KQED’s trailer:
At the Independent Lens website you can watch the documentary (1:55:26) until 3/18/2016 or find it there on your local PBS station/s. There are lots of extras, and the comments are interesting. One says it’s okay enough for being “even-handed enough for PBS, but “All Power to the People”, and “Bastards of the Party” are better, harder hitting, talking more explicitly about why the Panthers had to be destroyed, because their 85 different social programs were both working, and showing how the system wasn’t, and still doesn’t. But you can still be active in the human liberation process.’
One says: ‘I’ll be watching with a very wary eye.’ “Ex-Black Panther Leader Elaine Brown Slams Stanley Nelson’s ‘Condemnable’ Documentary” http://www.thedailybeast.com/a…
(Brown indeed calls the documentary “condemnable” and offers a stunning critique of what Nelson left out, minimized, or got just plain wrong in her eyes. Other Panthers I’d missed she didn’t name, oddly. Most of her points seem valid once she articulates them, especially marginalizing Huey Newton’s leadership, yet maximizing Eldridge Cleaver’s. She scathingly ends with: “I have asked Stanley Nelson to remove the snippets of his interview with me from his film. He has refused. My consolation lies in knowing that this film will not be relevant in the history of the Black Panther Party, which, fixed in the history of the United States, will be studied for generation upon generation to come, and in knowing that history will not remember Stanley Nelson at all.” Ouch.
And yet there was so much in the film I hadn’t known, and am glad to know now, especially concerning the horrific events in Los Angeles, and why Fred (‘Peace, if you’re wiling to fight for it’) Hampton had to be taken out. Brown was, by the way, great in the film, especially on how women were treated. “As I like to say, we didn’t get these brothers from revolutionary heaven.”
She is still a force of nature, that’s for certain. ;-)
There’s a long comment on Fred Hampton and others’ drug programs is fascinating, as well as his mention of how Gary Webb’s incredible series ‘The Dark Alliance’, “Nicaraguan Contra supplied cocaine and weapons with the full knowledge and consent, (definitely no interdiction) by the CIA and others” fit in.
Emory Douglas worked as the Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party from 1967 until the Party disbanded in the 1980s. He’s still alive and painting murals in Oakland; Bobby Seale moved back to Oakland in 2002, and has been ‘working with young political advocates to influence social change’. (Wiki) (Bobby’s website)
Emory Douglas’s (website link) artwork was naturally featured liberally in the film; it provided a breath-taking look at the Panther zeitgist . He was Minister of Culture for the Black Panther party, from February,1967 until the early 1980’s. ‘Douglas’s art and design concepts were always seen on the front and back pages of the Black Panther Newspaper, reflecting the politics of the Black Panther Party and the concerns of the community.’ Showing some of it won’t act as a spoiler; you’ll note how insanely relevant some images are today.
(this is hard to look away from, isn’t it?)
Oakland Palestine Solidarity Mural, Nelson’s portion
a Panther Paper, 25 cents
davidly
Greyson Smythe
LeMoyne
juliania2
ohiobarbarian
stephenadavis1
wendyedavis
café babylon 
bless his heart, black panther albert woodfox is finally free.
BREAKING NEWS
Albert Woodfox is Freed Today on his 69th Birthday!
Friday, April 19, 2016 – Louisiana, USA
Just moments ago, Albert Woodfox, the last remaining member of the Angola 3 still behind bars, was released from prison 43 years and 10 months after he was first put in a 6×9 foot solitary cell for a crime he did not commit. After decades of costly litigation, Louisiana State officials have at last acted in the interest of justice and reached an agreement that brings a long overdue end to this nightmare. Albert has maintained his innocence at every step, and today, on his 69th birthday, he will finally begin a new phase of his life as a free man.”
photo
oh, marym. look at that smile and panther power salute! it’s impossible not to cry big tears, isn’t it?
i think it was he who wrote about the effects of solitary so heart-wrenchingly well, including the fact that in such a small cell that one’s eyes simply stop being able to see farther than what, the six feet of the cell? and being afraid that in his total isolation he was afraid that he’d curl up and start screaming like a babby for comfort or similar?
thank you you always drop in with the best things. OT, i’d kept emailing you with the news the the chicago teachers rejected the bogus offers, with the splendid news that karen lewis still alive and raisin’ hell. she almost said ‘fuck you, rahm’, as i recall.
And the clarifying other shoe just went clunk:
Co-option complete. Meet the new Democratic star on the up escalator. Now we will see what sort of inside game McKesson has to go with his social media marketing game.
