#also overton window democrats are more to the right than most other countries left parties so if you are to the right of them you ARE very

[evilelitest2]

I wanted to echo a few points dimensionalrevolutionary said, as well as respond to a few things you said.

Firstly, implementing socialism without revolution has been tried before. Salvador Allende was a Marxist who was democratically elected President of Chile. As President, he began a number of programs to increase literacy, access to healthcare and employment, access to food, etc. You can look him up on your own time if you so choose. However, in 1973 a military coup forced him out of power and installed Augusto Pinochet, a dictator who killed thousands of innocents and caused many more to flee the country. This coup was backed by the United States, with Henry Kissinger saying “I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.”

In Indonesia, the Communist Party operated within the framework of electoral politics and became the largest non-ruling Communist Party on the planet. In return, the Indonesian government and army conducted mass killings of communists in 1965, resulting in the deaths of around 1 million people (many of whom weren’t even Communist Party members, just wrongfully implicated). It is no coincidence that the socialist states that remain today are those that seized state power via a revolution rather than relying on electoralism. History has shown that any non-violent attempt to achieve socialism is doomed to brutal repression by the bourgeoisie.

Now to address some of your points. Your point on “Sweden’s backsliding is because it’s not diverse enough” is only looking at part of the picture. Obviously part of Sweden’s slide to the far right is due to racist and anti-immigration sentiments, this backsliding has been occurring long before that, as far back as the collapse of the USSR (which provided an incentive to keep Scandinavian workers happy, lest they be influenced by the socialists on the border). AzureScapegoat, a Swedish Marxist, has an excellent video on this through the lens of the Overton Window (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UK1Ikx6el1E).

You say that most revolutions fail, which is true, but as I pointed out above every single attempt to achieve socialism via electoralism has failed. I would rather risk a low-percentage chance at achieving socialism than try the method that has NEVER succeeded.

Setting aside the fact that Hannah Arendt, a pivotal philosopher in defining authoritarianism/totalitarianism, was a massive racist who claimed anti-racism was totalitarianism (which immediately discredits the ideology for me), every government on the planet is “authoritarian.” Liberalism is just as authoritarian, it’s just that the powers-that-be are unelected and unaccountable billionaires who can set the rules of society to their whims by pouring ungodly amounts of money into the legalized bribery that is lobbying.

Regarding your final point on trans rights, while there are some parties that have bad views on LGBT+ rights (such as the KKE in Greece), in general implying that Marxists are uniquely bad when it comes to LGBT+ rights is laughable. The USSR, a country which dissolved over 30 years ago, didn’t have excellent LGBT+ rights? That’s so crazy, I wonder how LGBT+ rights were in the United States at the same time. It’s also laughable to say that the US has better LGBT+ rights than Cuba, a country which recently passed an incredibly progressive family law by popular vote (rather than via 9 unelected judges), and which provides trans Cubans free gender-affirming care (along with their other free healthcare).

Finally, bemoaning a socialist country like China for having worse LGBT+ rights than the USA is incredibly disingenuous. Less than a century ago large parts of China were still feudal. Less than 50 years ago China was a mostly rural society of poor farmers. Expecting Global South countries which have not had the same abilities to develop due to unequal exchange (and often had bigoted law codes forced upon them by imperialist countries) is intellectually dishonest. China’s LGBT+ rights are absolutely behind the United States, but the difference is that China is improving (recently Beijing made transitioning easier and Shanghai opened several clinics for LGBT+ youths), while the USA is backsliding. I feel the trajectory is far more significant.

Again, thanks for the polite response

I'm a historian, you can assume I know who Allende is, both Chille and Indonesia are some very dark stains on US history and the nation needs to apologize for it property. That isn't really a condemnation of social democracy though, its more a condemnation of School of the Americas, like any country is going to have trouble when an imperialist state overthrows there government to force a right wing mass murdering autocrat. Now the communist states who remain today have mostly become super capitalist at this point, so I'm not sure how much of a win that is.

Your youtube friend is simplifying things a tad, after the Soviet Union fell you had backsliding in some areas but also some major progressive reforms in others, its not a clear backslide until the last few years with the anti immigration nonsense because a major schism in Swedish politics has been the fact that it is a very homogenous country. Social Democracy tends to thrive better when it has a broad diverse base to draw upon and a more intersectional foundation

No friend no, you can't just gloss over the revolutionary logistics bit, your a Marxists, you are supposed to be consequentialist about this. WHAT IS YOUR SPECIFIC PLAN. A revolution without a plan is not a revolution, its a Che Guevara tee shirt with extra steps. What is your revolutionary plan in the United States (I assume you are American). What specific revolutionary steps are you taking. Do you know how to use a gun? Do you have an organized cell? What revolutions' are you modeling yourself after? Marx himself talks about this, Revolutionaries who are stuck on the romantic image of revolutions of the past rather than the realities of revolutions in the present. My argument against revolution is that in the United States, there is no model for it working unless circumstances change dramatically, or you secretly have control of the US military

For electoralism, you get tangible results, just compromised and disappointing one. Biden as I said is a centrist hack, but even under him, the United States has move to the left more in the last three years than in the 30 years before. The reason why so many unions are going on strike right now is because of Biden's policies (though possibly unintentionally). It also prevented Trump from turning the US into a dictatorship

I used to work for the Hannah Arendt society, I know her flaws, but she isn't the only scholar on Authoritarianism. (also Marx was racist, like come on dude) Liberals are often authoritarian, which is why i'm not a liberal, I'm a social democrat. Democratic foundations however produce more stable and egalitarian states than dictatorships, dictatorships are inherently right wing, you don't need Hannah Arendt to do that.

The US did have better policies on queer issues than the USSR. Not by much, its was pretty awful, but there is a reason why you managed to get a large gay rights organizing group going in the US and that never really took off in the USSR. This is to not let the US off the hook "better than the USSR" isn't a great moral accomplishment. And to be clear, the USSR was better than any far right government, so credit where its due, but its weird to mythologize a regime that was never good on any queer rights issue.

Cuba is a big reversals, because Castro infamously put gays into camps, but the regime has reversed itself a lot in the last 20 years. So you get one, one communist regime which genuinely got better on queer issues and got better than the capitalist states (though only after the dictators died and the state started to moderate but still). Credit where it is due

To be honest, I think you are taking a pretty patronizing attitude towards China. Even ignoring how China has had a very long homosexual tradition (again its not a Christian country) One of the entire points of communism is about "Dragging" nations in to modernity, even ignoring the problematic Hegalian framework of that, the fact is that the anti queer stuff in CHina isn't just coming from ignorant rural peasants, its from the party itself. In many ways, things got worse for queer people under Mao because the state was centralized enough to actually enforce its will more. China has made some progress in the last ten years, but the Party still to this day has not asserted Homosexuality as a human right

Also parts of the US have backslide, the Blue states have some of the best trans protections in the entire world, like its not good what is happening right now in America, but having lived abroad a lot, it can get so much worse. in the US at least, the majority of the country don't support this backslide, and while the Democrats do suck, they have not backslide as a party, if anything they have moved to be more inclusive (no where near enough though, I don't want to let them off the hook)

Finally, I tend to be much more comfortable with Marxists when they are clearly not tankies, but marxists places get so quickly infested with Tankie nonsense which inevitably leads them to repeat rightists talking points. So how the typical marxist response to the crisis in Ukraine is basically a copy/paste of Tucker's Carlson's talking points. I understand that not all Marxists are tankies, but I do think Marxism as an ideology really needs to get over the nostalgic worship of failed authoritarian states.

Cheers, fun discussion

[qqueenofhades]

I also want to add that my dad didn't.... read an article calling Bernie a radical? The framing around Bernie has been that he's radical, whether the leftists like it or not. He may not be, if you read deep into his policies or tweets or whatever else, but most voters are not doing that. Most voters are going by outrage-driven news headlines or TV reporting. The facts don't matter and the left won't win votes by "well actually"-ing people. It's all how the narrative is framed, in the end.

Well, yeah, because America is a deeply racist, imperialist, savior-complexed, essentially conservative country that was built on white settler colonialism, systemic Native American genocide, and African-American chattel slavery. Its existential conflicts about race and its unwillingness to solve the slavery question are written directly into the Constitution and are the core cause for a lot of our current social and legal angst. So yes, of course the most milquetoast left-of-center views are treated as a terrible existential threat by the shrieking right-wing noise machine that, due to the shifting demographics that might finally and generationally put them out of power, is more desperate than ever to keep (white) Americans stupid, angry, afraid, and viewing POC Americans as the "enemy."

Aside from all my other problems with Bernie as a functionally useless totem of white online leftism (as noted a few days ago, African-Americans generally don't vote for him either), obviously he's going to be heading upwind in regard to either shedding the socialism label (which he doesn't seem keen to do, seeing as he has previously defended Castro and that was what made him DOA in Florida) or getting over America's deep-rooted conservatism. The founding white supremacist state was then supplanted by Reaganism in the 1980s, and has been taken to its logical and hateful neo-fascist extreme under Trump. When that's what is treated as the "normal" standard, it sets the Overton window wildly to the right and makes even centrist Democrats (of which there are fewer than people tend to think; the Democratic Party overall has moved firmly liberal) look extreme. When Bernie leans into being "far left" without any attempt to educate, or any attempt on the part of his followers to educate, it's easy to spin and demonize. It can be undone, but it takes time, effort, and engaging in the real world with people who don't necessarily think like you, and a lot of Online Leftists seem deeply averse to actually, y'know. Doing that.

[ishkah]

On The Far-Left, Effective Activism & Violence

Introduction to what it means to be on the far-left

So first off, as socialists & anarchists, we know we are far outside the Overton window. We know even if left-wing policy positions are more popular than right-wing, most people are still going to be biased to what they’ve grown up with and what’s familiar to them.

But, we also know we can shift the Overton window from the radical fringe: [1]

The most important thing about the Overton window, however, is that it can be shifted to the left or the right, with the once merely “acceptable” becoming “popular” or even imminent policy, and formerly “unthinkable” positions becoming the open position of a partisan base. The challenge for activists and advocates is to move the window in the direction of their preferred outcomes, so their desired outcome moves closer and closer to “common sense.”

There are two ways to do this: the long, hard way and the short, easy way. The long, hard way is to continue making your actual case persistently and persuasively until your position becomes more politically mainstream, whether it be due to the strength of your rhetoric or a long-term shift in societal values. By contrast, the short, easy way is to amplify and echo the voices of those who take a position a few notches more radical than what you really want.

For example, if what you actually want is a public health care option in the United States, coordinate with and promote those pushing for single-payer, universal health care. If the single-payer approach constitutes the “acceptable left” flank of the discourse, then the public option looks, by comparison, like the conservative option it was once considered back when it was first proposed by Orrin Hatch in 1994.

This is Negotiating 101.

So our hope is that our ideals and passion can be admired by some, like risking prison to sabotage the draft for Vietnam, so some peoples sons aren't conscripted into fighting an evil war. [2] Then any moderate left policies might look reasonable in comparison which makes them the tried and tested policies of the future.

We should also openly acknowledge that the ideal future we would like to see is empirically extremely unlikely to come about in our own lifetimes in the west, as there are still so many hills to climb first in pressuring workplaces over to a more co-operative flattened hierarchy of workplace democracy.

To quickly summarise, the direction the far-left would like to head in, is going from; a two party system, to... a multi-party coalition through preferential voting, to... some local government positions being elected by sortition, to… the majority of society being so content with worker-co-ops and syndicalist unions that we transition from representative democracy to direct democracy. So, a chamber of ministers to federated spokes councils.

Now I might be the minority in the far-left on this, but I would want people to have the option of going back a step if people aren't ready for that level of direct democracy, where the choice is disorganization and suffering or slightly less suffering under a repressive system of governance again. You could relate this to the position Rosa Luxemburg was in in lending support and hoping some good would come of the Spartacist uprising, whilst also wishing they could have been convinced to hold off until they were more prepared.

This is why it’s so important to build the governance model slowly enough to match expertise, so as not to falter with people pushing for ideals before having adequately put them to the test. So as not to cause a whiplash effect, where people desire a reactionary politics of conformity, under more rigid hierarchy of just the few.

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As anarchists & socialists who desire a more directly democratic society, what tactics should we use if we want to be effective at moving society in that direction?

Electoral politics - We need to get really well educated on how even the baby step policies toward the left would be an improvement on where we are now, we need to learn the internal politicking of government and get good at having friendly arguments with comedy to appeal to friends and acquaintances basic intuitions.

The goal being that we can talk the latest news and (1) Win over conservatives to obvious empirically better policies on the left, and (2) Win over liberals when centre-left parties are in power to feel dismayed at the slow pace of change, and so acknowlege how much better it would be if there was a market socialist in the position willing to rally people to demonstrate and strike to push through bills.

Mutual aid – We should put the time into helping our neighbours and volunteering, for example on a food not bombs stall, to get people to see the positive benefits of a communalist caring society.

Theory – We should be educating ourselves and helping others know what work and rent union to join, what to keep a record of at work, how to defend yourself from rapists and fascists, how to crack a squat and how to write a press release, etc.

Campaigning – We should look for the easiest squeeze points to rack up small wins, like the picketing of a cafe to reclaim lost wages, so that word spreads and it creates a domino effect.

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What tactics should we or shouldn’t we generally avoid in our political campaigns?

Civility as an end in itself

They’re not lies, they’re “falsehoods”; it’s not racism, it’s “racially charged comments”; it’s not torture, it’s “enhanced interrogation.” For years, U.S. media has prioritized, above all else, norms and civility.

Mean words or questioning motives are signs of declining civility and the subject of much lament from our media class. However, op-eds explicitly advocating war, invasion, sanctions, sabotage, bombing and occupation or cutting vital programs and lifelines for the poor are just the cost of doing business. What’s rhetorically out of bounds - and what isn’t - is far more a product of power than any objective sense of "civility" or “decency.”

Where did these so-called norms come from, who do they benefit, and why is their maintenance–-even in the face of overt white nationalism––still the highest priority for many liberals and centrists in U.S. media? [3]

This is so important to challenge, and yet incredibly nuanced. So, it is obviously a great success that the rate at which people would go around hurling racist insults looks to have dropped in favour of more political correctness.

It is also true that in pursuit of political correctness and an ethic of care, we can look for simplistic niceness, to the detriment of being able to identify systems of oppression.  We need to be able to refuse the emotional labor of treating our bosses as friends when we have no desire to be friends with them. [4]

Similarly in our everyday interactions, we need to encourage our friends to accept us for who we are or not to accept us at all, so as to create deeper connections which builds stronger communities: [5]

It can be annoying or hurtful when others presume they know everything about you. But rather than assert their wrongness and make them defensive, you can acknowledge it as a common human failing and find creative ways to hold a mirror up to what life experiences they’ve had that lead them to jump to those conclusions.

One way is a kind of playful authenticity, telling a lie about a lie, to get back closer to the truth. So don’t outright challenge the idea, but don’t live up to it either, in fact live down to it. Playfully undermine the idea by failing to live up to the glamour of what it would mean to be that person, then find a way of revealing that it was a misunderstanding all along, so they needn’t worry about it applying to you.

Media Chasing – We shouldn’t chose our actions for the primary purpose of provoking conversations because it is insincere to ones own desires to materially affect change and it’s recognised as such by those who hear about it.

Transparency – We should be transparent with our supporters in all we hope to achieve and how successful we are being at achieving that task, so as not to attract funds for labor we haven’t and aren’t likely to be able to do.

Civil Disobedience – Whether it be breaking the law without causing any damage or economic sabotage and political violence which we’ll talk about later, anarchists hope to chose the right actions to provoke conversations and materially challenge unethical industries and actors, so as to push electoral politics towards direct democracy and eventually consolidate our gains in a revolution.

Fascists will also use tactics from civil disobedience to political violence, and tend toward violence against people for people holding ideas as the things they hate, rather than the lefts systemic critique of material conditions. All in the hopes of pushing society towards a more authoritarian constitutional republic, before seizing power in a palace coup and attempting to rule as a sequence of dictators for life.

It is up to the left to try and counter this violence by doxxing, making their rallies miserable, etc. And it is up to everyone to decide which government to vote in, to enact what degree of punishment to bring down on people breaking the law on either side.

Any direction the society goes in for either not controlling or bowing to which protesters demands is still the moral culpability of the government and those who participated in the party political process.

There simply is an obvious legal and moral difference between for example victimless civil disobedience on the left aimed at all people being treated equally in society like collecting salt from the sea or staying seated on the bus, to the type of violence you see on the right, like Israeli settlers throwing people off their land with arson attacks, stealing another country’s resources against international law.

But again, it is true that to whatever degree anarchists chose bad targets optically, we do to some degree bring the slow pace of change on ourselves by handing the right an advocacy win.

Graffiti & Culture Jamming – Whether it be an artistic masterpiece that no one asked for or altering a billboard to say something funny and political, instead of the advert that was there before pressuring you to consume more and more, most people can be won over by this as a good form of advocacy. Just don’t practice tagging your name a million times over every building in town.

Hacking – Obviously most people agree whistle-blowing war crimes is a yay. Selectively releasing documents to help conservatives win elections however, is a nay.

Sabotage – We should chose targets which have caused people the most amount of misery, for which people can sympathise most, like the sabotaging of draft cards I wrote about at the beginning. So causing economic damage to affect material conditions and make a statement.

We also need to carefully consider the difference between property which is personal, luxury, private, government owned and co-operatively worker owned.

So, it could be seen as ethical to chose material targets of evil actors in order to cause economic damage and make a statement, so long as in the case of personal property, the item has no sentimental value and can be replaced because the person is wealthy. Or is a luxury item that was paid for through the exploitation of others labor. Or is private property, meaning the means of production which should be owned collectively anyway.

It’s an expression of wanting to find an outlet for legitimate anger against that which causes us suffering. For example, if taking the risk to slash slaughterhouse trucks’ tires in the dead of night is how you develop stronger bonds with a group of people and gain the confidence to do amazing things like travel the world and learn from other liberation struggles.

Fighting – First off, I think propaganda by the deed, physically hurting people for the purpose of making a political statement is evil, as it runs counter to our philosophy on the left that material conditions create the person and so we should make every peaceful effort to rehabilitate people.

However, to the extent that some current institutions fail to rehabilitate people and the process of seeking justice through these institutions can cause more trauma, then personal violence to get to resolve feelings of helplessness in the face of evil acts can be an ethical act.

For example survivor-led vigilantism: [4]

“I wanted revenge. I wanted to make him feel as out of control, scared and vulnerable as he had made me feel. There is no safety really after a sexual assault, but there can be consequences.” -Angustia Celeste, “Safety is an Illusion: Reflections on Accountability”

Two situations in which prominent anarchist men were confronted and attacked by groups of women in New York and Santa Cruz made waves in anarchist circles in 2010. The debates that unfolded across our scenes in response to the actions revealed a widespread sense of frustration with existing methods of addressing sexual assault in anarchist scenes. Physical confrontation isn’t a new strategy; it was one of the ways survivors responded to their abusers before community accountability discourse became widespread in anarchist circles. As accountability strategies developed, many rejected physical confrontation because it hadn’t worked to stop rape or keep people safe. The trend of survivor-led vigilantism accompanied by communiqués critiquing accountability process models reflects the powerlessness and desperation felt by survivors, who are searching for alternatives in the face of the futility of the other available options.

However, survivor-led vigilantism can be a valid response to sexual assault regardless of the existence of alternatives. One doesn’t need to feel powerless or sense the futility of other options to take decisive physical action against one’s abuser. This approach offers several advantages. For one, in stark contrast to many accountability processes, it sets realistic goals and succeeds at them. It can feel more empowering and fulfilling than a long, frequently triggering, overly abstract process. Women can use confrontations to build collective power towards other concerted anti-patriarchal action. Physical confrontation sends an unambiguous message that sexual assault is unacceptable. If sexual violence imprints patriarchy on the bodies of women, taking revenge embodies female resistance.

Other examples we can think of are personally desiring to fight fascists in the street to block them from marching through immigrant communities. To pushing your way through huntsman to save a fox from getting mauled to death by dogs.

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Political killing

I’ll work through hypotheticals from circumstances relevant to the past, present and future, then talk through the ethics of each.

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Past possibilities

Most people agree anyone who took it upon themselves to assassinate Hitler a day before the break out of WW2 would be seen as committing an ethical act, no matter who follows, because throwing a wrench into the cult of personality spell built around Hitler would be a significant set back for the fascist state’s grip over the people. And given all the evidence pointing to the inevitability of war, such an act could easily be seen as a necessary pre-emptive act.

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Present possibilities

Most can sympathise with quick revolutions against dictatorships where the result is a freer society, like the Kurdish uprising in Northern Syria which took power from a regime who had rolled tanks on demonstrators and outlawed teaching of their native language.

But, even there, there are key foundations you need to work from, like the probability you won’t just give an excuse for the oppressor committing even worse horrors as was the case with the Rohingya militants who ambushed a police checkpoint, resulting in army & citizen campaign to burn down many villages, plus murder and rape those that couldn’t get away.

As well as a responsibility to put down arms after winning political freedoms and a majority are in favour of diplomacy through electoral politics, like in Northern Ireland today.

Under representative parliamentary systems, the sentiment of most is that even if it could be argued that a war of terror against the ruling class was the easiest route to produce a better society, that it would still be ethically wrong to be the person who takes another’s life just because it’s the easiest way. Since regardless of manufactured consent or anything else you still could have worked to build a coalition to overcome those obstacles and change the system slowly from within.

And I agree, it would be an act of self-harm to treat life with such disregard when you could have been that same deluded person shrouded in the justificatory trappings of society treating your behaviour normally. I don’t think the way we win today is treating a cold bureaucratic system with equally cold disregard in whose life we had the resources to be able to intimidate this week. Time on earth is the greatest gift people have, to make mistakes and learn from them.

So then, an easy statement to make on life under representative parliamentary systems is; outside of absurdly unrealistic hypotheticals, I could never condone purposefully killing others when campaigning against such monoliths as state and corporate repression today.

Breaking that down though; what do I mean by an unrealistic hypothetical? For example the philosophical thought experiment called the trolley problem, where you have a runaway trolley hurtling towards 5 people tied to a track, and you can pull a leaver so the train changes tracks and only kills 1 person tied to a track. Or you can change it to 7 billion to 1 even. Or 7 billion of your average citizens vs. 1 million unethical politicians, police and bosses, to make it political.

Now what do I mean by purposeful, well we can think of for example the most extreme cases of post-partum psychosis which has mothers killing their babies. But more nuanced than that, the rape victim who gets worn down by their abuser for years until they have a psychological break and kill.

That does still leave a lot of lee way for people knowingly taking risks with others lives, not intending to kill, but who are reckless in their actions, such as with some forms of economic sabotage. And I agree such a reckless act would bring up feelings of revulsion for all kinds of reasons like questioning whether the person was really doing it to help people or for their own ego-aggrandizement. All that can be hoped is a person makes a careful accounting of their ability for human error and weighs it against the outcomes of doing nothing.

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Future possibilities

We can hypothesise the unrealistic case of 99% of society desiring a referendum on a shift from parliamentary representative system to a federated spokes council system and the MPs dragging their feet, the same way both parties gerrymander the boundaries to make it easier to win despite it being the one issue most everyone agrees is bad, and people needing to storm the halls of power to force a vote to happen.

More likely though, an opportunity for revolution might arise from such a confluence of events as climate refugees and worker gains forcing the state and corporations into trying to crack down on freedoms in order to preserve their power and enough people resisting that move, who are then able take power and usher in radical policy change, with either the army deciding to stand down or splitting into factions.

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References

1. Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution - Use your radical fringe to shift the Overton window P. 215.

2. The Camden 28 - The Camden 28 were a group of Catholic left anti-Vietnam War activists who in 1971 planned and executed a raid on a Camden, New Jersey draft board. The raid resulted in a high-profile criminal trial of the activists that was seen by many as a referendum on the Vietnam War and as an example of jury nullification.

3. Citations Needed Podcast - Civility Politics

4. Slavoj Žižek: Political Correctness is a More Dangerous Form of Totalitarianism | Big Think

5. A Love Letter To Failing Upward

6. Accounting for Ourselves - Breaking the Impasse Around Assault and Abuse in Anarchist Scenes.

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[somerandomg33k]

I still don’t know who to vote for?

This election is going to be a weird and frustrating one. It is the first presidential general election where I am an Anarcho-Syndicalist. And this election in the darkest timeline has a Fascist as the incumbent. But the candidate that is opposing Donald Trump is Joe Biden. Almost everyone's last pick in the primary. The only worst candidate during this primary was Michael Bloomberg, who was trying to buy his way into the election. Possible to take votes away from Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, but that is damning with faint praise that Joe Biden is better than Michael Bloomberg.

The most likely results of this election are either the continued reign of a dictatorial Fascist, causes and continuing chaos and mayhem, or just straight up Neo-Liberalism. We are going back to a normal under Obama, which was terrible as well. Just not as awful as under Fascism. And we won't fix the problems that allowed Trump to rise to power. Since those are core systematic problems that the current Democratic Establishment is not interested in correcting. And the Republican party is just worse as they are OK with Fascism. Some of them want Fascism.

And let's not forget, serval people have very good personal reasons not to vote for Joe Biden. Joe Biden helped co-wrote the 1994 crime bill. In some issues, he was to the right of Regan on drug enforcement of the Drug war. He was always the most conservative Democrat in the Senate during his time there. He voted against busing 19 times. That is why many Leftists say that Joe Biden is Republican-lite. He is just the 'correct' color for Liberals and is the candidate the Democratic party chooses. So yea, there are two Republican tickets this election. The difference is one is not Fascist. Liberals know this. They are just in denial or flat out refuse to believe it. Because boy, don't say that Joe Biden and his running mate are anything but Progressive to them. Because they really hate that. "I think it is unfair to Joe Biden to judge him by International standards. I would prefer that he is judge by American Political standards," one Liberal said. Why can't Liberals admit that America's Political standards are shit?

Liberals have to believe that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are progressives because they can only think of voting for progressives and progressive causes. They can't accept they are voting for a Conservative on the Democrat ticket, because they would have to admit that the Democratic party has moved towards the right as has American's Overton Window. Joe Biden is against Medicare 4 All. On that issue, he is to the right of Boris Johnson and other conservatives of the UK and Canada. Liberals have to believe they are voting for progressives on the Democrat ticket. Because if they didn't, they would lose faith in the whole Ameican Electoral system as well as Reform. It is almost like Capitalist Realism. People can imagine the end of the World before they can imagine the End of Capitalism. Liberals probably have an easier time visualizing the end of the World before they could imagine a different system than the current governance of Liberal Capitalist Democracy.

Let's not forget, something we already know, that Joe Biden is a bit creepy. He is a Patriarch and treats women differently than men. Whenever he meets families at the White House who have sons and daughters, he would say to the sons, "You have a critical job. You got to protect your sister from all of the boys. That is something my Dad told me." The women must be protected, and it is the men who must do the protecting. Joe Biden has a habit of creepily smelling women and girls' hair and touching their bodies on the waist and shoulders. Serval women have said that Joe made them feel uncomfortable. And this was all before Tara Reade allocations.  #IBelieveTaraReade.

As for Kamala Harris, she did put trans women in men's prison, which resulted in one of them getting killed. "Kamala Harris couldn't do a thing." Is something Liberals need to stop saying. What they really mean is, "Kamala Harris choose to uphold an unjust system by blindly following rules instead of using her power and influence to change them." She attempted to block two Trans women's requests to get gender confirmation surgeries. Which, as far as I know, she hasn't really made amendments for. She wasn't good about slowing down The New Jim Crow. She was fierce to Sex Workers too. One of my comrades said, "As a trans woman and a Sex Worker, how should I feel about voting for Kamala Harris." She increased convictions for things like merely drug procession. She also wanted to jail parents for truancy. She has been called the Democrats Top Cop. Someone who is "Tough on Crime." Just like how Bill Clinton and Joe Biden were in the 90s. And that still has devastating effects on Black and Brown communities.

So many people have many good reasons not to want to vote for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. And Liberals want to think that they simply "have their flaws." Again, I think it is just all to make it easier for them to be excited to vote for them. All of those issues, including their voting record on increasing Military spending too, are "merely flaws." And they will also shame people into voting for Biden/Harris with, "It is the lesser of two evils." Which again, is more of an indictment of the system we have. "But we have an election, and we should all vote." So we can't talk about changing the system right now during an election. So when can we talk about change this entire system? And Just like with 2016, "A vote for a third party or a no vote is a vote for Trump."

Further shaming us into voting for Biden/Harris. "Do you want four more years of Trump?" FUCK YOU AND SHOVE THAT DISINGENUOUS QUESTION UP YOUR ASS!!

Merely bringing up all of these complaints are being associated with supporting Trump. Another by-product of the binary way of thinking with the Two-Party system and First Past the Post voting. Liberals have 'accepted' Biden/Harris is the ticket. And they honestly wish we do too. And since we are vocal with our complaints, they hate us for not 'accepting' Biden/Harris is the ticket. They hate us for not 'accepting' the way the system is as it is. "I have accepted all of this. Why haven't you?" This can explain how so many Liberals would go "URG" at the thought of Joe Biden as President back in January during the Primaries to skipping to the polls to vote for Biden for the General Election. "Well, he won the primary." "I get to vote Trump out of Office" is more what it is about and not how great Biden is. They tell themselves how great Biden and Harris will be as a recon.

And with all of the shaming us into voting for Biden/Harris, instead of voting for the Green Party or not voting, it completely ignores the fact we did vote for Hillary in 2016. She 2.8 million more votes. But it is the Electoral College that gave Donald Trump in the win. Plus, in Washington State, my state, four of the Electors didn't vote for Hillary Clinton when they were 'supposed to.' Washington State is likely to go blue again. So I don't know if it is essential for Me to vote for Biden/Harris. The fivethirtyeight poll from Sept. 22 shows Washington voting for Biden at 58% vs Trump at 36%. A 22 point difference. I think I can safely vote for Howard Hawkins and feel like I didn't help Trump win. But that won't be what Liberals think.

Now with all that said, Donald Trump is still a Fascist wannabe Dictator. He is almost the worst. His administration is just letting massive amounts of people died because of Covid-19. He is encouraging people to shoot BLM protestors. He told the Proud Boys to "stand back and stand by," at the first Presidential Debate.  He said there wouldn't be a peaceful transferal of power because there won't be a transferal, but a continuation. Donald Trump has sewn doubts about voting by mail. He will doubt any kind of election results where he doesn't win. So Liberals argue we most vote in such high numbers to show that it is the will of the people they want him out of office. To which he can easily say "Fake News." He did doubt the 2016 popular vote results claiming 3 million "illegals" cast fraudulent votes.

Another convincing argument is we most show that Trump's ideas can't win elections. Because if it continues to win elections, more people will adopt Trump's views and policies. It is sort of convincing. But since a Qanon supporter will win a seat in the House of Representatives, becoming a rising star in the GOP Party. The GOP Party has backed Trump throughout his time in office, Trump's views and policies will continue whether he wins or not. Even if Trump loses, we are not out of the woods yet. Not by a long shot. Trump base will still be here in this White Supremacist CisHetro Patriarchal Ableist country of the United Corporations of Imperialism. Who will always vote for the GOP and are not going away. Many Democrats will even speak highly of them. Nancy Pelosi prays for the Republicans. Liberals believe having an opposition is part of a functioning Democracy. Will the GOP no longer be Fascist? I doubt it.

"We have to get rid of Trump at all costs." I understand that urge. But the system gave us Trump and protected him. So how is voting and participating within the same system supposed to help? I know that Liberals think voting is very powerful because "So many people had to fight for their basic right to vote." And that is all true. The GOP only wins because of dirty tricks like gerrymandering and voter suppression. Hence, Trump is encouraging his base to watch the polling stations for "suspicious people wanting to commit voter fraud" and "rig" the election. It is straight voter intimidation and is happening already in Virginia. Part of the convincing reason to get Trump out of the White House. Biden will not encourage White Supremacist of all types to commit acts of violence against "The Radical Left terrorists" and "Antifa."  Antifa is not an organization; it is an idea. Even Biden got that right.

Knowing how terrible Trump is, brings me back to Biden and how bad he is. Not as bad. Trump and Biden aren't the same. Trump is a Fascist while Biden is a Neo-Liberal, and Neo-Liberalism isn't Fascism. Neo-Liberalism just leads to Fascism, as we have already seen with Trump. I simply see Neo-Liberalism worse than how Liberals see it. Not enough to make a false equivalent, but still. Remember, if Trump loses, he could pull a Grover Cleaveland and run again in 2024. Imagine that.

What bothers me the most about Liberals changing their opinion of Biden, by the mere fact he won the primary, is that Biden is granted votes from Democrats and Leftists. I am sure Democrats do love old Uncle Joe. There were a lot of memes from the Obama years. And many Liberals just love Obama. Even though they fully well know about his War Crimes. It is that acceptance that I don't have in me. "Well, he is the candidate. So I will support him to get rid of Trump." And what makes it worse, Biden isn't really offering anything as well. He is against the Green New Deal. He is against Medicare-4-all, even during a Pandemic. What is Biden/Harris offering? Even Biden, when asking these questions and about his record, says, "If you are questioning whether to vote for me or not, you ain't black."

So Leftists will get nothing and will receive all of the blame for of Trump winning if we don't vote for Biden. "If you are questioning whether to vote for Biden or not, you must want Trump for four more years."

Remember, I live in Washington State. A super blue State. If I live in any battleground state, even within a ten points difference, I would vote for Biden/Harris. But since Biden is ahead by 22 points in my state, and I don't see that changing anytime soon, I am considering voting for a third party. Howard Hawkins of the Green and Socialist party is closer to my position. I would prefer there is no State at all and no President at all. Especially no single person having that much power, especially being the 'leader of the "Free" world' by virtue of being the President of the United Corporations of Imperialism. If the President of the United Corporations of Imperialism is the 'leader' of the 'free world,' then how come the World doesn't get to vote in this election. The UCI, Imperialtopia bombs the hell out of the middle east so much, I think the middle east has a right to have a say in our elections.

I do have to acknowledge those platform holders, people with a Youtube channel, a Podcast, or have a large following on Social Media, feel the need to tell people to "to out and vote. Vote as if your life depends on it because for some, it actually does matter." Although for some people, much won't change materially for their lives, like the impoverished and the disabled. For some, it is life or death. For others, it is a shit show, regardless. But platform holders want Trump out of the White House. They don't know who lives in what state. They don't know if their audience's votes matter or not. Since they are speaking to a vast audience, and they must keep it simple, they have to say, "VOTE! VOTE! VOTE!"

But, I am thinking, if they acknowledge that some votes are more important in some states than others, they will have to admit the whole in the United Corporations of Imperialism is unjust. Votes are weight more heavily in some states than in others. The whole system has to change. But that can't happen in a year. However, folks can vote on Election Day. So, it is easy to encourage people to vote instead of organizing to abolish the Electoral College. It would take too long to do it. It would take a lot of effort. So even bother trying. Liberals would rather pretend that isn't the case and just badger and shame people into voting for a candidate they have 'accepted' won the primary, even though Biden was one of the worse candidates in that field. Everyone's tenth or so pick.

With all that said, vote for whoever you want to or whoever you feel comfortable voting for. I won't vote shame anyone. Except if you vote for Trump and the GOP. Then you are a Fascist because you are voting for a Fascist and the Fascist party. Pure and simple.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Pluralistic: 26 Mar 2020 (EFF's videoconferencing backgrounds, the ideology of economics, LoC plugs Little Brother, Canada nationalizes covid patents, Exponential Thread, Sanders on GOP stimulus cruelty, record wind power growth, social distancing and other diseases, Badger Masks)

Today's links

EFF's videoconferencing backgrounds: With a deep cut from the NSA's secret listening post.

The ideology of economics: Economics doesn't have "laws" it has "policies."

LoC plugs Little Brother: Open access FTW.

Canada nationalizes covid patents: An Act respecting certain measures in response to COVID-19.

Exponential Threat: Trump threatened to sue media outlets that aired this spot.

Sanders on GOP stimulus cruelty: "Millions for plutes, but not one cent for workers."

Record wind-power growth: Covid stimulus could start a Green New Deal.

Social distancing and other diseases: Do we trust IoT thermometer companies, though?

Badger Masks: UW Madison's open facemask design.

This day in history: 2005, 2010, 2015, 2019

Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming appearances, current writing projects, current reading

EFF's videoconferencing backgrounds (permalink)

Telework is a quiet reminder that we live, in some sense, in an age of wonders. As terrible as lockdown is, imagine it without any way to videoconference with your peers and colleagues.

But it's also a moment where we tremble on the precipice of cyberpunk dystopia, when calls for mass surveillance – both for epidemiology and stabilizing states that are bruised and reeling – meet a world where everything is online and amenable to "collection" by spooks.

This is, basically, the moment that EFF has been warning about for 30 years: the moment when the "digital world" and the "real world" fully merge, and where the distinction between "tech policy" and "policy" dissolves.

One way you can help keep this in your colleagues' minds is to use EFF's amazing, free/open graphics as your videoconferencing background (most of these are the creation of the brilliant Hugh D'Andrade).

Now, those are all great, but this one is Room 641A at AT&T's Folsom Street center, where the whistleblower Mark Klein was ordered to build a secret room so the NSA could illegally spy on all US internet traffic.

The ideology of economics (permalink)

Thomas Piketty's "Capital in the 21st Century" advanced a simple, data-supported hypothesis: that markets left to their own will cause capital to grow faster than the economy as a whole, so over time, the rich always get richer.

https://boingboing.net/2014/06/24/thomas-pikettys-capital-in-t.html

He's followed up Capital with the 1000-page "Capital and Ideology" – whose thesis is that the "laws" of economics are actually policies, created to "justify a society's inequalities," providing a rationale to convince poor people not to start building guillotines.

The first ideology of capital was the "trifunctional" system of monarchist France, dividing society into "those who pray," "those who fight," and "those who work."

After the French revolution, we enter the capitalist phase, then social democracies, and now, "meritocracies."

"Meritocracies" invest markets with the mystical power to identify and elevate the worthy, in a kind of tautology: those who have the most are worth the most. You can tell they're worth the most because they have the most.

("That makes me smart" -D. Trump)

In Piketty's conception, "Inequality is neither economic nor technological. It's ideological and political," where "ideology" "refers to a set of a priori plausible ideas describing how society should be structured" (think: Overton Window).

https://bostonreview.net/class-inequality/marshall-steinbaum-thomas-piketty-takes-ideology-inequality

The major part of the book seeks to explain how the post-war social democracies gave way to the grifter meritocracies of today, pulling together threads from across the whole world to tell the tale.

On the way, he described alternatives that were obliterated, and others that were never tried, and shows how "meritocracy" gave us Trump, xenophobia, Brexit, and the Current Situation.

In particular, he's interested in why working class people stopped voting (spoiler: they no longer perceive that elites will pay attention to them irrespective of how they vote) — and what it would take to mobilize them again.

The elites' indifference to working people is grounded in an alliance between the Brahmin Left (educated, well-paid liberals) and the Merchant Right (the finance sector). Notionally leftist parties, like the Democrats, are dominated by the Brahmin Left.

But more than any other, Macron epitomizes this alliance: proclaiming his liberal values while slashing taxes on the wealthy — punishing poor people for driving cars, exempting private jets from his "climate" bill.

Life in a "meritocracy" is especially cruel for poor people, because meritocracies, uniquely among ideologies, blame poor people for poverty. It's right there in the name. French kings didn't think God was punishing peons, rather, that the Lord had put them there to serve.

"The broadly social-democratic redistributive coalitions of the mid-twentieth century were not just electoral or institutional or party coalitions but also intellectual and ideological. The battle was fought and won above all on the battleground of ideas."

As Marshall Steinbaum writes in his excellent review, Piketty's work doesn't just highlight new ideas in economics: it highlights the intellectual poverty of the economics profession and its tunnel vision.

"Economists cannot be allowed to be the arbiters of the intensely political concerns Piketty takes up in the book, and the good news is that there is reason to believe they won't be."

LoC plugs Little Brother (permalink)

Honored and pleased to have my book Little Brother included on the Library of Congress's excellent collection of open-access ebooks in its collection, which you can always access gratis but which may be of especial interest during the lockdown.

https://blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/2020/03/more-open-ebooks-routinizing-open-access-ebook-workflows/

If you enjoyed Little Brother and its sequel Homeland, you might be interested in the third Little Brother book, Attack Surface, which Tor is publishing on Oct 12.

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250757531

If you're looking for more topical reading, Infodocket's carefully curated list of coronavirus resources is here for you:

https://www.infodocket.com/2020/01/31/2019-novel-coronavirus-resources/

Canada nationalizes covid patents (permalink)

Canada's Parliament has passed Bill C13, "An Act respecting certain measures in response to COVID-19," amending patent law to create automatic compulsory licenses for any inventionused to fight covid, including diagnostics, vaccines, therapies or PPE.

https://www.parl.ca/DocumentViewer/en/43-1/bill/C-13/third-reading

As E Richard Gold writes, it's an "important signal that Canada will not support IP delays…While most firms are helping find solutions, this will prevent those who try to take advantage-by raising prices or limiting supply-or those who cannot deliver to block what is needed."

Exponential Threat (permalink)

"Exponential Threat" is a remarkable – and factual – political ad, one that contrasts Trump's statements on coronavirus with the spread of the disease in America.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkMwvmJLnc0

More remarkable: Trump has threatened to sue the media for airing it, which is a totally cool and normal thing for someone who has sworn a solemn oath to uphold the Constitution and the Bill of Rights to do.

https://assets.donaldjtrump.com/2017/web/hero_images/Redacted_PUSA_Letter.pdf

"In case you needed more, here's an (admittedly incomplete) list of Trump statements on the novel coronavirus and COID-19"

http://www.joeydevilla.com/2020/03/25/exponential-threat-the-covid-19-themed-ad-that-the-trump-pence-campaign-doesnt-want-you-to-see/

Jan. 22: "We have it totally under control. It's one person coming in from China."

Feb. 2: "We pretty much shut it down coming in from China. It's going to be fine."

Feb. 25: "CDC & my administration are doing a GREAT job of handling Coronavirus."

Feb. 25: "I think that's a problem that's going to go away. They have studied it. They know very much. In fact, we're very close to a vaccine." [White House | New York Post]

Feb. 26: "We're going very substantially down, not up."

Feb. 27: "One day it's like a miracle, it will disappear."

Feb. 28: "We're ordering a lot of supplies. We're ordering a lot of, uh, elements that frankly we wouldn't be ordering unless it was something like this. But we're ordering a lot of different elements of medical."

March 2: "You take a solid flu vaccine, you don't think that could have an impact, or much of an impact, on corona?"

March 2: "A lot of things are happening, a lot of very exciting things are happening and they're happening very rapidly."

March 4: "If we have thousands of people that get better just by, you know, sitting around and even going to work – some of them go to work, but they get better."

March 5: "I never said people that are feeling sick should go to work."

March 6: "I think we're doing a really good job in this country at keeping it down… a tremendous job at keeping it down."

March 6: "Anybody right now, and yesterday, anybody that needs a test gets a test. And the tests are beautiful. They are perfect just like the letter was perfect. The transcription was perfect. Right? This was not as perfect as that but pretty good."

March 6: "I like this stuff. I really get it. People are surprised that I understand it. Every one of these doctors said, 'How do you know so much about this?' Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should have done that instead of running for president."

March 6: "I don't need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn't our fault."

March 8: "We have a perfectly coordinated and fine tuned plan at the White House for our attack on Coronavirus."

March 9: "The Fake News media & their partner, the Democrat Party, is doing everything within its semi-considerable power to inflame the Coronavirus situation."

March 10: "It will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away."

March 13: National Emergency Declaration.

March 17: "I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic."

Sanders on GOP stimulus cruelty (permalink)

This Bernie Sanders floor speech in the Senate on the GOP's relentless attempts to punish poor people in the covid relief package is a must-watch

https://www.reddit.com/r/SandersForPresident/comments/fp3my0/bernie_goes_full_sanders_on_the_republicans_for/

tldr: GOP Senators are freaking out because some people in line to get the pittances they're doling out actually earn EVEN LESS than $1k-2k/month, and so they might get a raise in the form of covid relief.

That is, rather than taking the fact that this bare-minimum subsidy package exceeds "normal" income as a wakeup call to raise the minimum wage for the first time since 2009, the GOP is calling for cuts to aid to the most vulnerable Americans.

As Sanders points out, these same Senators had no problem with the Tax Scam, which poured trillions into the accounts of the richest Americans, directly and indirectly through stock-buybacks, which also left US business vulnerable and in need of trillions more today.

Now those bailed-out plutes want workers to risk death to "restart the economy," and the GOP will ensure they'll starve if they don't.

As ever, The Onion nails it:

https://politics.theonion.com/gop-urges-end-of-quarantine-for-lifeless-bipedal-automa-1842461351

"GOP Urges End Of Quarantine For Lifeless Bipedal Automatons That Make Economy Go"

Record wind-power growth (permalink)

As the world's wind-generation capacity increases, you'd expect annual growth to fall proportionately (it's easier to double a very small number than a very big one!), but this year should see the largest proportional growth ever, a 20% increase!

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/mar/25/worlds-wind-power-capacity-up-by-fifth-after-record-year

That number is uncertain (hello, coronavirus), but on the other hand, there's a massive stimulus package in the offing that could be used to restart the economy by saving the planet with renewable energy.

The non-adjusted, pre-virus projection for this year's total growth in wind power was an additional 76GW (to meet climate projections, that number has to rise to 100GW/year, and then to 200GW/year).

Social distancing and other diseases (permalink)

Though the evidence is a little shaky, it appears that social distancing has dramatically reduced the spread of other infectious diseases, like flu.

https://qz.com/1824020/social-distancing-slowing-not-only-covid-19-but-other-diseases-too/

The data comes from an Internet of Shit "connected thermometer" company that (allegedly) anonymizes its data and uses it for health surveillance; they report a massive drop-off in high temps relative to other years and pre-distancing levels.

The claims are plausible, but they're also an ad for an IoT company that sells a product no one needs, so take them with a grain of salt.

I'd be interested in STI transmission after weeks/months of government-recommended masturbation-over-hookups:

https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/doh/downloads/pdf/imm/covid-sex-guidance.pdf

Badger Masks (permalink)

A local hospital asked researchers at the UW Madison Engineering Design Innovation Lab to design them a field-expedient face-shield that could be mass-manufactured to protect its staff from coming cases.

https://www.wired.com/story/tinkerers-created-face-shield-being-used-hospitals/

Using hardware-store parts, the UW makerspace, and teleconferencing with self-isolating collaborators, the team designed an excellent mask, the Badger Shield:

https://making.engr.wisc.edu/shield/

They've manufactured and delivered 1,000 Badger Masks to the hospital and a Ford plant in MI is making 75,000 more this week for Detroit-area hospitals. Here's a technical spec you can follow if you have access to equipment and parts:

https://www.delve.com/assets/documents/OPEN-SOURCE-FACE-SHIELD-DRAWING-v1.PDF

It involves just 3 pieces: polyethylene sheets (laser- or die-cut), an elastic headband, and a 1" thick strip of self-adhesive polyurethane foam. For initial production, Midwest Prototyping used office-supply-store electric staplers for assembly.

The design process started with a teardown of an existing, approved mask, and the project lead, Lennon Rodgers, worked with collaborators to replicate it, sanity-checking successive designs with his wife, an anaesthesiologist.

They started hand-delivering prototypes to the hospital, who refined the design further, swapping in latex-free elastic and lengthening the shield. Tim Osswald from UW used his polymer engineering expertise to find a supplier who could create a custom die.

Now, more than 1M Badger Masks have been sought, with manufacturers like St Paul's Summit Medical tooling up to meet demand.

Other designs are popping up across America. San Francisco's Exploratorium is making 200+ shields/day using its own makerspace.

This day in history (permalink)

#15yrsago If the Constitution was a EULA https://web.archive.org/web/20050330012000/http://slate.msn.com/id/2115254/

#10yrsgo Discarded photocopier hard drives stuffed full of corporate secrets https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2010/03/18/hightech_copy_machines_a_gold_mine_for_data_thieves.html

#5yrsago TPP leak: states give companies the right to repeal nations' laws https://wikileaks.org/tpp-investment/press.html

#5yrsago Woman medicated in a psychiatric ward until she said Obama didn't follow her on Twitter https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/woman-held-in-psychiatric-ward-after-correctly-saying-obama-follows-her-on-twitter-10132662.html

#5yrsago Sandwars: the mafias whose illegal sand mines make whole islands vanish https://www.wired.com/2015/03/illegal-sand-mining/

#5yrsago Australia outlaws warrant canaries https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/03/australian-government-minister-dodge-new-data-retention-law-like-this/

#5yrsago As crypto wars begin, FBI silently removes sensible advice to encrypt your devices https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150325/17430330432/fbi-quietly-removes-recommendation-to-encrypt-your-phone-as-fbi-director-warns-how-encryption-will-lead-to-tears.shtml

#1yrago Article 13 will wreck the internet because Swedish MEPs accidentally pushed the wrong voting button https://medium.com/@emanuelkarlsten/sweden-democrats-swedish-social-democrats-defeat-motion-to-amend-articles-11-13-731d3c0fbf30

#1yrago EU's Parliament Signs Off on Disastrous Internet Law: What Happens Next? https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/03/eus-parliament-signs-disastrous-internet-law-what-happens-next

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources: Slashdot (https://slashdot.org/), Naked Capitalism (https://nakedcapitalism.com/), Late Stage Capitalism (https://www.reddit.com/r/LateStageCapitalism/).

Currently writing: I'm getting geared up to start work my next novel, "The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel about truth and reconciliation.

Currently reading: Just started Lauren Beukes's forthcoming Afterland: it's Y the Last Man plus plus, and two chapters in, it's amazeballs. Last month, I finished Andrea Bernstein's "American Oligarchs"; it's a magnificent history of the Kushner and Trump families, showing how they cheated, stole and lied their way into power. I'm getting really into Anna Weiner's memoir about tech, "Uncanny Valley." I just loaded Matt Stoller's "Goliath" onto my underwater MP3 player and I'm listening to it as I swim laps.

Latest podcast: Data – the new oil, or potential for a toxic oil spill? https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/03/23/data-the-new-oil-or-potential-for-a-toxic-oil-spill/

Upcoming appearances:

Quarantine Book Club, April 1, 3PM Pacific https://www.eventbrite.com/e/quarantine-book-club-cory-doctorow-tickets-100931360416

Museums and the Web, April 2, 12PM-3PM Pacific https://mw20.museweb.net/

Upcoming books: "Poesy the Monster Slayer" (Jul 2020), a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Pre-order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627?utm_source=socialmedia&utm_medium=socialpost&utm_term=na-poesycorypreorder&utm_content=na-preorder-buynow&utm_campaign=9781626723627

(we're having a launch for it in Burbank on July 11 at Dark Delicacies and you can get me AND Poesy to sign it and Dark Del will ship it to the monster kids in your life in time for the release date).

"Attack Surface": The third Little Brother book, Oct 20, 2020. https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250757531

"Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583

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When live gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

[mamthew]

Why you should vote for Sanders in the Democratic Primary

I know this took me too long to write, and the Super Tuesday polls are closing soon, but to anyone who somehow hasn't voted yet, here's my...pitch, I guess, for Sanders over Warren, or Biden (or Bloomberg? God I hope I don't have anyone I interact with who's dumb enough to support Bloomberg). Or at least, here's my thoughts on where we are now and where we can go from here. The argument people tend to use when defending a vote for Biden is that the only issue that matters this year is that we must defeat Trump, and Biden - by being essentially a Republican - can do it by attracting moderate and Republican voters to his candidacy. Biden himself even floated the idea of choosing a Republican running mate for this very purpose.

Obviously, I agree that we have to stop Trump; he may be a mostly inept dumbass but he's still clearly and definitionally a fascist, and the policies that have managed to hold his attention long enough for him to pass are essentially just...unimaginable cruelty for the sake of inflicting unimaginable cruelty. We must, however, also stop Trumpism, the larger fascist movement that has grown out of Trump's rise. It's not enough to replace a Fascist figurehead with a Neoliberal figurehead, because there will still be the issue of millions of alienated people whose lives have been destroyed by the status quo and who have been distracted from the real cause of their situation by a man who will by then be painted as a martyr. The Democrats and Republicans have batted this voting bracket between parties over the decades, doing something small for them, then rolling it back, cyclically breeding cynicism and discontent. So here's something I've said so many times elsewhere that it might be a little divorced from meaning for folks who know me: Left-wing populism is the only way to beat Fascism.

Fascism is the use of aesthetics in politics to keep working people from getting too mad at those in power. These aesthetics (or illusions, or falsehoods, if you prefer) vary wildly from country to country and movement to movement, but they always ALWAYS include the framing of one or more minority groups and "the Left" as being enemies of the people. Obviously, "the Left" means different things in different places, but America's overton window has been pulled so far to the right that here it means Liberalism, a center-right ideology. Thanks to the wild success of Fascist propaganda in the '50s, it's considered the baseline that Socialists, Communists, and Anarchists are considered enemies of the people, which means America has always been this close to outright Fascism. Trump wasn't a bug, he was simply what we've been building towards kinda since the country's inception.

The reason, then, that left-wing Populism is the most effective way to stop Fascism is that it does not use aesthetics when identifying the issues hurting working people. There is no distraction from the machinations of those in power. You're not suffering because of "Liberals" or immigrants, or trans folks, you're suffering because for centuries backroom deals within corporations, within the government, and between corporations and the government have eroded away any semblance of human dignity for working-class people. You're a bargaining chip in a larger political game, but it's not your fault and it's also not the fault of the person next to you at whom Trump has been wildly gesticulating, who is also a bargaining chip in the same game.

Now, left-wing Populist movements don't often crop up in electoral politics, because of both the nature of electoral politics and the nature of the Left. These movements usually happen on the micro level, when communities work together to help each other, or groups of individuals try to lift up others. When they're larger, they're usually activist movements, or painted as terrorists, like with Occupy, Black Lives Matter, or the Black Panthers and Rainbow Coalition. Electoral left-wing Populist movements usually get kneecapped by corporate or government interests before they can do much (imagine if Eugene Debs wasn't in prison). But American culture has married politics to electoralism for so long that it's hard to get a large political movement going that isn't directly tied to an elected official or an electoral campaign. There are lots of left Populist movements right now that have been fighting the results of Trump's Fascism and the the results of the larger American Fascist experiment on grassroots levels, without involving themselves in electoralism in any way, but they haven't gained the same traction as Bernie Sanders, and they haven't stopped Trump, because those aren't their purposes.

Sanders' base is the most diverse, by far. It skews the youngest, and it polls best in working-class demographics. In 2016, Sanders won literally every single district in West Virginia. He won all but nine districts in Michigan. He absolutely cleans up with Hispanic voters - one of the minority groups that Trumpism frames as enemies of the people. Obviously, y'all know I care about Appalachia the most, and he speaks to Appalachia, both literally and figuratively. Counties that were painted as "Trump Country" in dishonest thinkpieces by journalists putting down six figures had more people vote for Sanders in the primary than voted at all in the general, and it's because what he said about the establishment rang true in a way that Trump's words didn't. If you want to attract a voter base who usually doesn't vote, you have to tell them the truth or spin them a convincing enough lie, and Clinton's lies, in the end, weren't as convincing as Trump's, just as Trump’s aren’t as convincing as the truth.

If the Democratic party is going to survive (and I'm not sure it even deserves to, at this point), it needs to stop engaging in aesthetics to protect those at the top, flirting with fascist strategies. We need to stop letting party elites hem and haw about what "moderates" might or might not want while selling our rights to the highest bidder and letting folks die because insulin cost them more than a month's income. I put "moderate" in quotes, because the "moderate voter" is mostly an invention; we all have things we care about and things we care less about, and very few people are actually that enlightened centrist strawman who believes there's a good midpoint between helping people and hurting them, corporations and working folks, concentration camps and no camps, etc.

Everything Joe Biden says about actually improving material conditions falls apart when you look at his record, because he's consistently voted for cutting social programs to benefit elites, he supported segregation, hell, he was on tape last year saying he has no empathy for young people struggling financially. His facade breaks easily, and he no longer has the mental acuity to even formulate a convincing enough lie to convince most Liberals, let alone nonvoters or former Trump voters. Sanders tells the truth about the reasons for living conditions in America, has the record to back up his convictions, and has the grassroots support to further back him up at the grassroots level, because (as much as every publication tries to make it a scare word) that's how Populism works.

If Sanders gets the nomination, it'll still be a hard fight against Trump. I'm not 100% believing those maps placing him at 474 electoral votes, especially because Trump's aesthetics have the backing of every corporate interest and centuries of disenfranchisement behind them. But Biden's fight just won't win, and if somehow we end up in the 1% of timelines where he somehow convinced enough people to show up at the ballot box for him, we still would have no defense against Trumpism. A burgeoning Fascist movement who still believe the same lies distracting them from the ruling classes and now with a martyr as a political figurehead will have no path to recuperation because primary voters believed it when the news said the word "socialism" was too scary.

Anyway, that's my piece, and it's where my mind has been for...honestly a few years, now. I'll see you on the other side of Super Tuesday.

[berniesrevolution]

Bernie Sanders is considerably older and “maler” than Elizabeth Warren — and, at this point, one could even argue that he’s a smidgen to her right on economic policy. Granted, the Massachusetts senator has been less fulsome in her advocacy for Medicare For All. But Warren’s plans for taxing the one percent’s wealth, breaking up tech monopolies, putting workers on corporate boards, providing universal day care, tackling the housing crisis,and taming agribusiness add up to a vision of sweeping, social democratic change at least as ambitious as her rival from Vermont’s.

This fact, combined with Warren’s proven technocratic chops — and the profound social implications of the U.S. electing a female head of state — has led some progressives to question the rationale for Sanders’s candidacy. In response, the socialist senator’s supporters have emphasized the distinctions between the two candidates’ ideological commitments and political biographies. In their telling, Warren is a Brandesian liberal whose faith in the liberatory potential of market capitalism kept her in (the shrinking liberal wing of) the Republican Party for much of her life. Sanders, meanwhile, is a Debsian socialist whose belief in the indispensability of class struggle long confined him to the far-left fringe of American politics. In the 1980s, Warren supported Ronald Reagan’s GOP; the mayor of Burlington backed the Sandinistas.

I’ve been skeptical of the practical significance of these differences. In Donald Trump’s America, the left would seem to be light-years away from reaching a point at which the policy distinctions between Warren’s “accountable capitalism” and Bernie’s “democratic socialism” would begin to matter. Both candidates favor breaking up concentrations of corporate power, bolstering labor unions, and treating health care, housing, childcare, and higher education as social rights. And on all these fronts, both will have to settle for whatever modest, incremental advances the Jon Testers and Amy Klobuchars of the Senate are willing to countenance. Meanwhile, whatever Warren’s background, there is no question that she can be trusted to stand up to regressive corporate forces within the Democratic coalition. No one fought the party’s Goldman Sachs wing more incessantly — or effectively — during the Obama years than Warren. And if she prefers to describe her social democratic vision as capitalist out of an aversion to the phrase “socialism” — well, that’s an aversion she shares with a large majority of the American electorate. (Plus, it’s hard to see how boiling down the definition of socialism to “European levels of transfer spending and unionization” expands the Overton window in a leftist direction.) Finally, while it is quite plausible that Sanders’s brand of politics is uniquely conducive to movement-building (as his backers insist), the evidence for that claim doesn’t strike me as dispositive.

Or so I recently thought. I now believe that this analysis missed one critical point: Sanders’s socialist background and orientation might not (necessarily) render him uniquely effective at building progressive movements or advancing egalitarian change at the domestic level — but they do appear to have those effects on an international one.

Warren’s background as a Republican-voting technocrat hasn’t stopped her from mobilizing populist anger at creeping plutocracy. But it did prevent her from assembling a decades-long record of decrying American imperialism, and defending left-wing governments the world over. Sanders’s socialist background, on the other hand, led him to do precisely this. And while that record of international leftist solidarity could be a liability with the American electorate, it’s a singular asset within the global left — and in an era when the survival of decent civilization likely depends on building a powerful, transnational left-wing movement, that is no small asset.

As Politico reports:

Bernie Sanders has a base that no other 2020 candidate can claim: left-wing politicians around the globe.

From South America to Europe to the Middle East, leftist leaders are celebrating his candidacy, viewing him as an iconic democratic socialist with the potential to lead a worldwide progressive movement at a time when right-wing populism is on the rise across the map.

… Among Sanders’ admirers: Evo Morales, the socialist president of Bolivia who blasted the United States last year for committing the “most egregious acts of aggression committed during the 21st century.” … Members of Parliament in the United Kingdom’s Labour Party have argued that Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn would have a “special relationship” if the two men both rose to the top of their countries … In Canada, Israel, Germany and Spain, progressive politicians have also hailed the Vermont senator on social media and in interviews, often speaking favorably of his Medicare-for-All proposal, non-interventionist foreign policy, and advocacy for the Green New Deal. Sometimes, the excitement is borderline giddy: Stefan Liebich, a Left member of the German Bundestag, recently posted a photo of himself on social media holding a Sanders figurine, adding, “#feelthebern.”

… In the eyes of progressives across the globe, left-wing populism is needed to take on right-wing authoritarians such as Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who recently met with President Trump.

“The far right have internationalised,” Ross Greer, a Green member of Scottish Parliament who went on the TV show “Scotland Tonight” to declare his support for Sanders, told POLITICO. “They cooperate and coordinate across borders, so if we are to defeat them, we need to do the same. Bernie gets that in a way I’ve not seen from any other presidential candidate.”

Sanders does not owe this international reverence solely to his advocacy for the global left as a young (or, more precisely, less old) activist. The Vermonter may have been conspicuously reluctant to discuss foreign policy in 2016. But this time around, he’s offered a clearer vision for what a progressive geopolitical agenda should look like than any of his competitors. With the help of his foreign-policy adviser, the one-time left-wing foreign affairs blogger Matt Duss, Sanders has woven the Trump-Russia scandal — and the president’s broader affinity for foreign dictators — into a tale about the global struggle between the forces of democracy and the “authoritarian axis.” Plutocrats the world over are using their wealth — and the retrograde politics of right-wing nationalism — to insulate their privilege from the threat of genuine democracy, no matter the dire consequences for the poor, vulnerable minority groups, or even the planet’s survival. Elizabeth Warren has struck similar notes in her public remarks on foreign policy. But Sanders has matched his lofty rhetoric with boldly progressive stances on concrete geopolitical issues to a degree that Warren has not. Sanders has established himself as the Senate’s most passionate defender of Palestinian rights(admittedly, a title somewhat akin to “the world’s largest chihuahua”), led the opposition to U.S. support for the Saudi war in Yemen (and has called for a broader rethinking of the U.S.-Saudi alliance), voted against increasing the Pentagon’s budget (Warren voted for it), and announced the formation of a “Progressive International” with radical Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis.

To be sure, Sanders’s foreign policy vision is still inchoate. On the critical questions of how the U.S. should navigate its relationship with a rising China, how it should seek to reorganize global trade and investment in a progressive direction, how it should balance its domestic interests with its obligations to developing countries — and, above all, how it should deploy its economic and diplomatic power to combat climate change — the senator has offered few details. And the utter lack of a left-wing foreign-policy infrastructure in the U.S. could make ironing out such details a difficult (and potentially, ideologically compromising) process.

(Continue Reading)

[republicstandard]

Populism is the Future for the Alt-Right

The infamous Charlottesville ‘Unite the Right’ rally, which took place last August, was intended to help unify the various political factions of the dissident right. But as we all know things did not go to plan. The authorities not only revoked the permit for the rally at the last minute, but they also funnelled attendees into the path of Antifa and other violent left wing protesters which caused conflict on the streets which was shown on news bulletins all around the world.

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Various members of the pro-white community suffered numerous problems both on the day and in the weeks and months afterwards. Some had their homes broken into; others were de-platformed on social media, whilst others are still currently battling in the courts. And in a historic first several websites had their domains seized and were forced into the dark web for months. To put it simply, the Charlottesville rally was an unmitigated disaster for the pro-white movement; but I also think it was the reckoning that the movement badly needed.

The following months after the rally were a mixture of infighting, self-reflection and change. It was clear that the momentum that had built up during 2015, 2016, and the first 8 months of 2017, was gone. Looking back it is clear that prominent members of the pro-white movement should have been more active in reorganizing and leading during this crucial period. However at the same time I recognise the very difficult situation many of these people were in and how little spare time they had.

More controversy later followed. Pro-white political candidates like Paul Nehlen and Patrick Little descending into meltdowns the likes of which have not been seen this side of Britney Spears shaving her head and beating a car with an umbrella. There are so many twists and turns in their stories that it would require an entire article just to write about them; and who has time for that?

Britain is in the process of leaving the EU, Trump has become the President of the United States of America, and anti-immigration Governments have been elected in Italy, Austria, Hungary, Poland and Czechia.

My conclusion from everything mentioned above is that the pro-white movement has energy, online presence and some potential, yet it is floundering due to its own faults and is simply not going to change anything anytime soon.

My sympathies with the populist movement grow by the day, not just because of their ability to get elected into power, but also because they have a large number of coherent and well thought-out policies that can actually be implemented in the near future. Not to mention the fact that they actually have political parties and a long list of financial backers with deep pockets.

It is easy to forget but in the last two years the populist wave has achieved many things. Britain is in the process of leaving the EU, Trump has become the President of the United States of America, and anti-immigration Governments have been elected in Italy, Austria, Hungary, Poland and Czechia.

I think that a pro-white movement of some kind is always necessary; simply because all other races have their advocacy groups and so logically whites will need their own as a counter and to represent their interests. It is the tragedy of identity politics that this is so, as we move from high-trust societies to ones which are weighted towards groups who can leverage moral authority through state infrastructure, such as diversity quotas and the risible affirmative action program. I also think that such a community is necessary because it helps shift the Overton Window to the right. Whether you agree with the Alt-Right or not, nobody can deny the influence it has had in moving certain topics into the public sphere over the past two years.

My main issue is that I still have no idea why people in the Alt-Right and other pro-white groups have not done more to support the populist movements. I read a lot of white nationalists on social media continuously claim that: ‘Elections don’t matter, if you vote your just feeding the system. We need to let everything collapse and rebuild from scratch.’ This way of thinking is patently absurd for a number of reasons; I think it stems from a mindset of wanting to be as edgy as possible and maintaining a ‘distance’ from the so called ‘normies’.

Obviously these same people would rather see Matteo Salvini, the new interior minister of Italy, continue to turn back migrant boats then allow them to dock at Italian ports. Yet at the same time they claim voting doesn’t change anything, even though Salvini’s policies are reversing Italy’s pro-immigration agenda. This mentality of rejecting the democratic process and working only in overtly pro-white activism needs to end. Even if you don’t agree with democracy, this is the system you have to work in and you must act accordingly. Rejecting the process and simply not voting will only bring victory to your enemies, because I can guarantee that the left will turn out in droves, and they certainly don’t play fair either.

Throughout the 2015-2016 election campaign of Donald Trump identitarians and civic nationalists worked together online to help him get elected. There is no reason why this should not continue, and it was silly from a tactical perspective when these two groups diverged so much after November 2016. In Poland, Hungary and now Italy, what could be described as ‘pro-white’ factions work in harmony with civic nationalist entities on a daily basis – and this partnership achieves results.

No matter how much propaganda you spread or how many immigrants arrive, the likelihood of a pro-white candidate let alone a party being elected in our lifetimes is very slim. Even in South Africa, where whites face rape, torture and murder on their own farms, the majority of whites still vote for mainstream parties. Indeed many liberal whites in Cape Town still deny that the farm murders phenomenon even exists.

The majority of white people by their very nature seem to be instinctively repulsed by ethnic nationalism to some degree, and in any given white country only a small minority of people seem aligned with pro-white causes. This is why I think populism is the way forward, because it provides a form of nationalism which not only solves most of the West’s problems, but is also amenable to the mentality of the average person in the street.

Brexit and Trump’s election were implicitly white events; framed as such more by the actions of the nay-sayers than the advocates. