Sunday, May 27, 2018
Out Of Touch Billionaire Wrote A Book Specifically To Shít On Bernie Sanders
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d03IBfuud6Y
Creepy Koch bros are spending $20M to convince US voters their tax plan is good
Before you start feeling too
sanguine about the Democrats’ chances in the 2018 midterm elections, I am here
to ruin your day: Bloomberg reported on Wednesday that groups affiliated
with and funded by the Koch brothers are slated to spend $20 million to sell
last year’s class war tax plan to voters.
Most of that money will go to
television ads—the group has already run more than 4,460 TV spots this year in
Indiana, attacking the Democratic incumbent Senator Joe Donnelly for voting
against the tax package—but some will reportedly pay for direct, door-to-door
canvassing, complete with Koch-funded iPads for the smoothest canvassing
experience:
After each visit, AFP workers
log answers from voters to three questions: Were they aware of the tax
legislation? Do they support it? And do they think Donnelly’s vote against it
hurt Hoosiers? At unanswered doors, workers leave literature highlighting
Donnelly’s vote against the legislation and urging voters to “tell him to make
the tax relief permanent.”
Creepy shit!
This has been going on for a
while, in fact. Americans for Prosperity started canvassing about the tax package last October, before
the final bill was even passed, employing a small army of unfortunate high
school students. The New York Times reported at the time that the
group had “hit more than 41,000 homes and made 1.1 million phone calls.” With
the midterms approaching, however, the Koch groups are targeting vulnerable
Democratic senators.
It remains to be seen if this
will work. The tax cut bill was politically savvy in that it pushes all the
financial pain into the future—the tax benefits that middle and lower income
people will receive are much greater in 2018 than they will be in 2027, when
lower-income people will actually see higher taxes as millionaires and
billionaires continue to get huge cuts. By 2027, if we aren’t all dead from the
First Gamer Wars of 2024, the simple passage of time will save the GOP from
political responsibility for their mess; it won’t be so easy for Democrats in
2027 to run on opposing a GOP tax bill that was passed 10 years back.
And still, Bloomberg reports
(and polls indicate), the public isn’t totally convinced:
For Republicans hoping to
stave off Democratic victories in November’s elections, the party will have to
do a better job of selling the overhaul to the public. It won’t be easy. Tax
policy is notoriously complicated. And if the responses to Porter’s efforts on
a recent Saturday are any indication, people are skeptical. “I don’t think my
check has changed,” says Linda Meredith, a 52-year-old bartender who was among
those visited. Meredith says she supported the tax changes. Then she adds:
“They’re going to benefit the rich.”
That is correct, Linda. And,
as New York magazine’s Eric Levitz pointed out in March, there are likely a lot of Lindas out
there:
Since late January, approval
of the tax law in Monmouth University’s survey fell by three points to
41 percent – while the Democrats’ lead in the 2018 race swelled by seven, from
a mere 2 percent to 9. Meanwhile, Quinnipiac’s latest pollhas support for the tax law
declining three points to 36 percent, and opposition rising three points to 50
percent.
Another bad sign for the
Republicans: Most people say they haven’t seen a change in their
paychecks since the bill was passed. Whether or not they actually have, the
fact that they haven’t noticed a positive change will make it harder for
Republicans to claim that they’ve handed out a big fat wad of freedom dollars
to voters.
Still, this shows is the
Republican party and their billionaire backers have a very smart, very
advanced, and very expensive infrastructure in place to advocate on issues
exactly like this, and they’ll continue to do so however hard Trump owns
himself on Russia, paying off a porn star, or whatever comes next. Americans
for Prosperity has been doing this, iPads and all, for years. It has practically unlimited
money at its disposal; as long as there are billionaires who will benefit from
massive tax cuts, there will be millions to spend on trying to sell Americans
on whatever raw deal they’re hawking next.
Assange 'split' Ecuador and Spain over Catalan independence
WikiLeaks founder met
separatists and tweeted on the issue, which sources say triggered a backlash
from Madrid
This article was written in
collaboration with Fernando Villavicencio and Cristina Solórzano
from Focus Ecuador
Julian Assange’s intervention
on Catalan independence created a rift between the WikiLeaks founder and the
Ecuadorian government, which has hosted Assange for nearly
six years in its London embassy, the Guardian has learned.
Sources who spoke on condition
of anonymity said Assange’s support for the separatists, including a meeting in
November, led to a backlash from Spain, which in turn caused
deep concern within Ecuador’s government.
While Assange’s role in
the US
presidential election has been an intense focus of US prosecutors, his
involvement in Spanish politics appears to have caused Ecuador the most pain.
The Ecuadorians cut
Assange’s internet connection and ended his access to visitors on 28
March, saying he had breached an agreement at the end of last year not to issue
messages that might interfere with other states.