It’s beginning to feel like the 1960s again. And Occupy Wall Street was just a rerun of the beatniks. More of a culture shift than a political event although anarchist operating style is a political cultural shift of the heavy organization of the 1960s. But SmartPhones are more flexible and fast to deliver information than mimeographs and ditto presses, aren’t they? And they distribute the power over information across all people in the movement who have them. As one upwardly bound young lady discovered in a famous OWS flap, controlling the brand does not control the movement.
as da valley gurls used to say: “gag me with a spoon, deray and obama”. my stars, glen ford said he was on mmmm…colbert, iirc., and had a little group therapy session or something. how many blue vests can dance on the head of a pin?
ha! let me go fetch an essay by a mcK detractor. here it is: Deray is no Malcolm X‘ by R.L. Stephens II on September 17, 2015
“Malcolm X used an elite forum to bring a radical and unapologetic message of support for radical resistance movements. Deray McKesson will do no such thing at Yale. This is a man who believes that charter schools are equivalent to the Black Panther’s Free Breakfast for Children program. This is also a man who received a $10,000 award from corporate education reform powerhouse Teach for America in the same summer that Black folks in Chicago have been suffering through a weeks long hunger-strike against the neoliberal takeover of their public schools. Again, it’s the content, not the forum, that we must judge. Deray’s brand of transformational leadership does not stand up to scrutiny.”
someone else had written that at none of the times he was protesting in ferguson did he ever even see, mckesson, save one, when he’d been arrested for photographing an event.
How does the film handle COINTELPRO? Interview any agents who fessed up? :)
So glad for Woodfox, who is my age. I can imagine what 43 years in prison as a political prisoner can mean. It is not pleasant because the entire institution believes a story that is not true and treats you accordingly — for 43 years. It’s gaslighting on steroids. Longer than Mandela.
Will watch the film, despite its limitations, at the earliest opportunity. As powerful as Cleaver’s Soul on Ice seemed at the time, in retrospect there was something cockeyed in his focusing on the leather, the total black attire, and the gun in the passage that affected white folk most powerfully. A riffing on James Baldwin’s image and asserting “We are the fire next time.” The reality of the Black Panthers in the neighborhoods was much grittier because what really scared the powers that be were black people organizing services like breakfast programs without asking permission. Where there can be no threat of withdrawal of white resources, there can be no control but force. And voila. Why the Bundy bunch’s seeking theft of public lands does not freak out the authorities quite as much. Bundy bunch wants more dependence, just permanently; give me (er my cattle) our free lunch. In both cases the guns were a pretext for both sides of the drama. The delusion of Chairman Mao and Chairman LaPierre.
ping! nelson didn’t ever mention COINTELPRO having set its sites on AIM, though; a large omission in my book. they were terrified of an indun rebellion after alcatraz. maybe even before, i forget.
sorry i blew by ‘bundy’s free lunch’, lol.
here’s what elaine brown said:
“While referencing the COINTELPRO operations of the FBI, which has been well-documented to have had the goal of discrediting, disrupting or destroying the Black Panther Party, Nelson reduces the massive, brutal effort by the U.S. government to destroy the Party to the story of traitor William O’Neal, who infiltrated the Illinois Chapter of the Party as an agent of the FBI. And, while showing emotional interviews with survivors of the ferocious, 1969 raid on the Party’s Los Angeles office by the Los Angeles Police Department’s newly-formed SWAT Team, Nelson erases the fact that this assault, like the murder of Fred Hampton in Chicago, was in fact orchestrated by the government of the United States—and this, despite that no other organization in the history of the United States has been so targeted by the government for elimination. Had he chosen to do the right thing, Nelson would have had to open up his film to the broad question of why the Party was so targeted by the United States government.”
but i dunno that that’s what i saw, save for the possibility that i might have known some of it earlier, so i can’t say for certain. but the key *reason* he had to go…was made quite clear in nelson’s film, and the reason was new to me.
i’d forgotten the informer’s name in the assassination of fred hampton (and tragically mark clark’s murder seemed incidental, jayzuz, but he admitted all of it in the film.
yes, it’s beyond sobering to imagine our ages, his, and extrapolate from there.
on edit: yes, it was the free breakfasts, free clinics, thousands of bags of free food handed out, drug clinics, and in some ways Occupy was that in some venues, wasn’t it?
a bromance of mine sent me a theirtube video of some saintly soul handing out 300k sandwiches per annum (or some unbelievable #), in chicago iirc. What One Person Can Do. i didn’t bother to watch it.
