movement was that people were able to watch blacks being shot with firehoses, and mangled by police dogs on teevee. that did tend to focus more white minds on the perils of having black skin.
if they see coverage of this iteration, i understand that the bottom creep-whatever usually comes with words like “riots! thugs!” and the like. but i will say that some print and online msm seem to have discovered that The Movement not only Lives, but it hasn’t begun to stop the killing, and some have begun to dig into the truth behind police lies. some are even issuing foia requests for court documents (including secret grand juries), and withheld cop-cam films.
yes, this is a marathon, not a sprint, and Viva Zapatismo!
the current kerfuffle over those Interruptions won’t last, i think, and again, there are so many other organizations that fall under the BLM umbrella. your thoughts about the burgeoning intentions to create community is well said, and is indeed happening in baltimore, oakland, i’ve forgotten where else at the moment.
but in any event, the larger movement is building even as the inherent dangers of the presidential politics serve to muddy the waters of movemental politics.
i’m pleased to hear that you believe the young uns are turning away from electoral politics as…unworthy.
Market organization not a major cover for fraud? Spare me. MMJ is in over her head.
Meanwhile, the materially ambitious laugh all the way to their banks …
It does strike one how hurtful the imposition of obama’s candidacy and two terms nearly, thank heaven, at an end,has been upon the integrity of the office and of what was left of the system, as tattered and mudbespattered it was already. Somewhere I saw a more cogent statement of this disheartenment – one in which two greyheads (or is it three or four?) vie spasmodically to spend their retirement years in the white house, to be renamed grey mansion perhaps?
At least the Greeks have a young leader. Maybe that’s what our eventual austerity (come one, come all) shall breed.
Chorus:
There’s a long, long trail a-winding
Into the land of my dreams,
Where the nightingales are singing
And a white moon beams:
There’s a long, long night of waiting
Until my dreams all come true;
Till the day when I’ll be going down
That long, long trail with you.
I’m just looking forward to the end of this present/last nightmare fauxpresidency. Only two votes I’m really ashamed of – one for Clinton; one for Obama. I’m one of the dupes. As were those ww1 warriors. Still, it’s a beautiful song.
Yes, first we had judicial cronies negating an election to install George W., then we had the supposed remedy, Obama, come in and deliver the opposite of what all his supporters believed he stood for. A remarkable one-two to the very concepts of democracy and consent of the governed. Sixteen straight years of illegitimate governance, IMO. During which the fascist police state has been firmly cemented into place.
Why would anyone with a brain still believe in the electoral process as a strategy for implementing constructive changes?
So, while I can critique the BLM approach as being electorally inferior to an All Lives Matter approach, on a strictly comparative basis, I also cannot put much stock (for effectiveness) in any strategy that does not include instilling an existential fear into the established oppressors. (Maybe as in, All Lives Matter Equally, So If Ours Don’t Matter Much, Then Yours Don’t, Either–ALMESIODMMTYDE.)
What really perplexes me is the relentless cognitive dissonance displayed by folks who recognize the systemic violence being imposed, while feeling morally pure for refusing, even philosophically, to ever consider the merit of engaging in violence in return. I find myself continually wondering, what then is your proposed option/strategy? And I never get an answer to that that does not involve some sort of magical thinking.
(But note that one bartoo of note has in recent months seemed to implicitly have finally accepted that the big r is the only reasonable route out of where we are, so that is one sign of faint hope, or am I reading too much into?)
first, the larger BlackLivesMatter was never designed to be an electoral movement, but an insurgency, as was the lengthy one in ABQ, pushing back on police assassinations of the homeless and Latino/Latinas, for the most part. funny acronym, and since it’s a bit in jest, i won’t google for any opinions on how AllLivesMatter fail the test of a social movement.
but i did try to keep up with various alternatives under suggestion over the past year or two, including this one that highlights armed resistance toward the end. i won’t fetch the internal links; you can scope them out. but among the things POC know concretely is that white people with guns are treated with shrugs, while POC are often arrested or murdered for having legally registered guns in or even around them.
it’s not cognitive dissonance to not carry a gun; it’s either a moral or exquisitely practical choice, imo, especially given that the demonstrations are bloody enough (on the po-po’s side) for this peaceful protest movement. also, cognitive dissonance means not only holding two opposing facts/beliefs in one’s mind at once, but includes being uncomfortable about it, and making adaptations that can file off the edges of that discomfort with justifications, rationalizations, and so on. that doesn’t seem applicable to most protestors.
““The questions not being asked are why the police exist in the first place; why they are armed and if they are to be armed, why citizens don’t have the legal right to defend themselves against police violence? The ‘self-evidence’ of the need for police is premised on maintenance of a social order that has violent repression as its ‘logical’ outcome.”
He notes that Slager was acting as an agent of the state, which history of black, colonization and brutality goes back to early Charleston, an entry port for predominantly kidnapped African slaves, but that the more recent police oppression timeline began in Oakland with the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, designed to stop the police from murdering blacks with impunity. He lists their demands, which are not far from the others we see in Chicago, Ferguson, and NYC.
“It wasn’t until the armed Panthers entered the state house in Sacramento that the modern gun control movement was born, notably limiting its interests to keeping the poor and powerless disarmed under the principle that, centuries of history to the contrary, concentrated social power exists to ‘protect’ them.”
……………………………………………………………
Oddly enough, just before Urie penned his piece, the head of the Georgia SCLC, the Reverend Samuel Mosteller called on blacks to arm themselves in order to defend themselves against murderous police. Referencing both the recent killings of Nicholas Thomas and bipolar Anthony Hill by police, he said (via AJC.com):
“You stand there, (police) shoot. You run, they shoot. We’re going to have to take a different tack,” Samuel Mosteller, longtime president of the Georgia SCLC, told reporters. “Nobody is protecting the black community,” Mosteller said.”
and of course, there’s plenty of music about the *other* kind of insurgency/revolution. ;-) in fact, DHS has already named all kinds organized dissent as ‘terrorism’.
““The questions not being asked are why the police exist in the first place; why they are armed and if they are to be armed, why citizens don’t have the legal right to defend themselves against police violence? The ‘self-evidence’ of the need for police is premised on maintenance of a social order that has violent repression as its ‘logical’ outcome.”
He notes that Slager was acting as an agent of the state, which history of black, colonization and brutality goes back to early Charleston, an entry port for predominantly kidnapped African slaves, but that the more recent police oppression timeline began in Oakland with the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, designed to stop the police from murdering blacks with impunity. He lists their demands, which are not far from the others we see in Chicago, Ferguson, and NYC.