Quito has been looking
to find a solution to what it increasingly sees as an untenable
situation: hosting one of the world’s most wanted men.
In November 2017, Assange
hosted two supporters of the Catalan independence movement, whose push for
secession from Spain had plunged the country into its worst
political crisis since returning to democracy.Assange has said he
supported the right to “self-determination” and argued against “repression”
from Madrid.
He was visited by Oriol Soler,
a Catalan businessman and publisher, and Arnau Grinyó, an expert in online
communications campaigns. Their meeting, which was reported
by the Spanish press, took place a little over a month after the unilateral
Catalan independence referendum, and 13 days after the Spanish government
responded to the unilateral declaration of independence by sacking the
administration of the then Catalan president, Carles Puigdemont, and assuming
direct control of the region.
Assange has been a vocal
critic of Madrid’s handling of the Catalan crisis and described
the independence movement as “the redefinition of the relationship
between people and state”, and “the most disciplined Gandhian project since
Gandhi”.
What is occurring in Catalonia
is the redefinition of the relationship between people and state. The most
disciplined Gandhian project since Gandhi. Its results will spread everywhere.
Though Assange’s supporters
deny he explicitly supported Catalan independence, his tweets and videos on the
issue annoyed the Spanish government.
A Spanish diplomat told the
Guardian that Spain “conveyed a message” to Ecuadorian authorities that Assange
was using social media to support the secessionist movement and sending out
messages “that are at odds with reality”.
“Spain and Ecuador are obviously
countries that maintain a constant and fluid dialogue in which matters of
interest to both parties, including this issue, are raised and discussed,” the
diplomat said.
“Spain has, on a number of
occasions, informed the Ecuadorian authorities of its concerns over the
activities that Julian
Assange has engaged in while in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.”
The source said Spain’s
foreign minister, Alfonso Dastis, had also addressed the issue when it arose in
November, saying attempts had been made “to intervene, manipulate and affect
what should be the natural democratic course of events in Catalonia”.
In December, Ecuador’s
president, Lenín Moreno, reminded Assange that he should refrain
from trying to intervene in Ecuadorian politics.
US intelligence agencies and
Spanish authorities have separately claimed that Russia
has had a hand in their domestic affairs. US agencies have accused
WikiLeaks of working with Russian intelligence to try to disrupt the US
election by releasing
hacked emails from Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, and
Spanish officials have suggested that much of the messaging on social media
about the Catalan crisis originated in Russia.
Soler and Grinyó declined to
comment on their meeting with Assange. However, in a tweet written four
days after visiting the embassy, Soler said the Catalan independence
movement sympathised with Assange, as its leaders and activists had “suffered
jail, exile, spying, censorship, injustice, fake news and financial blockades”.
The visit, he added, had been transparent and legal.
In 2016, Assange met two
members of the anti-austerity party Podemos, according to
visitor logs obtained by the Guardian in conjunction with the magazine Focus
Ecuador.
They were Pablo Bustinduy, the
foreign affairs spokesman, and Miguel Ongil, a deputy in the Madrid regional
assembly and a party funding, transparency and anti-corruption expert. Podemos
opposed a unilateral referendum on secession, but said it would in principle
have supported an independence referendum agreed between the Spanish and
Catalan governments.
A spokesman for Podemos told
the Guardian: “Pablo Bustinduy visited Assange in the embassy while on a trip
to London to take part in the pro-remain Brexit campaign. He was accompanied by
Miguel Ongil, a specialist in the fields of transparency and political
participation.
“It was an informal visit,
during which they discussed the issues of protecting whistleblowers, freedom of
expression and information in Europe, and democracy
on the internet. They also inquired after his legal situation.”
A spokesperson for Ecuador’s
foreign ministry said: “[We reiterate that] Ecuador maintains excellent and
fraternal relations with Spain and the vast majority of countries.”
Is it even possible to oppose capitalism anymore?
March 2, 2018
by SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK
In today’s historical
constellation, is the cupola limited to the Western affluent countries (and its
copies all around the world), so that the proletarian struggle to break into
the cupola is to be identified with the struggle against the scarecrow of
‘eurocentrism’?
Along these lines, in his ‘On
the Twilight of the West’, Pankaj Mishra advocates ‘a return to the
Ottoman-style confederal institutions that devolve power and guarantee minority
rights’:
"In the 21st century,
that old spell of universal progress – whether through Western-style socialism,
or capitalism and democracy – has been decisively broken. The optimistic
assumptions dating from the 19th century that these universalist ideologies and
techniques will deliver endless growth and political stability cannot be
sustained [. . .] The global crisis, which is as much moral and intellectual as
it is political and environmental, puts into question above all our long
submission to Western ideas of politics and economy. Whether it is catastrophic
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or disastrous interventions in Libya, the
financial crisis of 2008, soaring unemployment in Europe, which seems like a
problem with no solution, and is likely to empower far-right parties across the
continent, the unresolved crisis of the euro, hideous income disparities in
both Europe and the United States, the widespread suspicion that big money has
corrupted democratic processes, the absurdly dysfunctional American political
system, Edward Snowden’s revelations about the National Security Agency, or the
dramatic loss of a sense of possibility for young people everywhere – all of
this separately and together has not only severely depleted the West’s moral
authority but also weakened its intellectual hegemony [. . .]
