(Or: Cooptation Alert)
fungible fibonacci financialization
On Oct. 11 Gabriel Black of wsws.org, reported:
“The Ford Foundation, one of the most powerful private foundations in the world, with close ties to Wall Street and the US government, recently announced that it is overseeing the funneling of $100 million over six years to several organizations that play leading roles in the Black Lives Matter movement.
“We’re eager to deepen and expand this community of social justice funders,” the foundation’s announcement reads. “We want to nurture bold experiments and help the movement build the solid infrastructure that will enable it to flourish.”
She then references this Fortune.com announcement of the funding in ‘Who Is Funding Black Lives Matter?’ beginning with this subconscious (?) metaphor of Ford’s new noblesse oblige project; (both are allegedly wowed by the Movement4BlackLives detailed manifesto):
“Here’s some language that would make anyone sit up straighter if they read it in a pitch deck” [a presentation for startups seeking investor capital, Black adds].”
‘The BLMF’s strategy is supported by two other components: the first is the Blackprint Strategy, a collaborative process underway to identify movement needs and resource priorities to bring $100 million in new resources to the Movement for Black Lives. The Movement Strategy Center’s Blueprint Philanthropies Project is facilitating this effort. The second component is the BLMF Organizational Development Initiative supported by Benedict Consulting and focused on supporting the organizational capacity building needs of a rapidly growing movement.’
Keep in mind that Black had offered this Ford Foundation evidence:
“A British historian of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Frances Stonor Saunders, described the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations in her book The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters as “conscious instruments of covert US policy, with directors and officers who were closely connected to, or even members of American intelligence.”
The Rockefeller Foundation pops as funders of boatloads of the mot compromised NGOs as far as I’ve learned, but even their Wiki page has categories for Green Revolution and Eugenics, ay yi yi. And yeppers, via various ‘arms’ of the project, in a long, long, breathlessly benevolent and caring announcement, the Ford Folks include this:
What philanthropy can do—and learn
“The Movement for Black Lives has created an opportunity for philanthropy to see and learn from new and dynamic forms of social justice leadership and infrastructure. To support and fund this thriving movement, philanthropy itself has had to adapt. Meanwhile, leaders have kept donors’ good intentions in check with candid reminders of how philanthropy can hurt a movement, as well as how it can help. Listening and learning is central to Ford’s approach, as we strive to be a thoughtful, effective social justice funder at this critical time.
By partnering with Borealis Philanthropy, Movement Strategy Center, and Benedict Consulting to found the Black-Led Movement Fund, Ford has made six-year investments in the organizations and networks that compose the Movement for Black Lives. We also seek to complement the important work of philanthropic allies such as the Hill-Snowden Foundation, Solidaire, the NoVo Foundation, the Association of Black Foundation Executives, the Neighborhood Funders Group–Funders for Justice, Anonymous Donors, and many more. As we continue to engage with and learn from the movement, we’re eager to deepen and expand this community of social justice funders. We want to nurture bold experiments and help the movement build the solid infrastructure that will enable it to flourish. As we do so, we believe it’s essential that our funding not dictate or distort the work underway.”
It’s not hard to see why Black says about the project:
“The contribution of such an immense sum of money is a gift from the ruling class that will allow Black Lives Matter to construct a bureaucracy of salaried staff and lobbyist positions. The influx of money will bring the movement greater influence through campaign contributions and integrate it even more closely with the Democratic Party and the corporate media.”
Noting that the Ford Foundation commands about $12.4 billion provided by wealthy donors, corporations, and death bequests. Here are the current board trustees, a colorful lot, and whoa, Nellie, noticeably among ‘the ‘“who’s who” of powerful corporate players, including CEOs and Wall Street lawyers’ Black notes.
Now Black also claims that:
“The $100 million gift is an acknowledgment by a powerful section of the ruling class that the aims of the Black Lives Matter movement are aligned with those of Wall Street and the US government.”
My alternative take is that their aim is to align the movement with Wall Street and the US Government, or even state governments. “New millennial voices/ leadership by black immigrants, men, women, and queer people of color”, etc.
Treating the movement as monolithic and racialist, she indicts their rejection of “…the notion that any other section of society has the right to raise grievances of its own. Its group history page notes: “Not just all lives. Black lives. Please do not change the conversation by talking about how your life matters, too.” Yes, their manifestos are concerned with social justice for blacks, reparations, justice not impunity for police harassment and for the murders of black people at alarming rates, and yes, some of the associated movements breeze by any particular class analysis, or specifically cite capitalism and colonialism as the major culprits, but still, I reject her monolithic condemnation that ‘they’ see the world divided on racial lines, and ‘are devoid of any genuine element of social protest or democratic struggle. ‘. Oddly, I haven’t read the comments below her essay yet…
Of the three women who’d originated the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag, she says:
“One of these founders, Garza, runs an organization called the National Domestic Workers Alliance, on whose board sits Alta Starr. Starr oversees a fund at the Ford Foundation. She is also on the board of a foundation backed by billionaire George Soros, the Open Society Foundation’s Southern Initiative.
Patrisse Cullers is the director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. This organization was founded by Van Jones, a Democrat who worked under Obama as a special advisor on “green jobs, enterprise and innovation.” He is also a long time contributor to CNN. This organization also receives funds from the Open Society Foundation.” Youch.
“A leaked document from an October 2015 board meeting of the Soros-funded US Programs/Open Society revealed that the organization provided $650,000 “to invest in technical assistance and support for the groups at the core of the burgeoning #BlackLivesMatter movement.” The document notes that the board planned to discuss the difficulty of dealing with a de-centralized movement: “What happens when you want to throw a lot of money at a moment [sic], but there isn’t any place for it to go?” It was also raised that the Soros name could discredit Black Lives Matter if the public became aware of his financial support.
Many of the organizations on the list of Ford recipients are also members of the newly-formed “Movement for Black Lives,” which has published a policy agenda document centered on demands for greater government financing of black-owned businesses and institutions.”
Certainly she’s right that a section of the ruling class cultivated a base of support that ‘would be loyal to the status quo’; that’s undeniable, hello Black Misleadership class! Hello President Peace Prize! And any black activists and Al Sharpton-esque ministers who show up at street protests with voting registration forms (with the affiliation box filled in?) Pffffftt. What Black doesn’t seem to know is how many protests were very intersectional among black lives activists, school teacher strikes, Fight4Fifteen strikes, and so on. Mind you, that is the among the people on the street, not the putative ‘leaders’ of the movement on the whole. In fact, I almost gagged when I found this on Twitter, on the Blue Vest’s account, no less:
The information in the leaked Soros docs would go a long way in answering some of the burning questions in the Twittersphere as to how some of the big names are able to traverse the country for protests in various locales, though, wouldn’t it? Aside from possible TFA funding in Deray’s case, of course.
Re: the leaked Soros memo, all I could find was at Breitbart Jerusalem (?), “we reviewed these documents”, and given the Red/Blue likely component, I’d take their ‘report’ with some salt.
Digging further, I found ‘#BLM Activists Meeting with Liberal Billionaire Group for Funding’ November 16, 2015, eurweb.com (Lee Bailey?)
“Media sources cite Politico, which reports that Black Lives Matter (? link) leaders are planning to attend the annual meeting of Democracy Alliance, a secretive a group of liberal billionaires, next week in Washington. For the activists, the site notes that the purpose of attending the meeting lies in seeking funds in an effort to “[consider] ways to funnel support directly to scrappier local groups that have utilized confrontational tactics to inject their grievances into the political debate.”
Those in Democracy Alliance include billionaires George Soros, Tom Steyer and Paul Egerman.” No updates on the funding, so not exactly probative, but interesting nonetheless.
This is Ford and Borealis’s ‘grantees’ page. Mind you, there is no way to now if, or how many, of the groups have accepted their grant monies, but I admit that I groaned when I’d seen the Blackout Collective (Oakland) on the list. They are bold protestors, black, and queer women aided by allies of many colors.
Worker unity, anti-capitalist class struggle acknowledgement, yes! I believe that this is the major danger of this funding: cooptation toward the DemocRats. Dunno about you, but I’ve Been VanJonesed and DemocRatted, ProgressiveCauCussed and LibrulFatcatted Till I’m Blind….
But this is seriously cool:
https://twitter.com/prisonculture/status/786579132066914304
a little bit ‘o fun from Commie hip-hop rapper artist Boots Riley:
davidly
Greyson Smythe
LeMoyne
juliania2
ohiobarbarian
stephenadavis1
wendyedavis
café babylon 
just in, lol:
https://twitter.com/lolitalikesit/status/788724718253776896
O my goodness. Afro-american internment is falling out of favor. Maybe that propagated too much class analysis.
Say, what is (are) the intersection(s) between black compradors and Al Quaeda?
MLKing flipped the Birth of a Nation script – showing white Amurka on TV the real terrorizers. Soros’ Open Society now promotes to Amurka the racism of sociopathic police which, instead of guilt, amplifies fear.
i’m not sure what your first paragraph means, but ‘yes, apparently’ to your second two…i think.
phooey, i’d forgotten to include this in the OP: margaret kimberly judiciously skewers epic comprador henry louis gates. iirc, he lost his sinecure on pbs after allowing some star to convince him to hide some unsavory element of his family tree. anyhoo:
‘Freedom Rider: Henry Louis Gates’ $10 Million Scam’, by Margaret Kimberley on 10/18/2016
““We have had this remarkable growth of the black middle and upper middle class and we also have this black underclass that is perpetuating itself.” ~ Henry Louis Gates
In honor of Breast Cancer Awareness, the navy has a new pink fighter jet. so when you get cancer from DU or wonder why the petroleum jelly is suddenly bright pink on the way down, remember: the navy supports Breast Cancer. i mean, Awareness.
anyway, the wsws crowd are often so black & white (huh huh), ain’t they? being heirs of the platonic-hegelian tradition, and maybe certain segments of the christ potatoes, they really are committed to doctrinal orthodoxy as the most important thing. the Fordies would never try to throw money at them, right? there is a certain point to that fact, but they should also recognize the obviousness of efforts of co-optation of what is legit in movements and stop being purer than thou whingers.
nice barbs to the boat soldiers, jason.
that essay was confusing in that money changes everything in a social movement, and arguably some of the 50 organizations want to affect gummint policy, and might like all the layers of bureaucracy, hired help, tra la. between the ford and soros money (and more potential donors), it ain’t chump change, is it? even over six years or whatever. so yeah, the big deal is the dem cooptation effect, Trump being exhibit A as to why the movement sorta paused to endorse the red queen. cuz hillary loves black justice so much, yanno.
but yes, it bothered me that black assumes a hella lot that’s not in evidence concerning the actual protestors in the street. but like big bill mcKibben, et.al., the brand names fit for media get the juice, and may be gettin’ the bucks if they so choose.and still, i’m glad to know this news, and the soros funding news, aren’t you? but by my reckoning, if most of the effort turns toward electing dems for ‘policy reasons’, it’ll really choke off the movement.
not unlike the otpor movement and the color revolutions, i think.
