The Skinny: Class War & Global Gangsterism

Further discussions on active co-opting of leftist organizing by liberals and how to stop it:

Look, you know how you realized a long time ago that charities are not always charities but a lot of them are propaganda shops designed to work around campaign finance laws? That police unions were actually political lobbying arms? That big liberal orgs like the Center for American Progress were part of the machine?

So, how do you think things got like this? Let me tell you briefly. It is because rich liberals, just like fascists and other reactionaries, are attracted to power. When you establish alternate paths to power through organizing, the “Very Serious People” will try to stop you.

Once however it is clear that they can no longer stop you, the second line of defense is to co-opt your movements, to wrestle away control of your organizations and hijack that supply of alternate labor class power you have created.

You can see it in the corruption at the top of most public service unions in the entire western world, in the number of Ivy League graduates on your TV screen during news hour and in the expense budgets of liberal “charities” and NGOs all over the planet. This is how rich liberals are; this is a preexisting tactic that has served them well for more than 100 years. This is what they do; none of it should be a surprise to you.

Just because someone says they represent the labor class, doesn’t mean they do. As a general rule, a lot of these “grassroots” organizations lack a significant amount of labor class leadership at all – the same goes for a number of your “left wing” alternative media magazines and websites too.

And there is really only one way to stop this – and that’s to stop inviting the liberals into your organizations, stop trying to “get them onside” and understand enough about class to realize that labor is not “the middle classes” or the media, it’s not the landlords & bosses, it’s not the bourgeoisie.

The professional class as a whole is not your friend. They might become your friend some day when it suits their purposes, but right now they are firmly in the camp of establishment power and working night and day to simultaneously suppress your “revolution” while hijacking the parts of it that can advance them.

And you can accept that reality, you can accept it’s a real live, ongoing class war – or you can keep losing because the managerial class knifes you from the inside and steals everything you’ve worked for.

You won’t be the first revolution the Democratic Party has buried – I participated in one, we were going to end Bush’s reign of terror and stop the forever wars.

We got played.

You can be played too. Or you can get serious about what “class war” really means.

 

On Trump’s recent Foreign Policy signals concerning Iran

I think it’s safe to say with Trump announcing sanctions and Saudi Arabia backing off from “Iran did this” to “Iran sponsored this attack” that the immediate danger of war is over – despite all the usual suspects (*cough* Lindsey Graham) crying about America’s role in world affairs.

I do not believe the danger is over however because of Trump.

Factually we know from numerous statements Downmarket Mussolini has made over the years that he strongly believes starting a war increases a President’s chances of re-election and while the data is not completely conclusive, there does appear to be some basis for his argument.

Trump wouldn’t hire all these warmongers if he wasn’t trying to appease the imperialist wing on the right and he loves the BENEFITS of colonialism – just not the costs.

So Trump wants a war, we know this – what he has to contend with however is the fact that the fascist, nationalist, “America First” right does not want a war and right now, Trump can’t get anywhere without the nazis.

Which isn’t to say the Pepes won’t support a war, just that they’re going to need to believe America was attacked somehow – “we should go to war because someone hurt Saudi Arabia’s oil” was not a compelling argument to people who hate Saudi Arabia almost as much as the left does.

It is thus important to realize that although we are in some ways fortunate that Trump’s base is obsessed with 9/11, hates the Saudis and associates wars on foreign soil with neoliberalism, they cannot be relied upon to hold Trump back.

Clearly the Pork Reich is looking for a way to join the nazis with the warmongers and wall street wing in a cause for “American liberty” – it’s just not selling right now because Trump hasn’t figured out the magic recipe to bring everyone onside – yet.

For now however, peace through slow starvation (sanctions) holds – and hilariously enough the media seems more upset that Trump isn’t going to do a big war then they were when it looked like Trump WAS going to do a big war.

This doesn’t make Trump “good” it just means that for once his incompetence worked out in our favor – he’s still a complete disaster and a dangerous unhinged fascist.