“It wasn’t until the armed Panthers entered the state house in Sacramento that the modern gun control movement was born, notably limiting its interests to keeping the poor and powerless disarmed under the principle that, centuries of history to the contrary, concentrated social power exists to ‘protect’ them.”
……………………………………………………………
Oddly enough, just before Urie penned his piece, the head of the Georgia SCLC, the Reverend Samuel Mosteller called on blacks to arm themselves in order to defend themselves against murderous police. Referencing both the recent killings of Nicholas Thomas and bipolar Anthony Hill by police, he said (via AJC.com):
“You stand there, (police) shoot. You run, they shoot. We’re going to have to take a different tack,” Samuel Mosteller, longtime president of the Georgia SCLC, told reporters. “Nobody is protecting the black community,” Mosteller said.”
the new black panthers have already called for blacks to arm themselves in resistance, but i dunno that anyone heeded their call. heh; i tried to find a link, and discovered a newish hashtag: #WeWillShootBack (talk about diversity of tactics!) the poll sounds as bullshit as most do; i’ll click int it later, mebbe read the comment underneath.
hard to choose which Tweet to offer; click the hashtag to see more, get on A List. ;-)
say hello to mr. bartoo for me, okay? and dagnabbit, i keep meaning to say that as you’d said you dinnae want to discuss the ‘inside baseball’ stuff for lack of time/energy, that i’d meant to email you to read a response to your concern, as i did for a couple other e-friends.
Firstly, m’dear, you don’t need to repeat yourself so much lol.
Second, re “cognitive dissonance,” you distinguish according to”discomfort,” a criterion I do not require to use the term, as w/o the easy usage of “cognitive dissonance” I am left with only “incoherence,” which tends to alienate people. ;-)
As to BLM and other black-centric responses to state oppression, you will never convince me that it is smart to ignore all the white people that are also being intimidated and oppressed by the same state instrumentalities, albeit to a measurably lesser degree, but numbers matter, so my ref to “electoral” just reflects that emphasis.
I’ve not had an opportunity to interact with dwb, just read various comments at FDL over the past half-tear or so, where he kinda sounds like me from five or six years ago.
But as to big r, we can’t do detail w/o risk, so I’ll just say the concept is ludicrous if only thought of in terms of direct and open confrontation. But Dorner showed all the truth we need to know re what works and what would work.
BTW, if you saw the NBPP demo in Texas, remarkable for police restraint, especially since they clearly broke the laws against incitement to violence. A curiousity, from which no larger inferences can safely be drawn, IMO.
Finally, you are always welcome to contact me directly via any medium, but note that I surrender my reticences, and will comment here whenever I am so moved. You know what they say about old fire horses . . . ;-)
eeek and bugger; i tried to delete one, and both disappeared. by a quirk of fate, i did discover that there was a way to restore er…one? (she hopes)
yeah, it’s just that the term is a complex psychological term with all sorts of ramifications that i find illuminating, but i understand why you’ll prefer it your way.
please understand that i don’t have a hella lot invested in convincing you (although that would be a good thing), but the BLM umbrella doesn’t discount any other lives, it just pays homage to the fact that black lives (again, i’d add indian lives) have *always been discounted* since the time that nation was founded. a righteous crie de coeur, if you will. and it’s not as though the BL twittersphere fails to make note of the white people killed by police, especially the unarmed or mentally ill.
my inbox is always stuffed with unanswered mail due to the fact that time is moving more quickly alla time; have you noticed? but i thank you for the invitation, and will…upon need. ;-)
some folks were tweeting this graphic to make a bit of sport about the ‘all lives matter’ shouting. ;-) (but oh, my; it’s time to make my toast…)
It’s depressing to watch so many White Liberals regress to their White Trash roots because of such a minor irritant such as BLM. A few instances of someone holding a mirror to their failings and their egalitarian appearing mask melts like the Picture of Dorian Grey.
I witnessed their similar reactions to Martin when he used a larger mirror in ’67 and by ’68 it was clear, as Phil Ochs explained, their compass was easily deflected to the Right.
Even Bernie is living up to expectations by disowning any apology to BLM made by his token Black Woman as unnecessary. not one word about his Cult’s vicious attacks or lack of Respect for the women who challenged him to live up to his supposed ideals and suffer under the White culture he represents.
i’d call it failing to escape their white privilege, but i admit ‘white trash’ designations offend me, but that’s a long story. now i might *think it* when i see some of those photos of the cretins waving confederate flags in black demonstrators faces, but….so it goes.
a friend and i were talking again about how such strong oppression brings great art, so i’ve been collecting some over the past couple days, and am almost too steeped in the long history of pain, rage, and power being expressed.
i’m not a bit surprised that he doesn’t feel the need to apologize, though. prolly reckons those uppity women should say sorry to him.
on edit: i assume you weren’t including reality checker in that generalization but if you were…i’d object to the Nth degree, no matter how misguided i find his thinking on this.
As you already know I call things as I see them and I see little difference in the effects on Black people from White privilege or the White trash that wave offensive flags, in fact White privilege is what is killing, jailing and exploiting more Black people than even the recent racist murders in SC would have some people believe.
White liberals have long been in denial about the White supremacy, racism and sexism in their ranks and they are much more adept at coding their speech to hide this fact but recent events have exposed these tendencies.as one of the BLM women pointed out at and after the last Bernie demonstration.
I don’t know much about RC but when someone uses terms such as Black-centric responses and continues to champion the definitely White-centric All Lives Matter response, even though coded in a less racist context, one has to wonder where this thinking comes from. The statement that it’s not ‘smart’ for BLM to ‘ignore’ the poor White oppressed people because there are more of them says more about the author than those he addresses.
i do know that you call things as you see them, but what i always hope we are doing here is to share opinions and teach/earn from one another. name-calling darts aren’t conducive to learning in this context; they just build a more defensive armoring.
i don’t grasp where he’s coming from either, nor jacob freeze, but i can assure you that neither is ‘white trash’, highly educated, etc., but seem to have blind spots on this issue. i get that this is an issue that comes with great emotion, but let’s stay civil toward each other.
Wow, WOW, I can’t believe you actually chose to double down on being so wrong-headed. “Black-centric” is just a descriptor, and an accurate one, not racist. “White-centric,” as you used it here, is also a descriptor, but not accurate; if you care to have it be accurate, then use “regular people-centric.” Then you’ll have a chance to actually understand where I am coming from.