The Ford Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation were early adopters of programs to “help the inner cities” in the 1960s. All of the projects were “demonstration” (i.e. feasibility) projects that were never massively replicated through actually pulling together public, private, and NGO (voluntary) money and local volunteers.
The #blacklivesmatter movement is however a movement beyond the individual organizations that have popped up locally and nationally to give it form. Individual murders of innocent people by police will ignite yet another national news story until (1) there is fundamental change in the police practices of the country, (2) the movement is sufficiently co-opted to ignore police business as usual; (3) the movement is forcibly suppressed by the police legitimized by national, state, and local government and supported by the general public. Likely all three will occur; I dare you to estimate in what percentage for each.
it’s late for me here (plum processing day, as well as yanno, bogging), but methinks you skip past the ‘who’ and ‘whys’ of their funding of past the 60’s. but i admit to being flummoxed as to why on earth would you throw down some strawman gauntlent of ‘i dare you’?. please explain at your leisure. and how would we know? is the larger question i’m asking.
“The Police Killings No One Is Talking About”: Native Americans Most Likely to be Killed by Cops
Does the WSWS argument focus on anomalous behavior by the Black Life Liberators? Or does Gabriel Black ineptly illustrate that BLM evades the essential problem?
From an “activist” associated with Demos, which “has been made possible by nearly $4 million in funding by major foundations, including the Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Nathan Cummings Foundation, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and Carnegie Corporation.
“[Derren] Walker sits squarely within the traditions of American liberalism, with its belief that promoting equality of opportunity within the current economic and political system is the best response to its failings. Everyone should have the same chance to be privileged, you might say, so that they can use their privilege to attack privilege more efficiently.
There’s some logic to this line of reasoning, but it rests on two questionable assumptions.
The first is that generating more philanthropy is effective as a route to reducing inequality. If it isn’t, then the intellectual scaffolding supporting Walker’s arguments collapses, because the problems of capitalism can never be addressed regardless of how many new philanthropists it creates. At the macro level however, societies that are most dependent on philanthropy like the USA are also the most unequal and vice versa—it’s the social democracies of Scandinavia that have the highest levels of equality and wellbeing, where the foundation sector is very small.
Tax-funded, redistributive government; people-funded, independent civil society action; and dynamic but well-regulated businesses are far more important. It was the same story in America under the New Deal and the Great Society, which kept economic inequality at much lower levels before the new gilded age began around the turn of the Millennium. In fact in the US, philanthropy has increased in line with inequality over the last 50 years, so the more you have of one, the more you have of the other. Statistically speaking, philanthropy is a symptom of inequality and not a cure.”
As the opening quote demonstrates, persecution does not bode well for BLM. Ford’s campaign against inequality is very dubious. Are they only alike in their evasions, or is Gabriel Black correct and they are aligned in them?
The trend is clear. Perhaps token outreach on global inequity is meant to subvert international worker alliance just as Obama’s achievement stymied proles against war. Sure, one can claim a movement is not hijacked by its leadership, but the compradors’ puppeteers depend on the technique.
i unblockquoted the one outtake from black to be able to read it. good questions, hard to answer partially because again, the blm movement isn’t monolithic, nor are the best-known and followed tweeters. walker: “what kind of capitalism do we want to have?” har and har.
that exact title at DN has been kicking around for a year or two, and yes, there is indeed a #nativeLivesMatter account, and i’m familiar w/ all those murders. but a few different times i’ve gone hunting for the CDC report that indicated those numbers, and i couldn’t find the larger report, and what i did find was per capital killings for a very narrow age range, so…i dunno. but it’s telling and good that with the assault on the dakota access pipeline protectors that the stats may come more into focus.
now the guardian’s ‘the counted’ is always behind ‘killed by police’ on facebook, although the latter is now behind a facebook block (pfffft), nor does it attempt to keep track of racial identification. but the counted says today:
5.49 Native American 5.16 Black 2.4 Hispanic/Latino2.11 White0.78 Asian/Pacific Islander
as to the question of ‘why no corporate news accounts?’ one reason is simply because lots of NA live where there are no corporate papers, so citizen journalism on social networking helps bring more stories.
more in a bit.
the issue of ‘whose lives matter’ is a complicated one, isn’t it? there’s actually a #PoliceLivesMatter account. well, yes we know that… but ‘all lives matter’ is one of white privilege, no? in m. kimberly’s essay in comments, she’d told h l gates that ‘the problem is racism and capitalism; who needs $10 billion for another study?’
rather than make the OP even longer, i’d left out a piece at BAR by benjamen lauding m4bl, noting On the other hand, Benjamin Woods, whose opinion piece BAR published recently, might believe this is all just what the doctor ordered given this:
“The M4BL demands for economic justice include federal and state jobs programs that target the most marginalized, the right of people to organize, some confused stuff about renegotiating trade deals, so one might imagine that m4bl might like the lucre if they imagine using it to lobby for policy, or be the lobbyists, who can say? but woods did get that policy itself doesn’t create justice, or close to that. but given the fact that so many white saviors tout education around the globe (esp. for ‘black girls’, cuz of the holiday), if these facts are right, how interesting:
“The sustained gap in wages, combined with a number of other factors, has helped to sustain the racial wealth gap as well. Another recent report, Umbrellas Don’t Make it Rain, found that white households with college degrees have $180,000 in wealth while similarly-educated Black households have only $23,400. And according to the Institute for Policy Studies, Black households will not reach wealth parity with white households until 2241.”
what that last sentence might mean, i have no idea at all.
but yes: walker: better capitalism™ thru reducing wealth disparity. by the by, the ford foundation announcement page contains some of the ugliest black vitriol i’ve read to date.
again, it’s hard to say what any of the associated BLM groups believe about class or capitalism, or even individuals on the street, but if ford, et.al. are trying to peel off what they believe are more potentially compliant to capitalism and dems in order to subvert a global workers revolution, that makes sense. otoh, there are any number of global black socialist organizations, and yeppers: they seem to focus on color, not just class solidarity as far as i know. african socialist int’l, omali, et.al.’s Uhuru movement, black is back coalition (glen ford, et.al.), solidarity w/ the greater BLM in zimbabwe and s. africa.
but hey, then there’s the us and bloomberg’s african prosperity initiative, lovin’ on paul kagame, and this recent coverage.
on edit: here’s café snapshot coverage of turtle island #nativeLivesMatter from june, 2015, including, as i’d remembered it, some cow saying ‘don’t appropriate our hashtag” (no one familiar to me) and only one cow… it includes ‘Rebel Music; Native America: 7th Generation Rises, MTV.
“Assuming that white wealth remains stagnant at today’s levels and average African-American wealth grows at the same pace it has over the past three decades, it would take the average black family until the year 2241 to accumulate wealth equal to what white families have today. ”
The many clones of Trump will surely disrupt that scenario. And this is no mirror image of black compradors: “global black socialist organizations […] seem to focus on color, not just class solidarity”.
The undertow is not racialized.
please don’t hold my view of the global black socialist as true, i may simply not remember who the ‘we’ is/are, but black self-determination is a key principle (i would quibble w/ some of the ‘policing’ subsets). a fine quote, and this is true: “The undertow is not racialized’, but are you seeing that in the quote, or just offering it as an exquisite truism?
also, it’s not just killings by police that have radicalized the larger black lives movement, but political prisoners, black incarceration rate mega-disparities, stop and frisk policies, bogus arrest fines’ ‘failure to pay’ leading to modern day debtors prisons, beatdowns by school ‘resource officers’, and many other many ‘urban underclass black’ oppressions. depending on the locale, of course, first americans don’t face those police practices every day; of course in NM and a few other states and cities…they do. but the 2012 operation ghetto storm report counted *all* extrajudicial killings, not just by the po-po.
Of course I am seeing that in the quote. There are many others.
Versus “please do not change the conversation”. BLM “aims” to self-defeat.
thanks, but i will once again object to gabriel black’s characterization of the larger movement. but she also calls the original panthers: ‘petite bourgois’; hardly, in my opinion.
on edit: wot? because a trotskyite said it? pfffft. i’d asked davidly earlier about ‘news’ johannes someone there had delivered. he said ‘bullshit, simply not true’ (about berlin, where he dwells).
You’ll have to forgive my skepticism on this “donation”.
What better way to control a movement that threatens TPTB?
Bring them in, out of the cold, to the warm fuzzy wonderfulness of the U.S. bureaucracy and oligarchy. Make a good portion of the members happy with decent paying positions.
Sorry, as a self exiled, self proclaimed anarchist; I call bullshit. ;-)
We’ll see, no?
…make no mistake; I’m all in for BLM; they’ve made a difference and the gods speed…
no forgiveness needed, v arnold; your take just ballasts my thesis. to my mind, the first cooptations began when the movement stars were invited to the white house. ;-) the fortune.com writer mentioned something close to ‘this may prove that the BLM movemental activists aren’t violent’, arrrgh.
i remember your having said you’re self-exiled. to rural thailand, is it? sorry if i have it quite wrong, or i should have stfu. .
Yes, you have that correct. I was offered a job as a CAD engineer at a U.S. owned toy company here. I left after a year and decided not to go back to the U.S. because of the Iraq war crime in 2003. Cheers.
good on you, v arnold. lots yet to do before i zzzleep, including laying and lighting a fire. w/ the greenhouse roof off, and freezing night temps, an overnight fire is welcome by morn.
question though: the western press has some strange headlines over the passing of the king, like ‘price-gouging for black clothing, w/ photo of addidas running suits. (?) today: ‘Thailand hits out at ‘false’ foreign reports following death of king’; Amid questions over successor to King Bhumibol Adulyadej, junta insists ‘constitution, royal laws and traditions’ are being properly observed.” any thoughts of what’s up with any or all of it?
the art in thailand is sublime, including. dragons. wished i could have afforded a hanging wooden one i saw once…it moved something inside me, but i can’t articulate what it was. genetic memory, a universal archetypal symbol as per carl jung? anyway, you’ll be asleep by now.
