The Liberals Thread

[dada]

The truth is, the democrats need to move to the left if they want to win elections.

A 'winning over the white male' campaign is not going to convince anyone to change teams. Connect with your base. Disconnect from the propaganda machines for a few minutes and think about it.

edited to add: I'm a white male, with self-confidence, self-respect and sexy 'peal. I know how to get along with women. Maybe the 'white male identity movement' could use some pointers. I'm willing to help.

[JackRiddler]

The truth is, the democrats need to move to the left if they want to win elections.

A 'winning over the white male' campaign is not going to convince someone to change teams. Connect with your base. Disconnect from the propaganda machines for a few minutes and think about it.

Yes.

In fact a "winning over the white male" campaign is what the Democrats always run already, and they haven't figured out yet that it can be circumvented by a low-cost propaganda frenzy using any cherry-picked out-of-context remark ("deplorables," etc.).

[slomo]

The reasons for supporting Trump (who I agree is "low-grade professional con-man and bully") are far more diverse than simple predatory racism. Most people in my world who have judged Trump to be an equal or less evil than Clinton have expressed reservations about Trump and bemoaned the awful choices presented to us on November 9. (Granted, my experience may be biased -- I can never tell whether people think of me as "white" or not, as I get mixed feedback on that point, and I do not immediately come off as obviously gay -- but it is certainly true that liberals/progressives are over-represented in my social network.)

I will also grant that the folks who give Trump a grudging pass may be less conscious of the everyday reality of racial and sexual minorities. However, they do not seem to me to be necessarily committed to the isms that plague our society. And that's an important leverage point: the people who are guilty of "micro-aggressions" out of ignorance are the very people you want to reach with an open heart and mind, as they are at some level open to having their minds changed. Beating them on the head with endless "diversity" thought-policing only alienates them. I don't need people in my life or online to conform 100% to my ideological position, because my sense of self-worth is not dependent on cognitive and ideological uniformity in my social environment (real or online). Instead, I need them only to be open to entertaining my point of view for the period of time they are interacting with me (online or in real life). My Christian fundamentalist working-class white FIL, who is not 100% comfortable with his son's homosexuality, and perhaps was even a bit uncomfortable with the non-100%-whiteness of his son's boyfriend the first time we met (I'll never know exactly), has nevertheless become one of my favorite people (he hates Trump BTW). We don't have to agree with each other on everything. We just have to respect each others' human dignity, and (with any luck) love each other.

[JackRiddler]

The reasons for supporting Trump (who I agree is "low-grade professional con-man and bully") are far more diverse than simple predatory racism.

I've said that. On the other hand, here in New York, we just get his core support, not the people who need to rationalize it or who think he's going to work for the common man.

Most people in my world who have judged Trump to be an equal or less evil than Clinton have expressed reservations about Trump and bemoaned the awful choices presented to us on November 9. (Granted, my experience may be biased -- I can never tell whether people think of me as "white" or not, as I get mixed feedback on that point, and I do not immediately come off as obviously gay -- but it is certainly true that liberals/progressives are over-represented in my social network.)

I will also grant that the folks who give Trump a grudging pass may be less conscious of the everyday reality of racial and sexual minorities. However, they do not seem to me to be necessarily committed to the isms that plague our society. And that's an important leverage point: the people who are guilty of "micro-aggressions" out of ignorance are the very people you want to reach with an open heart and mind, as they are at some level open to having their minds changed.

I'm not a "micro-aggressions" complainer. I see some pretty heavy macro-aggression already here.

Beating them on the head with endless "diversity" thought-policing only alienates them.

Ok. You do know you're talking to Mr. Class Struggle, right? Such as I am. (Failure to live up to my ideals doesn't negate that.)

I don't need people in my life or online to conform 100% to my ideological position,

In the other thread we're not talking about ideological position, but intentional lying. (Which happens also to suit the needs of a certain ideological position.)

because my sense of self-worth is not dependent on cognitive and ideological uniformity in my social environment (real or online).

lol! Welcome to the club.

We don't have to agree with each other on everything. We just have to respect each others' human dignity, and (with any luck) love each other.

Lovely. I un-ironically agree. I submit that lying and insisting on it tends to be a violation of that. How do you respond to violations? Do you defend yourself, or do you sing kumbaya. You don't strike me as the (ideal) Christian type.

.

[slomo]

You don't strike me as the (ideal) Christian type.

No, I tend to agree more with Laveyan satanism that says reward your friends and punish your enemies. But I take the long view and wait for a very long time before concluding that somebody is really an enemy. Mostly because it's more personally rewarding that way, and often strategically beneficial. It feels good to have friends, and it feels bad to have enemies.

If a member repeatedly and habitually shitposts after multiple warnings and temporary suspensions (via WR's sometimes light, sometimes heavy strike of the banhammer) then, yes, by all means terminate with prejudice. But I like to have a semblance of due process beforehand. That's really what this is about.

[dada]

Good reminder of 'where we are,' historically. Maybe keep us from retreading the same worn grooves. Probably not, but hey.

Two Concepts of Liberty, Isaiah Berlin (from here: http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/published_works/tcl/index.html)

Inaugural lecture: Two Concepts of Freedom – no, of Liberty,
sorry. Begins:

Mr Vice-Chancellor: The subject to which my chair is
dedicated – social and political thought – has fallen upon evil days
in this country....

http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/published_works/tcl/tcl-a.pdf

"...Throughout the nineteenth century liberal thinkers correctly maintained the doctrine that if by liberty was meant a limit upon the powers of anyone else to force me to do what I did not wish to do, whether in the name of reason or State, my own good or the good of unborn generations, or in the name of God or man, history or class, or the rights of a man of genius to mould inferior beings to his pattern (for thus they too shall share in his free
creative activity and be raised to a higher level), absolute sovereignty must be declared to be a tyrannical doctrine in itself.

If I wish to preserve my liberty, it is certainly not enough to say that it must not be violated unless someone or other – a sovereign, or the popular assembly, or the king in parliament, or the judges, or all these persons together, or even the laws (for they may themselves be oppressive) – authorise this. I must establish a society in which there must be some interferences which nobody should ever be able to authorise.

I may call such frontiers natural rights; I may found them upon what philosophy I please, I may call them the word of God or the demands of the ‘deepest interests of man’; I may believe in their validity a priori, or simply declare them to be subjective ends, but sufficiently widely believed
and grounded in empirical human nature as it has developed through history to be part of the definition of what a human being is, so that those who do not recognise it are rightly regarded by me as having so different a view of what men are as to be justly called abnormal, morally deficient, deranged; but however I view it, unless some such stand is taken, individual liberty will not remain inviolable, self-government will not be sufficient.

In theory, no doubt, in a democracy the majority of its citizens govern themselves, but historically no government has found much difficulty in forcing its subjects to generate the will that the government wants. The triumph of despotism is to force the slaves to declare themselves free.

How is this to be prevented? Many devices have been suggested, but the principal safeguard of a democracy resides in retaining political rights with which to protect individual rights, in an exercise of these rights, and in the preservation of an enlightened public opinion. If it is believed widely enough and repeated often enough that no powers can be absolute – only a right can be that, in the sense that I have an absolute right to
refuse to behave inhumanly – that ‘natural’ frontiers exist in the sense that there are some principles so widely accepted that they have entered into the definition of what it is to be a human being; rights and corresponding laws of which it would be absurd to say that they could be abrogated by some formal procedure of some absolute sovereign; if this is sufficiently often repeated, it is difficult for the worst governments to proceed publicly against it.

That is the status, for instance, of the punishment of men not proved guilty even by some semblance of a trial, or indiscriminate destruction of lives and liberties by the arbitrary will of a despot.This causes horror even in this hardened day; and this horror of despotism is precisely this implicit recognition of the existence of barriers to interference. If public opinion does not operate, the tyrants find it only too easy to pay homage to the power of the people, and speak for it even while muzzling it, and crush it in its own name.

What liberals demand, therefore, is the limitation of sovereignty as such; what believers in ‘positive’ liberty demand is the placing of it in their own and not in others’ hands. These views are ultimately not reconcilable. But it is a profound lack of social and moral understanding not to recognise the absolute claims of each of these types of liberty as being among ‘the deepest interests of mankind’.

In the end, what is responsible for despotism and the crushing of individuals in the names of ideals – distant ends such as ultimate felicity or their own ‘real’ selves, of which they may not be aware, or the claims of such embodiments of themselves as the destiny to which they are called, their historical mission, or their ‘selftranscendence’ in a ‘higher’ level, nation, race, class, tradition, Church, humanity, progress, liberty itself, all the great altars upon which human sacrifices have been brought – is the belief that somewhere in the past or the future, in divine revelation or the mind of the individual thinker, in the pronouncements of history or science, or the simple heart of an uncorrupt good man, there is a final solution. It is an ancient belief founded upon the assumption that all positive values in which men have believed must in principle be compatible, and perhaps even entail one another. ‘Nature binds truth, happiness and virtue together by an indissoluble chain’, said Condorcet, perhaps the most enlightened representative of this view.

But is this true? We know that equality is not compatible with individual liberty, with unrestricted laissez-faire, as things are; that always to tell the truth will not necessarily conduce to universal happiness; that rigorous justice is not compatible with generosity or unrestricted liberty. But somewhere, we shall be told, somehow, a state of affairs must exist in which these virtues can coexist, otherwise the universe is not a cosmos, not a harmony.

The conflict of values – tragedy – is an intrinsic part of it. No situation is conceivable even in principle, let alone realisable in practice, in which men are wholly wise, good, just, free, happy. The very notion of a rational ideal, the total harmony of all values and all interests, is seen to involve incompatibilities. This is a mortal blow to the very nature of a reasonable universe."


For those who have 'been down this road before,' these are fun:

The Isaiah Berlin Virtual Library

MORE EXPLAINING
Isaiah Berlin on his own ideas
These letters and extracts are posted here in the belief that
they may be useful to scholars who wish to clarify Berlin’s
ideas, even though room could not be found for them in the
published selection.

http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/published_works/a/more-explaining.pdf

Explainings, explainings...

[tapitsbo]

Giving everyone a seat at the table is a good shortcut to getting a bigger consensus

This has to be repeated as often as possible.

If you define yourself as "white" first, and think "white" has an interest unto its own (which it does, but only through the act of definition), then no, you don't have any particular place at a table that's going to bring anything positive to the "consensus" or the situation. Abandon that and become a human being again, and you certainly do.

The definition is there whether I reject it or embrace it, ironize it, or deconstruct it, take it at face value, or divorce myself from whatever context I've been instructed to leave out. I know this and you guys know this. Right now its deployment and meaning is "owned" to a much greater degree by hostile institutions than it is by any "pro-white" fringe movements, however misguided they are.

If you find that grating or difficult to accept things are going to continue to get a lot more rough for you, at least as long as you stay here in North America.

There are hundreds of millions if not billions of people with their own tables they might not welcome Jack at though. I don't give a fuck about whether I'm a human being or not in his eyes - on the other hand I necessarily am only interested in taking part in a movement or consensus that ruthlessly excludes people like Jack, for a series of reasons but not least of all for his insistence on dictating to me who I am and his arrogant claims to speak for me or a supposed "consensus" out there in the world. Trust me, I'm not alone in thinking this way. Block me or continue your creepy obsession with me at your discretion, Jack.

While we're at it I'm not the only one here who will be quite happy to reject Isaiah Berlin, Theodore Adorno, and all their baggage that we are at this point quite familiar with, thanks. Those are names you can continue talking about at your own table while most of the world ignores you.

And soon you guys will find that the very institutions and territories you most feel are under your control are about to become quite contested and existentially threatened indeed.

[dada]

While we're at it I'm not the only one here who will be quite happy to reject Isaiah Berlin, Theodore Adorno, and all their baggage that we are at this point quite familiar with, thanks. Those are names you can continue talking about at your own table while most of the world ignores you.

My point was that the table will always have irreconcilable conflicting point of views sitting at it. I thought he said it better than I could at the moment. I don't have as much time to do the political philosophy thing as is necessary. As Rumi said in the Fiha Ma Fiha (The Table-Talk)

The night passed away, but our tale remained completely untold. Where was the fault of the night; our tale was too long.

edited to add: also thought it was relevant stuff for a 'liberals thread.' So I put it there.

[tapitsbo]

And for me there's absolutely nothing wrong with any of that. Everything you just said, dada, confirms why Jack's challenges and false assumptions about me ring so hollow, whether you meant it that way or not.

[JackRiddler]

While we're at it I'm not the only one here who will be quite happy to reject Isaiah Berlin, Theodore Adorno, and all their baggage that we are at this point quite familiar with, thanks. Those are names you can continue talking about at your own table while most of the world ignores you.

As if you can mention three works by either without googling, let alone claim you've read them.

[8bitagent]

This article is exactly what Ive been saying...
http://www.newslogue.com/debate/120

How The Hell Did We Let The Alt-Right Steal The Revolution? In this bizarre timeline, the Republicans are now the anti-war party, and are the launchpad for the only viable revolution in America. This needs to change.

Basically saying what I've been saying. The anti globalist, anti war, anti wall street, purge the elites out of power has been co-opted by fascism.