You should know better than to so casually label me as racist. “Calling ’em as you see ’em” is no guarantee that you will always see ’em right, ya know, and the left has always stayed ineffective because we’d rather attack and label each other than work together for real effectiveness. I’m suggesting what I think would be a better, i.e., more EFFECTIVE, tactical approach. Attacking me in such a pc reflexive but sloppy fashion was really uncalled for, and, much, much worse, very inaccurate.
I can’t prevent you from misconstruing my words, but I might wonder why you chose that as your best option.
RC. I don’t think I called you a racist but I did challenge the use of the ‘All Lives Matter’ meme which is a diversion and has racist meaning to some people because of its context and usage by some other people. I don’t see this as PC or sloppy and it would be great if you could find a less suggestive or aggressive way to make your point.
You may not actually see what attitudes your choice of words are projecting and I apologize if mine are too harsh. You seem to be under the illusion that effective political tactics will produce any meaningful change or that the primary motivation of the Left today should be to join groups such as BLM to at least intervene against the genocide of Black communities.
It’s telling that of the three targets that MLK identified as central to the evils of Amerika, racism, poverty and militarism Bernie choose only one, the economic one , to base his campaign on and only grudgingly added a pathetic judicial reform plank and still says almost nothing about militarism.
Bernie had a rare opportunity to, if not expand his support, at least immunize himself from further conflict with the growing Black Liberation insurrection. All he had to do was raise his fist and lead a chant of Black Lives Matter and encourage his followers to respond in kind. he could have then asked BLM to assist in drawing up his Black Justice Platform plank.
The second opportunity he was offered and his response seems to show that he was aware of the mixed attitudes about BLM of his target audience, White Liberals, and was not about to offend them by showing too much support for BLM or even attempt to shut down the booing and racist catcalls.
Thanks for that support (on edit lol!), which I totally DESERVE. ;-)
Cute graphic, but let’s not forget that a few years later, Martin realized, as I do now, that it was smarter, and more EFFECTIVE, to broaden the appeal to a wider swath of the population, i.e., all the “regular” poor people. Martin was right (although they did then kill him, didn’t they, perhaps showing how scary he then became with this tactical shift/emphasis), and so am I, on the same line of reasoning.
no, he became an enemy of the state after his ‘why i oppose the war in viet nam’ speech, and called out capitalism and militarism as criminal. who cared about the po’ folks?
zounds; they did restore some our diaries. kewl. sadly, no comments where the juice often is, but still… -)
http://shadowproof.com/2014/01/20/restoring-socialist-visionary-radical-martin-luther-king/
on edit before i’m due for a siesta: i love irony, including when i’d remembered this a.m that you were such a champion of wayoutwest when i’d called him cranky or somesuch back in the day. i was within a gnat’s eyebrow of contacting you to chuckle over it earlier.
So, when Martin made that shift, was he not saying he stood with the “regular people”? If not, who else?
Yes, I’ve defended WOW in the past, cuz I believed, and still do, that his heart is in the right place. He probably forgot that I still have his phone numbers (albeit I haven’t used them in a long time), and have an ongoing ability to call him up and yell at him any time he pisses me off. ;-)
well, quoting from the paul street op-ed in the link: “‘No careful listener to King’s CBC talks could have missed the radicalism of his vision and tactics. “The dispossessed of this nation – the poor, both White and Negro – live in a cruelly unjust society,” King said in his fourth lecture. “They must organize a revolution against that injustice,” he added.
Such a revolution would require “more then a statement to the larger society,” more than “street marches” King proclaimed. “There must,” he added, “be a force that interrupts [that society’s] functioning at some key point.” That force would use “mass civil disobedience” to “transmute the deep rage of the ghetto into a constructive and creative force” by “dislocate[ing] the functioning of a society.”
now bernie sanders is calling his candidacy ‘a revolution’, and implies that doctor king would be behind him. but i just checked, and there’s still zip, nada, nuttin’ on his issues page about the gargantuan military budget, US foreign war hegemony; wow, what a revolution. of course he doesn’t want some of his past votes in those areas out there…
and who are these ‘regular people’, and why can’t more of them just join the movement against police brutality and assassinations of citizens? the movement doesn’t ask for pity, as some of you contend, but sure, it asks for empathy, why not? ‘see what we face daily, and this future may be yours one day’.
after i’d read some of the recent comments last evening, as i was being the chinese noodle factory, there must have been a dozen songs that played on my realplayer that pinged as soulful answers to these comments. and of course, often songs are just poetry set to music. i thought of bringing a few, and then realized that few here seem to even *hear* songs. one key exception (besides juliania) is the sole black man here whom i seem to have chased off; go figure. ;-)
but that epiphany may be one of the key differences as to seeing this with our heads as opposed to our hearts an souls; i dunno. hell, i’ve read exactly one comment on the revolving photos on the banner, as well. that speaks to me, too.
You supply that quote, and don’t agree that Martin was making the same “regular people” frame that I am advocating?
Def. of “regular people”–all remaining after you deduct the corporate oligarchy, the 1% and their top comprador allies (aka the Oppressor group, if you will). Approx. 75-80 %, my estimate. Good to have that majority in mind and on your side, whether you want their votes, or just their heart support. That’s why BLM is stupid, IMO, just a group of self-centered venters.
Martin said “poor,” I say all are “poor” compared to the oppressor group. I am very comfortable to be taking the position I am taking here.
I see WOW denying that “racist” is the only possible inference to be drawn from his comment about me, and then calling me out for being too aggressive. The smell of unproductive esoteric absurdity is getting too strong around this comment thread, my head is starting to spin, and I am moving on.
I commented on your flower show but I was a little embarrassed about making further comments after offering you gardening advice in another thread and then realizing that they were from your garden.
Below RC seems to be entrenched behind the lines of the Poor White Middle Class Oppressed majority, many of whom are having economic problem even the ones who struggle to make McMansion, SUV and private school payments, they’re ‘regular people’ too.
I hoped for some moderation but RC seems comfortable calling these Black women activists ‘stupid self centered venters’, feel the loving Bern Sisters!
“seeing this with our heads as opposed to our hearts” …
The internet would seem to be a means of collective emoting but you can’t get away from organizing systemically. Head and heart work together, no matter how individually defective (that’s not a confession!)