Ah, the western media vs Thailand; believe very, very little of what they say re: Thailand.
The price gouging was a statement by the government “not” to price gouge black clothing. There has been none that I’m aware of. By the way, white clothing is also considered proper mourning attire. My wife is a civil servant (teacher) and wore her white uniform to the Monday ceremony at her school. There is no more beloved human on the planet than King Bhumibol Adulyadej (Nai Luang [distant traveler]) and I would agree; everything is fine, under the circumstances. I follow the proper mourning attire as well, even though, as a foreigner, its not really expected.
Thai art, what can I say; it stuns and takes my breath away; sud yot (awesome). It’s 9:54 am here now. Cheers
P.S. I do not believe the western media on any topic. ;-)
yes, it’s a good rule of them to believe the western media, although most media seem to be biased in some way or other, so one sifts for kernels of truth, sometimes in a ‘confirmation bias’ way of belief.
now is your sud yot (i’m assuming) wife thai? and how lovely to hear how beloved the Nai Lugang king was; even the idea of a king is so foreign to me. was he a titular head of state (wrong term, but like elizabeth II), or active in government? also, i am a complete idjit about time: is thailand 13 hours earlier or later than mountain time? as in: yanno: yesterday or today? ;-) i found a cool website world clock, time ticking away, how many hours + or – GMT, but for cripe’s sake: they figured you’d know which date it was!
it’s reverent of you to wear proper mourning attire, and after 13 years you must not be quite a foreigner, no? you must have learned the language pretty well by now, as well.
Sud yot means something akin to awsome. It’s colloquial Thai and new to the language since I’ve been here. Thai wife is “Paraya”; and I speak enough Thai so that I can function autonomously. I speak Thai more than most westerners, but not what I would term fluent. My wife is an English teacher, so, being lazy, I didn’t learn Thai as well as I should have.
We’re +7 GMT and on the other side of the International Date line; so half the day is ahead of ya’ll; it’s the 22nd right now and 7:20 am.
Nai Luang was very similar in function to Queen Elizabeth of England. Thailand was, until the coup, a constitutional monarchy.
Wendy, you are one of the very few (and I mean few) people who have questions re: me and Thailand; thank you for asking.
I think most assume I came here as a sex tourist, which is pathetic. I was 57 when I left the U.S..
My wife is the only woman I’ve ever dated here.
Hope your green house made it through the night okay.
Cheers
bless your heart for not being offended that i was being overly inquisitive (read: nosey); some think that on the boards such questions are bad form. thank you for telling me what date it is; mr. wd and i got the giggles and whoops trying to figure it out. ‘now, the earth rotates from west to east toward the sun’…and i even looked on a few sites explaining it as ‘kid science’, then adult science, which was er…kinda explicative, but…beyond me.
i appreciate knowing that before the coup thailand was a ‘constitutional monarchy’; i’ve forgotten so many terms and words in my mental decline.
there are few lands i consider more exotic than thailand; perhaps bali, and i failed to ever travel to so many places i’d yearned to visit: florence, hong kong, and even NYC. having had blogging e-friends over the years in prague and geneva was quite a treat for me, even though we’ve lost touch by now.
and woot! mr. wd will put the finishing touches on the new greenhouse roof in the morning! (i’ve been creating a celebration dinner for him today (shhhh…)
for you, your dear Paraya (please send her my best heart), and the distant traveler, and i’m hoping it’s appropriate:
Wow, you found a performance of Kinnaree Dance. I’ve been to the Joe Louis theater in BKK where this was performed. Thai performance art is just sublime; Khon, 3-man puppets, and shadow play (Nong yai). Shadow play is performed in our neighboring Province of Phortharam at Wat Kannon;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nang_yai
Wat Kannon is a World Heritage Site and a mere 24 kilometers (15 mi.)from our home. There is a museum of shadow characters there, some well over 100 years old. Fascinating to say the least.
And it’s very appropriate, no worries there.
I’d be more than happy to give you my e-mail address if you like. I feel a wee bit guilty taking this tangent away from the original post.
Cheers.
Oh, I just realized; you have it (e-mail) already…
just fancy how long those cultural artistic traditions have endured. as with balinese dance, not only is it formal to the Nth degree, but every placement and gesture feet and hands describe in the air must have old meanings, as well. the long, long, fingernails: is that a sign as it is/was in china of not needing to do menial work? (please understand i know how ignorant of all this i am.) but how wonderful you live so close to a world heritage site.
look at how many there are! and the architecture! i didn’t see wat kannon, but it’s early for my eyes…
oh, please don’t feel guilty; i asked, remember? plus i’m fascinated, and i reckon others are, too. thanks for the offer of email, yes, i have it; mine is on the categories list: ‘contact me’. but if there’s a worse e-correspondent than i, it’s hard to imagine. ;-)
Well, yes, that’s exactly what co-option is about. Most movements have multiple organizational forms plus a lot of non-organized activities that spring up from occasional and opportunistic affinity groups. That is, as long as the movement doesn’t ossify into organizations. It is the “leaders” of the organizations or the more persistent of the catalysts of the affinity groups (the authorities still tend to think of them as “organizers” who who become the ones most difficult to co-opt.
This donation seeks to channel protest and potential widespread change into incremental and “manageable” change. In the 1960s, as I mentioned, these sorts of co-opted groups did make palliative changes in specific local communities or already existing local institutions. At which point they were instructed to build their own “development” infrastructure and spin free of the consortium of foundations that were funding them. In most of the neighborhoods or cities that these organizations (which after partnership with the co-opters they were), there were not the resources of financial, technical, or organizational support that operated in the “professional” style of the foundations. After all the foundations were using billionaire or dead millionaire or billionaire money, concentrated only at one or two places in the US. These new organizations either became co-opted by their local context or long-term dependents on specific foundation funding. It is after that relationship is established that the threat to cut off support becomes and unstated assumption in order for manipulation.
The other pressure is the bragging rights of how much funding one has raised to do particular jobs; foundations encourage these comparisons along with metrics of who well the money was spent. What generally happens is top salaries of local neighborhood organization are fractions of the the foundation project managers’ salaries or are conducted by volunteer staff. Co-option need not mean singing the foundation’s song; it might mean only pulling in those activities that the foundation perceives as throwing sharp elbows in situations in which sharp elbows are definitely needed.
I counted at least 3 high-profile groups using the #blacklivesmatter hashtag agenda. And lots of local chapters of those or local independent groups. Total co-option of the movement is as difficult as co-option Occupy Wall Street encampments were. So much so that some duplicative organization of encampments in some cities (DC was the prime example) was carried out to bring some “organizational strength”.
i know that your comment is to v arnold, but a bit later (mr. wd has a dead people board meeting) i may have a question or two. but what was your dare about in your three possible scenarios, please? i finally twigged that either you had guesses, or that cooptation toward ‘policy’ might be the way to go to avert #total police state shutdown. a few folks in the comments on the piece at wsws thought it was downright silly to attach meaning to ‘the fbi is monitoring the movement’. i do not. ‘we are all terrorists now’ (dissenters, esp. public, according to dhs)
Avoiding total police shutdown certainly is one reason for being accommodating to effort to co-opt one part of a movement. We have seen cases in which co-option achieved some significant institutional changes. Certainly the view among many in the civil rights movement was that MLK got co-opted by LBJ. What MLK got in return were two civil rights acts and a huge program of subsidies for programs for the white and black poor to end poverty. Those were significant institutional changes. How significant is in the persistence of those who opposed them to seek to reverse them, even up to this election. People in North Carolina did not have to show voter ID in order to vote, despite one of the most discriminatory state laws in the country because a federal judge struck down the state law as contrary to the Voting Rights Act. Of course, the price for this is thinking for 50 years that similar co-option by the Democratic Party will bring the same dramatic institutional results. In retrospect, it seems that MLK did more co-opting than did LBJ, who very clear about what he had done predicted that it would throw Democrats out of power (meaning his kind of FDR Democrats) for a generation. It is a strategy that should be considered carefully before being co-opted, because many will try to just shut up those they are co-opting.
Since you asked, this funding is going to Movement For Black Lives. If I’m not mistaken, this is the organization that Packnett and Deray McKesson promote. McKesson has returned to a public school position with Baltimore Public Schools the last I heard from the Tweets. Not sure what Packnett is doing aside from training organizers. You can see why these two and their part of the #blacklivesmatter movement would be attractive to Ford and other foundations.
Alicia Garza, Opal Tometti, and Patrisse Cullors started Freedom & Justice for Black Lives in reaction to the failure of a Florida jury to convict George Zimmerman. They originated the hashtag and triggered some of the massive support around the protests in Ferguson.
These are their stated principles. Judge for yourself whether they are keeping them. And their statement that this is a movement not a moment echoes the Rev. William Barber of the Moral Movement.
http://blacklivesmatter.com/guiding-principles/
Rev. William Barber and the NC NAACP has this advice on their organization blog and also a Voting Guide to the ballot that voters will see.
http://www.naacpnc.org/
Bree Newsome, who climbed the flagpole at the South Carolina State House and hauled down the Confederate Battle Flag lives in Charlotte and is one of the many voices in the #blacklivesmatter movement in Charlotte and the Carolinas. She currently is keeping the protest against the police murder of Keith Lamont Scott and seeking changes in the the way CMPD holds accountability. See her Tweets for any political opinions on the election. Given what she is focused on, she is unlikely to be given any props by people seeking to co-opt the reaction to the CMPD lack of accountability.