the BP discussion has been informative. of course cops will often enough hassle people who are simply handling out food to the homeless. where’s your permit & a social worker & all that. There’s something else going on w/the BP sandwich (food) program, though. solidarity w/the oppressed peoples of the world? (love the posters, btw).
they don’t actually want all that bullshit about self-sufficiency & self-uplift, do they? the owners, i mean. rather desperately needy & thoroughly disempowered is preferable.
a lot to learn. despite some of my commie pretensions, i’m still drawn toward the tradition of non-violence. but i’m thinking about the presence of the gun among the BP’s. as a symbol. as a deterrent. as self-defense. as throwing the violence of the gov’t back in its face (for which, i guess, you get solitary, even if you never pull the trigger or the gun ain’t even loaded.)
i got a biz meeting w/some urban episcopalians tomorrow. gonna have a chat about “the jesus tradition and the black panthers,” or some such. what to say about the homeless breakfast program…
nite
mornin’, jason; i hope your meeting’s going well. as elaine brown criticized, nelson’s documentary didn’t go into the underlying principles of many of the Panther’s programs, although as i understand it, it all spread so quickly across the nation that goals weren’t monolithic. i did dig out some of the articulated revolutionary thought that underpinned the many programs they created in different locales, and this section explained it well. breakfasts were served not to just black kids, but any of any color who were in need, as bobby seale said so well. the ‘erve the people/survival program categories are good indicators of what they were…fomenting…as an alternative to the oppressors’ realities. this is huey newton speaking:
“The original vision of the Party was to develop a lifeline to the people by serving their needs and defending them against the oppressors, who come to the community in many forms, from armed police to capitalist exploiters. We knew that this strategy would raise the consciousness of the people and also give us their support. Then if we were driven underground … the people would support us and defend us.“
‘Guerrilla vanguard and community service’
„They’re not reform programs; they’re actually revolutionary community programs. A revolutionary program is one set forth by revolutionaries, by those who want to change the existing system to a better system. A reform program is set up by the existing exploitative sustem as an appeasing handout to fool the people and keep them quiet“
– Bobby Seal
„The programs … are meant to meet the needs of the community until we all can move to change social conditions that make it impossible for the people to afford the things they need and desire.“
– BPP official
Arguably the strenght of the BPP was to combine militant, and often armed, political work with community service. In effect the BPP formed a state within the state providing welfare and security where the US government failed or refused to engage. But the strenght of the BPP was also its latent weakness under pressure, when priorities had to be made, and when different models of organzing started to clash.
„The members of the BPP are oxens to be ridden by the people’ getting up at 6AM to prepare breakfast.“
Huey Newton
„The Black Panther Movement was never a mass activity. We were a vanguard organisation with rigid entry standards, rules and regulations“.
Edridge Cleaver.
i chose an easy-to-read page with their 10-point demands/plan; lots of it will sound familiar. but yes, the guns are discomfiting for those of us advocating non-violent revolution, but i will say that one of the reasons they were used in self-defense was to go to arrests-in-progress sites to make sure that their homies weren’t killed outright or brutalized. but those were the days when carrying arms in public was legal, and damned quickly the laws were changed. now that may have been just in california, i’ve forgotten already.
peace; if you’re willing to fight for it.
~fred hampton
;-)
on edit: as to your meeting today, you may just love this quote:
“The breakfasts often started off in churches, and spread into community centres and schools. The aim was to eventually hand over the programs to the communities.
“Black preachers have got to stop preaching about a kingdom in the hereafter which is a “land flowing with milk and honey” … We must deal with concrete conditions and survival in this life! The Black Panther Party .. has merely put into operation the survival program that the Church should have been doing anyway. The efforts of the BPP are consistent with what God wants.”
– Father Earl Neil, Episcopal Church prist of Oakland.5
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/feb/20/albert-woodfox-angola-3-first-interview-trump-confinement
In his first interview since being released from West Feliciana parish detention center in Louisiana, Woodfox told the Guardian that in 1972, when he was put into “closed cell restriction”, or CCR, he made a conscious decision that he would survive. He and his comrades from the so-called Angola Three, Herman Wallace and Robert King, made a vow to be strong.
“We made a conscious decision that we would never become institutionalized,” he said. “As the years went by, we made efforts to improve and motivate ourselves.”
The key, he said, was to stay connected to what was happening in the outside world.