Good afternoon wendyedavis,
A line of showers from your place to mine, more or less, and summer is well on the wane to those of us reading the signs (acceleration of weed growth, with weed seed head production beginning almost immediately upon emergence). ;-)
On to your topic, the same small town publisher of central WI newspaper runs a great article just about calling potus wannabe Walker a sociopath and then follows it with a generic white-guy early 50-ish regionally syndicated low level commentator telling blacks what a friend the have in Bernie and that they are dissing up the wrong tree interrupting Bernie, their “real,” friend. Fair and balanced and all that.
Rain changing plans today, but we had a nice week or so of close family catching up. Two weddings, a social gathering of over three hundred (music, drinks, dancing and a shuttle service for attendees, catered gourmet dining with one, elopement announced with the other). Nice celebrations, many youngsters and young couples, locals attending who it is hard to connect with in the high (vacation) season. This is when we must work or perish during the winter.
A bit off topic I was there, but I did take the time to read and follow the discussion here and your last thread. Currently preparing points/questions for newly scheduled “listening,” sessions and trying to round up people to populate them as our state district Reps in Madison are on summer break and “want,” to hear our concerns they which they ignored at the prior to the state budget listening sessions.
All the best.
hello, nonquixote; nice to have you here…and doesn’t it suck that this is the main venue you can get an answer from me? (i know folks try to understand that i rarely find the time to answer email any more….)
your family get-togethers sound wonderful. ooof, i hear you on the waning of summer and the gardens. our tomatoes have barely begun to ripen, but every vase in the house is full of the most glorious and enormous flowers you can imagine.
so many opinion pieces i’ve read lately start out with the ‘bernie should have listened to those upstarts’, and end with the same old ‘they made a better candidate out of him’ (and once in awhile hillary). but your words reminded me of the pop church hymn: “what a friend we have in jesus”. same thing? ;-)
ack, to live in walkerstan must be quite a trial. since the beginning of july i’d meant to send you part of an email from a longtime blogging friend in WI: sleeping jeezus. he said:
“The news from Wisconsin is abysmal as the asshats have completed their budget “process,” which resembles crony capitalism, vandalism, barbarism, narcissism, sexism, racism, elitism, etc., and all of it mixed with a little butt sex. YIKES!”
best,
wd
don’t worry about the order; the site gets a bit haywire at times.
So the news from your friend in WI is the full truth, but there are ways to continue to attempt to counteract the asshats. We aren’t giving in but stepping up the pace. The closer one gets to home the easier it is to shame them/embarrass them publicly by asking a few innocuous and simple questions. We are talking 3rd world residential water well failures at 50% in nearby townships for corporate profits for industrial agriculture going unaddressed by the state or the feds. True corporate handouts whose results are the environmental, “sacrificial zones,” we are asked to accept as, “necessary,” for competitive economic, “growth,” in the new world order.
Loves ya dear, both you and yours.
my guess is that he’s working locally as hard as you are, amigo. you’re reflecting the ‘all politics are local’, which while not totally true, is where you can make a difference. water, of course, is the next “oil”, if it isn’t already. in the intermountain west, it sure is. major conferences are going on with all the stakeholders in the colorado river system, and that rewrite of the colorado river compact john mccain had blathered about is underway.
but yeah, those urban money-makin’ white areas will likely win the water wars.
heh; diné protestors chased his ass off the rez today. one might call it…”art”.
love to you, too.
Sorry for putting that last response out of chronological order. Not sure what I did there. ;)
Well, this has nothing to do with Black Lives Matter, except insofar as electoral political correctness is starting to rear its ugly head on various sites (would be for sure at fdl, so it’s probably good that has ridden off into the sunset). My gripe has to do with nakedcapitalism featuring a long piece from the Real News that I watched a few days ago, on Syriza, with one anti-populist, Leo Panitch hogging the discussion and really being extremely discourteous to the other panelist. His line is right up the pro-Bernie bandwagon alley that nc is now featuring as well – I may just leave them off my list for a while, not doing my bloodpressure any good to go there. I was happy to see comments are diminishing in that neighborhood.
It did make me wonder if some of the clamor over BLM (and I hasten to add this in my book doesn’t apply to reasoned critiques such as have been proffered here) is political – I will just quote an example of the parenthetical middle:
“Why would anyone with a brain still believe in the electoral process as a strategy for implementing constructive changes?”
I suppose they are just trying to soften us up for the campaign commercials. I may just drape a black towel over my tv, leave it there six days a week. (Reruns of ‘In the Heat of the Night’ are almost keeping me sane. There once was a world . . .)
yves had grown quite vexed that her commentariat wasn’t taking her opinions and certainties on syriza as gospel. on how many posts did she commenting closed? a lot, in any event. i can scarcely make heads or tails out of ShadowProof or tell if people are even commenting there. it must function as they desire: to be a base from which their work can be social-networked. but i will offer the opinion that the format is butt-ugly. ;-)
mr. wd kindly gets me DVDs from the library to watch, else i’d be more crazy than i am already. but i ran out the other night and watched the old crank McLaughlin (sp); he did a short history on the nuking of japan, and asked for comments. not one of his panel, NOT one, save for the-man-ya-hate-to-love sometimes, pat buchannan, said it was not only immoral, but totally unjustifiable. my.stars.
Well, I thought I was commenting at the end of the line – turns out I wasn’t. My apologies also.
no, i tried twice to post at the far bottom; it won’t take there. i blame lemoyne’s mojo. ;-)
Yes the Bern is strong with this one. B-D
well, quit grabbin’ ever’ blessed comment up here! B-D, as per da bing cache: black and decker, bondage and discipline, etc.? oh, you mustta meant the second one….
Actually just a smile under my glasses.
Can we talk about black and white and yellow and red and green compradors now?
jeeez, comrade x; she nukes capitalism, but you diss her for failing to name more colors? at least for ‘white’, it would seem self-evident, yes?
Comrade Orange Peel, you ain’t talkin’ ’bout compradors neither.
yeah, it dudn’t seem likely i’ll ever cotton on to you ‘comprador’ schtick, eh?
ah, well; comrade orange peel will just have to forgive herself. ;-)
seems as though there have been some internecine skirmishes going on over this on the twit machine. hope it serves to clear the air, not just crack the movement apart. my guess is the former, though.
Gotcha! Fer ongoing edgucation of the incorrigible comrade(s): Dear #BlackLivesMatter: We Don’t Need Black Leadership
Thanks for that link, dear Ludw . . ., er, Comrade X. That gets much closer to the path of my own thinking: “shared interests rather than empathy or pity,” indeed. I don’t know why anyone (not a comprador lolol) would doubt that the former would be the more effective approach, whether that effectiveness manifests as voting support or just general support from the population at large.
