Sunday, December 2, 2018
Launching Progressive International w/ Bernie Sanders at the Sanders Institute Gathering
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4757NVsUp3c
The Dream of Living With No Risks
December 1st, 2018
Translated by Florencia F.C.
Shanahan
AIDS was probably the first
postmodern event to inaugurate the definitive consolidation of biopolitics and
the appropriation of the concept of risk by the State with the aim of
introducing a regulation, an ordering, and even a prophylaxis of subjectivity.
Threatened by a pandemic of proportions unprecedented since the era of the
great European plagues, and following a first period of perplexity and dread,
the Western subject learned to add a new concern to the shadows that hovered
over him from the political realm.
When, twenty years later, the
Al Qaeda operation against the Twin Towers was broadcast live by all
audiovisual media on the planet, the subject (who in the meantime had mutated,
his Western identity dissolving into the undefined and euphemistic magma of
“global society”) came to realize that from then on risk (his eternal
and not always visible traveling companion) had become converted into the only
dogma of faith to which he could cling.
In losing in an almost
definitive manner its political function, the State has become administrator,
manager and supervisor of the fabulous risk industry, driven by the
alliance between techno-science and capital, a compact that consists in turning
fear into an object of consumption, into a justification for obedience and into
a good argument for organizing new crusades of salvation.
At this point, one cannot help
perceiving the inversion of the sublimatory process that, according to Jacques
Lacan, constituted one of the most extraordinary creations of culture: the fear
of God, capable of “replacing innumerable fears by the fear of a unique being
[…] It was necessary that someone invent it and propose to men, as a remedy for
a world made up of manifold terrors […]” [1].
The “risk society“, in
contrast, returns the contemporary subject to the most primitive feeling of
helplessness in the face of a multiplication of dangers and fears that in turn
are carefully promoted and disseminated, to the point that the demand for
security has become an imperious claim and a new market value. Risk will have
to be measured, predicted, assessed, even mathematicized in commercial figures,
in order to finally become the fundamental rationale of economic, military,
policing, sanitary and judicial strategies.
The subject must train himself
in the recognition and acceptance that his life is definitively besieged by
innumerable real dangers from which he must be protected by policies that –
unfortunately, but for his own good… – will require a progressive loss of
rights and freedoms. Beyond what is supposed by this treatment of castration in
terms of the perverse instrumentalization of the political function, it implies
a radical distance from the ethics of psychoanalysis.
If for Lacan desire is what
justifies the effort to live “when life does not turn someone into a coward”[2], existence conceived as the
minimization, prevention and management of risk entails the enthronement of
solitude and isolation as ways of access to a jouissance which one tries to
purge of all connotation of loss. In the end, war by remote-control and love
via WhatsApp are based on a common logic: to eradicate presence.
[1] Lacan,
J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 3, “The Psychoses”, W. W. Norton &
Company, London; New York, 1997, p. 267.
[2] Lacan,
Jacques, Ecrits, The First Complete Edition in English, Norton & Co.,
London; New York, 2005, p. 660.
Saturday, December 1, 2018
Special counsel, Democrats step up pressure on Trump over Russia, Assange
By Barry Grey
1 December 2018
The latest moves by Special
Counsel Robert Mueller in the Russia investigation underscore the close
coordination between the former FBI director and dominant factions of the
military/intelligence establishment, which, in alliance with the Democratic
Party, are using the fabricated charges of Russian "meddling" and
alleged Trump campaign collusion to pressure Trump into pursuing an even more
provocative and reckless policy against Russia.
This campaign is increasingly
combined with an effort by Mueller to frame up WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange
on espionage or conspiracy charges. The aim is to force Assange from his
enforced refuge at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, so that British
authorities can arrest him and extradite him to the US, where he already faces
federal charges that carry a possible death sentence.
This week's moves by Mueller
also highlight the reactionary substance of the Democratic Party's opposition
to the right-wing Trump administration.
