New Hillaryite Rule Locks Out Sanders, Any Others the DNC Won't Ok as Real Democrats, Thus Formalizing the Party's Hatred of Reformers
'"We just came off a devastating presidential loss in 2016. It would seem to me the actual impetus would be to expand the Democratic Party. I just for the life of me don’t see any motivation for this beyond personal spite,' Mark Longabaugh, a senior adviser to Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign, told Yahoo News.'I scratch my head and ask why they would want to make the party more narrow and more exclusive.' Other progressives echoed Longabaugh’s critique of the new rule on social media, with many noting that such restrictions could demobilize large constituencies that are disaffected with both major political parties...'Democrats don't want Bernie-Most-Popular-Politician-In-America-Sanders running for President, but they're perfectly fine with Mark-Raise-The-Social-Security-Retirement-Age-Warner, because although he commonly votes with Republicans, he IDs as a Democrat...'''
See also: "The Democratic National Committee’s rules and bylaws committee adopted a new rule on Friday that would prevent outsiders like Bernie Sanders from seeking the party’s nomination in the 2020 presidential race. The move seems to be the latest salvo in the ongoing jockeying over the party’s future that emerged following the...bitter primary battle between Hillary Clinton and Sanders in 2016... the move could only have been motivated by lingering animus from the primary race between Clinton and Sanders."
Comment: despite the false pseudo-Left optimism by which these reports attempt to soften the Democratic (sic) National Committee's terminal blow to any rational hope for a progressive takeover of the party, by this new rule the DNC awards itself the absolute power to determine who is and is not a real Democrat. The rule therefore locks in ideological cement overshoes the party's suicidal, already thoroughly documented malice toward Sanders. It also radically expands the party's hateful efforts to exclude all would-be reformers, a brazenly pro-Republican purge exemplified by its maliciously triumphant slandering of Laura Moser. Thus once again we are taught our only possible exit from JesuNazi theocracy is the formation of a genuinely socialist -- and genuinely revolutionary -- party of the Working Class. Indeed the Democrats' fuck-you message to all of us in the 99 Percent was never clearer -- so unmistakable (and such an unmistakable endorsement of Capitalist malevolence) -- even those in the deepest depths of denial can no longer reject it.
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And Here is Always Insightful Paul Street to Tell Us Why the Democrats So Ruled
"The reigning corporate Democrats would rather lose to the right, even to a proto-fascistic white nationalist and eco-exterminist right, than lose to the left, even to a mildly progressive social democratic left within their own party."
Comment: Street's essay -- though it is entirely too pseudo-Leftish for my taste -- was written before approval of the DNC's rule to exclude progressive reformers, but it explains perfectly why the rule was enacted and -- most importantly -- why those of us on the Real Left should forever abandon any (1930s/Stalinist) notion of infiltrating the Democratic (sic) Party and attempting to make it the mechanism of our national redemption.
Additional late-night insight: today's Democratic (sic) Party -- in an exceptionally grotesque example of Orwelliano-Machiavellian deception proven by its ever-more-fawning obedience to its Capitalist masters -- is now the Republican Party's most colossally ambitious false-flag operation ever. It positions the Democrats as a Fifth Column to bolster by discouragement the more obvious Republican effort to shrink voter turnout even as the illusion of two parties helps perpetuate the apocalyptic Big Lie of "American democracy." (Please remember where you read this hypothesis first: on Dispatches' weekend update, 9 June 2018.)
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T/P Regime Resumes Obama's Anti-First Amendment War on Journalists
"Now we know that the Justice Department secretly seized the phone and email records of Ali Watkins, a New York Times reporter, in a leak investigation involving a former Senate staffer. It is the first time the Trump administration is known to have engaged in such an aggressive tactic against a reporter, and it is exactly the kind of press surveillance at which the Obama administration excelled. For years, conservatives attacked Obama for using such tactics to spy on reporters. Of course, there was no outcry from the right on Friday over Trump’s willingness to do the same thing."
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Why We Must “Beware the Democrats and Their Good Billionaires"
"(Starbucks) Executive Chairman Howard Schultz...(fashioned) for himself a shining reputation as a moral capitalist... As a result, he’s become that favored species of Democratic Party hacks: the Good Billionaire...Schultz has political ambitions, perhaps presidential ones. He almost certainly would have been Hillary Clinton’s secretary of labor...And let’s be honest:The psychopathic acquisitiveness required to actively hoard $3 billion is a close relative of the titanic self-regard and absolute megalomania that drive most presidential candidates...On CNBC, Schultz worried that the Democratic Party has drifted too far to the left...and identified the national debt as the great crisis of our time...There you have it..(worsening) austerity, but with a few rainbow flags and diversity seminars. America’s shining, post-Trumpian future.”
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G7 Summit Reveals Europe's Intensifying Hostility to U.S. JesuNazi Imperialism
"This weekend’s summit of the G7 is the most contentious meeting in the body’s 43-year history. It has revealed deep and growing fissures between the United States and its European allies...Looming over the summit is Trump’s June 1 decision to impose sweeping tariffs of up to 25 percent on steel and aluminum imports from the EU and other countries...At the same time, Trump has opened the prospect of cooling off the United States’ two other major geopolitical conflict areas: with North Korea, including a US-North Korean summit scheduled in Singapore immediately after the conclusion of the G7, and with Russia, to which Trump held out the prospect of regaining membership in the G7 after it was ejected in 2014...However, as with the (Nazi) fractured geopolitics of the 1930s, the 'deals' offered by Trump to one or another country are merely the prelude to military conflict. War is on the horizon, though it is not yet clear between whom."
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Poll Shows Seattle Citizenry's Growing Contempt and Hatred of Homeless People
"Seattle residents are not only deeply dissatisfied with how the Seattle City Council has addressed homelessness, but also less willing than they used to be to sign off on new taxes to address the problem, according to a poll of 800 likely voters conducted in March that Crosscut has obtained...Those familiar with the results, who requested anonymity to discuss private polling, were stunned: It’s the first time anyone can recall the usually generous Seattle voters being overwhelmingly skeptical of additional taxation...a shift from just 18 months prior, when voters responded more positively to the idea of increasing spending on homelessness..."
See also: "The campaign to repeal the recently approved (housing-for-homeless-people) tax has gathered more than 20,000 valid signatures...more than what the campaign needs to put a referendum on the ballot next fall, leaving it to voters to decide whether to keep or repeal the tax."
Comment: having had the profound misfortune to have resided in Seattle from 1972 through 1976, I know too well the malicious hypocrisy of the majority of its white residents. Thanks to the courageousness of the late Walter Crowley, I also know of the breathtaking racism, bourgeois socioeconomic bigotry and anti-Jewish malice exposed by the still-officially-secret polling that explained the self-destructive defeat of the Forward Thrust subway proposal as precipitated not as much by the so-called Boeing Bust as by the white Seattleites' decision to listen to their Inner Fascists. (Walter told me of the poll and its results during an otherwise-social late-1970s J&M Cafe conversation that for a moment became the deepest of what in journalism is known as "deep background" briefing. Thus I promised him I would never write about it as long as he was alive, but now that he is dead [and sorely missed], there is no remaining reason for me to keep silent about his disclosures.) Hence given how the old, clandestine poll results inadvertently predict the new poll's results, I would judge Seattle's alleged change of heart toward homeless people to be nothing more than a 21st Century version of the "we-don'-wanna-be-another-Jew-York/yeah-we're-closet-Nazis-deal-with-it-fuck-you" exclamation like the ones of 1968 and 1970, albeit without the never-more-than-whispered "Zieg Heil" asserted quite so loudly.