The Bush-Obama neocon-neolib immoral wars forced millions of Muslim civilians northbound, providing the oxygen for far right politics to run wild in Europe and elsewhere

It's true though, and we need to admit it. The hippies became yuppies, the Occupy movement fizzled, the only protests in the streets you see happening on the left anymore are liberals who are upset that a warmongering Wall Street crony didn't get elected, most Berners were persuaded to throw their support behind establishment nepotism and corruption, Sanders himself is now being bandied about by sleazebags like Chuck Schumer as the man to lure disenfranchised progressives back to the establishment, and Hillary supporters are still going around accusing everyone who mentions WikiLeaks of being a Russian agent like a bunch of witch-hunting McCarthyists from the fifties.

Meanwhile, what is the right up to? The alt-right essentially memed their beloved outsider candidate into the White House with a highly unorthodox internet campaign and a ton of enthusiasm, the new President Elect is a populist who talks openly about globalism and the globalist agenda, who just fired Chris Christie and a bunch of corrupt lobbyists who made it onto his transition team, who says he wants to impose term limits in congress and tighten the rules for lobbyists, who just appointed a man as his chief strategist who has made a career out of attacking neoliberalism and neoconservativism and who is pushing a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan, whose base opposes exploitative free trade agreements and unnecessary wars and who are pushing a message of hope and change, and who just secured a lock on the House and the Senate for their movement.

This is all true. You might not agree with the particulars of their ideology, you might not believe their candidate will do the things he's saying he'll do, but in terms of getting things done on the front lines of the rebellion, the alt-right has gained far, far more ground than those of us on the left have. To put it bluntly, they're handing us our asses.

The Republicans are even better than the Dems on war now. War! For crying out loud. How'd that happen? Trump's out there saying America shouldn't be the world police and talking about diplomacy and making deals, and we've got people out in the streets protesting in favor of a woman who was clearly trying to start a war with Russia. Obama has bombed twice as many countries as Bush did, dropping 23,144 bombs on Muslim-majority countries in 2015 alone, made a record-shattering arms sale to a totalitarian regime, and committed more than a trillion dollars to nuclear weapons spending over the next thirty years.

[dada]

8bit, it's like you're watching a movie on the internet and mistaking it for real life. Donald was elected by republicans who like to think of themselves as upper middle class, who care nothing about changing the 'new world order,' and the non-votes of the disenfranchised left.

The stadium rallies, twitter, and nazi jokes are what's called branding. And you're 'loving to hate it.' Being fed a line, and swallowing it hook, line, and sinker. So you proselytize the narrative.

Don't be fascinated by the media game side-show.

edited to add: Here on reality-base, I'm thinking of making the trip to Washington in January. And if I'm even feeling it, I know there must be something positive stirring. There's good reason to hope, for once. The left just does things differently.

The democrats will be paying close attention in the next few months, to get a sense of what messages they need to send, to woo over the left without challenging the power structure. It is a delicate balance, I don't envy those people their jobs.

The press will do their best to attenuate the leftward swing by feeding the bubble world-narrative, kind of like the one you're helping them spread around. And once the left is on board, the press will spin it as, 'oh noes! Revolutionaries are taking over the democrats! We must not go too far left! That would be anarchy!" And it all balances out. Thank you, press, we owe you another one.

If anything, the left could learn to treat their war more as a game, make it fun for themselves. You're going to fight anyway, might as well sing while you slay.

[dada]

I'm aware I come on as 'a lone voice, speaking in the wilderness.' It's a fun role.

Here, this made me laugh this morning:

"According to the exit polls, Clinton underperformed Barack Obama's 2012 results among not only non-college educated whites, but also white men; black men and women; Hispanic men and women; Asian men and women; men and women of other races; every age group except voters over 65; liberals, moderates and conservatives; Protestants, Catholics, adherents of other religions and those who claim no religious affiliation; married men and unmarried men and women; union and non-union households; self-identified Democrats; straight people; people who think undocumented immigrants should be given legal status; and people who think the country is going in the right direction. In that sense, the commentariat's intense focus on non-college whites already seems a bit odd."

I was like, "damn, that's quite a laundry list":)

"It's true that in 2016, non-college whites swung to the GOP by a 15-point margin relative to 2012. But Clinton underperformed Obama among voters of all races who make less than $30,000 per year by an identical margin. If the pundits were churning out hundreds of columns about how the Dems need to win back low-income voters, it would likely have a more salutary effect on Democratic policy.

As for whether these were mostly former Obama voters, it's important to understand that we're talking about a group that tends to turn out in low numbers. In 2012, only one in four high school grads voted. That was true of fewer than 10 percent of those who didn't complete high school, and around four in 10 of those with some college experience."