You’re welcome, my corrigible comrade!
White-shaming the critics (and critic-quoters) of #BLM errancy is foolish.
in an attempt to allow more space for comments due to seeming ‘nesting’ problems, i’ll jump down to the bottom to see if it will take this time.
“Comrade X | August 18, 2015 at 7:50 am
Gotcha! Fer ongoing edgucation of the incorrigible comrade(s): Dear #BlackLivesMatter: We Don’t Need Black Leadership
http://www.orchestratedpulse.com/2015/08/black-lives-matter-leadership/
dunno what you mean by ‘gotcha’, unless it’s that even some in the movement are, like Oso, calling for ‘black leadership to be foregrounded’, but ford’s trying to communicate the same meme, as was malcolm x with his (ahem) vibrant speeches contrasting House Negroes and Field Negroes, as well as his excoriation of the 63 (?) march on washington for the same thing. the funding of same, and tra la la.
i’d been trying to think how to express in my ‘internecine kerfuffles’ comment…how many folks putting their bodies on the line aren’t even on twitter, have no smart phones, thus no star power for the msm. one man opined that looking backward in time and trying to create an Origin story was a fool’s errand; no one group owns the larger movement.
and yes, some dubious funding is going on, apparently, as well as coalitions with elite house negro pacifiers, including some black clergy
i understand why you chose that comment to highlight, and while i think that it’s true to a certain extent, this reference i find useful for this era, in this particular emergency:
“It is tempting to use class as an umbrella covering race because it is simpler to say Wall Street is the root of all evil. Nonetheless, most leftists understand economism is as much of a dead end as identity politics. Decent-paying jobs and free public education would not have saved Tamir Rice, John Crawford, Sandra Bland, and countless others obliterated by a society that defines their existence as a threat.
Economic reductionism is also ill thought out. It cannot explain why the white working class is so invested in whiteness. It does not indicate how to unravel the intertwined material, psychological, and cultural phenomena of structural racism. It revives discredited ideas, such as the Communist Party’s short-lived position in 1919 that the “racial oppression of the Negro is simply the expression of his economic bondage and oppression, each intensifying the other.” And it’s generally bad politics to tell a group of people, especially ones in a dynamic social movement, they don’t know their own history or community.
The fact the first real pushback from leftists against Black Lives Matter is around the 2016 election reveals how electoralism can induce activists to side with elites against the grassroots. Many Sanders supporters will be inclined to ignore if not defend every bad position he takes because they believe his campaign is a means to the greater end of advancing socialism. ”
the piece has lots to quibble with, no time now, and a hegg-ache is gaining strength; time to toast, i guess. it at least ends with the fact that ‘the bern’ ain’t no socialist. more later, there were a few other things i’d meant to add.
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/Crash-and-Bern-20150805-0012.html
but fannie lou hamer’s testifying was a righteous jolt to my soul.
also, just to save another comment space:
A throwaway line. Of course, radical explanations are not encyclopedic. Still, capitalist economics and class analysis are indispensable.
BTW, Wikipedia understands that economism is a tool of the right:
look, comrade x; i have zero idea of your circumstances, but for far too man, this is not a game. it seems for you that it is a game of class politics and dialectics defined by *some*, terms (that in this case i know not whether the author knew, while admitting that i winced over it not knowing), and yes, i now see why ‘compradors’ was a bit appropriate to the star power of the movement as being co-opted, if inadvertently, spokespeople for the liberation of black people and the other POC with boots on their necks, choking the life out of them, slowly or in the snap of “i can’t breathe”.
but please know that while you honk on about minutiae, always grabbing the failures of different opinion pieces,or touting things with your own confirmation biases, POC and other ‘expendables’ are being killed by US police at the rate of two a day and given free passes for the most part.
and yes, i have increasing concerns about the co-optation even by white elites of note, but i won’t bring them to the boards.
The line of criticism of economism, economic reductionism or a purely economic analysis seems quite apt. All the more so because it does appear to be indispensable. It is in fact the basis of the #BLM and deep left criticism of Sanders’ making an immediate pivot to class issues in the face of the question of blatant racism. Not only is it rude in the sense of All Lives Matter, economism is at the foundation of essentially all of the definable ills today: neo-liberalism, resource wars, land rape, heartless gentrification, the influence of money on politics and so on and on.
The modern world has made an idol, a false god of money. When people say ‘I need money to live’ they are willing to commodify themselves, and if a person will commodify theirownself then they will commodify anything else and there is little to no room for anything to remain sacred. When we accept money as necessary for any & everything, we place that ‘necessary evil’ between ourselves and everything else in the world.
We were all born into the milieu where ‘need money to XXX’ is held out as truth. Once we accept that as true then there is no more room to say we are forced into that mindset. To my mind this is the real struggle we face, what Francis’ encyclical is about and the most missed message of Occupy. It’s not just capitalism per se but the worship of money that must be overcome.
We don’t need money – We need each other.
In that sense we are essentially all compradors to some degree.
The “economic reductionism” of political-economic history not only provides some good explanations, it is therapeutic. Sanders’ “democratic socialist” economism has a grave problem and it’s not its inability to “explain why the white working class is so invested in whiteness.” Long after the heyday of democratic socialism, economism is a mask for pillage. Crapitalists no longer believe in the market or entrepreneurship; neither should proles believe in Bernie Sanders’ restoration of social democratic crapitalism in this time of exception. Bernie’s acceptance of the role of hegemonster for the US means he would acquiesce to pillage as well.
The Catholic Pope sees the doom of the false religion of crapitalism as an opportunity. Yet when he extends only an apology for the Catholic role in primitive accumulation in the New World, you know that’s not repentance.
i’m hoping that the Pope’s next encyclical will announce that the Vatican will sell all its hoard of gold and jewels, land holdings, and give it to the poor. (or use some of the cash to ‘teach the ‘poor to fish’. not long after his climate change encyclical, i saw a headline that the vatican was *considering* divesting its portfolio of fossil fuels. and i bet it’s substantial. ;-)
as a tangential issue, mormons were long forbidden to drink coca-cola…until the church bought the company, and the High Prophet said that god told him that it was okay to drink it now.
Not tangential. The “Almighty Dollar” rules them all and they pretend that their indetectable Gawd does, as per their agreement with the Earthly priests.
