Linked

It has become obligatory. To be taken seriously in American politics, one must kneel before the altar of “American exceptionalism”—the messianic notion that the United States is a constant source for good in the world with a unique mission to spread its particular values.--Maj. DS

The good Major keeps hammering away.

Smedley Butler would approve.


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Worse Than Trolls

Oregon City may not seem like the soft underbelly of American democracy.

But as the public learns more about the hidden propaganda role of Russian "trolls," or fake identities on the internet, an Oregon City man named Jeffrey St. Clair has become an unintentional authority on the subject — by virtue of having been duped by one.

St. Clair is the editor of the popular left-leaning website Counterpunch.org. On Christmas Day, he became the center of the sort of mainstream media news frenzy that he'd normally be critiquing from the sidelines.--NB

I have interest in this story and interview because I've contributed to CounterPunch on numerous occasions. Likely, the FBI scrutinizes every writer who publishes with CP and many other U.S. left/independent news organizations.  So they stumble across an "Alice Donovan," who doesn't really exist. The Washington Post is tipped off, and a reporter calls CP's St. Clair.

But here's the catch.  This story's headline says the non-existent Alice Donovan is a Russian troll.  As St. Clair points out in the interview, there's no proof anywhere that AD is infact a Russian surrogate. All anyone knows is that it's a fake name adorned by plagiarism.

The headline states "Russiagate" as fact. The sloppiness of mainstream journalism rolls on.  WTF?  It will be interesting to see if St. Clair responds to this.


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At Ease

Vietnam: it’s always there. Looming in the past, informing American futures.

A 50-year-old war, once labeled the longest in our history, is still alive and well and still being refought by one group of Americans: the military high command. And almost half a century later, they’re still losing it and blaming others for doing so.

Of course, the U.S. military and Washington policymakers lost the war in Vietnam in the previous century and perhaps it’s well that they did. The United States really had no business intervening in that anti-colonial civil war in the first place, supporting a South Vietnamese government of questionable legitimacy and stifling promised nationwide elections on both sides of that country’s artificial border. In doing so, Washington presented an easy villain for a North Vietnamese-backed National Liberation Front (NLF) insurgency, a group known to Americans in those years as the Vietcong.--Maj.DS

Lately this soldier has been letting it rip.

Along with retired soldier turned history professor, Andrew Bacevich, he is among my favorite military dissidents.


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Clarity

“It is a bit surprising that Democrats haven’t managed a single victory yet,” declared a University of Wisconsin election expert. “Panic is setting in on the left,” exclaimed a Vox headline.

Really?

No, not really. The professional political observers are like cats watching the wrong mouse hole. They are so fixated on the minutia of Washington-centric politics that they’re missing the much bigger story of transformative political changes that have erupted in every region of the country. Far from panicking, America’s political left is organizing, strategizing, mobilizing … and WINNING. Coalitions of local progressive activists (newly energized by an infusion of dynamic, creative young people and people of color) came together after the 2016 election. They recruited and trained candidates from their own ranks; methodically knocked on doors, having thousands of front-porch conversations with voters on basic issues; mobilized supporters for intensive election-day turn-out drives; and elected scores of audaciously populist mayors, council members, legislators, and other officials.--JH

The duopoly is in trouble, theoretically.

At this late date I still marvel at people who insist we'd be so very much better off with the Democratic Party in charge.  All lathered up in pragmatic oil, they're missing the point--the country wants else.

I marvel at the stupidity of it all.


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Sunday Night Serenade

Toke up and perk up your ears.


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Word

How to spot a communist.

This one will scare you.


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The Message

The corporatocracy wasted no time in dealing with this new insurgency. They demonized and hamstrung Trump, as they’ll continue to do until he’s well out of office. But Trump was never the significant threat. The significant threat is the people who elected him, and who voted for Brexit, and the AfD, and Sanders, and Mélenchon, and Corbyn, and who just stayed home on election day and refused to vote for Hillary Clinton. The threat is the attitude of these people. The insubordinate attitude of these people. The childish attitude of these people (who naively thought they could challenge the most powerful empire in the annals of human history … one that controls, not just the most fearsome military force that has ever existed, but the means to control “reality” itself).

The corporatocracy is going to change that attitude, or it is going to make it disappear. It is in the process of doing this now, using every ideological weapon in its arsenal. The news media. Publishing. Hollywood. The Internet. Intelligence agencies. Congressional inquiries. Protests. Marches. Twitter’s “advisory emails.” Google’s manipulation of its search results. Facebook’s “counterspeech” initiative. Russiagate. Shitholegate. Pornstargate. The ruling class is sending us a message. The message is, “you’re either with us or against us.” The message is, “we will tolerate no dissent, except for officially sanctioned dissent.” The message is, “try to fuck with us, and we will marginalize you, and demonize you, and demonetize you, and disappear you.”--CJH

Smack, this piece hits it on the nose.

The rest of the story.