 

On the key to understanding Trump’s seemingly bipolar Foreign Policy decisions – from Mastodon:

While obviously the vast majority of foreign policy journalism amounts to straight up U.S. State Department propaganda, I think even in the context of a neoliberal interventionist framework the media doesn’t really understand what Downmarket Mussolini’s foreign policy is actually about.

This comes from the inherent tension between how Trump sees the role of the U.S. military in the world and how neo (liberal or con) imperialists see the role of the U.S. military in the world.

Dating back to the opening of Trump’s campaign, it has been extremely clear that he is neither the anti-war president his supporters claim him to be, nor the “Fire and Fury” Commander in Chief his rhetoric and choice of hired corpse merchants (Mattis, Bolton, Pompeo, Haspel all come to mind here) would suggest he is.

Trump is and has always been a gangster. As such he views Pig Empire global military hegemony in much the same way the mafia would view a (potential) protection racket. Herr Donald’s somewhat simplistic logic, as demonstrated by his numerous calls for payments from NATO, Saudi Arabia and other allies is that if US forces are deployed in over a hundred countries to defend against the unspecified “threats” facing them, then these countries should have to “pay through the nose” for that service. Trump either doesn’t know, or more likely doesn’t care that US arms sales are fueled by this policy – he wants his protection money up front and immediately.

Of course like a lot of Trump’s so called “anti-imperialism” it only makes sense in an absolute vacuum and in practice it’s based on a false assumption.

Factually, there is no “threat” the rest of the world needs the United States to defend it from; the War on Terror is a complete sham and “Russian or Chinese imperialism” is more than offset by the number of forces the United States would use for home defense – we outspend them seven to one or more in terms of defense budgets, every single year.

The truth is that the wealthy leaders of foreign countries *allow* America to put bases and military personnel on their soil in exchange for access to American markets through massive global financial instruments like the World Bank, the IMF and various trade deficit producing free trade agreements that advantage the wealthy at the cost of American labor.

Which isn’t to say that these instruments actually *help* the people of those countries, just their rich elites – much like here in the U.S.

Thus in terms of practical effect, what Trump is asking American allies to do is “pony up the protection money” for a service they’ve already *rented* to America. Furthermore, he’s doing so while simultaneously demanding that they forgo the bribes our neoliberal interventionist establishment gave them in exchange for this service by demanding a vast reduction in trade deficits between the United States and its partners. (See “Fear” by Bob Woodward for some background on this.)

Ok, so if the president doesn’t want American troops on foreign soil without running a protection racket, it costs America trillions of indirect dollars to keep them there and there really is no threat to the world that requires the United States to maintain hundreds and hundreds of bases spread out all over hell’s half-acre – then why the hell are those troops there in the first place?

The short answer is “colonialism” – namely US troops are deployed to foreign countries to protect the interests of American (or at least) western corporate entities, to battle left wing organizations under the specter of “anti-communism” or “anti-terrorism” and to genuinely ensure that no foreign entity hostile to free market fundamentalist, globalized capitalism ever rises to power in any place we want to exploit. (See War Is a Racket by Smedley Butler for more background on this.)

This of course presents a conundrum for the Klepto Kaiser because he sees the benefits of American imperialism (namely corporate colonialism) as the just deserts the leader of the Pig Empire is entitled to. Thus it can be said that Trump likes imperialism, because he likes colonialism, or at least the proceeds of colonialism – he just doesn’t want to pay for it and that’s the larger source of tension acting on his foreign policy decisions that nobody ever even mentions.

Finally it must be remembered that Donald Trump has already made numerous public statements that reveal in his heart of hearts, that Downmarket Mussolini truly believes he needs a war to secure his re-election chances.

But it can’t just be any war, it must at once be a war big enough to “unify” the country and also a war borne of American revenge – the nationalist wing he needs to get re-elected will never accept Trump doing the Bush doctrine in the open, otherwise.

