By Any Means Necessary Discussion of Nationwide post-George Floyd Uprising and My "Over the Rainbow" Article (6/9/2020)

At George Floyd's Funeral, Biden Offers Lots of Words, Little Action

In this episode of By Any Means Necessary hosts Sean Blackmon and Jacquie Luqman are joined by Jim Kavanagh, a political analyst and contributor to Counterpunch and ThePolemicist.net, to talk about his latest article, “Over the Rainbow: Paths of Resistance After George Floyd,” the awkward and largely-symbolic responses by Democrats to the mass uprising, and why both the party and the black capitalist class appear to be attempting to co-opt the language of protesters while refusing to commit to core demands like defunding the police.

The Siege of Venezuela and The Travails of Empire

Not on CNN or MSNBC. Four of the huge pro-government rallies held throughout Venezuela on February 1^st 
(Photo: PSUV)

Here’s the bullet-point version:

• It’s imperialism.
• It’s American imperialism, a bipartisan national project.
• American imperialism is the global management of capitalist class power.
• It’s a binary situation in which one side or the other will win via the use and threat of armed force.
• It’s trouble for Venezuela and for imperialism.
• There’s no such thing as Progressive Except Imperialism.

Here’s the long rant:

The United States government’s new offensive against Venezuela is an act of naked imperialism.

I predicted last year that Venezuela would be the first new country hit by the Trump administration’s indispensable need to establish its American-exceptionalist, “Presidentialist,” bona fides. It is the Goldilocks target. Not too small: It is, in fact, a significant country with world's largest oil reserves, and a proclaimed socialist government that's been a thorn in the gringo boot on Latin America for almost twenty years. Not too big: It’s no military match for U.S. & Latin American proxy armed forces, and nobody will start WWIII to defend it. Just right: A decisive win, at little apparent cost. And just the kind of amuse-bouche needed to get the U.S. population’s juices flowing for a more costly and difficult attack on the ultimate target—Iran. At least, that’s the way they think.

Ship of Fools: What Trump Teaches

It happened.

Yes, I was surprised. Since I spend a lot of time in western Pennsylvania, I knew there was more support for Trump than the media let on, but he just seemed too incompetent, incoherent, and disorganized a candidate to defeat the Clinton machine. I enjoyed torturing my friend who has been very close to Hillary for decades with scary stories about Trump surging. But in our early election day texting, I confessed that I thought it would be called for Hillary by 11PM at the latest. I was as wrong as everyone else.

I did not vote for either Hillary or Trump, and was resigned to taking my chances with either horrible outcome, but I was implicitly anticipating the dangers of a Clinton administration. I also thought, however, that there might be one positive effect of Hillary’s presidency. Contrary to what might be considered the usual leftist line that electing the explicitly ultra-reactionary Trump would foment the revolution, or at least radical discontent, I thought that, in the American context, Hillary being president would help the left the most.

If Trump wins, I argued, and his policies fail miserably and obviously, Democrats and liberals would spend the next four years saying: “See, you should have voted for Hillary,” and channeling oppositional energy into a familiar anti-Trump, anti-Republican, “Let’s make sure we elect a Democrat in 2020” politics—as we saw after Bush’s election in 2000.  The Democrats would once again present themselves as the system’s way out.

On the other hand, I thought that, if Hillary were to win and wreak her expected havoc on America and the world, Democrats and liberals would not be able to blame the Republicans. It would be the left that could say “See what you voted for?” The system would have failed in its Democratic guise. Because this might finally persuade more progressive-minded people to break with the Democratic Party once and for all. It was Hillary’s presidency, not Trump’s, that would open new paths for the left.