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Known Liar

But Gary was a big liar. This desperately poor Eastern European Jew reinvented himself as a French patriot and literary figure, titles he earned by fighting for France and by writing very good novels in French, one of which won the Goncourt Prize, France’s highest literary award. And then, when he was famous under one made-up name and persona, he invented another name and persona, and wrote well enough in this very different voice to win a second Goncourt Prize. (The rules say it can be awarded to someone only once, so he remains the sole writer with this distinction.) No lie Romain Gary told was bigger than that he was Romain Gary.

Through it all, he was, puzzlingly but certainly, great: a great man of a special mid-century kind—great in form, in fable, in the entire fiction he made of his life, dedicated to an extravagantly complicated ideal of humanity. Here was a man of steadfast personal courage who spoke up in his writing for those called cowards, for the schlemiels and wise guys and pranksters who, faced with the unimaginable evils of human existence, feigned and dodged and, sometimes, survived. He allowed the contradictions in his own life to become identical to the absurdities of modern existence.--AG

Lying for Art's sake is not always a bad thing.


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Whose Fight?

One year after millions marched across the United States and internationally to oppose the new Trump administration and its fascistic policies, the Democratic Party organized, in the name of the second Women’s March, demonstrations designed to divert mass opposition to Trump behind the election of its own right-wing candidates in the 2018 midterm elections.

Compared to last year’s march, which to some extent reflected broader anti-Trump sentiment and opposition to his right-wing agenda of war and xenophobia, this year’s marches were focused almost exclusively on electoral politics and the #MeToo campaign, which is using allegations of sexual misconduct to attack democratic rights. “Me Too” and the related “Time’s Up” slogan dominated signs and speeches.

All the major issues confronting the working class—attacks on immigrant rights, the threat of nuclear war, layoffs and stagnating wages, police violence—were either downplayed or ignored entirely. The democratic issues highlighted, including the right to an abortion and the rights of LGBT Americans, were separated as much as possible from the broader attacks on democratic rights, aided and abetted by the Democrats as much as the Republicans. Every effort was made to portray the Democratic Party as an ally in the fight for these rights--WSWS


As I attempted to argue in my previous post re: the Women's March.


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Not Radical Enough

I have little interest in the anti-trump movement, though I deplore him. A march against the oligarchy might mean something, because if and when Trump is ousted nothing will change until the income gap closes permanently and U.S. imperialism comes to a screeching halt.

Unless capitalism is confronted head-on and destroyed, nothing will change.  The heroes of the moment, the women in high places and their capitalist sympathizers among men, are as much a problem as the deplorables.

My message to the Women's Movement is you're not radical enough.  In fact you're kind of boring.

Liberalism is not enough.  You must clinch your fists and punch like Ronda Rousey.

Not radical enough.


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Hedges on the Edge

But, far to the north, was a shithole country ruled by a former B-list movie actor who had starred in “Bedtime for Bonzo” and who was in the early stages of dementia. This shithole country, which saw the world in black and white, communist and capitalist, was determined to thwart the aspirations of the poor and the landless. It would not permit the profits of its companies, such as United Fruit, or the power of the pliant oligarch class that did its bidding in El Salvador, to be impeded. It had disdain for the aspirations of the poor, especially the poor of Latin American or Africa, the wretched of the earth, as writer Frantz Fanon called them, people who in the eyes of those who ruled the shithole country should toil in misery all their lives for the oligarchs and the big American companies allied with them. Let the poor, brown and black people go hungry, watch their children die of sickness or be murdered. Power and wealth, those who ruled this shithole country believed, was theirs by divine right. They, as the lords of shithole-dom, were endowed with special attributes. God blessed shithole countries.--CH

From a writer who was there.


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RIP, Bill Deemer

Sorry to hear that the poet Bill Deemer has died.  He was the younger brother of my old friend and RBP contributing author Charles Deemer.

Charles talks about his brother's work in this video.

We had the good fortune of publishing Bill's "Variations" in 2011, a brilliant book of poems he later chose to retire from Round Bend Press Books.

I never met Bill in person, but I admired his work.  He was the real deal.

My condolences to Charles and the family and friends of one of Oregon's greatest poets.


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Yes Sir!

Every year, we’re treated to the same hypocrisy. Mainstream figures in both parties—some who vote for massive tax breaks for the rich, nearly all who support America’s endless wars—publicly laud and then invoke the ghost of King. None lays out a 21st century plan to implement MLK’s still incomplete vision. They have no such plan. They were bought and sold by corporate elites and the military-industrial complex long ago. On the right, some even engage in the fantasy that King was actually a Republican. He wasn’t. Truth be told, King would fit into neither of the two parties today. His platform and favored issues hardly receive public airing anywhere but the fringe left. Nonetheless, both Democrats and Republicans invoke King’s ghost every January for petty political gain. It’s heinous.--DS

Seriously, this is a must-read piece, by a military man for god's sake.


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Happy Birthday, MLK

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'Nuff Said

This year marks the 50th anniversary of King’s tragic assassination, and though countless publications will brim with commemorations and retrospectives of this misunderstood icon, most will miss the mark. Long ago co-opted and sanitized by mainstream political figures, the King of memory bears little resemblance to the radical, complex man himself.--DS


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