“We made sure we always remained concerned about what was going on in society – that way we knew that we would never give up. I promised myself that I would not let them break me, not let them drive me insane.”
bless his heart, marym, and i hope is sane…or sane enough to live a full life now. pretty weak tea from the UN’s mendez, though, imo. ‘could amount to torture’, exceptions for gays and others in danger, etc. pfffft. other solutions are out there.
i remember that someone who wrote on their behalves at my.fdl asked us to send cards with nature photos as they were sooooo starved of the natural world. i sent a few of mine, but of course…forgot to continue after a time.
not long after chelsea manning’s solitary torture, i did some research and reported on it, and a couple things i found were noteworthy. a bit contra the one link in the guardian piece, no one knows how many prisoners are in solitary on a given day…precisely because there are so many designations for it. how coy.
the other was that the quakers promoted the idea way back in the day, as part of their practice and belief that solitary silence were key to communicating with ‘the god within’ or however it went. fancy that.
yeah, yeah, Obama’s been nibbling away it, but then…most prisoners aren’t federal prisoners in any event. i guess it’s not nothin’ to create an OE mandating no juveniles in solitary, but…oh my stars. what barbarians we are.
what a dear photo with his brother; i just can’t imagine, srsly.
i found the diary, oddly in a post i did on kalief browder and kkenan davis, teens who hung themselves in solitary, jeezum crow. a few noteworthy bits i’d forgotten (it’s hard to see things i wrote when my brain was more…functional):
“The development of control units can be traced to the tumultuous years of the civil rights movement, during which time many activists found themselves in U.S. prisons. We believe this use of isolation stems directly from the brain-washing techniques used during the Korean War. Sensory deprivation as a form of behavior modification was used extensively for imprisoned members of the Black Panther party, members of Black Liberation Army formations, members of the Puerto Rican Independence Movement, members of the American Indian Movement, white activists, jail house lawyers, Islamic militants, and prison activists. At one time or another, they all found themselves living in extended isolation, sometimes for years on end. Many political prisoners still live in isolation, not because they have received charges for infractions, but because of who they are and what they believe.”
“It was from Robert King, one of the Angola Three, about whom Anita Roddick inspired Vadim Jean to make a documentary film titled In the Land of the Free.
“The only one of the ‘Angola three’ at liberty, Robert King, said his ability to see distance was permanently altered by his years alone in a cell. “I had no concept of how you actually looked further, as a result of living in such a small space,” he said.”
the portions on prison rape (far under-reported, of course) and solitary for the mentally ill…are sad, sick, and only too believable. but i was wrong: it was king’s eye/brain that was so altered.
i clicked into solitary watch, some improvements here and there, and a piece about who O’s EO affects solitary in federal prisons…and who it doesn’t. the mentally ill section will likely take as long to effect as it has at riker’s.
i didn’t get the new BP breakfast program started just yet, i am sorry to say.
the decades in solitary…the impossibility of communicating that experience. in music, in a narrative, in a painting, in…what? i mean, that is what it is. there is nothing to say, nothing to see.
i suppose they could have killed him. maybe that would have created too much ado about something?
it’s okay about a new breakfast program, jason. it likely would have had to have been a true movement to matter lots and lots past those they fed (which is not an inconsiderable a proposition).
let me consider the rest; i spent too much time today on imaging solitary, and watching the videos i’d brought on a few diaries..
for tonight, i’ve had a long-standing date with the final episode of miz fisher mystery, and now (yay-usss…) doctor blake down under. do sleep and restore as you can. tomorrow.
it’d take something surreal close to ‘guernica’ to portray it in a painting, wouldn’t it? or hieronymous bosch.
this short graphic film i grabbed from the kalief browder post. it represents the artist’s attempt to help us picture what it was like for Izzy to spend time in solitary on rikers island. music by mos def.
of all of it, his comments about the scents of screams and saliva made me wanna scream…and do violence myself. i felt the same watching some bishops torture a ‘heretical female’ on the rack in ‘the tudors’ last night.
a sculpture, too. how to represent the loss, the waste, the theft of time. difficult to imagine. and being in prison or even jail ain’t no picnic. i knew this kid (well, 25 yr old) who did two weeks in DC Jail on a DWI. the screams of children (as far as i’m concerned; 17 year olds) being raped in the night, the corruption of the guards (who would get you anything for money), the filthiness of the food, etc.
oh, my, that’s hard to hear, jason. i’ll leave it to THD to say where and how long he was in ‘jail’ not long ago, since he may not want to, of course.
i may have survived some jail time in my youth, but by now i swear i’d choose death by cop it terrifies me so.