It is helpful to inquire who “DHS” that considers protesters as terrorist is. As we saw during occupy, there are training manuals written by consultants that are used to train police chiefs and their departments in “crowd control”. And after 9/11, Israeli consultants on terrorism worked this public sector market very thoroughly with their “documented history of countering Islamic terrorism”. Urban Shield, as we saw back then is nothing more than an Israeli vendor (and now other vendors) sales convention to police departments with freebie officer training in warrior cop sort of tactics. I sure Radley Balko has more details about who exactly has escalated the response to protests and why (specifically in this time and place). We well suspect why; after all, in FDR’s New Deal, state national guards (home guards) were set upon Southern textile workers and the Ford automobile workers at River Rouge. The generic response to protest has not changed: co-opt or suppress.
actually, the protocols that deray, packnett and samuel sinyangwey are promoting is essentially a version of the WH’s plan, #campaign zero. (the top mspackyetti tweet is great in itself, but that became her motto once the twitter wars over deray’s TFA promotion were outed; he and shaun king especially quarreled. the fortune article named #M4BL, borealis named these additional groups.
i’m not getting your point about garza, tometti, and cullors; do you think their affiliations w/ the ford and soros boards are negligible then? but yes, i do think we all know how and when they began the hashtag part of the movement. ;-) their twit account is mainly about ‘standing with haiti’ from what i see. meaning: no prez politics from what i see. next season?
bree newsome, wonderful and ballsy woman, yes, working hard in the assassination of keith scott. you decide the import of any of this:
@BreeNewsome Oct 20 Trump isn’t just saying election is rigged. At rallies, he’s specifically pointing to predominantly minority polling places as the issue
@BreeNewsome Oct 20 I’m blown away by shallowness of thought in political analysis today. If Trump weren’t such a disaster, US would be fascist nation in Nov
@BreeNewsome Oct 19 “I need to watch this debate tonight to make up my mind about this election.” -No one
she did retweet sam swey (sinyanwey), but i won’t hold it against her. ;-)
various grantees will either accept or abjure the largesse, not even considering what the downsides would or could be. ha, hasn’t balko said that he’s a libertarian? so mebbe he’ll vote johnson? but no, that wasn’t your point.
oh, and you said that (iirc) ‘the leaders’ would be less likely to be coopted. can you say which, or did you just name them? i’m still having trouble imaging the blackout collective doing so, but come to think of it, what, if any strings would come with the grants? you made a great point about ‘fearing the funding might dry up if ___’ (they don’t tuck in their sharp elbows’, was it?, though.
on edit: i reread the ford announcement, and it sees as thought there are perhaps some strings. i also wanted to say that shaun king is major in the movement, and he’s gettin’ a hella bang out of hitting on the podesta emails, so.. ;-)
TarheelDem, Thanks for that reply.
IMO, the occupy movement was a good idea, but bad I.Q. (a uniquely Thai phrase). It was co-opted on some level into obscurity.
BLM is black to its roots; like the Black Panthers, MLK, and Malcom X.
They were co-opted by nobody in spite of the onslaught of the CIA, FBI, and every police force in the U.S. A..
So, I guess we disagree on the “Occupy Movement”; where is it today? MIA in my view.
Further, the BLM will die if they accept $1 USD from any organization, agency, or NGO.
They have to survive organically, from their roots; there is something raw, from the streets, and even the gutters of their existence that can survive and flourish (possibly), if they remain true to their cause. The alternative is slavery and death. There in is a long and ugly history of the U.S. government.
In closing; I don’t mean to be hyperbolic (almost impossible given the U.S. history) but pretty words and obfuscation accomplish nothing in furthering understanding.
Further, I hope I have not mis-understood your post…
What I saw with regard to Occupy Wall Street was a multi-city orchestrated police suppression of extremely persistent Occupy Wall Street encampments over a three week period. There were massive deployment of riot police, strategies to execute raids when outside supporters were not protecting the encampments, use of “health and safety” propaganda to justify departure for Constitutional guarantees, and transport of personal property, tents, and even the encampment libraries to dumps by garbage trucks. The charge of co-option can likely only be exteded to Occupy Congress, who camped on a National Park Service square near the National Mall. Another local encampment for Occupy DC was at a park; that encampment was taken down three times before the one at the National Mall was attacked in broad daylight and shut down. I did not see co-option of the movement no matter how the controversies in local general assemblies seemed. There should be a good streaming history of most of these events to study. It was automatically archived when videoed to ensure that it could not be destroyed by the police.
The articles says that the Movement for Black Lives is the sort that the Ford Foundation seeks to support. If what you say is true, that support might strengthen, legitimize, and expand the movement. And the question that I raise about who is co-opting who applies. We will have to wait and see.
The follow-up on Occupy Wall Street is that the people who were in it have kept protest alive even in the most oppressive cities, like Chicago, and were early supporters of turning out people for #blacklivesmatters actions. In addition, they provided a lot of the support in Chicago for #NoNATO. Those people are neither co-opted nor complacent. The brand might have been mainstreamed and a watered-down version of its analysis, but one must not conflate being mainstreamed with being co-opted.
That is true of all successful movements. In fact movements, in contrast to the institutions they spawn, identify themselves by these characteristics. And now it is the turn of the people of Cannon Ball ND to show this same determination in the face of suppression to be the movement that the reaction to climate change and the rise of the Anthropocene.
Hopefully not pretty words but my observations over 50 years of how movements set institutions in their wake through knowing when to oppose and how and when to negotiate and how and when to follow-up and hold accountable and how (the revival of what was only a decade ago a seemingly co-opted NC NAACP under Rev. William Barber is a case study in this that we will see how it works out in practice.)
I’ve seen some pretty amazing stuff happen in my region in the past couple of years. I saw, thanks to the wonders of livestreaming, a strong black female, Bree Newsome, from Charlotte take down the Confederate flag at the State House of my native state, the one that first seceded, by shinnying up the flagpole, detaching it, shinnying down, and surrendering to the officers who had just arrived to arrest her. It was that well-chosen moment when the politics turned so that she was released and the flag was taken down permanently (at least for now, will see when next Governor takes office).
I have seen the video of the busiest highway in the Carolinas shut down for a few hours in protest to the police murder of a black man. And a black Democratic President, white conservative Republican governor, and white female Democratic mayor paralyzed to do more for a while than just have cops in riot gear stand there watching because of their fear that suppression could ignite other people with less political reasons and less discipline to actually riot, which would be a big mess for all of them, most of all the governor who is running for re-election.
This is not the region is was 55 years ago, although it is close to what it became 50 years ago.
Bree Newsome is one gutsy human; Amy Goodman did an interview of Bree on Democracy Now. Very impressive young woman.
Death would appear to be the new America way, both at home and abroad…
Do not even get me started on our president; and it would seem we’ll get a harpy, war hawk next. A number of pundits have opined 2017 will see WWIII. I hope we have some sanity stashed away somewhere close by…
On Bree Newsome, indeed. Charlotte and North Carolina is lucky to have her activities keeping a movement going. The Republicans keep signaling to their base that the election period will see a red shirt campaign. (Stephen Budiansky, The Bloody Shirt: Terror after Appomattox recounts the historical model for this kind of voter intimidation. Most people think that with Clinton’s high probability of winning if not a landslide, that at most this will amount to a few guys in red shirts attempting to intimidate minority voters and being chased off by the election judges. We will see.)
To be disappointed in an admittedly duopoly Presidential election indicates a political analysis that allows for lefty politics short of full revolution. For those with this perspective, the past 70 years have been a frustrating time. The success of some lefty movements in the late 1930s, the rise of labor movement power in the early WWII years in both the UK and the US, the destruction of blatant de jure segregation in the former Confederacy in the 1960s, and the mobilization of seemingly large numbers agaist the War in Vietnam gave lefties a false, especially those who succeeded in shutting down college campuses at certain points, a false sense of their own power. And the misleading sense from the LBJ presidency in the glow of the New Deal and the JFK presidency and assassination that the President of the US is the all-powerful mover of lefty change if only the President is aligned with that supposedly powerful liberal-progressive-lefty big tent that is out there. That is pretty much a liberal delusion; liberals are getting a lot of their agenda. Progressives somewhat less. The active movement to exclude the left from electoral politics is unmistakable; likely exposing that is what Wikileaks was up to with its email releases during the campaign. In my opinion, the current lefty strategy of aligning only with candidates whose moral “principles” align with my own is an attempt to avoid the moral hazards of power of which Lord Acton was perfectly willing to accept: Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely. It is a good thing that the US President does not have absolute power; there are still political spaces in which to have movements and to carry out specific electoral strategies.
The following is an analysis of what a lefty electoral strategy might look like, not an attempt to whip a vote in a particular way. It is an exercise pointing out that one must look at specific historical situations carefully to see opportunities, something that IMHO a fragmented left concentrated into geographic strongholds has not widely done since at least the 1960s and probably since the Great Depression. It was the strength of the US left in 1932 that rocked FDR out of what might have been patrician conservatism; after all, he ran on some pretty conservative policies and was not comfortable at all with what he wound up doing.
Movemental and electoral politics, especially a large unified Socialist Party headed by Eugene Debs, set the political frame for the New Deal. The pragmatists in Roosevelt’s cabinet were not coddling the bankers who brought down the economy but the small merchants and manufacturers who had been put out of business; thus the essentially fascist National Recovery Act, which fortunately was struck down by a conservative Supreme Court.
Which brings the first limit on a Presidency, the political composition, of the Supreme Court, into view. The current one is split 4-4 between a range of liberal Democratic appointees and a range of conservative Republican appointees. Depending on which issue is being considered, those overlap or not toward the center. In political range, it is a duopoly court, as might be suspeced.
The second limit on the President is the Congress. You can see this best in what FDR and LBJ could not get done and where a Democratic Congress frustrated Nixon and Reagan, and a Republican Congress after 2010 mostly obstructed Obama’s domestic policies and mostly drove somewhat unsuccessfully Obama’s national security policy and foreign policy.
The third limit on the President is the “non-political” appointees in the federal civil service, the Foreign Service, and the uniformed military. These folks from top to bottom have years and decades of experience in fulfilling personal and institutional agendas through the internal office politics of one administration after another. It is why those who want specific results are so frustrated with “bureaucrats”. That office politics has cross-currents largely unseen from the outside. As an IT contractor at EPA, I watched how the federal civil service maintain the agency’s ability to continue working to clean up water in the face of the Bush administrations attempt to sabotage the entire agency to generate a call to dismantle it. There were all sorts of innovative tactics deployed: creating outside volunteer constituencies, making sure that the contents of closed libraries did not disappear and had the possibility of being quickly restored after the administration ended, and on and on. Individual details that added up to strategic resistance. My reading of the Obama foreign policy is that most of it involves strategic resistance on the part of the neo-conservatives and the other part involves co-option by the responsibility-to-protect liberals formed in alignment with the Clintons during Bill Clinton’s administration; that bunch were shaped by the trap in Somalia left over from the George H. W. Bush administration and the Republican attack on a “draft dodger”. Political necessity drove the Clintons toward a “muscular” national security strategy; as a bunch of relatively young White House denizens, the middle part of their political schooling created a bent toward attention to national security. And this is where the Foreign Service folks like Victoria Nuland (and her assorted Kagan in-laws) and uniformed military like Obama-cashiered Gen. Stanley McChrystal gained their influence over Hillary Clinton.
The fourth limit is popular pressure as manifest in midterm elections and the election to a second term. This is mostly overemphasized as compared to the the other three sources of constraints.
The fifth are divisions within the governing party. The presence of independent Joe Lieberman (Lieberman for Lieberman party) and independent Bernie Sanders (democratic socialist) in the Democratic Caucus from 2009 to 2011 constrained the Obama administration generally in ways that supporters and critics have not clearly recognized. No amount of arm-twisting (especially after the elimination of earmarks) or appeals to their constituencies could alter the power they had over legislation that was must-pass in a Congress in which the Republican strategy was complete and total full-court press obstruction except with the public blamed the Republicans. Interestingly in hindsight, the anger on the left empowered the Republicans as they eluded responsibility and accountability for governing at all. And now from the perspective of the left, that allowed them to overreach, fragment, and possibly set up the collapse of the duopoly into an establishment monopoly under Hillary Clinton.
If indeed this election marks the collapse of the duopoly into monopoly establishment party control of Congress and the Presidency, that means that the side of the duopoly that becomes the monopoly colors the nature of that monopoly control. If Democrats control both the House and Senate, not currently likely, the control both appointments and fiscal policy. If Democrats control only the Senate, the control appointments only if that control is either filibuster-proof or the rule that allows filibusters is not allowed to apply to appointments (the so-called “nuclear option”).
The collapse into a monopoly situation has the effect of now making Democrats solely responsible for the results of governing only to the extent that that responsibility is clearly visible to the public. That changes the options in electoral strategy in this election years and opens the possibility of a challenging opposition coalition from the left (if it can organize and effective electoral strategy) in 2018. This is an option that very much includes for the moment what are called Berniecrats and creates a political situation that allows them the counterpressures not to be co-opted. They are at this point, if elected, a minority that cannot force or stop legislation but they can add to legislation provisions that temper its neoliberal provisions. And example of this is Bernie Sanders’s successful amendment to the affordable care act that did two strategically important things; it authorized funds for rural and urban clinics in underserved areas; it restricted insurance company overhead to 20%. A minimum of 80% of funds must go to payment of providers. Those have had interesting strategic consequences on the choices the insurance companies have had to make about premium rates, profits, and staffing that begin to make clear that infrastructure (which universal “anything” is) cannot be run in markets (which discriminate on the basis of ability to pay).
The electoral strategy is to elect more people to do the sort of legislative tweaking that Sanders did and to put people with Sanders understanding of legislative levers of power in committee chairs. Sanders’s campaigning for Hillary Clinton and the Democrats was bargained with allowing him to become Chair of the Budget Committee. The Senate Budget Committee chair is a powerful structural player just by his position and his ability to stop legislation in its tracks or to stop expenditures. The last Democratic chair was Kent Conrad, who bargained allowing the amendments to the Afffordable Care Act through “on reconciliaion” which allowed the most controversial part of Obamacare, the financing arrangements, to be passed with only 50 votes and the vote of the Vice President, who presides in the Senate. In return, Kent Conrad got his bipartisan commission on the national debt, headed by Republican Alan Simpson and Democrat Erskine Bowles that led the Obama administration down the distraction of the Grand Bargain until the stalemate of the Supercommittee forced a compromise that reverse part of the Bush tax cuts, froze non-military spending and capped increased in military spending. This compromise came before the Republican winners in 2010 took office–in the lame duck session of 2010. That compromise was undone after the 2014 rout of Democrats in the House. One guy, Kent Conrad, triggered that whole chain of events by insisting on the Simpson-Bowles Commisison before he would release a bill. That’s the power that Bernie Sanders could potentially muster as Chair of the Budget Committee.
So the first possibility is to ensure that the monopoly party becomes sufficiently Democratic to get that power into Bernie Sanders’s hands. That is a quid pro quo. If Bernie Sanders delivers votes for Democrats to retake the Senate, he gets the Budget chair.
Again I pause to point out that this is not advocacy but analysis. This is how you scope out an electoral strategy.
The second possibility is to have enough unlikely Democratic candidates win in the Senate to be able to make the argument that Chuck Schumer should not be the majority leader. That would be a quid pro quo for documentable progressive support. Schurmer as effectively the Senator from Wall Street would be an enabler of Clinton’s payback of her Wall Street donors. It’s probably too late in this cycle for that to work unless there are some Democrats already working this argument. Progressive enthusiasm for Deborah Ross in North Carolina (a former exec director of the NC ACLU) and Patty Judge in Iowa should be easy to find. The LOTE principle is the sole benefit of voting for Jim Gray in Kentucky (sole plus is taking out Rand Paul), Anne Kirkpatrick in Arizona (sole plus is taking out John McCain). Getting Democrats to 61 or 62 in the 2016 results with documentable progressive fingerprints provides a 2018 candidate selection bargaining position as well as one for who becomes committee chairs. Bernie Sanders provide the negotiating figure to wring out the quo for progressive quids. The Senate polling in Nate Silver’s 538 blog can tell you where it is possible of progressives to be the margin of victory. Certainly this is true of my four examples. All require a margin of less that 10% of registered voters in the state to tip the balance. And I don’t believe there are Green Party candidates in any of those states.
A third option is to tip the House through voting for Democrats regardless of other characteristics in marginal Republican districts of heavily Republican states or creating a constituency that gets rid or one or another of the Republicans considered by Democrats as bete noir. These include Steve King of Iowa, Virginia Foxx and Robert Pittenger of NC, Louis Goehmert of Texas, Trey Gowdy and Joe Wilson of SC, Darrell Issa of CA. Having Democrats elected in these districts would constitute a stunning change that might prompt a media narrative of conservative collapse as a result of Trumpism.
Remember that the premise of this analysis is that a Trump landslide lose triggers the self-destruction of a Repubican Party split into factions — traditional conservative Republicans on the Reagan mold, take-no-prisoners Republicans of the Gingrich and McConnell mode, Tea Party Republicans of the Ryan and Gowdy mode, and Freedom Caucus Republicans of the Ted Cruz mode. It is the more establishment Reagan-style Republicans who are now supporting Clinton. The others are supporting Trump as a matter of convenience, party loyalty, and hope to take over the party after Trump’s defeat. At the moment, the differences, political and personal, between the three factions look unbridgeable in defeat. Thus the Democrats and traditional Reagan Republicans become and unstable alliance behind Clinton. If those Republicans also change registration to the Democratic Party, it tilts candidate attention to include rather than exclude them. You have monoply party and the ruins of the former duopoly partner.
All of which goes to how to constrain Hillary Clinton’s tilt toward national security advice that seeks to restore the US’s now lost sole superpower status, which is what is prompting the march of folly leading to military conflict with the emerging prospect of Eurasian political and economic integration: (1) a Supreme Court reassertion of Congressional power over declaring war; (2) Congressional legislation restraining the President, reducing funds for the military, or downsizing the mission of the military; repeal of the AUMFs from the Bush era and the PATRIOT Act would be two good first starts; (3) Formation of an internal peace movement within the national security civil servants, Foreign Service, and uniformed military; (4) popular pressure against wasting more resources on destruction of the global infrastructure; (5) a peace caucus within the Democratic Party.
In order to be elected the first woman in a previously exclusively masculine role, one must be sufficiently masculinized to show the required toughness of the alpha male. That act alone draws on the mythology of some monster of mythology, most generally the harpy. Women in national security jobs tend to adopt that role.
By way of reference:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harpy
Note the role of carrying “evildoers’ to the Furies. The word “evildoers” strikes a particular chord after the Bush presidency.
And who under this metaphor would be the Furies?
wd, sorry for going so long. The prompting comment hit on a pet peeve of mine with regard to politics to the left of Evan Bayh. Not understanding that Presidents can be pressured from the left if the left ever gets a solid electoral strategy that goes for interests instead of symbolism. It also tapped some thoughts I’ve been having since the Democrats have been partying about their luck. It is how Hillary’s rush to war could be blocked, not whether anyone should undertake that as a strategy. It is predicated on the left being interested in an electoral strategy, which does not seem apparent to me.
long? why, it’s a mere 2,606 words! but whew; i’m so glad it’s for v arnold, not moi. srsly, i’ll try to read it when i have more time. i can see you put a a hella lot of analytical thought into it.
That is indeed a lengthy reply. You cover a huge amount of detail within your analysis; however, I do not operate in your paradigm of reality.
The major fault I see is that you still apparently, believe elections in the U.S. matter. I do not accept that belief and I feel, based on history going back to the 1940’s bears me out. Events, looked at in the context of known history; Italy, 1948, August 19,1953, November 22,1963, and in Florida, November, 2000 were incremental steps in wresting legitimate elections from the U.S. citizens.
These events having gone unchecked make a true democracy impossible and an elected government is the last illusion left. This is not some crazy conspiracy theory; but rather documented historical facts. And, to be clear, I’m not a “Truther”, so please do not even go there.
Surely you must be aware of this history, as your analysis is well reasoned and presented. So, logically it would follow your knowledge is broad.
I do appreciate your considered reply and have no problem with other POV.
Cheers
Elections still matter in some marginal sense. They can do some things and not others. Election of Goldwater in 1964 would have allowed de jure segregation to remain the law of the land in 13 states, for example and might have resulted in the the Vietnam War becoming a nuclear war. At least, that is what was on the table at the time.
