Month: November 2019

by William Skink

I usually find the non-American perspective of the Moon of Alabama blog valuable, and this post about the possibility that the House chooses censure over impeachment is interesting, but it’s the following comment from Allen about the role of the Democratic party that I find to be the mosy insightful. it’s a long comment, but worth the read:

The Democratic Party plays an indispensable role in society’s political machinery. This doesn’t mean it has any power, in terms of controlling the state or setting policy. It means that without the existence of the Dem Party, the US could no longer maintain the pretense that it’s a “democracy.” If the Dem Party disintegrated, the US would be revealed for what it really is — a one-party state ruled by a narrow alliance of business interests.

The party’s true function is thus largely theatrical. It doesn’t exist to fight for change, but only to pose as a force which one fine distant day might possibly bestir itself to fight for change. Thus the whole magic of the Dem Party — the essential service it renders to the US power structure — lies not in what it does, but in its mere existence: by simply existing, and doing nothing, it pretends to be something it’s not; and this is enough to relieve despair & to let the system portray itself as a “democracy.”

As long as the Dem Party exists, most Americans will believe we have a “democracy” and a “choice” in how we are ruled. They will not despair, and will not revolt, as long as they have this hope for “change within the system.” From the system’s point of view, this mechanism serves as the ultimate safety valve — it insures against a despairing populace, thus eliminates the threat of rebellion; yet guarantees that no serious change to the system will be mounted, because the Dems weren’t designed to play that role in the first place.

The Democrats are not the “lesser evil;” they are an auxiliary subdivision of the same evil. To understand the political system, one must step back and regard its operation as an integrated whole. The system can’t be properly understood if one’s study of it begins with an uncritical acceptance of the 2-party system, and the conventional characterizations of the two parties. (Indeed, the fact that society encourages one to view it in this latter way, is perhaps a warning that this perspective should not be trusted.)

Any given piece of reactionary legislation is invariably supported by a higher percentage of Republicans than Democrats. Does this show that the Democrats are “less evil?” If one focuses on the efforts of the few outspoken dissenters, it’s easy to feel that the Democrats are somewhat less evil. But in the larger picture, Democrats invariably submit to what their bosses promulgate and the entire range of official opinion thereby shifts to the right. Thus the overall function of Democrats is not so much to fight, as to quasi-passively participate in this ever-rightward-moving process. Just as the Harlem Globetrotters need their Washington Generals to make their basketball games properly entertaining, Republicans need the Democrats for effective staging of the political show.

The Democrats are permitted to exist because their vague hint of eventual progressive change keeps large numbers of people from bolting the political system altogether. If the Democrats potentially threatened any sort of serious change, they would be banned. The fact that they are fully accepted by the corporations and political establishment tells us at once that their ultimate function must be wholly in line with the interests of those ruling groups.

For the Democratic Party to even begin to serve as a vehicle for opposing the absolute rule of capital, it would at a minimum have to be capable of acknowledging the conflict that exists between the interests of capital and the rest of the population; and of expressing a principled determination to take the side of the population in this conflict.

A party whose controlling elements are millionaires, lobbyists, fund-raisers, careerist apparatchiks, consultants, and corporate lawyers; that has stood by prostrate and helpless (when not actively collaborating) in the face of stolen elections, illegal wars, torture, CIA concentration camps, lies as state policy, and one assault on the Bill of Rights after the next, is not likely to take that position.

by William Skink

There aren’t many people I’ve continued reading after year zero of the Trump crisis because we are not in a Trump crisis and the year is 2019.

Michael Krieger’s Liberty Blitzkrieg blog has successfully avoided a monomaniacal focus on Trump by taking a step back and viewing both sides with suspicion. By doing so he is able to arrive at insights that partisans are simply not capable of. Here is the opening of his latest post, The Illiberal World Order:

From a big picture perspective, the largest rift in American politics is between those willing to admit reality and those clinging to a dishonest perception of a past that never actually existed. Ironically, those who most frequently use “post-truth” to describe our current era tend to be those with the most distorted view of what was really happening during the Clinton/Bush/Obama reign.

Despite massive amounts of evidence to the contrary, such people now enthusiastically whitewash the decades preceding Trump to turn it into a paragon of human liberty, justice and economic wonder. You don’t have to look deep to understand that resistance liberals are now actually conservatives, brimming with nostalgia for the days before significant numbers of people became wise to what’s been happening all along.