‘a sculpture’ got me musing about how one could convey all you’ve imagined it might say. dunno if just the figure would say enough in this painting, or it requires the light coming through the bars.
he’s been in prison for nigh onto 40 years for a crime that ‘the system’ knows he never committed, but someone has to pay for. he’s hoping for clemency from obama again. he didn’t make the last list a few months ago.
http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/16659
georges leroux ‘l’infer’ in honor of the start of the battle of verdun.
in honor to the spirit of the black panthers, this:
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/02/22/twih-f22.html#75
“one Dutch resistance group burned down the registry of births in Amsterdam to hinder the search by German troops.” the gesture didn’t work, but that’s not the point. given all the hysteria over “illegals”, if one were to devise some means of obliterating the US gov’t’s distinction b/n citizen & non (by deleting all social security accounts or whatever; far beyond my capacity to even theorize what would be involved in such a task) to put a halt to the on-going crimes against non-citizens (& citizens) and to forestall undoubtedly much greater crimes to come, half the country would call for you to be lynched, ok maybe just the upper 3rd.
a most powerful anti-war image indeed. sometimes i think about how artillery trench warfare was the updated, mechanized version of revolutionary war ‘battles’: two lines of opposing soldiers lined up shooting each other. but srsly, imagine being in a trench with rotten feet, hunger, dead bodies of your comrades around you, and being ordered to charge the ‘enemy’.
i dunno about social security cards and immigrants, green cards or not, but i do know undocumented ‘aliens’ can get driver’s licenses, hence much griping from the usual suspects. they can also serve in the military, iirc, and pay taxes on their wages. the drive to make employers responsible for checking the status of their slaves spoke to that issue. but i reckon that ICE would be the key institution noting who is who in this nation, at least. ‘la migra’ in espanol.
i wasn’t aware of that dutch ‘nazis v. commies history, sigh. nor of the cia overthrow of the ghanan prez, though the author didn’t have much sympathy for him, wot?
the discussion you and thd had about the fact that so many nazis were left in place as police and security forces was new to me, as well. i’ve been watching the big EU conference in brussels that was purported to be about how to ‘handle’ the massive flux of…those in war diaspora. no surprise, but all the oxygen/time was taken up by negotiations of what cameron could get the UK to prevent the burgeoning brexit movement. i think i’ll post about it and other thundercloud rumbles across the water. what a dark little planet, as mr. wd so often notes.
oh, speaking of which, i’d stuck this (and a stephen cohen interview) on the ‘rats sez yats’ post:
‘Congress Has Removed a Ban on Funding Neo-Nazis From Its Year-End Spending Bill; Under pressure from the Pentagon, Congress has stripped the spending bill of an amendment that prevented funds from falling into the hands of Ukrainian neo-fascist groups.’
“the light shines in the darkness.” it’s funny what each of us commented on in that wsws “this week in history” recap. i completely glided thru the piece on Africa but did read w/horror (thinking of l’enfer) of the “highway of death” in the first (of how many?) iraq war. saddam hussein told his troops the same kind of BS, said it was “truth,” that the Uncle Sam told its warfighters, nationalist nonsense, and the one w/the most bullets was “right.” trial by ordeal. & the market speaks quite clearly when the regulators go around assassinating people ( a la the piece on africa you mentioned.)
capitalism reduces everything to trial by ordeal. the bloodthirstiest wins. and so is unleashed “the universal wolf.” my gmo flower will kick your puny organic flower’s ass. if i pump all this nitrate & garbage into this ground meat, and serve billions, well, the market w/its “free competition” has spoken, and I win. it is only a curiosity to forbes’ magazine and The Economist types that this “philosophy” of the hamburger kills millions & millions of people. who coulda thunk that distributing food thru the trial by ordeal of capitalism would lead to the owners killing untold numbers of people? holy toledo, batman!
btw, maybe just for grins, this is the ngo my brother founded & runs (inter alia; he’s one of those doers, an “achiever” if you are a lebwoski fan);
his pic at the top, in which i note ruefully his intentionally-closed eyes.
http://www.noi-orizonturi.ro/index.php/en/about-nhf/board-and-team/team.html
fudge. hadn’t looked at his donor page in a while. Nokia is bad enough but there it is: USAID.
trial by ordeal and bloodthirst rules! fine imagery and description, but could we add ‘best (advertising) cons the market can bear’ to it? and i of course include the western financial sites in the mix. ‘market correction’, ‘due to china’s pegging the yuan’, etc.
now i have no idea about your bro’s outfit, but how interesting the funding page is. clicking on the orange yielded more ‘communications’ devices, a few i googled for, found nothin; much. your bro’s ngo ha no wiki, so no ‘talk’ page for criticism.
but on facebook, not twitter since 2011, iirc, the DR second one reads a lot like the old ‘christian children’s fund’. i think they renamed it a few years ago, but you can see le jeux de votre frere (yeah, i prolly buggered up the french) in the first one.
https://www.facebook.com/NewHorizonsFoundation
https://www.facebook.com/NewHorizonsFoundationFUHNO
got waylaid earlier with ccr’s newsletter: the french have charged geoffrey miller (gitmo to abu ghraib) in the torture of three french nationals. i’d needed to remind myself which of his torture chambers came first.
right on re advertising. the global killing requires lots of glossy, bright, chirpy, sparklingly sparky, upbeat, lying.
i’m sorry for inflicting another ngo on you. you looked around his stuff more than i did. i’ll suggest he upgrade to Twitter. to, uh, catapault his propaganda.
ya needn’t apologize, amigo. like avaaz, et.al., they are: it all looks so wunnerful, and for only 20 ammerikun dollahs you can feed a kid a meal a day fer a month! (photo looks like some sorta gruel)
but their other ‘partner’ IFY is hell-bent on making them good little workers for the bidness machine; dang, it’s so hard not to get too cynical, isn’t it? but yeah, a different kind of ‘free breakfast program’.
http://www.iyfnet.org/partners
it’s like an international boy scouts w/some upgraded NGO-speak (“social capital,” post-commie “corruption,” “transparency,” etc. ad vomitorium) an Outward Bound knockoff to make happy middle managers for the laboring masses, using this religious tint to smuggle in international development gobbledygook. fortunately, kids are kids & not everyone sticks to the plan.
some of his crowd gave a conference in athens, gr 2014 on “youth development in times of crisis”. amartya sen & these other heavies. my bro presented a paper (ahhh, the int’l academic circuit, too.) it was not about the Youth (who, experts agree, are The Future) taking over the banks or…organizing mass strikes or….why the youth of greece didn’t run those know-nothing pointdexters out w/pitchforks and flaming cocktails….weaponized social sciences.
OT: The SC GOP just got Trumped in tonight’s primary. That means that evangelical candidates could not get traction in one of the most evangelical states to stop Trump’s momentum. Significance is that movement folks need to start thinking about how operating in Trump political environment, Clinton political environment, or Sanders political environment would be different (if at all). If not at all, then the institutions dominate over personalities. That means something about responses. If personalities and their networks differ, then that means differences in how to respond. Some sorting out is in order before inauguration day sets it in concrete. It will affect the political environment after January 2017.
er…ummmm….could you repeat that tomorrow, darlin’? ;-)
on edit sunday morning: and explain? for instance: what movement/s or institutions?
Institutions are the easy part. The US Government in all of its pieces parts is an institution whose intertia carries a lot of weight in policy. The network of transnational corporations is another set of institutions of which the subset labeled “Wall Street” was the poster child for Occupy Wall Street’s protests.
The movements appear or reappear in response to events and trends. They are always less identifiable unless they are pre-co-opted astroturfing organizations. And increasingly those astroturfed movements fly under the radar for a while to the extent they are skilled at manipulating social media.
How the institutions configure their political power will differ in response to who the election actually produces. I’m brooding over how that might differ for critical movements depending on the candidate elected.
It’s still kinda fuzzy because it’s an intuitive insight that Trump and Sanders produce environments that will not necessarily be more of the same. In both cases, they could wind up being more difficult to deal with–but for different reasons. Or either one could provide new opportunities. In contrast, a Clinton presidency intuitively looks to me like a third Obama term with a heavier national security emphasis. A first woman leader tend toward Elizabeth I – Victoria – Maggie Thatcher – Angela Merkel styles of leadership. Hillary Clinton does not seem to depart from that model.
And the fundamental reality is that the conservative consensus that Reagan put in place on the right collapsed this year. It is no longer the case that that people cannot hear the argument that the conservative movement failed miserably to deliver what it promised beginning with Goldwater. It is not longer the case that left-wing proposals can be dismissed as impractical. Or that reflexive red-baiting has extended into the current generation. Even with a Trump presidency, we should be ready to find some unexpected openings for fundamental changes in society that ripple back into government.
thanks for explaining your comment. i’ll admit that it seemed to have provoked some wild dreaming for me, and while i can’t recall it all, the gist of it was that i was enmeshed in a life-sized board game featuring colors of turquoise, white, and rust, with occasional burst explosions of…something. of course i was being punished/reviled for not gettin’ with whatever program was afoot, but somehow i can think i was carrying a very large rhode island red rooster. lol.