On Thursday morning, Michael
Cohen, Trump's former personal lawyer and "fixer," pled guilty in
Manhattan to a charge brought by Mueller of lying to Congress. Cohen has been
cooperating with Mueller's prosecutors since he pled guilty last August to
violations of campaign finance laws in connection with an election-eve payoff
to silence two women who claimed they had had sexual relations with the
then-Republican presidential candidate. Cohen also pled guilty in August to
unrelated charges of financial fraud.
In statements made to the US
district judge and legal filings by the special counsel's office, Cohen
admitted to lying to Congress about negotiations carried out during the 2016
election campaign between the Trump Organization and Russian officials over a
Moscow Trump Tower project. Cohen said he lied to back false statements made by
Trump that the hotel project talks ended in January 2016, prior to the first
Republican primary election, and that Trump had no input into the negotiations
while running for president. Cohen also contradicted claims by Trump that none
of his family members were involved in the talks.
Mueller's prosecutors made a
point of telling the court they believed Cohen was telling the truth in
connection with his plea bargain. This takes on added significance because
Trump's lawyers last week submitted answers to questions from the special counsel's
office, including queries relating to the negotiations over the Moscow Trump
Tower proposal. This raises the possibility of obstruction of justice charges
against Trump or his aides and family members based on discrepancies between
their accounts to Congress or to Mueller's investigators and that of Cohen.
The surprise court filing and
guilty plea were timed to coincide with Trump's departure for the G20 summit in
Buenos Aires, where he was slated to meet with Russian President Vladimir
Putin. It took place in the context of Ukraine's weekend provocation against
Russia, in which the right-wing, US-backed government in Kiev sent ships into
waters off Crimea claimed by Russia. This was seized on by major media outlets
aligned with the CIA and the Democratic Party to demand that Trump cancel the
meeting with Putin.
Thursday morning's court
appearance by Cohen added fuel to this media campaign, and within hours Trump
reversed himself and announced from his plane en route to Argentina that he was
canceling the Putin meeting. This sequence followed last July's pattern, when,
on the eve of Trump's meeting with Putin in Helsinki, Mueller filed criminal
charges against 12 Russian intelligence officers in connection with Moscow's
alleged Russian interference in the presidential election in support of Trump.
That meeting, where Trump
failed to give unqualified backing to US intelligence claims of Russian hacking
of Democratic Party emails, triggered furious condemnations from the Democrats
and media outlets such as the New York Times, the Washington Post and
CNN, and charges by former top intelligence officials that Trump was guilty of
treason.
Since then, Trump has
escalated the confrontation with Russia, including by withdrawing from the
US-Russia Intermediate-Range Nuclear Treaty. This, however, is not considered a
sufficient demonstration of Trump's readiness to engage in full-scale
diplomatic, economic and, ultimately, military war with Russia.
Leading Democrats seized on
Cohen's plea bargain to step up their anti-Russia campaign and ratchet up the
pressure on Trump. California Congressman Adam Schiff, who is slated to chair
the intelligence committee when the new, Democratic-controlled House of
Representatives takes office in January, announced that his committee would
launch an investigation into Trump's business dealings abroad.
On Monday, Mueller went to
court to declare that former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort had breached
his plea deal agreement by lying to special counsel prosecutors, voiding the
agreement and opening up Manafort to additional charges. This move appears to
be linked to Mueller's increasing focus on Assange, suggesting that Manafort
had refused to give testimony implicating Assange in the hacking of Democratic
campaign emails.
One day later, on Tuesday,
the Guardian newspaper published a scurrilous article making
unsubstantiated claims that Manafort had secretly met on several occasions with
Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy. This was proclaimed by US cable news
networks CNN and MSNBC as a "bombshell" revelation that definitively
implicated Assange.
Both Manafort and WikiLeaks
immediately denied the allegations and threatened to take libel action against
the newspaper. The Guardian quietly amended the original piece to
make its claims somewhat less categorical, and the media subsequently dropped
the allegations entirely.
