The Divine Mr. M

America does not have a far left movement.

Our far-right are Fascists.

Our center-right are extremist nationalists.

Our center-left are classical conservatives.

Our far-left are moral centrist moderates.

Any objective political compass would place politicians like Sanders or Warren barely left of center.

A real far-leftist movement would be advocating for forced property seizure of the Capitalist Ruling class by the Working class.

Instead our far-left is like "don't let people die in medical poverty, please"

Feb. 19th, 2017 at 2:22 AM

~I keep reading endless numbers of articles and essays about how Trump became president. And none of the them really seem to get it. Chris Hughes comes close, but he seems to have lost his mind. Can't blame him really, as everyone is dancing around the elephant in the room; we are in fact already IN Collapse, eg, The System is in Terminal Failure.

We are in Late Stage Capitalism. What that means is as the profit margins get narrower, The Owners need to squeeze harder to extract said profits. This has been going for a few decades now, but for the general public, the 'balloon went up' with the Crash of '09, which was the direct result of The Big Squeeze. Wall Street et al created a Housing Bubble of insane proportions via all manner of shady and even illegal marketing and accounting games.

When the shit hit the fan, they got their political lackeys to use Tax Payer Money to 'reimburse' them for their loses and left said Tax Payers out to dry. Roughly 40% of the American Middle Class Wealth was lost. FORTY PERCENT. That meant eroded tax bases, gutted pension funds, wrecked state and municipal bond portfolios.

That is what Obama inherited. And, being the Corporatist he is, he bunted economically. The perfect example is the ACA [which originated with The Heritage Foundation, a very right wing think tank]. He'd promised a Public Option over and over and over again on the campaign trail. Withing a month of his Inauguration, it had vanished, forcing thirty million Americans into the clutches of the Insurance Industry. [see The Big Squeeze]

Eight years later, after more and more of that kind of betrayal from the Democrats and the insane slavering obstructionism of the GOP, the American Electorate had come to hate the establishments of both parties. And two Insurgent candidates emerged from outside of each party; Bernie and The Donald.

We all know what happened. The 'undisciplined' Dems suddenly became Very Disciplined and sandbagged Bernie. And the infamously disciplined GOP fielded a slate of total buffoons and got its clock cleaned.

Even then, Hillary should have won. She did in fact 'win' The Vote. But her ground game sucked so badly [arrogance], and the Dems had alienated so much of their own base [more arrogance], she lost four states by roughly 120K votes in total.

And that boys and girls, is how Collapse works. The System becomes so rotten that a Black Swan like The Donald can end up in the White House. [EDIT: 5/5/22 At this point I made some noise about 'The Deep State gaming The System in order to fix the problem and do a reset' but they turned out to be fuckin' gutless and did fuck all, while The Owners, those traitorous scum, got their $1.4 trillion and so didn't give a fuck]

But we are still in Late Stage Capitalism and Collapse is still underway and no one has any real idea what to do about that ...except, of course, More Of The Same, which is a well known definition of insanity.

Toss the now inevitable Catastrophic Climate Change into the mix and one can be certain that the next century or so is going to be 'very interesting times' indeed.

You can kill yourself now if you wish....

~Here is some brutal irony for y'all: Donald Trump could have be a great president, maybe the greatest since FDR. He has long been a conman and as such could see clearly what a massive con job the present political setup is. He even talked about that back in 2016 when he was running, pointing in the GOP debates that he'd donated to everyone on the stage with him with the full knowledge that they'd 'owe him'. He talked about how American corporations were stripping America of its jobs and industries. That was a big part of how he won.

If he'd actually done something about those things once he got elected, he'd have become great...

...but he's just a conman who was running a Big Con and never expected to win. And he'd also 'poisoned the well' with his racism and homophobia and all his other flaws. And when he did win, he only saw that as an opportunity to Grift on a grand scale.

The California Highway Patrol used its SWAT team to evict a homeless family on Thanksgiving Eve. They were squatting in an empty house owned by CalTrans. The CHP also brutalized and arrested the neighbors who tried to stop them.

I'm looking at another 30 day ban on Facebook because I put an expletive in front of 'Russians', which they claim is 'hate speech'. For me, that is really just a pin prick, even tho it triggers my PTSD. We have food and a safe roof over our heads.

These two events are each at the far end of the scale, but they are still Corporate Abuse...and such is cumulative.

How long, and how much, of this non-stop abuse we it take before there is a real explosion?

PS Don't think things will change with Joe Biden. He's a Corporatist to his bones and is actually going to put Republicans into his administration.