And so it is that every day the Trump administration works its tail off to manufacture consent for a war, preferably with Iran because that will be easier to win than China or North Korea. And every day Trump himself tries to distance his administration from the decision he knows it must ultimately take to win in 2020, by focusing entirely on the economic terms of the Pig Empire global dictatorship.

Trump wants you to want a war that will put him over the top. That doesn’t make him a man of peace, just a smarter warmonger than Dick Cheney was.

That’s the secret key to understanding Trump’s foreign policy – just like understanding that Obama was an imperialist but only interested in “wars” that were easy to fight with drones and missiles, was the never-spoken key to understanding the previous administration’s foreign policy.

 

On fake polls and the construction of an anti-Sanders narrative in the media:

The vast majority of the time I post a focused article analysis piece here on Facebook it’s because I’m looking to highlight glaringly obvious mistakes in the mainstream media’s coverage. Today I thought I’d switch gears and take a look at this delightful piece of low budget independent journalism by Ashok Koyi on his website which appears to be called “the Kalinga” – Koyi drills deeper into a recent Iowa 2020 Democratic Party primary poll that got a lot of mainstream media play and discovers that not all is what it seems.

You can find the article here:

Manufacturing Consent — How Democratic operatives are undermining Bernie Sanders 2020 candidacy

With the important note that Ashok’s article appears to be the result of multiple Twitter sleuths (two of which he credits at the bottom of the piece) I’d like to start by noting that I agree with almost everything the author states in this piece. Furthermore the investigative methodology is sound and the conclusion Koyi draws from his investigation of the people behind this poll is completely inarguable – namely that this isn’t so much a “poll” as a mainstream liberal Frankenstein memo designed to manufacture the narrative that Iowa is going for Biden or Warren and Sanders is doomed.

In particular I encourage readers to please note the following paragraph taken from Koyi’s report:

“The most important aspect being: “Binder specializes in qualitative rather than quantitative research. His focus is on assessing subjective factors such as language, emotion, and attitudes.”

To me, all this word salad means only one thing. It means he mind-reads potential voters when conducting his polling. In simple terms the polls capture his feelings of voter’s feelings about politicians

I have never heard a worse way to describe a pollster than this. Given that only the memo is published without the underlying dataset, I am assuming that this poll is based on the feelings of David Binder staff about which democratic candidate gets what percentage of votes in Iowa in the upcoming democratic primary election”

This analysis is dead-bang on and although the author is generous enough to allow for the possibility that this isn’t a mockery of traditional polling, I am not so kind – the poll in question is clearly paid for propaganda designed to discourage Sanders supporters and hopefully keep them from voting for Bernie in the primary.

This of course brings up the larger issue of the rise in paid polling outfits that operate like public relations and marketing firms over roughly the past decade. As anyone familiar with the Koch-backed climate change denial industry can attest, it is now possible for literally anyone at all to hire a polling company to produce a poll that manufactures whatever specific narrative you like.

Typically this will be accomplished with some combination of leading or ambiguous questions or carefully targeting polling by a region’s average annual income – who can forget the CNN poll upon which Biden’s case as an “unassailable front-runner” was built up in the media, including in particular and to the surprise of no one, CNN! What was only mentioned on Right Wing News sites however is the fact that the polling company somehow managed not to sample a “statistically significant” number of 18-49 year olds who probably wouldn’t have been all that jazzed about Biden.

The simple truth is that “he who pays the piper, calls the tune” and while political campaigns demand accuracy from their internal polling contractors, they are not above hiring what amounts to PR firms like Focus on Rural America and the company of its founder, Link Strategies, to manufacture a specific narrative in the media. These results are then fed to influential figures in the public discourse and you’ve essentially created the idea that Bernie is finished and Warren is ascendant out of nothing. Now traditionally, the mainstream media has been considered a safeguard against spurious polling because they not only sponsor a number of polls that are in theory designed to be accurate, but they also publish the methodology behind those polls when they release him. What happens however when the mainstream corporate media itself is now controlled by politically active billionaire titans of industry like say, Jeff Bezos? What happens when massive American corporate media companies are the ones paying the piper, and the tune they want to hear is that Bernie loses? Well, in this case what clearly happened is a B.S. poll designed to suppress pro-Sanders turnout in Iowa got treated seriously in the mainstream media for a few days; whether or not it actually stops Iowans from voting Sanders in five months is less clear – but that is certainly the intent of the exercise.