For their part, the Democrats
have seized on the Cohen plea filing to escalate their McCarthyite-style
attacks on Russia and denunciations of Trump as a Putin "stooge." This
only underscores the fact that the Democrats' opposition to Trump, to the
extent that it exists, is entirely focused on tactical disagreements over US
imperialist foreign policy, with the Democratic Party attacking the militarist
and semi-fascist Trump from the right on his posture toward Moscow.
When it comes to Trump's
general warmongering, his massive expansion of military spending, his
pro-corporate tax cuts and gutting of business regulations, and his
Gestapo-like pogrom against immigrants, the Democrats are virtually silent.
They have responded to their victory in the midterm elections, including the
retaking of the House with a gain of 40 seats—a pale reflection of the scale of
popular anger and opposition to Trump—by reelecting all of the geriatric
right-wingers who have led the House Democratic caucus for more than a decade
and pledging to cooperate with Trump in pushing through his reactionary
domestic agenda.
Casualties of the social counterrevolution in America
1 December 2018
One million dead from suicide,
drug overdoses since 2007
This year’s report on
mortality rates released Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC)
reveal that the American working class is confronting an unprecedented social,
economic, health and psychological crisis.
The CDC’s findings show a
staggering increase in the indices of social misery in just one year, from 2016
to 2017:
Life expectancy dropped from
78.7 to 78.6 years, the third consecutive year-by-year decline.
The age-adjusted death rate
increased 0.4 percent, from 728.8 deaths per 100,000 people to 731.9 per
100,000 (including a 2.9 percent increase among young people aged 25-34).
Drug overdose deaths increased
9.6 percent (including a 45 percent increase in deaths from fentanyl). Drug
overdose is the leading cause of death for those under 55.
Suicide rates increased in
2017 by 3.7 percent, from 13.5 per 100,000 to 14.0 per 100,000.
The report’s historical
figures quantify the devastating impact on the working class of the financial
crash of 2007-2008 and its aftermath.
From 2007 to 2017, suicide
deaths rose from 34,598 to 47,173, a 36.3 percent increase.
Drug overdose deaths nearly doubled,
rising 95.0 percent, from 36,010 in 2007 to 70,237 in 2017.
The total dead from suicide
and drug overdose since 2007 alone is 954,365 people—equivalent to the
population of America’s 10th largest city. This is more than the total number
of US soldiers killed in all of America’s wars, excluding the civil war. With
2018 nearly complete, the total dead has now likely crossed one million people.
The response of the political
establishment to the report is entirely predictable: an article or two in the major
newspapers, a quick segment on the evening news, and maybe a tweet from a
handful of politicians.
But everyone knows that
nothing will be done. The stock prices of the corporations peddling pills to
disabled veterans and injured workers will continue to rise. By tomorrow, the
CDC reports will be long forgotten, buried beneath the ruling class’s
anti-Russia and anti-China campaigns, #MeToo hysteria, and demands for internet
censorship.
The cause of the deaths of
100,000 people per year from social misery is not a great mystery. It is the
product of the capitalist system and the intended result of policies of
deindustrialization and social counterrevolution carried out for more than four
decades by both the Democrats and Republicans, in collaboration with the trade
unions.
This is a widely recognized
fact among medical professionals.
A 2018 study published by
the American Journal of Public Health titled “Opioid Crisis: No Easy
Fix to its Social and Economic Determinants” blames “a multi-decade rise in
income inequality and economic shocks stemming from deindustrialization and
social safety net cuts” for growing differences in life expectancy between the
rich and the poor.
In particular, the study notes
the devastating impact of the massive wealth transfer carried out by the Obama
administration after the 2008 financial crash. “The 2008 financial crisis along
with austerity measures and other neo-liberal policies have further eroded
physical and mental well-being,” the report states.
While the banks and
corporations received trillions in bailouts, millions of workers lost their
homes, their jobs and their sense of dignity and purpose.
Last Monday, when General
Motors announced that it was closing five auto plants and laying off 15,000
workers in the US and Canada, its stock soared nearly 7 percent. For the
company’s affluent shareholders—including the bureaucracy of the United Auto Workers
union (UAW)—this news means longer and more exclusive vacations, new and more
expensive cars and homes, and plenty of jewelry and champagne for the holidays.