"...Democrats should certainly focus on a progressive economic agenda – both because it's good policy in our new Gilded Age, and because there's evidence that it spurs enthusiasm among their entire coalition, including with non-college whites."

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/stop-obsessing-over-white-working-class-voters-w450780

Of course, that's Rolling Stone talking. So I don't really give a shit. But you might, dear reader. I know you like that professional popularity stuff.

Well, time for work. Got my fun job this morning, as small-time local press apprentice pressman guy.

[Morty]

Foibles, Fables and Failures
The Financial Press and its Keepers
James Petras • November 23, 2016


Introduction: US officialdom and their media megaphones have systematically concocted narratives having less to do with political reality and more with their hallucinogenic world view. Pre-election and post-election reportage weaves a tapestry of fiction and fantasy.

___________________________________________________________

We will discuss the most pernicious of these remarkable foibles and fables and their predictable failures.

1. The pundits, prestigious editorialists and ‘economists with gravitas’, have convinced themselves that the election of Donald Trump would ‘lead to the Collapse of Capitalism (COC)’. They cited his campaign attacks of globalization and trade agreements, as well as his ‘reckless’ swipes at speculators. In reality, Trump was criticizing a specific kind of capitalism. The pundits overlooked the variety of capitalisms that constitute the US economy. With their snouts deep in the trough, their own vision was limited; their curly tails blindly twirled meaningless formulae on blackboards; their ample backsides flapping away in place of their mouths. Thus occupied, they easily ignored Trump’s glorification of national capitalism.

Trump followed the legacy of protectionism in US policies established by George Washington and Alexander Hamilton and carried into the administrations of Franklin Roosevelt and others. Capitalism comes in various forms and is promoted by different protagonists at different times in our history. Some leaders have championed such economic sectors as domestic energy production, manufacturing, mining and agriculture and depended largely on the local labor markets. Nevertheless, the pundits’ dream of a final collapse of capitalism with the rise of Trump turned into a real stock market bonanza, the ‘DOW’ boomed to record levels, and monopolists rubbed their hands in anticipation of larger and more lucrative merger and acquisitions.

The world’s largest billionaire bankers had bankrolled Secretary Hillary Clinton, the ‘million-dollar-a-speech’ War Goddess. Blankfein, Soros and the dirty dozen had bet heavily against the populist-nationalist Donald Trump and they lost. Their pre-paid political manifestos, addressed to the readers of the NY Times, flopped and sputtered: Most readers and investors in domestic markets had placed their bets on ‘The Donald’. Their domestic celebrations pumped up the market after the election. The unimaginable had happened: George Soros had bet and lost! The ‘deplorable’ electorate preferred the obnoxious nationalist to the obnoxious speculator. ‘Who’d a thunk it?’

2. From electoral losers to street putschists, the speculators and their whiny media mouthpieces strive to overthrow the election process. Against the tens of millions of free voters, the speculators bankrolled a few thousands demonstrators, drunk with their own delusions of starting a color-coded ‘Manhattan Spring’ to overthrow the elected President. Decked out in black ‘anarchist chic’, the window vandals and historically illiterate students were energized by George Soros’ promise to replicate the putsches in Kiev and Tbilisi. They took to the streets, cracked a few some windows and signed thousands of ‘on-line petitions’ (while denouncing Trump as the ‘Second Coming of Kristalnacht’). The media magnified the theatrics as a sort of uprising to restore their loser-emancipator to the throne - the bleery-eyed Jean D’Arc of the Hedge Funds. The losers lost and Hillary will hopefully retire to count her millions. The stock market soared to record heights.

3. The four most influential financial newspapers, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), the Financial Times (FT), the New York Times (NYT) and the Washington Post (WP) had deeply mourned their ‘Paradise Lost’: Long-gone was the rotting vassal-state of Russia under Boris Yeltsin 1991 - 2000, source of so much Western pillage. Their bile turned to venom, directed at the new Nemesis: Putin. The election of Vladimir Putin led to a remarkable economic and social recovery for Russia. From a Western controlled gangster-capitalist ‘thug-ocracy’, Russia has become a modern global power asserting its own sovereignty and national interests.