Now we have Donald Trump as president. His election is a disgrace, and we know what a disaster his administration will be for the country and the world. Mr. Anti-establishment, “drain the swamp,” tribune of the forgotten, is already filling up his clown car cabinet with the same-old tired Republican reactionaries and incompetents (Sarah Palin, Giluliani, Christie, Bolton), not to mention turning to industry and Wall Street lobbyists (and here) and, of course, Goldman Sachs (Steven Mnuchin) to run the Treasury. As business news site Quartz so aptly headlines: Trump criticized Clinton for her Wall Street ties, but he’s the best thing to happen to big banks.

Lawyers, Guns, and Twitter: Gun Battles and Class Struggle after San Bernardino

Kent State, 1970 
14-year-old Mary Ann Vecchio, crying over the body of 20-year-old Jeffery Glenn Miller. Photo: John Filo

As can be expected, in the aftermath of the horrific San Bernardino mass murder committed by Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik in December, the issue of “gun control” and “gun violence” comes to the fore again, highlighted by a teary appeal from President Obama for new “gun safety” measures. I’ve dealt with the issue of gun rights in a comprehensive essay after a previous mass shooting (Sandy Hook), and I stand by the position laid out therein.¹

There are two considerations that, I think, count for something:

1)   The right to own firearms is an important political right. That is not a right-wing position. In fact, I consider the defense of that right part of the populist tradition in left revolutionary politics. Therefore, any necessary regulations on that right – and there will be some – must be as carefully considered as the limitations on any other important right.

2)   The American capitalist state is an apparatus whose main purpose is to protect class rule and its accompanying injustices, and to project compliance-inducing aggression on behalf of the American elite and its favored allies — locally, nationally, and internationally. Any mitigations of these injustices and aggressions are not the products of the liberal state’s inherent neutrality and altruism. They are the hard-won, always-precarious, fruits of social movements that scare the liberal capitalist state into forgoing particular wars, advancing particular minority and civil rights, establishing remunerative social welfare policies. etc.

In most “gun control” discourse, the first point — that gun ownership is a fundamental political right — counts for less than nothing. Most such discourse, in fact, considers it important that gun ownership not be considered a right, but some kind of frivolous luxury. Those who think that should acknowledge it, and advocate openly for the rescission and denial of that right, as do now the major organs of mainstream liberal opinion in the United States, the Washington Post (“The problem with Obama’s promise not to take away your guns”) and the New York Times (“it would require Americans who own those kinds of weapons to give them up”). The strongest, most forthright, statement of this position is given by Israeli-American sociologist Amitai Etzioni in his Huffington Post column, “Needed: Domestic Disarmament, Not 'Gun Control'”.²

How Capital Steals Wealth from Labor.

The Picture of Inequality

Most Americans carry around in their heads an image of the socio-economic world they live in that is inaccurate on the order of psychosis. It's as if they saw the Empire State Building as 50 feet tall. And it's important that they do not have it corrected. That's why this video, which seems to have gone viral, is an excellent educational tool. (Despite its ritual dismissal of "socialism.") Burn this more accurate picture in your mind. And understand how "middle class" is a muddling concept.

Here, Kitty

Where has it gone? $9 doesn't even make up half the difference.

Reminder: It Has Happened Here

Class warfare. It has happened here. Every social advance, every social benefit that was won from the American ruling class, was only ceded because organized labor fought for it. And every single one is now being rescinded because American working people and their erstwhile supporters are not fighting for them. Would there be any proposals for cutting Social Security and Medicare, while the banksters received trillions of dollars in subsidies, if the politicians knew they would be facing resistance like this? Class warfare. Sometimes it's obvious and sometimes it's not, but it is always there. A fact of capitalist social life. It is happening here -- only, unfortunately, with the working classes agreeing to limit themselves to the inevitably losing tactics and strategies permitted by the their masters. For the moment, at least.

(A nice compendium of clips, with the narration making clear, as always, whose side the media is on.)

Perspective

sources:
http://epi.3cdn.net/2a7ccb3e9e618f0bbc_3nm6idnax.pdf
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_of_wealth#In_the_United_States
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/income-inequality-in-america-chart-graph