But for autoworkers, their
families and the millions of residents of the impacted areas, it means
desperation, drug addiction and death.
Those cities impacted by the
GM plant closures—including Detroit and its Warren, Michigan suburb, White
Marsh, Maryland and Lordstown, Ohio—are already among the most horribly
affected by the opioid crisis after decades of cuts to jobs, wages and social
services. The difference in life expectancy between the richest and poorest 25
percent is already 6.7 years in Youngstown, Ohio, near Lordstown. In metro
Detroit the difference is 8.2 years.
GM’s move was hailed by the
corporate press. The Wall Street Journal and Washington Post (owned
respectively by the multibillionaires Rupert Murdoch and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos)
praised the decision as a stroke of genius. Automotive News named
company CEO Mary Barra “Industry Leader of the Year.”
The duplicitous and staged
anger among a relative handful of Democrats, Republicans and UAW officials to
GM’s move is totally fraudulent. All those politicians and union bureaucrats who
are pounding the podium with one hand are accepting company payoffs with the
other.
GM gave billionaire CEO Donald
Trump $25,000 for his 2016 presidential run and he reciprocated with massive
tax cuts for corporations and the rich. That same year, GM gave more money to
Bernie Sanders ($33,000) than to any other senator.
In 2018, GM contributed to the
campaigns of a majority of those elected to the House and Senate, in
equal parts Democratic and Republican.
As for the UAW, this
organization of bribe-takers and company agents is responsible for decades of
concessions, which have transformed auto towns like Dayton, Toledo and Kokomo
from relatively comfortable communities to epicenters of the opioid crisis. In
return, the union bosses have been well compensated. A growing list of current
and former UAW officials is under federal investigation for accepting bribes
from GM, Fiat-Chrysler and Ford in exchange for helping the companies increase
exploitation and cut labor costs.
Under capitalism, the working
class is entirely excluded from the decision-making process. The political
establishment makes nothing available to help the victims of factory closures
and deindustrialization, leaving them to die.
Instead of meeting the needs
of the working class, the ruling class pockets the wealth created by workers
and allocates trillions of dollars to the military and intelligence agencies so
that they can implement through military force the demands of the banks and
corporations.
The Trump administration cut
more than $200 million from health programs to help pay the cost of locking up
14,000 working-class children from Central America, whose only “crime” was to
flee their impoverished homelands in search of a better life.
In September, the Department
of Health and Human Services announced that it was transferring $16.7 million
from the CDC, $9.8 million from Medicare and Medicaid, $87.3 million from the
National Institute of Health and $80 million from refugee care to establish
internment camps for immigrant children. And Trump wants workers to believe
that immigrants—and not the government and corporations—are to blame for plant
shutdowns and cuts to wages and social programs!
The CDC reports provide a
quantitative expression of the immense social anger and desperation that have
built up in the working class, for which there has been no progressive outlet.
The decades-long suppression of the class struggle imposed by the trade unions
has forced workers to channel their anger inward, and in their isolation, many
are taking self-destructive measures.
But this long period of
one-sided class war is coming to a close. This year, which has seen a major
increase in strike activity, is only the beginning of a new period that will be
marked by increasingly powerful strikes and protests in the US and
internationally.
Workers must build their own
organizations—rank-and-file committees—to unite and coordinate their struggles
across industries and national boundaries. In this way, workers can harness
their collective social dissatisfaction and channel it in a political direction
in the struggle against capitalism and for socialism. By unleashing their
immense social power, workers will storm the commanding heights of the
capitalist system and free up trillions of dollars to meet the urgent needs of
the human race.
Eric London
Trump, The Koch Brothers and Their War on Climate Science
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vM_0kRoRgr0&t=4s
Slavoj Žižek - Is it possible to move beyond the transcendental? [Full lecture]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLsTttR0Sms
Srećko Horvat on Julian Assange & Europe's Progressive Movement
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvqTdRiFGkI
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)