If all proles worship the moolah, why are the connivers so secretive? Why does the decisiveness of investor interest get written out of history? Why does the Pope wait till the end of history to make token amends?
Even the Pope can’t tell the real history.
we seem to have maxed out the 10 allowed comments per nest, so:
realitychecker1 | August 19, 2015 at 8:52 am
You supply that quote, and don’t agree that Martin was making the same “regular people” frame that I am advocating?
Def. of “regular people”–all remaining after you deduct the corporate oligarchy, the 1% and their top comprador allies (aka the Oppressor group, if you will). Approx. 75-80 %, my estimate. Good to have that majority in mind and on your side, whether you want their votes, or just their heart support. That’s why BLM is stupid, IMO, just a group of self-centered venters.
Martin said “poor,” I say all are “poor” compared to the oppressor group. I am very comfortable to be taking the position I am taking here.
I see WOW denying that “racist” is the only possible inference to be drawn from his comment about me, and then calling me out for being too aggressive. The smell of unproductive esoteric absurdity is getting too strong around this comment thread, my head is starting to spin, and I am moving on.
………………………………………………………………….
wd: heh; i see why you chose the profession you did; you supply your own definitions to suit your argument, and call it martin’s; anything to win your point. ;-) but to say the truth, i reckon that most of us don’t come close to being poor (even while the wolf is frequently outside our own door), in that we still manage to afford high-speed internet, for instance. the next coming crash will change that wholesale, of course, and the fear and anger may indeed sharpen more minds and imaginations as to ‘what’s next?’
i can’t recall how or why we got so focused on MLK, but i do remember (and may have written about) malcolm X calling the ’63 march ‘the farce on washington’, and was peeved at rustin, king, and others for self-kettling it by way of ‘permitted participants’, ‘approved speeches’, etc. pfffft.
but both X and mlk (as in the quote i brought up yonder) said the only way forward is to end business as usual, and those tactics have begun, both in the pushback against police brutality and murders, in wage strikes, and port strikes, often with intersections aplenty, iirc, and of course many acts of civil disobedience against energy extraction, especially the indigenous in the americas, cuz they were always easiest to steal from and pollute with toxic waste.
yeah, i feel like i’m spinnin’ my wheels a bit here, too. no one’s commented on my new post, which is a very important one to me, and maybe no one will comment on the one i’m working on now on Resistance art. so it goes, i guess.
i’ve never banned anyone, nor have i posted any moderation rules, but i have reminded a couple folks that i like barry ritholtz’s list, the key one being: ‘don’t be an asshole to your host or other commenters’. tough to draw that line, so i do try reasoning as the first tool.
and dang that lemoyne mojo! he’s still a-hoggin the bottom of the thread! ;-)
@ wayoutwest up yonder: how did you get another comment in? i still have no ‘reply’ options. well, anyway:
you’d actually made the sole comment about a photo in the banner across the top of the page. you had admired a gorgeous opium poppy (papaver somniferum). i have a pink paonia now; they revolve with each refresh or entrance to the site (a new feature wordpress added). we garden small, no longer large, due to physical considerations, let’s say. but the flowers and birds and butterflies are balm to my soul, so i keep trying to grow a few things, and mr. wd has helped this year immeasurably, bless his heart.
but no, RC is scraping by like many of us, far more so than i, although at the moment i’m effectively re-caning a porch chair with six pairs of shoe laces, i patch everything until i’m patching the patches, but: we built a small house which we’re still hanging onto by a gnat’s eyebrow, but in comparison to the millions of hungry children in this nation, and their parents, grandparents, the hundreds of thousands of homeless, and those one missed paycheck away…we are comparatively wealthy, my stars.
but with his math, yes he may be counting the rather comfortably afflicted in there. but no, i don’t reckon calling the #blm women stupid qualifies as needing moderation; they are simply guests here in absentia. your calling him white trash might have qualified, i’ve forgotten the other back and forths i saw via email. oddly enough, i’d thought you’d kinda shaken hands over it, but i see now i was wrong. one day i’ll learn to read…
Wendy, the reply appears on some comments and not on others.
I tried to make peace without compromising my support for BLM but that failed. My use of ‘White Trash roots’ was aimed at those Burners who displayed overt racist language at the demonstrations and elsewhere and I only addressed RC’s comments after you defended him. I did infer he belonged to the Bernie Cult and I did ask where this anger and aggression aimed at BLM was coming from.
I wasn’t calling for you to Mod his comment only hoping for some moderation in his harsh rigid positions. I know I have never called for anyone to be censored.
well then i got it wrong; i’d thought you’d agreed that you were calling him out for his white trash roots; sorry. but i’m still glad that i objected to what i considered a personal attack on RC.
hmmmm; dual use of ‘moderate’. okay. this is getting murky at best.
This thread is wearing thin but I may have learned something about why some people think and react to radical stimulus the way they do, it may be generational. If this conflict reappears I may offer some opinions on that topic.
I did ‘moderate’ myself when I read your Nuke Japan post even though I wanted a shot at that revisionist historian Gar Alperovitz’s claims about the bombing. I doubt you would welcome that conflict but I have done some research and am certain that Chinese. Pilipino and Burmese survivors of WW2 would have interesting things to say about how the war ended.
“wearing thin”, ha. yeah, it’s been a real algonquin round table, indeed. ;-)
as for generational reactions to radical stimulus, at least on this thread (although some aren’t fully represented, except via email), it may not be so. i’m 64, RC is a bit younger than i, dunno about lemoyne save for that he called himself “a wizened old fart” or something as adorable; the most militant “the blm movement can do no wrong” of the folks i’m in contact may be close to a decade older than i.
yes, moderating your self on the nuke japan i might thank you for, especially as we have been at odds on so many issues, eh? and yes, the chinese, filipino and burmese survivors would definitely have a different opinion, as did most US vets, save for the generals.
i did a bit of research again for the post, and found not a few claims that hirohito had been trying to surrender since midway (?), but that either by design or snafu, the cables never reached truman’s team. so…i dunno. but i do know that those two nukings unleashed a nuclear arms race that will likely never stop, until perhaps, most of the wold is destroyed, or people wake up to the rank absurdity of war.
on edit: p.s. i should have mentioned my long time brother jacob freeze, who though significantly younger, was the first at tpm to get that obama was a con-man.
that i would like to see a ‘first jewish president’ in the vein that JFK was the ‘first catholic president’, i do prefer even in a republican system, the Swiss one, in which cabinet members take turns being president.