Look, this is big business and these folks will go to any length to rig even meaningless internet polls – good examples include Trump fixer Michael Cohen hiring an IT firm to try and rig a GOP nomination contest Drudge Poll or the weirdo Pelosi fanboys over at Daily Kos rigging weekly forum polls against Sanders by banning almost every Bernie supporter during the 2016 election.

Obviously there is a certain amount of value in using rigged polls to suggest a political narrative and clearly it’s fairly effective.

Who watches the watchmen when the watchmen have all been bought?

Go back and read Koyi’s report at the top of this article again and ask yourself how many people are going to bother to take the roughly ten steps it takes Ashok to figure out this “poll” is utter nonsense, before they decide to believe it or not?

Right, the answer is “almost nobody.”

As I’ve written numerous times since the real Democratic Party 2020 nomination fight kicked off just before Christmas in 2018, the mainstream corporate media, the Democratic Party and rich liberal elites are prepared to do anything, say anything and push any narrative to prevent Bernie Sanders from winning the Dem nomination – precisely *because* they know that he will beat Trump.

Since that time, the Manhattan Island media and Beltway Think Tank glitterati have rotated through a seemingly never ending cast of “Bernie Slayer” ascendant candidates who had supposedly already rendered Sanders and his revolution irrelevant. One by one Lock Em Up Kamala, Trapper Keeper, Skateboard Jesus and Dollar Store Macron have fallen by the wayside only moments after the establishment media told you they were in the driver’s seat. Now Palooka Joe Biden is in the act of falling on his sword and a newly conciliatory Liz Warren is hanging out with Wall Street executives and Hillary Clinton – you’d have to be a complete idiot not to see what’s going on here at this point.

The narrative that the Bernie Sanders political revolution is already dead will never die, so long as the Bernie Sanders political revolution continues to live – the fact that they’re still paying media minions and fake pollster gurus to tell you Sanders doesn’t stand a chance is all the evidence you need to demonstrate he’s still in the race and the fight is not over.

As always in life, it’s important to “consider the source” and the source of all this anti-Bernie mainstream media coverage are companies owned by rich people who’d rather lose to a fascist like Trump, than share with the labor class under a Democratic Socialist like Sanders.

 

On the myth of free medical coverage harming organized labor:

This is a surprisingly candid article about Medicare for All and Union-bargained health benefits that was posted under the teaser “Did General Motors just make the case for Medicare-for-all?”

The simple one word answer to this question is “yes” but I’d also like to point out that in Vox’s desperate effort to remain “balanced” they perpetuated the pro-business argument that there is no evidence that reduced health care costs lead to higher wages – while simultaneously noting that “Companies use health care as leverage to negotiate down wage increases and other benefits. That’s why some of the biggest unions in the country support Medicare-for-all — or at least moving in that direction.”

As anyone who has ever been to Canada, or the UK, or most of Europe, or any other country civilized enough to have both public healthcare and the right to organize will tell you however, this phenomenon exists only in America – everywhere else on the planet, unions are able to negotiate for either higher wages, or more benefits (think dental, eyeglasses, etc) in lieu of company sponsored health insurance.

Naturally, longtime observers of the American health insurance debate will recognize this willingly obtuse myopia – many of the arguments that have been used to deny Americans reasonable (and free) public healthcare options are firmly rooted in a type of American exceptionalism that refuses to acknowledge the dozens and dozens of countries that have tackled the problem of public healthcare without suddenly transforming into Stagflation Argentina.

 

• nina illingworth