Elections by themselves do not bring about transformation. The transformation gets legitimized through elections. My reading of this US election is that the transformation that has occurred is the public realizing that the Reagan Revolution has finally spent its wad and the Democratic neoliberal reaction to that has collapsed (already) the two parties into one. The question to be decided is whose electoral infrastructure will rule that one party and what the character of the party leader will be. Far for any revolutionary transformation but offering an opening against neoliberalism if the left can organize the party infrastructure to be the opposition party,
The US Constitutional government has never from the beginning been a true democracy; the planter-merchant elite who jiggered it understood from their view of history that democracy led to tyranny (in the classical, not modern connotation), and they wanted none of that populist rabble, that might take down their privileged positions.
I am more interested in getting at least a brief period of US government that returns the political process to something based on some degree of common understanding of facts and a process that is not totally a matter of astroturfing.
To do that one has to understand how the elite infrastructure that the Constitution (as amended) works and where the conflicts between elites get played out. And who elites really have to look over their shoulder for clues when the elites act. Rax would say that elites need compradors, but those compradors really don’t work for free nor are they necessarily tied to only one person in the elite class. That is the first point.
The second is that it doesn’t take much money to buy a Member of Congress nor does it take that much effort to win an election–as long as you don’t require expensive media to do mass marketing for you. If you can get 175,000 people organized in a Congressional district and a candidate recruited, you can win a Congressional seat. To do effective get out the vote requires around one volunteer for every 200 voters you want to ensure gets to the poll on one day to mark one ballot for your candidates. The infrastructure to turn that out among ordinary people requires negotiating time off from work, child care, transportation, reminders of the correct date, getting people registered if they are not, and educating folks of how to negotiate the byzantine election system in states in the US.
My argument is that if there is a collusive duopoly doing kabuki to distract the voters from the fact that they are working against voters’ interests, the current meltdown of the GOP means that the GOP can be brought down, the Democrats become the governing monopoly and that allows the building of an authentic opposition party. And that opposition party need not organize elections as consumer marketing campaigns.
It is an argument for an experiment in an electoral strategy that does not assume that US elections matter but that can use the election process to gain power in order to change the process so that they do matter enough to compare favorably to governance processes in other nations in which people and their participation in governance do matter.
TD It is an argument for an experiment in an electoral strategy that does not assume that US elections matter but that can use the election process to gain power in order to change the process so that they do matter enough to compare favorably to governance processes in other nations in which people and their participation in governance do matter.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
It is my contention that we are far past the point where meaningful change is possible. I can no longer (for decades) frame my POV of the U.S. government in the still idealized version of “the city on the hill”.
What I see when speaking of the U.S. government is a Potemkin Village, Maya; the mask hiding that which is behind.
Our destruction of 7 middle eastern countries, which is following a plan openly decided on decade ago. You or I had no say in the implementation of these actions.
It’s very difficult for me to be concerned with a faux leadership when the international action, outright war crimes, are carried out with no accountability to the U.S. citizens and the world in general.
I don’t really understand your, apparently, close focus on the body politic and mechanics of democracy (sic) and elections.
I no longer believe it matters one whit who is in the White House; the last 8 years offer ample evidence, IMO.
Thanks again for your response; vive la différence.
Clarification: It is my contention that we are far past the point where meaningful change is possible;
through elections and/or the political processes left us, via the government, elected officials, and voting.
i agree, v arnold, and i’d further say that there really isn’t any meaningful ‘left’ in this country, although many claimed bernie sanders is/was. not so much save for domestic policy, but war? US military exceptionalism? ‘Bernie Hearts Drone Assassinations, but with One Proviso’ (in his own words). oh, man; one of them giant bucks just strolled thru..
if anyone slows down the rush/es to war, my guess it’ll have to come from the outside, maybe things like this can help a little. rats, still no transcript, but the title indicates the message. another proxy war there w/ nato/russia.
“what country has the most ngo’s per capita?” i think the goog may not be accurately interpreting the ‘per capita’ part, but still: the answer is india. next: haiti. you’ve got your cambodia’s, etc. at that goog search, there’s too many interesting links that pop up lambasting the effectiveness of ngo’s, but one comment states: it’s clear that as ngo activity increases, inequality increases.
ngo funding is like The Black Hand, Don Fanucci, in The Godfather 2 putting some money on that money post/tree thing, at which he piously doffs his hat & crosses himself when it passes by in the big Catholic procession.
“Perhaps token outreach on global inequity is meant to subvert international worker alliance…” no perhaps about it.
Inequality is fundamental to neo-crapitalism; Walker likely wants only to polish crapitalist shinola.
See a pattern here? Who would be more efficient at redistributing Hope and Optimism than others?
What do these puppeteers more efficiently leverage through the BLM color revolution? Walker: “What can we do to leverage our privilege to disrupt the drivers of inequality?” and “Many [in philanthropy] already are answering King’s call, working intensely toward a world that renders philanthropy unnecessary.”
A more thorough fraud.
jason, there are many sorts of NGOs, from war pimps to compromised humantiarian orgs to fauxlanthropic orgs didn’t you have a better name for those? and those that are essentially cia, etc. or even a few that might honestly mean to help. not the red cross in haiti, for instance. and the UN did extend its mission there for six more moths, sadly. poor haitian 99%….they will stay in hell.
but remember that you brought us the Times version?
‘What the NYT Left Out About Obama’s ‘Secret War’ in Somalia’; With hundreds of US special ops now in Somalia, Black Agenda Report’s Glen Ford recount the more than 2 decades of US involvement, at trnn
oh no! not the RC!! next thing you’ll be telling me the Red Magen David is a fraud!!! iirc, florence nightingale initially opposed the formation of the RC b/c, as she rightly noted, gov’ts will just punt on their responsibility to care for the wounded, incl. their own soldiers. for whatever reason, she later recanted that sane position.
i’m sure some Soros/Clinton type right now is scheming away at how to monetize cave-dwelling in Haiti. (maybe they can get a micro-loan to put some Ikea crap in there? turn it into a real man-cave?) what’s Haitian for entrepreneurship? the IMF can move in and teach them some serious nostalgie de la boue. get your mud cakes here! piping hot mud cakes! 100% of the soil nutrients a body needs! 3 for a dollar! get ’em while supplies last.
oh yes, and just recently the WaPo blew the whistle on them! ooof, must suck to be outed as corrupt mofos by the WaPo, eh? of course the spox had a story to tell, but it warn’t even a good un. micro-loans? now who else do we know…or, was that just india?
mud pies, steamin’ hot; i like it. mebbe O can take a page from bubba and force haiti to lower their rice tariffs to again, and then: ‘let there be gifts from monsanto! srsly, the update is that they burned it all cuz gmo is said *now* not what it was: just hybrids (pfffft) loaded with dangerous pesticides and fungicides. the reagan-era pig slaughter is a story i’d never heard, though. but always remember: willy apologized, so it’s all good.
but what really matters, of course is: WOOT, i finished pitting and freezing the rest of the plums!
in Gaza, there are 100 ngo’s per person. this is slightly more than afghanistan, which has 98 ngo’s per person. it’s unclear how effective they are, since they never leave Tel Aviv or their bunkers in Kabul.
Your “larger movement” is only a presentiment and you misrepresent Black’s opinion re the Panthers. She says, “While their political program was of a petty-bourgeois character …”
Of course the mass of BLM will continue to be manipulated. And what do you expect would happen if BLM masses were to throw off their shackled leaders?
Pffft.
i stand corrected as to ‘petty bourgeois character’, rather, but it seems a distinction w/o much difference. i’d had to look up presentiment, and while that may be part of it, i’ve also been attentive to this movement for years, as well as its progenitor in ABQ, new mexico. so has thd, and yet we have slightly different opinions, as per his most recent comment, no matter. and i will absolutely confirm that many in the larger movement often featured police state killings of other than black people, not all, certainly, but most of my faves in the twittersphere did. many even understood that this is a class struggle, which is part of my objection to black’s painting the whole movement as monolithic as she did, as well as her claim that ““The $100 million gift is an acknowledgment by a powerful section of the ruling class that the aims of the Black Lives Matter movement are aligned with those of Wall Street and the US government.” for many, it seems sadly so, but again: i’d put my alt take on that into the OP.
the mass may indeed be manipulated, many already have as i also noted, as in: visits to the WH, meeting w/ the queen of chaos, etc., and more will be coopted by this grand largesse, hence my post w/ that sentiment.
by the by, you featured the DN! interview and story re: native lives, and never responded to my comments or diary on that (and i do have an entire category on ‘indigenous oppression’.
now from today at wsws, and again, she paints the movement as entirely monolithic, but she makes many, many strong points about mr. blue vest’s absurdly ignorant and self-serving version of identity politics , as well. but yes, he and netttaaaa (jonetta elzie, iirc) both went to the WH, and genuflected:
‘DeRay Mckesson and the right-wing character of racialist politics’, by Genevieve Leigh
later, she says ‘reactionary politics’, but the setting:
“The online newspaper Voice of San Diego, in conjunction with the San Diego State University School of Journalism and Media Studies, held a “Politifest 2016” event on campus last month. This year’s keynote speakers were the right-wing author and executive editor of National Review, Reihan Salam, and DeRay Mckesson, a leading member of the Black Lives Matter movement and the interim chief human capital officer for the Baltimore public school district.” [snip]
“There were no sessions devoted to issues such as unemployment, poverty, economic inequality or war. The complete prostration of academia to the ruling establishment was on full display. This was perhaps best expressed in the exaltation of identity politics throughout the event, personified in the main attraction, DeRay Mckesson. His session, “A Conversation with DeRay Mckesson,” drew over 300 people.”
Jah, caught that earlier. The following is a potent gotcha:
These provocations (the claim we are “discussing” and “complete prostration of academia”) may be agitprop but they circumspect.
yeah, and ‘police kill whites?’ too many gaggable quotes, really. what leigh may not know is his long history as a teach for america grifter, i.e. getting paid to fire teachers who can be replaced for ‘teachers’ trained for six months at half the pay. of course many are hired to work in for-profit charter schools, but when running for mayor of baltimore he’d been asked some questions about that for baltimore, and claimed a mayor has nothing to do w/ schools. (hello, rahm emanuel!)
being arrested in baton rouge was fun, too. a baltimore protestor had been on trrn some time ago, and confessed that he’d never run into deray on the street. so what it looked like, was that mr. blue vest hightailed it to baton rouge, did something that might get him grabbed by the po-po, and lo and behold: we were treated to a twitter pic of him aping for a camera as they snapped on the cuffs. ‘can y’all see this is me???’ should have been the caption.