~I’ve pretty much given up any hope for a better future, at least in my lifetime. I’ve given up on the hopes and dreams I held on to for the last two decades and have just settled in to enjoy the fairly comfortable life we now have for as long as it lasts. The only wish I have left is that whatever kills us takes our fur babies, too. My fear is that they will be left behind, scared and hungry. /sigh

We humans have at least a century of disaster and collapse ahead of us. Yeah, if Biden gets elected the overt horror and brutality of the Trump White House will abate. But Biden is not going to change the underlying conditions that led us to Trump. He’ll simply be a ‘pause button’. /sigh

Yeah, I’m sighing a lot. I nurtured the idea of The Sisterhood for a long time. It was what got me through much of my fear and worry the past twenty four years. But La Rona has crushed that. And no one has really stepped up to lead it anyway.

What I suspect will happen in the next hundred years or so is that Catastrophic Climate Change will finally break our civilization, which has proved to be quite brittle anyway, and the race will split in two, one group going underground and the other up into orbit and hopefully beyond. Both groups will almost certainly be ‘modified’ – genetically and cybernetically – to adapt to their new environments and each will diverge from the other.

We Baseline Humans will be left upon a ravaged surface and will likely go extinct. *shrugs* Oh well.

Now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, I’m gonna have some coffee and a banana and take my meds and supplements…and there ya have it. Nebs out…

Much of the criticism of new Postmaster General Louis DeJoy has centered on his $2 million in contributions to the Trump campaign and other Republican causes since 2016. DeJoy is in charge of fundraising for the Republican National Convention in Charlotte.

These facts are cause for worry, but postal workers should be even more alarmed at his 35 years’ experience in labor analytics—the art of eliminating as many jobs as possible.

His company has a terrible labor record, rife with red flags including sexual harassment, discrimination, speedup, workplace injuries, excessive use of temps, misclassifying workers as independent contractors, and inadequate sick leave during the current pandemic.
https://labornotes.org/blogs/2020/05/new-postmaster-general-expert-job-killer

“Only when the tide goes out,” Warren Buffett observed, “do you discover who’s been swimming naked.” For our society, the Covid-19 pandemic represents an ebb tide of historic proportions, one that is laying bare vulnerabilities and inequities that in normal times have gone undiscovered. Nowhere is this more evident than in the American food system. A series of shocks has exposed weak links in our food chain that threaten to leave grocery shelves as patchy and unpredictable as those in the former Soviet bloc. The very system that made possible the bounty of the American supermarket—its vaunted efficiency and ability to “pile it high and sell it cheap”—suddenly seems questionable, if not misguided. But the problems the novel coronavirus has revealed are not limited to the way we produce and distribute food. They also show up on our plates, since the diet on offer at the end of the industrial food chain is linked to precisely the types of chronic disease that render us more vulnerable to Covid-19.

The juxtaposition of images in the news of farmers destroying crops and dumping milk with empty supermarket shelves or hungry Americans lining up for hours at food banks tells a story of economic efficiency gone mad. Today the US actually has two separate food chains, each supplying roughly half of the market. The retail food chain links one set of farmers to grocery stores, and a second chain links a different set of farmers to institutional purchasers of food, such as restaurants, schools, and corporate offices. With the shutting down of much of the economy, as Americans stay home, this second food chain has essentially collapsed. But because of the way the industry has developed over the past several decades, it’s virtually impossible to reroute food normally sold in bulk to institutions to the retail outlets now clamoring for it. There’s still plenty of food coming from American farms, but no easy way to get it where it’s needed.

How did we end up here? The story begins early in the Reagan administration, when the Justice Department rewrote the rules of antitrust enforcement: if a proposed merger promised to lead to greater marketplace “efficiency”—the watchword—and wouldn’t harm the consumer, i.e., didn’t raise prices, it would be approved. (It’s worth noting that the word “consumer” appears nowhere in the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, passed in 1890. The law sought to protect producers—including farmers—and our politics from undue concentrations of corporate power.)1 The new policy, which subsequent administrations have left in place, propelled a wave of mergers and acquisitions in the food industry. As the industry has grown steadily more concentrated since the 1980s, it has also grown much more specialized, with a tiny number of large corporations dominating each link in the supply chain. One chicken farmer interviewed recently in Washington Monthly, who sells millions of eggs into the liquified egg market, destined for omelets in school cafeterias, lacks the grading equipment and packaging (not to mention the contacts or contracts) to sell his eggs in the retail marketplace.2 That chicken farmer had no choice but to euthanize thousands of hens at a time when eggs are in short supply in many supermarkets.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/06/11/covid-19-sickness-food-supply/

BY NOW, the shortage of medical supplies in the United States is a notorious fact. The nation has between 160,000 and 200,000 ventilators; it may need a million. Masks, gowns, face shields, gloves, bottles of hand sanitizer, and tests for the virus are all in short supply.