This is why its message to the
rest of the world’s population can no longer be the smooth reassurance that the
Western way of life is the best, which others should try to replicate
diligently in their own part of the world through nation-building and
industrial capitalism [. . .] Reflecting on the world’s ‘pervasive raggedness’,
the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz once spoke of how ‘the shattering
of larger coherences’ into ‘smaller ones, uncertainly connected one with another,
has made relating local realities . . . with the world overall, extremely
difficult. If the general is to be grasped at all,’ Geertz continued, ‘and new
unities uncovered, it must, it seems, be grasped not directly, all at once, but
via instances, differences, variations, particulars – piecemeal, case by case.
In a splintered world, we must address the splinters’ [. . .] The Western path
to modernity can no longer be regarded as ‘normal’; it cannot be the standard
against which historical change in other parts of the world is measured.
Europeans had created their own kind of modernity in the very particular
historical circumstances of the 19th and 20th centuries, and other people have
been trying since then, with varying degrees of success, to imitate it. But
there are, and always were, other ways of conceiving of the state, society,
economy, and the good life. They all have their own specific difficulties and
challenges. Nevertheless, it will be possible to understand them only through
an open and sustained engagement with non-Western societies, and their
political and intellectual traditions. Such an effort, formidable in itself,
would also go against every instinct of the self-regarding universalism the
West has upheld for two centuries. But it will be needed if we wish to
seriously confront the great problem confronting the vast majority of seven
billion human beings: how to secure a dignified and sustainable life amid
deepening inequality and animosity in an interdependent world.
These long passages are worth
quoting since they render in a concise way the post-colonial common sense: we
should recognize the failure of Western civilization as a global model, and the
failure of those decolonized nations that tried to emulate it. There is
nonetheless a problem with this diagnosis: yes, the lesson of post-9/11 is the
end of the Fukuyama dream of global liberal democracy; but at the level of
economy, capitalism has triumphed worldwide – the Third World nations that are
now growing at spectacular rates are those which endorsed it. The mask of
cultural diversity is sustained by the actual universalism of global capital.
And this new global capitalism functions even better if its political
supplement relies on so-called ‘Asian values’. Global capitalism has no problem
in accommodating itself to a plurality of local religions, cultures,
traditions. So the cruel irony of anti-eurocentrism is that, on behalf of
anti-colonialism, one criticizes the West at the very historical moment when
global capitalism no longer needs Western cultural values (egalitarianism,
fundamental rights, the welfare state) in order to function smoothly, and is
doing quite well with authoritarian ‘alternative modernity’. In short, one
tends to denounce Western cultural values at the very moment that, critically
reinterpreted, many of them can serve as a weapon against capitalist
globalization. And vice versa, as Saroj Giri pointedly noted,
"it is possible that the
immigrants who secure rights thanks to the anti-racist anti-colonial struggle
might be securing the right to free capitalist enterprise, refusing to see,
refusing to ‘open your eyes’, as the angry black yelled at the post-colonial
immigrant. This right to free enterprise is another way to capital accumulation
powered by the post-colonial entrepreneur: it produces ‘unfree labor’ and
racialized class relations in the name of challenging the colonial rule of
difference [. . .] There is a closet Ayn Randian class position underpinning
the anti-racism of hyperbolic anti-colonialists – it is then not difficult to
see that the non-modern, radical alterity upon which the anti-colonial is
premised now stands for the capitalist universal."
Giri’s last sentence should be
taken in all its Hegelian stringency: the ‘concrete universal’ of today’s
global capitalism, the particular form which overdetermines and colors its
totality, is that of the ‘anti-colonial’ non-European capitalist.