‘50 years later, Black Panthers look back at party’s founding’
from Associated Press. just for allowing a voice to say you have the right to shoot back at the cops, i tho’t this was noteworthy. BLM as successor to the Black Panther Party for Self Defense? maybe that’s why the PTB gotta throw a few monetary scrap in its direction?
i know some crackers that share that self-defense sentiment, but seeing a black man w/a shotgun in a capitol bldg would scare them paler than a Kluxer’s pointy mask.
heh. now as far as i know, no black lives matter folks have been armed, saved for the poncy ‘new black panthers’ sorta playing at being..whatever. the police just leave them alone if they show up where open carry is legal. but i suppose that whole ‘let’s make capitalist inequality better’ by funding these O, so worthy social activists’ might just hide a whole greater fear.
i mean how many think tank and IMF docs have we read in which the PTB are quietly terrified that revolution, or at least massive unrest, is a’comin’ down the tracks?
Seale: “Today, a tart-tongued Seale bristles at all the talk of free breakfasts and firearms without what he calls critical context. He formed the party, he said, to elect minorities to political seats. The “survival programs” such as food and clothing giveaways were linked to voter registration drives, he said.”
Seale would like to see Black Lives Matter organize people to seek political office and create an environmental jobs program for youth.”
so mebbe seale would want the various groups to take the money?
i clicked the ‘elaine brown’ link, partially cuz hotflashcarol had emailed me that brown had despised the recent ‘black panther’ film. this is just one of sgate’s stories with brown in the center. purdy cool stuff.
i wonder if clinton-supporter angela davis is there?
on edit: i was incorrect; i checked for the quote and found this by margaret kimberly:
“There is nothing more revealing than passive voice and tortured syntax. One-time left wing icon Angela Davis demonstrated as much when she said she may vote for Hillary Clinton. Her actual words, “I’m not so narcissistic to say that I wouldn’t vote for her,” indicate some embarrassment with a bit of defensiveness thrown in for good measure. If Ms. Davis finds it difficult to be straightforward and say she is voting for Hillary then perhaps she ought to rethink her decision.”
an existential question to all: ‘when twitter is offline for hours, the guardian and wsws.org as well, does the falling tree make a sound?‘
and yet, these seem to be live as yet?
http://www.bpp50th.com/conference-tickets-information/
http://www.bpp50th.com/gala-tickets/
is it possible that we hear or intuit…the sound of one hand clapping? ;-)
‘3rd DDoS attack on internet under way, Dyn alerts customers’ 21 Oct, 2016 20:26
https://www.rt.com/usa/363705-third-ddos-attack-dyn-internet/
the only that is being remotely fairly distributed in this capitalist hizzy is DDOS attacks!!!
mebbe not even that fairly. bafflingly, someone on the wikileaks told ‘our supporters to cut it out, you’ve made your point’. guess they thought it was about them; they also had a big photo of well-armed po-po in a car outside the ecuadoran embassy near assange’s habitat.
no twitter or Fuchs! no reruns of Glee via Netflix!
suprising the guardian made no mention of the Bear in the room: Roooooooshia!
no idea what to make of this.
The complementary perspective unexplored here is, how is the course of philanthropy (the occupation of Amurkan aristocrats) being modified? Once commonly seen as palliative, as a political concession, the IT billionaires prefer to see it as grand investment strategy, as the visionary engineering of new markets, a la Rockefeller. Thus “philanthropy” becomes a mode of crapitalism. In this light, what might “philanthropists” imply by “the end of philanthropy”?
The comprador pretends that crapitalism will become truly beneficial for all. In this illusion, the consummate crapitalism will be inherently philanthropic.
Of course, we will never get there, not just because it is an illusion, but because crapitalism is a fraud.
doggonnit, i can’t place the origin of this quote: ” In this light, what might “philanthropists” imply by “the end of philanthropy”?” was that from an extra you’d brought from from Herr Walker? but yikes, what a good comment and questions.
“The comprador pretends that crapitalism will become truly beneficial for all.” yes, that’s what we see constantly in the many putatively philanthropic tweets and related articles courtesy of bloomberg african, gates, clinton foundation, Omidyar group, on and on. rats, i can’t recall the bloomberg one on twitter, but there bloomie was huggin’ on paul kagame, swear to goddess.
hmmm; this might be it…
Jah, Walker: “Many [in philanthropy] already are answering King’s call, working intensely toward a world that renders philanthropy unnecessary.” They will sooner rusticate all pretenders than repair crapitalism.
“philanthropy” is also a moral/psychological outlet for upper middlers, an admittedly decreasing pool of donors. “i work my ass off helping the NSA develop best practices and i go that extra mile by donating to NPR & Save the Huge Manatees! It’s people just like me that help bring America PBS’s ‘The Northrup Grunman’s Childrens Hour,'” those very instructive cartoons about protecting intellectual property & how not cool China’s digital piracy is.” way to get your hands dirty w/the Great Unwashed. Why, then I never have to reconsider, via personal encounter, the bourgeois notion that the poors are the poors b/c they don’t act just like middlin’ me.
dayum, you’re a treat. not only was this spit-take worthy, but it caused me to make the first spit take in my life: America PBS’s ‘The Northrup Grunman’s Childrens Hour”.
i tried to find chrystia freeland’s column on the new multi million $$$$ hedge-funders competing to one-up each other on their philanthropic investments, but i failed. after i’d read it, both she and matt taibbi, o yes, were on w/ bill moyers. he gave her all those down-low side-glances that would have done an elk in rut proud. this un will have to instead:
‘The Rise of the New Global Elite’; F. Scott Fitzgerald was right when he declared the rich different from you and me. But today’s super-rich are also different from yesterday’s: more hardworking and meritocratic, but less connected to the nations that granted them opportunity—and the countrymen they are leaving ever further behind.
too many passages to choose one, but let’s try…:
““Not all plutocrats, of course, are created equal. Apple’s visionary Steve Jobs is neither the moral nor the economic equivalent of the Russian oligarchs who made their fortunes by brazenly seizing their country’s natural resources. And while the benefits of the past decade’s financial “innovations” are, as Volcker noted, very much in question, many plutocratic fortunes—especially in the technology sector—have been built on advances that have broadly benefited the nation and the world. That is why, even as the TARP-recipient bankers have become objects of widespread anger, figures such as Jobs, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett remain heroes.
And, ultimately, that is the dilemma: America really does need many of its plutocrats. We benefit from the goods they produce and the jobs they create. And even if a growing portion of those jobs are overseas, it is better to be the home of these innovators—native and immigrant alike—than not. In today’s hypercompetitive global environment, we need a creative, dynamic super-elite more than ever.”
oh, yes; we are soooo surprised she got a gig at the FT, behind a paywall no less. ;-)
“we need a creative, dynamic super-elite more than ever”. they make the best line-up for the firing squad! poor people expect to be executed, one way or another. there really is nothing like the cringing, begging, look of surprise in doomed elite eyes. savor the little things, people!
;-) ;-)
zzleep well, amigo.
i am working on placards of charges to be placed above these soi-disant Messiahs when they bite the bullet. only one down so far, for Warren Buffett: “Jobs Creator.”
diese Scheisse ist das Bomb! i mean the coup video.
boots is a pistol, lol. you’ll appreciate these recent tweeties of his:
“After 9-11, Pentagon openly met w Hollywood to discuss how2manufacture consent. Right after is when we got current slew of superhero movies.” (a piece at salon, i think)
Surprising that Hollywood had forgotten how to manufacture consent after the J. Edgar Hoover G-Men days pioneered that role.
well, maybe the salon essayist is young. but ooof, yes! ’77 (snap, snap) sunset strip’ and ‘the untouchables’.
i may be finished for the day. i’m making mr. wd a celebration dinner for almost finishing the new greenhouse roof, and a fine one it is. so bright in there now we’re gonna hafta leave a pair o’ shades in there. shrimp étouffée, and even though i made the dark brown roux yesterday (takes an hour of stirring constantly), it’s taking lots loner than i’d imagined, then pbs mysteries to zone out with.
night all.
the 1st Cap Amer movie…yawn. Disney managed to smuggle a black guy into Cap’s infiltration team to get the baddies, a French guy. kind of like the black kid in “it’s a small world after all”? what’s his name again? Token? .(sorry for the Southpark joke).
the 2nd one centered on a common theme: if you need all this super spy & warfare crap to combat “the enemy,” how do you keep from becoming what you are fighting against? how do you, like, you know, balance, like, privacy & security and, you know, stuff? deep thoughts from the bowels of the CIa… i mean Disney.
At the crest of IT crapitalist’s buzz:
Ooops. It gets ether-real up there in shambhala. From growth to innovation to disruption in a generation, was a fucking blast!
Once you’ve globalized your technique of oppression you have no choice but to incorporate philanthropy.
whazz valien’? can’t even find it binging. rhymes w/ ‘alien’; is that a klew? where did you find that? ‘listen-not just act upon’: wouldn’t that be a fine idea? perhaps something a little less ‘kinetic’? but oy; that passage is just full of emancipatory buzzwords, isn’t it? sign me up!
Value, comrade; please boost your error correction. Yeah, the reality distortion field left them totally unprepared for bankster blitzkrieg.
you needn’t be rude about, comrade rax. i’d still swear it says ‘…and at the same time provide valien to those who are serving us?’ Valien.
Jah, serendipitous? versus “deliberate mistake”, comrade. Valien, as in have you been e-valienated yet, citizen prole? HA HA.
Rude? Ooooo. my politesse is working!!!! HA HA HA HA..
fuck off w/ your smart-ass snottiness, Rax.
Wot? you want ice cream w/o the ice?
HA HA HA HA HA HA HA.
poor metaphor, comrade milk. please stop it; i don’t want to ask you to leave as you’d been doing so well here recently.