Gone are the days when Harvard economists could sack Russia of millions through their various ‘democracy’ foundations and Wall Street bankers could launder billions from the criminal oligarchs. Pentagon planners had dismantled Russian bases throughout its previous Warsaw Pact neighbors and set up NATO bases on Russia’s borders. State Department functionaries had overthrown elected pro-Russian regimes in the Ukraine, Georgia and as far afield as Libya. These were the unfettered joys of the US unipolar rulers and their stable of prestigious press pimps and academics, until Putin arrived to spoil the party. And in the run-up to the US election, the Clintonites and their Democratic entourage in the media launched the most frenzied demonic attack accusing Vladimir Putin of financing Trump’s campaign, of hacking Clinton’s messy, unsecured e-mail messages to undermine elections, of bombing Syrian hospitals full of children, of preparing to invade Latvia and Poland etc., etc. If there is one sliver of truth in the vassal press, it is that the demonic changes made against Putin reflected the gory reality of Hillary Clinton’s well-documented policies.

Clinton’s model for a democratic Russia was the drunken President Yeltsin, bankrolled by thugs as they gorged themselves on the corpse of the USSR. But Vladimir Putin was elected repeatedly by huge majorities and his governance has been far more representative of the Russian electorate than those of the recidivist loser, Hillary Clinton. Russia didn’t ‘invade’ the Ukraine or Crimea. It was the ‘potty-mouthed’ Victoria Nuland, US Undersecretary of State for European Affairs, who boasted of having tossed a mere 5 billion dollars into neo-fascist-kleptocratic putsch that took over Ukraine and who famously dismissed the concerns of the European Union…with her secretly recorded ‘F— the EE’ comment to the US Ambassador!

__________________________________________________________

At some point, reality has to bubble up through the slime: Putin never financed Trump - the billionaire financed his own campaign. On the other hand, Clinton was bankrolled by Saudi despots, Zionist billionaires and Wall Street bankers. The mass media, the WSJ, FT, NYT and the WP, dutifully served the same stale, old sexist gossip about Trump in support of the sweet and sour, wide-eyed Madam Strangelove, who never hesitated to rip the lives out of thousands of Muslim women in their own countries. The media celebrated Madame Clinton’s nuclear option for Syria (the ‘No-Fly Zone’) while it ridiculed Trump’s proposal to negotiate a settlement with Putin.

The media accused Trump of being a sexist, racist, anti-immigrant villain, all the while ignoring Secretary of State Clinton’s blood-soaked history of bombs and destruction, of killing of tens of thousands women in the Middle East and Africa and driving hundreds of thousands among the two million sub-Sahara Africans formerly employed in Libya under Gadhafi’s rule onto rotting ships in the Mediterranean Sea. Who in Madame’s media count the millions of people dispossessed or the 300,000 killed by the US-promoted mercenary invasion of Syria? Where were the feminists, who now dredge up Trump’s crude ‘crotch talk’, when millions of women and children of color were killed, injured, raped and dispossessed by Madame Clinton’s seven wars? Given the choice, most women would prefer to defend themselves from the stupid words of a vulgar misogynist over the threat of a Clinton-Obama predator drone ripping their families to shreds. Nasty, juvenile words do not compare with a history of bloody war crimes.

It is much easier to denounce Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump than to analyze the consequences of Madame Candidate Clinton’s policies. The mass media, subservient to Clinton, wave the flag of ‘worker struggles’ and highlight ‘capitalist exploitation’ when they describe China, Russia and the businesses of US President-Elect Trump. But their perspective is that of the ‘Uni-Polar Empire’. They cite non-unionized worker protests in Chinese factories and peasants fighting the rapacious developers. They cite corrupt oil sales in Russia. They find cheap immigrant labor employed on Trump’s building projects. The media describe and defend Hong Kong separatists. They heap praise on the Uighar, Chechen and Tibetan terrorists as “freedom fighters” and “liberators”. They fail to acknowledge that, as bad as worker exploitation is in these examples, it is far less horrific than the suffering experienced by millions of local and immigrant peasants and workers who have been injured, killed and rendered jobless and homeless by US bombing campaigns in Libya and US invasion-destruction of Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria. The imperial media’s phony ‘anti-capitalist-exploiter stories’ against Trump, Putin and the Chinese are mere propaganda rhetoric designed to entice leftists, influence liberals and reinforce conservatives by playing on workers’ plight inflicted by national adversaries instead of imperial conquests and egregious crimes against humanity.