They want to forget about the bipartisan coverup of Saudi Arabia’s involvement in 9/11, all the wars based on lies, and the indisputable imperial crimes disclosed by Wikileaks, Snowden and others. They want to pretend Wall Street crooks weren’t bailed out and made even more powerful by the Bush/Obama tag team, despite ostensible ideological differences between the two. They want to forget Epstein Didn’t Kill Himself.

Our corporate media helps the public sleepwalk through the day by not highlighting information that could produce cognitive dissonance strong enough to wake them up, like the re-authorization of the Patriot Act last week by Democrats amidst the impeaching charade.

If one were to wake up the world would look much different. Here is some more assistance from Krieger:

Lying to yourself about history is one of the most dangerous things you can do. If you can’t accept where we’ve been, and that Trump’s election is a symptom of decades of rot as opposed to year zero of a dangerous new world, you’ll never come to any useful conclusions. As such, the most meaningful fracture in American society today is between those who’ve accepted that we’ve been lied to for a very long time, and those who think everything was perfectly fine before Trump. There’s no real room for a productive discussion between such groups because one of them just wants to get rid of orange man, while the other is focused on what’s to come. One side actually believes a liberal world order existed in the recent past, while the other fundamentally recognizes this was mostly propaganda based on myth.

The first 6 years of my blogging activities focused on how Democrats were lying to themselves about Obama, Clinton and the dangers posed by Neoliberalism. They couldn’t see how Obama continued developing the notion of a unitary executive, which was cooked up by the Neocons and implemented in the wake of 9/11. The branding of Obama was all they cared about, and if you described what the product was doing beyond the perception management of the labeling, they got very angry and defensive.

Now the only thing that matters is getting rid of bad orange man, and the two sides of that showdown consume two completely seperate narratives about what has transpired the past 3 years.

With the public dangerously dug in to their cognitive bunkers, what will happen when the economic everything bubble pops? Will we turn on each other, doing the work of culling the herd for our benevolent oligarchs, or will we create better local cooperative structures of real sustainability while the billionaires move off shore to their techno-islands to wait out the chaos on the mainland?

Quit it with the dystopia fiction, Skink, YOU are the delusional one!

Yeah, I hope I am. But I also know my history, and it’s not the fairytales we are told growing up. I opened my eyes a long time ago. You can to.

by William Skink

While corporate media carpet-bombed the American public last week with impeachment hearings, provisions of the police state legislation known as the Patriot Act got quietly reauthorized by mostly Democrats, though the hypocrisy stinks on all sides.

From the New Republic:

It may seem to many Americans that Washington is entirely consumed by the impeachment inquiry, and that no other important business is getting done on Capitol Hill. But on Tuesday, in a break from televised hearings, the House of Representatives voted to fund the government through December 20. If passed by the Senate, the continuing resolution would prevent a government shutdown and forestall a debate about border-wall funding.

That’s all well and good, except that Democratic leaders had slipped something else into the bill: a three-month extension of the Patriot Act, the post-9/11 law that gave the federal government sweeping surveillance and search powers and circumvented traditional law-enforcement rules. Key provisions of the Patriot Act were set to expire on December 15, including Section 215, the legal underpinning of the call detail records program exposed in the very first Edward Snowden leak.

“It’s surreal,” Representative Justin Amash told me on Tuesday, just before the vote. Amash, an independent who left the Republican Party over his opposition to President Trump, pointed to the hypocrisy on both sides of the aisle. Republicans have “decried FISA abuse” against the president and his aides, he said, referring to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, “and Democrats have highlighted Trump’s abuse of his executive powers, yet they’re teaming up to extend the administration’s authority to warrantlessly gather data on Americans.”

Hmmm, you don’t think we’re being treated to some kind of kabuki performance from all sides while the real work of the security state marches on, unmolested by the prying eyes of legacy media, now do ya?

by William Skink

Today I recorded an interview for Voice of the People, a radio show airing on KFGM 105.5 in Missoula. The topic? Nick Checota’s Logjam empire and the misuse of Tax Increment Financing. You can find out more about Missoula Community Radio here.

My interview will run tomorrow, Saturday, November 23rd at 12:30pm. Tune in. And stay tuned, because there is definitely more to come.

by William Skink

In less than a month I expect all my videos on Youtube to disappear, along with my account. Despite being directly impacted I haven’t really looked too deeply into Youtube’s new terms of service, or what terms like “non-viable” mean.

Most of my videos have views in the single digits. I’ve made no effort to monetize and market myself, so if Youtube needs to get rid of my dead weight on its bottomline, well, so be it.

Of course there’s more going on here than that, but for now enjoy this freshly uploaded video rendition of my Paddlehead poem.