but the other institutions that will come into play are the fed (especially if the next crash is baked in and might happen in time to get on the ballot before election time) as it was for O-whozzit, (then a bloomberg billionaire technocrat might look good to some), state governments as are increasingly key to survival of the Rabble Class now.
the only one whose rule i can kinda see is clinton’s, and i agree with your take:barry redux +, but i’d guess moar wars and r2p’s for fun and profit. dunno much about trump save for his anti-immigrant stuff which likely has emboldened state govts to act out against the undocumented, or poorly documented. but beyond that, i know little about his caterwaulin’ call-outs for actual policy. bernie is a bit of a mixed bag for me, a better capitalist, according to michael hudson, perhaps favoring mmt by way of kelton and allies.
in some ways, rather than nibbling around the edges of uber-capitalism via corporatocracy rule, i’d almost prefer a trump, just to see what revolutionary spirit might come of his rule. yep, the misery would be fierce, but what i’m watching of slow-motion death in europe makes me almost eager to see how much USians will put up with without a fight. just spit-ballin’ here, as they say. further pension cuts and joblessness? bail-ins when the crash comes? more anti-trade unionism (scalia heard friedrichs v. CA teachers, if i have the case right), more privatization of the commons, and so on.
oh, and smart phones v. pulp papers: given the programs baked in for locating and watching users, the ability to shut down servers in certain locales, both might be good to have. at least the Panthers knew each other’s names and locations via community connections, yanno?
hate to say ‘interesting times’, but… i guess i will.
ooof; another mega-diss of the film:
“Vanguard of the Revolution” is Liberal History, Strips and Omits Socialism from History of the Black Panther Party’ by Bruce A. Dixon
“Stanley Nelson’s documentary on the BPP is “history” by and for lazy American liberals. He turns the BPP into a pop culture icon a T-shirt. Nelson mentions guns hundreds of times, big naturals and swagger a few dozen times but not the word “socialism” once in 2 hours. The BPP described its Breakfast For Children and Free Medical Clinics every day as “socialism” in person and in our newspaper, to each other and to the neighborhoods we served.” [large and heavy critique snip]
“Mistaking Vanguard of the Revolution for a real history of the BPP puts the film maker’s liberal blinders on young black activists looking for clues. It directs them away from questioning capitalism, from investigating socialism, from appreciating the influence from and upon the global movement for peace, justice and socialism upon our movement here inside the US. With this stuff as the historical standard it’s no wonder a generation of activists are seeking individual validation and stardom, Facebook likes and Twitter followers instead of questioning real authority and educating themselves and their communities to struggle for power.”
(elaine brown ran for city council at the same time seale ran for mayor; she was irked that all that footage was left on the cutting room floor, as well.)
Separating reality from the fiction, awesome wendyedavis and commentators. Got here early enough to follow this one. Thanks.
A month of chasing local legislators to save our water has left little time for anything else. Rules attempting to make private ownership of municipal water systems easier to do, were defeated. Granting ownership in perpetuity for high-capacity wells (industrial agriculture), and elimination of all regulation as to quantity extraction rates went to the state senate for March deliberation.
Sorry, way off your topic except that with declining farm commodity prices, the last vestiges of “family,” farms, the CAFOs here are still mostly under locally held extended family LLCs, but will be defaulting on their expansion and huge equipment and facility loans, and these area family, “farmers,” (roots going back over a 100 years) will be joining the ranks of the rural poor once again, needing social services just like the immigrant labor that perform 90% of the actual “farm,” operations state-wide, as hedge investors swoop in to buy debt and real property, at pennies on the dollar.
The big investors are likely backing the water privatization before this economic fall as it adds, “certainty,” of value to the takeover of local ag industries.
To say that the topic you brought to consider again these 50 years later was a relief for a momentary change of focus is sad in its own way, but we cannot let the history get lost in the shuffle. Thanks again.
wisconsin has become a banana republic, hasn’t it? as have many cities in michigan. ooof, as the US, i guess, even though here, the assassinations are slo-mo some of the time, but not alla the time. i put up a joni mitchell song that caused me to take her lyrics wider and deeper to that theme. i remember: ‘paradise’ (pave, put up a parking lot)
sigh. in nation after nation, privatizing the commons is what drove revolutions, take whichever @%@ president reversing mexico’s ejidos laws. at least the zapatistas got (ahem…took) back some of the chiapas land. but water….oh, the water will become the largest fight, as you’re already seeing. colorado, as well. in our very own neighborhood in fact, arrrgh.
as to the poor farmers, that’s happening en masse in the clinton’s family project: haiti as we speak, especially as women do lots of the farming there.
bless you in good fortune for your fights against that WI machine, nonquixote. i also just learned that malcolm X was killed 51 years ago today, may he be resting in power.