These financial scribes are very selective in their critique of economic exploitation: They denounce political adversaries while churning out vapid cultural stories and reports on the ‘eclectic tastes’ of the elite. Their weekend cultural pages may occasionally contain a critique of some predatory financiers next to a special feature on an unusual sculptor or successful upwardly mobile immigrant writer. Day after day, the same financial media publishes predictable ‘bootlickeries’ masquerading as reports on vulture capitalists, warmongers and imperial warlords. They court and offer advice to Wall Street, the City of London and Gulf State sheikdoms. They write in blubbering awe at the bold multi-billion dollar mergers and acquisitions, which eliminate competitive prices and establish effective monopolies. Then they deftly turn to rant against President-Elect Donald Trump’s pronouncements on workers’ rights - he is ‘the demagogue threatening free-market . . . capitalism’.

The fear and loathing of the ‘Wildman’ Trump, so evident in the four most prestigious English language newspapers, is nowhere to be found in reference to Secretary Clinton’s pathological glee over the gruesome torture-murder of the injured President Gadhafi by her allied jihadi tribesmen. The global and domestic implications of the US Secretary of State expressing glee and high pitched squeals on viewing the filmed torture and final ‘coup de grace’ on the wounded head of the Libyan President was never analyzed in the respectable press. Instead, the press superficially covers the plight of millions of immigrants and refugees who would never have left their jobs and homes were it not for the US destruction of the Middle East and North Africa. The respectable media defend the US officials directly responsible for the plight of these migrants flooding and threatening to destabilize Europe.

The same newspapers defend the ‘human rights’ of Chinese workers in local and US-owned factories who out-competed domestic American factories, but ignore the plight of millions of unemployed and destitute workers trying to survive in the US war zones and Israeli-occupied territories.

The Presidential elections made millions of American voters starkly aware of the mendacity of the mass media and the corruption of the Clinton political elite.

The media and the Clinton-elite denounced the Trump voters as ‘deplorables’ and totally mischaracterized them. They were not overwhelmingly unemployed, bitter former industrial workers or minimum wage, uneducated racists from the gutted ‘heartland’. ‘Angry white male workers’ constituted only a fraction of the Trump electorate. Trump received the vote of large sections of suburban middle class professionals, managers and local businesspeople; joined by downwardly mobile Main Street shopkeepers, garage owners and construction contractors. A majority of white women voted for Trump. City household residents, still trying to recover from the Obama-Clinton era mortgage foreclosures, formed an important segment of the Trump majority, as did underpaid university and community college graduates - despairing of ever finding long-term stable employment. In short, low-paid, exploited and precarious business owners and service sector employees formed a larger section of the Trump majority than the stereotyped ‘deplorable angry white racists’ embedded in the media and Clinton-Sanders propaganda.

Post-election media has magnified the political significance and size of the anti-Trump demonstrations. Altogether the demonstrators barely surpassed a hundred thousand in a country of 100 million voters. Most have been white students, Democratic Party activists and Soros-financed NGOs. Their demonstrations have been far smaller than the huge pro-Trump public rallies during the campaign. The pro-Clinton media, which consistently ignored the size of Trump’s rallies, doesn’t bother to make any comparison. They have focused exclusively on the post-election protest, completely papering over the outrageous manipulation by which the Democratic National Committee under ‘Debbie’ Wasserman Schultz cheated Clinton’s wildly popular left-wing rival, Bernie Sanders, during the primaries.

Instead, the media has been featuring Clintonesque ‘feminist’ professionals and ‘identity’ political activists, ignoring the fact that a majority of working women voted for Trump for economic reason. Many politically conscious African-American and Latino women knew that Clinton was deeply involved in policies that deported 2 million immigrant workers and family members between 2009 - 2014 and destroyed the lives of millions of women of color in North and Central Africa because of her war against the government of Libya. For millions of female and male workers, as well as immigrants - there was a ‘lesser evil’ - Trump. For them, the Donald’s nasty remarks about women and Mexicans were less disturbing than the real history of Hillary Clinton’s brutal wars destroying women of color in Africa and the Middle East and her savage policies against immigrants.

The more bizarre (but transient) aspect of the anti-Trump smear campaign came from a hysterical section of the pro-Hillary ‘Zionist Power Configuration’ (ZPC) and ‘Israel-First’ crackpots who accused him and some of his appointees of anti-Semitism. These venomous propagandists slapped the Manhattan real-estate mogul Trump with an odd assortment of labels: ‘fascist’, ‘misogynist’, ‘anti-Israel’, Ku Klux Klan apologist and White Nationalist. The Minnesota Senator and former comedian Al Franken described Trump’s critique against Wall Street Bankers and finance capital as ‘dog whistles’ for anti-Semites, labeling the candidate as a 21st century disseminator of the ‘Protocols of Zion’. Senator Franken darkly hinted that ‘rogue’ (anti-Semitic) agents had infiltrated the FBI and were working to undermine Israel’s favorite, Clinton. He even promised to initiate a post-election purge of the FBI…upon Clinton’s victory… Needless to say, the Senator’s own rant, published (and quickly buried) two days before the election in the Guardian, did not help Madame Hillary with the security apparatus in the United States. History has never been a strong point with the Comedian Senator Al Franken, who should have know better than to threaten the deep security state: his Mid-West predecessor Senator Joseph McCarthy quickly deflated after he threatened the generals.