The shortage has come as a great surprise, because the government has been contracting with private firms to make these supplies for years, and private firms, as everybody knows, will provide more of any product at a lower price than any central planner ever could. Responding to market signals like greyhounds leaping out of the gates, they race after efficiencies, pushing down costs and boosting productivity.

Yet every day brings fresh evidence of market-based inefficiency. To pick only one example, The New York Times reported on March 29 that a medical supplies company in Costa Mesa, California, which had won a competitive multimillion-dollar contract to make ventilators in 2008, had yet to deliver a single unit. How could a private firm fail so spectacularly to meet the public demand?

A hundred years ago, the economist and satirist Thorstein Veblen was pondering a similar question. In his 1921 book The Engineers and the Price System, he noted that the recent war had demonstrated the tremendous industrial capacity of the advanced nations, yet after the war, unemployment rose and production fell, pushing the industrial world into recession. Machines and men stood idle everywhere, to the great detriment of the public. “[P]eoples are in great need of all sorts of goods and services which these idle plants and idle workmen are fit to produce,” he wrote. “But for reasons of business expediency it is impossible to let these idle plants and idle workmen go to work.”

“Business expediency” meant nothing more than profitability, which Veblen thought was not at all the same thing as productive capacity. In fact, the executive’s job was to reduce the latter in order to ensure the former. “[I]t has become the ordinary duty of the corporate management,” Veblen wrote, “to adjust production to the requirements of the market by restricting the output to what the traffic will bear; that is to say, what will yield the largest net earnings.” Contrary to popular belief, corporate management doesn’t spring forth like a greyhound; it dawdles like a Great Dane.

Veblen had a name for this kind of foot-dragging: sabotage. He pointed out that the word itself derives from the French for “wooden shoe” (sabot), and so it denotes “going slow, with a dragging, clumsy movement, such as that manner of footgear may be expected to bring on.” Because profitability required scaling back production to maximally profitable levels, it followed that economic sabotage “is the beginning of wisdom in all sound workday business enterprise.”

Even if the industrial supply chain is more complicated in our day than it was in Veblen’s, it is still possible to catch the economic saboteurs at work. Returning to the Times story, the original bid-winning company was bought up by another, larger company called Covidien, which begged the federal government for more money, shuffled key employees around the firm (effectively gumming up the gears), and then demanded to be released from the contract. As a result, they received millions of public dollars but provided not a single unit. Veblen would insist that this was not a failure of the free market “price system.” On the contrary, the price system had worked according to its basic laws. As industry observers and government officials explained to the Times, “building a cheaper product […] would undermine Covidiens’ profits from its existing ventilator business.”

Who will save our economy (not to mention countless lives) from these vandals? In order to frighten financiers, “absentee owners” of capital, and other guardians of the status quo, Veblen suggested that they should all be replaced by a “Soviet of technicians.” It was the engineers, he argued, who actually knew how to run the factories.

"Without their continued and unremitting supervision and direction the industrial system would cease to be a working system at all; whereas it is not easy to see how the elimination of the existing businesslike control could bring anything but relief and heightened efficiency."

Given the manifest failure of privatizing pandemic preparedness, Veblen’s proposal looks pretty good. Perhaps it is still true, 100 years later, “that there is no single spot or corner in civilized Europe or America where the underlying population would have anything to lose by such an overturn of the established order as would cancel the vested rights of privilege and property.” If so, then it is time for the state to start buying up industries rather than bailing them out and then staffing them with technicians who will run them with an eye to the common good, rather than the interests of shareholders.

But what is the common good, exactly? Veblen’s proposal looks suspiciously like a technocracy, in which a credentialed panel of engineers decides what the public needs. In a pandemic, the public’s needs may be clear enough, but that is seldom the case. The crucial questions — What do we need? Who gets what? Who decides? — have no technical answers. They are open-ended political questions, but Veblen’s proposal lacks a place for deliberative democracy.

This is probably because he put little stock in the wisdom of crowds. Americans believed in the price system too strongly. “This commercialized frame of mind,” Veblen regretted to say, “is a sturdy outgrowth of many generations of consistent training in the pursuit of the main chance; it is second nature, and there need be no fear that it will allow the Americans to see workday facts in any other than its own perspective, just yet.” It would take something really incredible, “harsh and protracted experience to remove it.”