Repeating the claim that Hirohito had been trying to surrender may make it appear that the US somehow extended the war or that the Bomb was unnecessary but it is not the whole story and as far as I can determine Hirohito never offered unconditional surrender. He did attempt to treat with the Allies seeking to set conditions under which the Japanese would cease hostilities which included retaining the Japanese Army, the Emperor and rejecting occupation. Remember that it took eight or nine days after the first Bomb was dropped for the Japanese to actually surrender, unconditionally. When Hirohito finally pushed through surrender their was a bloody revolt and an armed military assault on the radio station where his surrender address was to be broadcast.
The after the fact comments by generals and admirals, some involved in the Pacific War and some not, seems to show that some of them were willing to accept terms with the Japs to end the war. This may be why the military high command was bypassed when the decision to use the Bomb was made. The power of the Bomb may have also made them fearful that their military might be obsolete.
It’s been 70 years since the first use of the Bomb and there has been no second use, the horrible example displayed in Japan even the censored version, may have saved us from a second world killing exchange. That fact doesn’t mean that the use of the Bomb was good or even moral, war is evil, but it is something to weigh when reflecting on that decision.
In deference to the shortness of life, my temperamental keyboard, and a desire not to get too far off track from reality, I try to deal in essential concepts, rather than reduce the forest to a toothpick and then dissect the toothpick with a microtome. If a reader was trying to understand the concepts I advance, it would be easy. If trying to infer the opposite of my meaning, that is easy, too. Also easy to malign what you have chosen not to understand, easy but unworthy, IMO.
Martin was interested in the powerless, he used the word “poor.” He and I are in perfect alignment. Do you guys even know which way you are pointing after all this navel-gazing?
Should the political figures accommodate the demands of the anti-political BLM, who don’t even really care what the political figures do, or shouldn’t they? Should the snake eat its own tail? Should Bernie be allowed to wave his privileged old white arms back in the faces of those angry black ladies who waved their righteous black arms in his face? NO, that would be racist, and misogynistic, and aggressive, and disrespectful, and, and, and, and. Should the angriest stupid victim always be designated to lead us all to freedom and empowerment and the perfect world? How can anyone sleep with these questions unresolved?
Don’t know why the “ban” word even came up here, but if it was directed at me, please be clear. I certainly don’t wish to discomfort anyone, just looking for some quality intellectual interactions.
‘chosen not to understand’, navel gazing’, ‘angriest stupid victim’; zounds and holy crow. do i take it that you’re disagreeing here a bit, lol? personally i don’t give a fuck about bernie or his racism issues page; i do care that he doesn’t cover the issues i’ve mentioned three times now. those sorts of quality intellectual interactions? oh, my. ;-)
no, banning was just generalized to note i don’t even have a moderation policy up, and hope i never need to post one. and as i said, i chose to reason with wayoutwest, and had thought it worked, i guess not for you. gads, though; i won’t go back and wend my way through the comments; what a waste of my time that would be. you guys can just take care of it on your own. crap, it’s 4:00 already.
prolly not ready for a bit of levity, but i do love elon james white of ‘this week in blackness nation (TWIB nation); his intagram making sport of anderson cooper in ferguson was beyond compare.
and yeah, i checked. what MLK was alluding to was how many millions at the time were living below the poverty level, not that it wasn’t quite a different construct in the mid and late ’60s. the sclc’s “economics bill of rights” ($30 billion) was formidable, though.
Wendy, m’dear, if you recall, I started by presenting my preferred frame as “regular people vs. the corporate oligarchical power structure.” I think what I meant was easy to understand, and tracks closely with what Martin was saying in his later years, namely that all “regulars” needed to stand together against those who unfairly determined their place in life, including being drafted for corporate/colonial purposes that did not benefit the “regular” class. Why we have to quibble about that is a mystery to me. Poor is only one kind of powerless, they all count as powerlessness. That’s the concept I steer by.
Martin and I both recognized that there was strength in numbers, and where there was a shared interest, more numbers would make success more attainable. And that is my only argument against the philosophy of the BLM folks, i.e., they can’t be effective on their own because they represent too small a slice of the population, and their me-first-ism will alienate many who would otherwise be inclined to join the fight with them.
It’s about believing more numbers make the better tactic, not about racism, white privilege, or sneaky lawyer-speak. OK?
I hold no grudges against anybody here. Debate is good, it’s inaccurate ad hominem type insinuations that take the fun out of things.
Looking forward. :-)
i cry ‘uncle’! yes dear, whatever you say dear… ;-) (2 burned out on this week + -long thread.)
Well, OK, then, I cheerfully accept your unconditional surrender. ;-)
Only remaining problem is, how can I get it bronzed lol?
Hugs to you, dear one. (ducking, covering)
Interesting events in my corner of the world. Seneca SC is still bubbling with the extrajudicial killing of a white teenager, reported by the cops to be about drugs, but witnesses claim they planted a baggie after they killed him and high-fived the corpse. I think you covered the first notice of it up above. The white parents and their lawyer and local supporters have been protesting at the Seneca PD, whose response is wait for SC State Law Enforcement Department (SLED) and FBI to report their investigation.
And Bernie Sanders makes a swing through South Carolina on Friday Aug 21 and Sat Aug 22. They’ve already gone to a larger venue in Charleston based on online sign-ups. Will be interesting to see how he tailors his remarks for Greenville (bailiwick of Trey Gowdy), Columbia, Sumter (Jim Clyburn’s Congressional district) and Charleston (Bailiwick of Mark Sanford of Appalachian Trail fame–the one that goes to a lady in Argentina). The stakes here are small-bore in the primary: substantially getting more delegates than Clinton from a minority of voters. (Obama got 44% in South Carolina in 2012.) But inroads into white swing voters could be rewarding for Sanders–but he has to solidify the black Obama voters from 2012. That’s the institutional math. And he likely has to say something about #blacklivesmatter and the Confederate flag (deinstitutionalizing its display) without losing what white voters still vote Democratic. The more straight up he is about his positions, likely the more respect he gets; don’t know that he or his staff have figured that out yet. Also interesting to watch whether he mentions the police killing of the teenager in Seneca SC. Certain that there will be some references to the Charleston killings.