The accusations of anti-Semitism against Trump were baseless and desperate: The Trump campaign team has prominently included Jews and Israel-Firsters and secured a minority of Jewish votes, especially among smaller businesspeople supporting greater protectionism. Secondly, Trump condemned anti-Semitic acts and language and did not appeal to any of the extremist groups - let alone ‘cite the Protocols of Zion’.

Thirdly (and predictably) the Zionist Anti-Defamation League (ADL) slapped an anti-Semitic ‘guilt by association’ label on Donald Trump because of his consistent criticism of US wars and occupations in the Middle East, which Trump had correctly pointed out cost the US over two trillion dollars - money that would have totally rebuilt the failing US infrastructure and created millions of domestic jobs. For the loony ADL, the US wars in the Middle East have enhanced Israel’s security and thus any opposition to these wars is anti-Semitic or ‘guilt by association’.

The ADL directors, who have raked in over $3 million dollar salaries over the past 5 years ‘protecting’ US Jews, objected to Trump because Hillary Clinton was the darling of the pro-war Israel-First lobbies and Obama-Clinton appointees.

Trump’s daughter Ivanka (a convert to Judaism) is married into a prominent Orthodox Jewish family with strong ties to Israel; the Trump clan is close to elements among the Israeli elite, including the uber-racist Netanyahu. These hysterical slanders against ‘Trump the Anti-Semite’ reflect the fact that the most prominent domestic Jewish power bloc, ‘the 52 Presidents of American Jewish Organization’ had invested heavily in Hillary Clinton. No matter what the cost, no matter what the land grab, no matter how many Palestinians were ‘killed or maimed by Jewish settler-vigilantes’; the State of Israel could always count on Clinton’s unconditional support. The Lobby would not need to ‘petition’ their ‘First Woman’ President; Madame Hillary would have anticipated Israel’s every desire and even embellished their rhetoric.

In the end, Senator Al Franken’s rabid anti- Trump rant went too far . . . vanishing from the Guardian website in less than one day. Influential Zionist organizations turned their backs on the Senator Comedian; the Zionist Organization of America reprimanded the ADL for its intemperate slanders - sensing that Clinton could lose.

The Franken-Zionist power structure’s last-ditch efforts to attack Trump must have provoked a very negative response within the US ‘deep state’. There can be no doubt that the entire intelligence, military and security elites struck back and put their organizational

‘thumb on the scale’. The FBI’s release of damaging documents related to Secretary Clinton undermined the ADL’s candidate in the run-up to the election and hinted at an interesting power struggle behind the curtains.

The FBI’s release of confidential documents, likely including epistles from Chappaqua to and from Tel Aviv, linked tangentially to the pedophilic crimes of the disgraced Congressman (and former Clinton ally) Anthony Weiner was a heavy blow. The Netanyahu Cabinet put distance between themselves and their favorites, probably telling AIPAC leaders to muzzle Al Franken and pretend his threats to purge the FBI had never been launched. They were clearly worried that their lunatic attack dogs could set the entire US Security State on a hostile track against Israel.

The Franken-ADL trial balloon fizzled and disappeared. The intelligence establishment pounded the final nail into the coffin of Hillary Clinton’s Presidential aspirations. She even briefly accused the FBI of ruining her candidacy - hinting at some partial but oversimplified truth. A Zionist darling to the end, Hillary would never dare to identify and castigate the crazy and incompetent Zionist provocateurs that had helped to turn the Deep State against Madame Secretary.

A last note: Once Clinton lost and Trump took ‘the prize’, the Zionist Power Structure deftly switched sides: the former ‘Anti-Semite’ candidate Trump became ‘Israel’s Best Friend in the White House’. None of the 52 leading Zionist organizations would join the street protests. Only vulture-speculator George Soros (who had bet heavily on the wrong horse) would finance the motley group of goys marching in the streets and collecting on-line petitions for ‘democracy’.

The foibles, fables and failure of the financial press and their keepers lost the elections but are back, hard at work, remaking President-Elect Trump into a global free marketer.

[PufPuf93]