I thought it was you who was not doing so well, comrade.
did you not get wendy’s request not to put quotations in block italics? or do you just not care?
wendye needs to reassign the font-style for blockquote in css, WP won’t let me do it in a comment:
blockquote {
font-style: normal;
}
see http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tryit.asp?filename=tryhtml_blockquote_default_css
nothing says “alienation from labor” liking forcing philanthropy down your worker drones’ throats so they can have “satisfaction w/how their work has improved the world itself.”
can you tell me where this quote is from? the link? i got a certain ngo-fluffing fambly member i want to rib w/this “philanthropy in the workplace” BS
The End of Philanthropy: A New Model for Globalization
SNPO not far from comprador’s future Commonwealth of Belle Isle.
i’d mentioned elaine brown upthread, and linked to an sfgate story on her non-profits and housing plans (aided in part by none other than jean quan), but youch: grio must have been at the conference in oakland (they don’t seem to have a twit account for it):
“Former Black Panther says Black Lives Matter has ‘plantation mentality’”
by thegrio | October 21, 2016
“I was ashamed of them for asking that racist warmonger what she thought of black people.”
Shitez! Elaine’s being nice. Maybe Sorose hisself sent the puppy dogs to meet Her Fraudness.
i hadn’t noticed that in the grio column ‘elaine brown’ was a hyperlink; here’s the longer essay at ‘the spike’.
so seale at 80 wants folks to run for office, oakland 35-yr-old oaktown activist robbie clark says ‘some activists want to focus on elections and others want to go outside the political system. Many insist the movement needs both.
“We can shift some of those conditions by having the right people in office,” Clark said, “but it’s with the understanding that having different people in those seats doesn’t make the system change overnight.”
does bobby have an idea how far the structural system would have to change? be nice to know.
brown wants them to organize for revolutionary change (marxist-leninist) and take control of their communities. the panther programs included *all poor people*, not just those of color.
and the author, slater, blinks at some of mcKesson’s more clueless responses to his questions.
Happy Sunday all! I’m just loading in a comment before I go out, will come back to read – impressive, comments at 87! Is that a record? Lovely lovely weather here, and I must go water my kumi kumis – starting to produce like crazy. Plus the cranes are flying, and their soft call of relief as they head south – a charm to the soul. But I’ll be back; bravo team!
and a good sunday to you, as well, ww. dunno about a record, but cool, if it is. ah, the cranes: are they sandhills on their way to the bosque? i’d always meant to go, as i’ve only seen a cadré of seven once, and that was on the co/wy border, believe it or not. at sunset, at the the light made them look cast in a salmon color. too lovely, but i hadn’t remembered their songs as soft….
Just got through my read here – you guys are way above my pay grade or intellectual spiff – wow. Not to mention fixing a shrimp something or other – I give up.
Yes, soft calls these first ones glad to be out of the frozen north. Sandhills they are. They’re more vigorous going t’other way and uphill in the spring – at least hereabouts. They follow the Rio Grande, which is presently ablaze with golden cottonwoods, so they can’t miss it. A few do winter round about Albuquerque. big they are on the ground.
Not with respect to subject matter exactly, but THD mentioned various factors weighing on executive abilities to command policy (and if Hillary does ‘win’ I’m gonna hold him to that.) One he didn’t cite specifically – at least I don’t think he did – is that of such entities as the CIA and other undercover folk – I just picked up Peter Wyden’s “Bay of Pigs – the Untold Story” written in the late ’70’s. Wow, is all. I’d like to hear how and why that agency ever came into existence – I guess I’ll look into that, pretty sure it was Truman. If so, he’s got a lot to answer for.
Anyway, thanks all. Hope the dinner was delish, Mr WD.
oh, the cottonwoods on the rio grande look on fire in the autumn sun, don’t they? it makes sense the sandhills call more loudly heading north in the spring. we’ve had a lot of four- and five-point bucks here in the yard lately, along with a number of younger ones. they’re not in full rut yet, but they are definitely preparing for it and are they magnificent! we chuck apples to them, and they seem to remember the sound of them hitting the ground. ;-)
oh, mr. wd love the cajun/creole étouffée, as did i. it turns out that i became allergic to shrimp, though, so my face lit up red and poofy like one of those appalaichian dolls with the dried apple faces. but…i ate some again last night. benadryl helps, so mr. wd scored some for me, but tak about ‘scare the horses’!.
yes, under truman, and here’s a bit of the history told by the late great chalmers johnson.
If I may chime in; Chalmers Johnson was a main source for my understanding of the world we really live in. May he RIP. A great loss to the U.S. public. My hopefully, ongoing dialogue with THD, is the point/s I’m trying to further in the ongoing U.S. propaganda push.
Thailand has limes, lots of limes, but no lemons. We have a lemon tree and it has 8 lemons on it as I write this. I love both, but have, in the past, missed the choice. Cheers
his voice and wisdom were a great loss, indeed, and you made me hungry to hear his voice and see his face again. this is one of the shortest talks of his on youtube, of course (i didn’t have time to listen to all of it): 3/3
“A nation can be one or the other, a democracy or an imperialist, but it can’t be both. If it sticks to imperialism, it will, like the old Roman Republic, on which so much of our system was modeled, lose its democracy to a domestic dictatorship.”[
Funny how all this theory comes too late.
limes and lemons may be a literary device i’m missing, v arnold. but i will offer that i’ve been teaching myself thai cooking for a few years, not that it comes as naturally as traditional mexican, even chinese & italiano, for that matter. but limes are central to some of the dishes i prepare, my favorite being thai peanut noodles i sort of made up combining recipes. lemon grass you seem to have there in abundance (yum), here, if its available, it’s beyond our pocketbooks, and the dried version….yech, except for alkaline tummy tea.the fish paste i’m luckily forced to leave out.
best luck /your lemons; ‘lemon tree very pretty..’ did you ever have a chance to walk in a flowering orange grove? my stars, but a little goes a long way. cheers to you as well.
Ah yes, Thai cooking. I made Red, green, yellow and red curry dishes for years before coming here. Those various Thai curries are available at Asian stores state side; if you’re lucky enough to have one at hand. I also had a terrific Pad Thai recipe; alas long lost.
Fish sauce and oyster sauce are key to stir fry dishes. Fish sauce adds saltiness and oyster sauce a subtle sweetness; the two are used together in many stir fry dishes.
I must admit that after almost 14 years here I get to the point of not being able to look another grain of rice in the eye. So I retreat into western food for a break. ;-)
well, no, our grocery shopping is quite limited here, but you reminded me that we have partial cases of thai kitchen green and red curry pastes down in the food room i bought thru our local coop, but that privilege is about to stop with the sale of the natural foods store, is my guess. i confess i like my homemade stuff better, but it is a long process, isn’t it? i did have some oyster sauce, but i can’t imagine. but thanx for reminding me. and how cool that you’re so adept at cooking (cheffing?)
whooosh; do grains of rice have eyes? by gum, i’m gonna stare down one o’ those mofos! ;-) last night i dreamed that when mr. wd brought in the jonathan apples he’d finished picking yesterday, they were large oblong
shapes like red cucumbers. dayum, i love dreams…
Many thanks to you, wendye. I’ll see if my library can get that book, though Chalmers Johnson does a great job reviewing it.
“. . .As an idea, if not an actual entity, the Central Intelligence Agency came into being as a result of December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor. It functionally came to an end, as Weiner makes clear, on September 11, 2001, when operatives of al-Qaeda flew hijacked airliners into the World Trade towers in Manhattan and the Pentagon in Washington, DC. Both assaults were successful surprise attacks. . .”
From reading the Wyden book, I would say it functionally came to an end with the Bay of Pigs – that was so totally a CIA misread of everything about the Cuban situation – ships were sunk, people died, and the ‘intelligence’ was totally wrong on so many fronts – even just not accurately describing the terrain for crying out loud. Those guys should have been disbanded right then and there. They didn’t even use the people they already had put in place before the invasion. Different days, I know, but oh my, if I could only rewrite that chapter of shameful American history. . .(I know, there are so many others.)
welcome, juliania. johnson wrote a lotta books; this is the wiki re: his blowback series. good history to rewrite, but starting with the cia and british ss overthrow of mosaddegh would be another, wouldn’t it? lots of his talks and interviews are on youtube, as well, but i know you have issues about bytes and bits. ;-)
Rayquan is being held in solitary confinement as the suspect in the killing of Justin Carr despite many witnesses saying that police killed him with a rubber bullet at too close range. And phone videos.
The action is phone calls to the CMPD asking for immediate release of Rayquan Borum.
i googled to refresh my memory, but one source says raquan ha confessed. tortured confession? and pantaleo *might be charged* in the assassination of eric garner?
busy morn, be back as i can.
And CMPD is trying to quell dissent: “The CMPD has gone even further by surveying protesters social media accounts and then issuing new warrants based on alleged incriminating videos or feeds that defendants don’t have access to.”
Call to Action: Free Rayquan and All Political Prisoners:
You called it. Here is the personal co-option into this election. Their organization is called Campaign Zero, for funds tracking purposes in your research. Don’t think Campaign Zero sees its mission as endorsing candidates, but verify that.
My guess is that CMPD thought Homan Square a good model. Just add a sorry public defender. Not sure that there is a National Lawyers Guild chapter in Charlotte. But something the functional equivalent of torture if not the legal-technical definition in NC-USA.
Forgot to add the citation from, yes, Daily Kos.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/10/26/1587161/-Black-Lives-Matter-activists-endorse-Hillary-Clinton-for-president
They aren’t the only #blacklivesmatter activists, and even this reporter is pretty clear that McKesson came to fame through his citizen journalist work in Ferguson and Baltimore and his activism in running for mayor of Baltimore. Might have just handed out cards with a blue vest and “available for co-option to highest bidder”.
He does know how to work the system.
ha, and yes: remember i’d said somewhere up yonder that deray, packyetti, and sam swey just jiggered Obama’s grand plan a tad, then renamed it campaign Zero?
fdl margaret was on the comment stream, love that hillary! no way he didn’t get soros and tfa funding to gallivant across the nation in his blue vest. wish i could find the twit image of him getting ;arrested’ in baton rouge; it was priceless.
“it’s just personal” says miz TFA grifter. gotta love it; thanks for the news. O asking for it? sure; they’re on a first name basis, prolly nettaaaaa, too. ewww, did you see when vogue (or was it cosmopolitan?) did makeovers of some of the BLM women? they put nettaaaaa on the cover. how weird is it that i always like the “before” version better? grin. was he ever out of campaign mode? (i get the WH email, see…) the ACA claims are embarrassing as hell.
Wonder if the President himself did the asking for McKesson’s endorsement? BHO is is definitely in campaign mode at the moment.