The long term feint played on the formerly small and struggling family dairy farmers here, lured and seeing immediate cash returns in the $5.2B in tax incentives and expansion grants since 2011 (Walker regime era) to go into these corporate CAFOs, I don’t have a lot of sympathy for.
So the eventual “owners,” will also benefit from that socialized public “investment,” value in these properties, complicit with county level (public/private) economic development programs, as those billions were borrowed against rural roads, now crumbling, health and senior care, more elusive and unaffordable, and rural schools that can’t afford to stay open or pay teachers enough to want to get into the profession anymore. A couple of examples of the chickens coming home to roost while denial of reality is increasingly promoted in the state msm, mostly done by ignoring any meaningful reporting.
Closer to your topic, the work visa immigrant labor force has been additionally demonized as the state legislature just passed increased authority of state LE to check work visa/citizenship status on any traffic stops or other perceived “infractions,” of the law.
Peace and Resolve
Good spirits here though, as the weather is doing a mid-April on us.
ah, i see i’d misread what you’d said; thanks for the correction. come to think of it, i now remember that this had come in on the popular resistance newsletter:
‘#DayWithoutLatinos: Thousands Protest Anti-Immigrant Bills in Wisconsin’
“Workers, students, and activists walked off the job and out of their schools for a massive action in Wisconsin on Thursday, protesting two anti-immigration bills currently advancing through the state legislature.
Thousands of Wisconsinites converged at the State Capitol in Madison for A Day Without Latinos and Immigrants, organized by the grassroots rights group Voces de la Frontera, among other organizations. The action is being updated on Twitter with the hashtag #DayWithoutLatinos.
The crowd chanted “Si se puede/Yes we can!” and brandished signs reading, “We are workers, not criminals” and “Wisconsin is not Arizona,” a reference to the state that in 2010 passed infamous legislation that opponents said encouraged racial profiling of Latinos. Fusion reported that at least 14,000 people are in attendance.
“Today we are seeing a general strike of thousands of Latino and immigrant workers that is causing major disruption in industries throughout Wisconsin,” said Voces de la Frontera executive director Christine Neumann-Ortiz. “Workers and their families are mobilizing on the Capitol to tell Governor [Scott] Walker and the Wisconsin State Senate to stop these racist, anti-immigrant bills from moving forward. Wisconsin needs Latino and immigrant workers, and today everybody knows it.”
because of course we naturally think of arizona, although sheriff joe arpaio didn’t need no stinkin’ laws to back up his profiling, arrests, deportation without due process, and pink underwear tent city prisons, O, no. handy little pair of bills, though.
glad your spirits are high; it’s uncommonly warm here, as well, and the rather deep snowpack is melting fast. weird. or mebbe not. it would be nice to know if the current temp patterns are locked in; one’s gardening, even in the greenhouse, would change a lot. i just guess any more, and start twice as many seeds as i used to, set plants out early…and have reserves if they freeze. i’m trying to switch to more perennials, but that only works for flowers. soon i won’t be able to care if that’s all i grow. ;-)
gotta gangsta hegg-ache. sometimes a siesta in the dark helps.
hey, jason! down here! ain’t no mo’ nested comment spaces!
yeah, i reckon you’re right about ‘middle management’ ideas, given the cell phone connected social capital stuff. networking, babeee!
looked up his amigo amartya sen: “Sen views free markets as an essential method of achieving freedom. His work has been criticized by those who claim that capitalism—and especially neo-liberal capitalism—reinforce unfreedoms.” far out, lol. ‘unfreedoms’.
bro’s a carrot top; RU2? or is that rude to ask?
freedom requires free markets (plus a hella lot of lemon socialism, no?)
these days mostly a gray top. but no, brownette. he was born in yokohama. an omen of good luck. all the japanese wanted to pet his head.
ahh, they pay well to weave the tapestry of flimflam, that’s how. the conscience snores blissfully in the wallet.
oops. “that’s how people like sen do what they do.”
O, i wish i had your way with words, my grey-top friend. i’ll stick up my next post, no matter how far i’ve mangled it.
petting his head reminds me of the early little rascals: “wish cotton was a monkey” pats. ;-