Veblen died in 1929, just a few months before the stock market crashed and the Great Depression began. The Depression was eventually harsh and protracted enough to inspire mass movements in favor of federal involvement in the economy and a new social safety net. In our own day, the government’s response to the pandemic has so far favored capital holders and other members of the “kept classes,” as Veblen liked to call them. It seems safe to conclude, as he did, that “[t]here is nothing in the situation that should reasonably flutter the sensibilities of the Guardians or of that massive body of well-to-do citizens who make up the rank and file of absentee owners, just yet.”

¤

Paul W. Gleason teaches in the religion departments of California Lutheran and Loyola Marymount University. A winner of the National Book Critics “emerging critic” award, he has published reviews and essays in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Point, the Guardian, and elsewhere.
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/who-sabotaged-the-american-economy-thorstein-veblen-knows/

~The COVID-19 crisis shows not only the bankruptcy of Libertarianism, but its utter impotence as well. Not only has Rapacious Capitalism used Libertarianism as ideological cover to loot The Commons, leaving the average citizen out in the cold and, in the present circumstances, quite likely to die, but that insidious ‘small government’ ideology is now also shown to be totally useless in the face of a nation crisis on the massive scale of this pandemic. The bodies of those tens of thousands, probably even hundreds of thousands, of dead Americans can be laid at its feet. All of you should be forced to bury them with your bare hands.

~I have been posting this paragraph quoting the Chris Hedges article linked below for a while now. But I realized that by breaking it up into individual sentences, it becomes a Bill of Indictment...

"The final stages of capitalism, Marx wrote, would be marked by developments that are intimately familiar to most of us.

Unable to expand and generate profits at past levels, the capitalist system would begin to consume the structures that sustained it.

It would prey upon, in the name of austerity, the working class and the poor, driving them ever deeper into debt and poverty and diminishing the capacity of the state to serve the needs of ordinary citizens.

It would, as it has, increasingly relocate jobs, including both manufacturing and professional positions, to countries with cheap pools of laborers.

Industries would mechanize their workplaces.

This would trigger an economic assault on not only the working class but the middle class - the bulwark of a capitalist system - that would be disguised by the imposition of massive personal debt as incomes declined or remained stagnant.

Politics would in the late stages of capitalism become subordinate to economics, leading to political parties hollowed out of any real political content and abjectly subservient to the dictates and money of global capitalism."

http://www.nationofchange.org/2015/06/02/karl-marx-was-right/

“Donald Trump is Putin's revenge for America's egregious interference in Russia in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union.” ~Nebris

Ok, first things first. The Soviet Union really was an 'evil empire'. [so is the US, but that's a story for another time] Gulags. Purges. Targeted mass starvation. State Terror as a daily diet. All the old Bolsheviks, Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, the whole fucking lot of them, were ruthless murdering sons of bitches. Khrushchev, Brezhnev, et al were only marginally better. And Vladimir Putin is a product of that system...

When the whole gaddam shithouse fell in on itself in '91, the system was so hollowed out it could not even orchestrate a simple coup to save itself....

Ok, I wrote the above a few days ago, and frankly, all this shit is exhausting me. I'm just gonna link to a 1994 LA Times article on how we fucked over Russia [HERE] and another relating the end results [HERE], treating them as a defeated enemy, which they were TBH, but because of our endless need to Subvert and Dominate, we created a Versailles Treaty paradigm and now it has come back to bite us on the ass....

...and then days passed since I wrote that because it's hot and I'm tired...

So, I'll try to be brief. First, the Russians knew two things about Trump up front. One, that he and his crew are a bunch of third rate grifters and con artists who are not all that bright. And two, that he was not serious about winning the election, that it was just a 'branding exercise' on his part and a way to gain some influence in GOP party politics for future financial gain.

"Donald Trump is a patsy." ~Nebris

What I am now suspecting that what the Russians did is hack some voting machines in the three states that put Trump over the top via the Electoral Collage, giving him just enough to in fact 'put him over the top'. I'll point out that because A: the GOP had already engaged in all manner of voter suppression in said states [including highly hackable voting machines] and B: the DNC/Clinton campaign had arrogantly 'taken those states for granted' [plus the Bernie thing], such an op would be fairly easy to slide under the radar.

And in doing so, they now have him trapped. I said just the other day, “Us Nu Yawkas have known that Trump was mobbed up for decades, but the rubes in the sticks are fucking clueless..as usual.” I do not think that even The Donald is so fucking stupid to actually want to become President when he has sooooo much dirty laundry. [also, it's far more work than he really wants to do]

But now he is...and Putin has him by the nuts...and us, too really. And he is squeezing as long and as hard as he can.

Dishonorable Mention goes to US Corporations for gutting our economy and dumbing down our education system, thereby creating an electorate angry and stupid enough to get tricked in this fashion.