Giri’s point is not simply to
assert the primacy of economic ‘class struggle’ over other struggles (against
racism, for sexual liberation, etc.) – if we simply decode racial tension as a
rejection of class differences, such a direct displacement of race onto class
is effectively a reductionist way of obfuscating the very dynamic of class
relations. Giri refers here to Jared Sexton’s writings in the aftermath of the
1992 Los Angeles uprising, where he
"critiques scholars like
Sumi Cho who argue that ‘the ability (of Korean Americans) to open stores (in
black neighborhoods) largely depends upon a class variable.’ Hence, ‘many of
the tensions (between these groups) may be class-, rather than racially based,
actually rejecting differences between the store-owning Korean immigrants and
the African-American customers.’ As Sexton shows, this class analysis does not
have anything to do with class struggle as class is abstracted from any real
unequal social relations. Secondly, ‘the mention of class-based relation is
done in order to mitigate the resentment and hostility supposedly born of
“cultural differences and racial animosities”.’ Thus for Cho, ‘the ability to
open stores (Korean businesses) largely depends upon a class variable, as
opposed to a racial one.’ A watered-down politically sterile notion of class is
invoked even as the question of anti-black racism is diluted. Sexton calls this
approach ‘subordinating the significance of race while pacifying the notion of
class’ [. . .] This is where we encounter the familiar story of the
post-colonial immigrants making great entrepreneurs and keeping the American
Dream alive even as other ‘illegal’ and undocumented migrants are pushed to the
bottom and even as a vast majority of blacks are reduced to not just
marginalization and deprivation but ‘social death’ [. . .] this backhanded
emphasis on class is a way to reduce the overdetermined status of the black
poor to what looks like the natural outcome of (free) market relations."
Do we not encounter here an
exemplary case of the very reference to class being a means of obfuscating the
concrete functioning of class struggle? Class difference itself can be the
fetish which obfuscates class struggle.
The Western legacy is
effectively not just that of (post-)colonial imperialist domination, but also
that of the self-critical examination of the violence and exploitation that the
West brought to the Third World. The French colonized Haiti, but the French
Revolution also provided the ideological foundation for the rebellion that
liberated the slaves and established independent Haiti; the process of de-colonization
was set in motion when the colonized nations demanded for themselves the same
rights that the West took for itself. In short, one should never forget that
the West provides the very standards by means of which it (as well as its
critics) measures its criminal past. We are dealing here with the dialectic of
form and content: when colonial countries demand independence and enact the
‘return to roots’, the very form of this return (that of an independent
nation-state) is Western. In its very defeat (losing the colonies), the West
thus wins, imposing its social form on to the other.
The three types of
subjectivity that, according to Alain Badiou, are operative in global
capitalism, do not cover the entire field. There is the hegemonic Western middle-class
subjectivity that perceives itself as the beacon of civilization; there are
those possessed by the desire for the West; and there are those who, out of the
frustration of their desire for the West, turn towards (self-)destructive
nihilism. But there is also the global-capitalist traditionalism: the stance of
those who, while fully participating in global capitalist dynamics, try to
contain its destabilizing excesses by relying on some traditional ethics or way
of life (Confucianism, Hinduism, etc.).
The European emancipatory
legacy cannot be reduced to ‘European values’ in the predominant ideological
sense, i.e., to what our media refer to when they talk about how our values are
threatened by Islam; on the contrary, the greatest threat to what is worth
saving from the European legacy are today’s (anti-immigrant populist) defenders
of Europe themselves. Plato’s thought is a European event; radical
egalitarianism is European; the notion of modern subjectivity is European;
communism is a European event if there ever was one. When Marxists celebrate
the power of capitalism to disintegrate old communal ties, when they detect in
this disintegration the opening of a space for radical emancipation, they speak
on behalf of the emancipatory European legacy. That’s why Walter Mignolo and
another post-colonial anti-eurocentrists attack Badiou and other proponents of
communism as all too European: they dismiss the (quite correct) idea of
communism being European and, instead of communism, propose as the source of resistance
to global capitalism some ancient Asian, Latin American or African
traditions. There is a crucial choice to be made here: do we resist global
capitalism on behalf of the local traditions it undermines, or do we endorse
this power of disintegration and oppose global capitalism on behalf of a
universal emancipatory project? The reason anti-eurocentrism is so popular
today is precisely because global capitalism functions much better when its
excesses are regulated by some ancient tradition: global capitalism and local
traditions are no longer opposites, they are on the same side.
Let us take an example, one
that challenges the stance that local customs are sites of resistance. In the
autumn of 2016, a 55-year-old former pastor in Santiago Quetzalapa, a remote
indigenous community 450 kilometers south of Mexico City, raped an 8-year-old
girl, and the local court condemned him to buy the victim’s father two crates
of beer. Santiago Quetzalapa is in Oaxaca state, where many indigenous communities
are ruled by an idiosyncratic system popularly known as usos y costumbres
(‘traditions and customs’), supposed to enshrine the traditions of diverse
indigenous populations. Officials in usos y costumbres communities
have previously used the framework as a pretext to exclude women from local
government; for example, Eufrosina Cruz Mendoza, an indigenous woman, won the
mayoral election, but was denied office by local leaders because of her gender.
Cases like these clearly demonstrate that local popular customs are in no way
to be revered as a form of resistance to global imperialism. The task is rather
to undermine them by supporting the mobilization against these customs of local
indigenous people themselves, as in Mexico where indigenous women are organized
in effective networks.
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