I think I covered the #blacklivesmatter and Bernie issue last time under the interaction between movemental outside politics and institutional inside politics. Co-option is the institutional actors wanting the movemental actors to sign on to supporting their agendas with little to no reciprocation. Transformation has to do with institutionalizing changes the deal with the issues the movemental actors are protesting. We are in the realm of protest politics here still–thus the playing nice with Obama, Loretta Lynch, Jeh Johnson, and saying nice things about the dearly revolved-out-the-door into his more lucrative life Eric Holder. Sometimes you have to deal with comprador you have rather than the principal you want. And do what you can until you get a stronger position. Especially when their Fusion Centers have you by the nutz.
The insertion of Oath Keepers into a #blackopencarry position this week in Ferguson seemed to me to be a setup for police suppression of armed black protesters like that that launched COINTELPRO’s assassination campaign against the Black Panthers and scared the white liberals of black revolution.
In Chicago, apparently there has been a class action lawsuit been brought against the operations at Homan Square by quite a number of Chicago locals who have been abused there. Watch that one.
The 2016 election is still looking dismal. The main reason is the fixation on the Presidential race and the total absence of looking at the Congress. An enterprising third party if they wanted to waste a little time could field the 468 or so candidates for House and Senate and cause a little heartburn in business as usual. Lightning might strike and put a third party candidate or two into Congress (mobilizing 175,000 voters per district). Not as flashy sounding as running for President but might have more ability to get some things done. Only those who have hopes and an enough motivation to build an organization to win should bother with this. But the opportunity is there and the public dissatisfaction is high enough for surprises.
Unless something changes quickly, the predominating issue in the media this election will be ending birthright citizenship. Wahunsenacawh failed to implement that as a policy 400 years ago.
Two books about the origin of policing of black and red people:
Alan Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the South, 1670-1717 — English took 50,000 or so indigenous people (mostly women and children) as slaves for transport to the West Indies, the northern colonies and Europe. It was the pressure that created the major confederacies of the “Five Civilized Tribes”.
Gerald Sider, Living Indian Histories: Lumbee and Tuscarora People in North Carolina. Starts with the events from the 1973 AIM actions in Robeson County NC and moves forward with the consequences of those actions. Then flips back to the subject of the identity of the people who today call themselves Lumbee and Tuscarora and discusses the construction of the frontier, the construction of negro, Indian, and “white” identity as markers of class with specific economic functions in maintaining the frontier and plantation systems, and the gradual destruction, assimilation, and retreat into the worst land of the indigenous peoples of the Southeast.
Both focus on South Carolina, which had its origins in settlers from Barbadoes (where sugar plantations created the early management techniques of factory capitalism and labor organized in gangs in the 1600s). And transplanted that system to the Carolina proprietary colony, swapping rice for the staple crop instead of sugar and specifically importing African slaves from the rice-growing areas of the Niger delta in order to gain the agricultural technology. The Gallay book extends to the deerhide and slave trading that went on between Charles Town and the Mississippi River beginning in the 1680s. And competition between that, the Spanish Florida mission system, and the French Mississippi fur, deerhide, and slave trade through Mobile.
Likely of interest to those who can tolerate a long read (300-400pp)
thanks so much for your in-depth comments, thd. i wish i had more juice to respond, but after eight days of this thread, i’m plum worn out. yes, zachary hammond and the high-five by cop planting evidence. cocaine it was? well, rumor has it that the camera recordings are under foia request.
too many names, to many police lies. “we found a gun under a car in a nearby parking space!” sorts of garbage. yes, stop the killing, stop the beatdowns for ‘failure to submit to commands’.
Their political aims are clear. They want the extrajudicial killing of black people to stop. Now.
My understanding was that these two ladies were from Seattle. As I’ve said, this is a collision between movemental politics and institutional politics. Their allies are focused on what it takes to end extrajudicial killing now. It is unfortunate, but Bernie Sanders inevitably must have a less focused agenda on that if he is to grab the institutional gold ring. Sanders cannot escape the limits of institutional politics short of leaving Congress and hitting the streets. Nor can these two ladies have direct access to members of Congress except by being in their faces. That’s what happens when the political discourse is so severely controlled by the institutional politicians. To the extent that Sanders can break out of that and have two-way political discourse with grassroots voters (not focus-grouped or opinion-polled), he can build networks of trust. People are fed up with faked sincerity (and at the same time falling for Trump’s “straight talk”.) Sanders’s ability to cut through that artifice and confront voters with authentic choices is what creates his momentum. I’m still pessimistic that that is possible this year; we will see.
For proles diddling their generational novelty: The long, repressed history of black leftism.
Calling out massa for executions as a means to bringing down his (e)state is in-credible.
Isn’t ‘calling out massa for executions as a means to bringing down his (e)state’ exactly what the Old Left, the USSR and the early New Left did? Individuals in the Communist Party may or may not have had affection for Black people but the Party certainly used them and their condition for political/propaganda agendas.
This is why I think Cold War politics was the main driver for the passage of Civil Rights legislation in the ’60s, not the often claimed White Middle Class public opinion shift due to the scenes of White violence on Blacks seen on TV.
This visual evidence of US hypocrisy was a gold mine of ready made propaganda to show the world the inferiority of capitalism and its promoters.
Supporting BLM to bring down the State is certainly in-credible just as it is in-credible to expect that supporting any of the so called Left in the US will bring down the State. That’s not the goal of BLM, at this point, it is just to begin organizing the Black community to defend their lives and communities with whatever means are available.
Too many White people on the so called left don’t seem too enthusiastic about offering any support to BLM or Black people in general in their struggle for some basic liberties. It might interfere with their attracting more White people to their cause whether revolutionary or partisan political.
You read the article.
That’s well beyond BLM’s strategy. Furthermore, BLM’s situation does not well compare to SU’s “exploitation” of the US civil rights movement. International crapitalism is no longer sold, it’s imposed and crapitalists have little shame these days. BLM’s strategy is unsettlingly confluent with the hegemonsters’ …
Wasn’t it you who sees these “disruptive” tactics as the only form of politics left us? And weren’t you for bringing down the state by this only means possible?
Other means must be aspired to, especially since BLM can be managed by hegemonsters. Did you see the interview with the BLM activists on DN!?
That’s ignorant and tameable.
Basic liberties? The right not to be shot dead on a police stop is best framed from liberties standpoint? Not only would the left’s concerns be broader than basic liberties, they would reject a broader spectrum of oppression that flows from elite and comprador privilege.
I wonder whether the power analysis that these activists have been trained in and their guerrilla propaganda tactics are rather a means to control and subvert them. I guess if you have no alternatives you have no responsibility.