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How Elite Colleges Protect Their Young Aristocrats from Police-State Savagery
"American police...(are) militarized...occupying forces for America’s poor neighborhoods, not unlike the American military abroad. If one lives in America and is poor, especially black and poor, the police are your oppressor, not your protector...Encountering a police officer, let alone confronting one for their injustice, is a dangerous activity for many in this country. The poor have been abandoned by our government yet they are arrested for petty and necessary crimes done to survive. Once in the system it is even harder to make a legal living and people have no choice but to turn to alternative methods of survival. The police in this country consistently use a call to them as an excuse to hit the victim with a crime of their own. The right to protest is considered a criminal offense, as evidenced by Standing Rock and the protests against President Trump. ICE is becoming an increasingly insidious force that obtains people in extraordinarily inhumane conditions.On the other hand, you have elite college campuses that aim to protect their students of crimes at all costs."
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New Evidence in RFK Murder Prompts Demands for Reopening Case
"Robert Kennedy was shot on June 5 and died June 6, 1968, fifty years ago today. A new examination of evidence is forcing human rights organizations -- including the (Organization of American States) -- to consider probing the case."
See also: "We now live in a country that would be unrecognizable to anyone who died prior to 1968."
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The Empire Escalates Its Efforts to Drag Assange into a Death Chamber
"One day after Ecuadorian Foreign Minister María Fernanda Espinosa declared that her government would continue blocking WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange from all communications and deny him any personal visitors, she was elected president of the United Nations General Assembly...There is little doubt that the treatment of Assange...is the outcome of pressure and threats by the US and other powers. Washington is demanding Assange’s head...to silence him while Washington (seeks) his extradition to stand trial on espionage charges that potentially carry the death penalty.”
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Millennials Favor Unions Over Corporations
"Pew Research Center has just released its annual survey on public opinion and unions in the United States. As in the last few years, the general public views the decline of organized labor negatively.... Sixty-eight percent of people aged 18-29 said they have positive views of unions, while just 46 percent of young people said the same of corporations."
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Last Words (I): Eulogies for Anthony Bourdain
"Anthony Bourdain was the only major American celebrity who succeeded in depicting publicly the Palestinians as rational, caring human beings rather than as irrationally angry 'inciters' to violence. He was the anti-Bernard Lewis. Lewis smeared the world’s 1.8 billion Muslims with the charge of 'Islamic Rage' (as though large swathes of humankind are angry for no reason). Bourdain said, 'The world has visited many terrible things on the Palestinians, none more shameful than robbing them of their basic humanity.'"
See also: "Anthony Bourdain, who was found dead Friday in an apparent suicide, opened his viewers' eyes to issues within and beyond the borders of the United States through food. He also championed many of the communities that affected his work in the kitchen and on screen. Whether it was global poverty, systemic racism in the United States or sexual abuse of women in the workplace, Bourdain frequently used the publicity he earned through his celebrity to draw attention to the issues affecting the people behind the food that he brought into Americans' living rooms. Here are some examples..."
With heartfelt thanks to my dear friend and comrade Brie, who in a poignantly teachable moment told me of Bourdain's significance in her own life and then opened my eyes as to his significance for the rest of our species.
And here is Brie's own tribute to him: "Anthony Bourdain taught me from a young age that food is love and a way to connect with others when language-barriers are present. It's a way to respect and honor your elders and your younger comrades too. He taught me that food is what can bring us together when we think that there is no common ground to be found. Food is also love, service, honor and much more. It's what binds us together and fuels our bodies, minds and souls for the fight we all face daily -- and I'll always treasure the ways Tony Bourdain taught me to serve my comrades and community with love, dignity and respect. For that alone I mourn the loss of a man I never had the pleasure of meeting."
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Last Words (II): Cossacks Dare Verbalize what All Warriors Secretly Know
"There's something dashing and soulful about Russian folk music, especially when it originates with the Cossacks, Russia's warriors of the steppe. This is perhaps the most famous Cossack song, sung at dinners, concerts and campfires. It's a song about a love that is always just out of reach, a strange mix of longing and recklessness. Listen to it. You won't regret it." (The lyrics translated to English are here.)
LB/9 June 2018
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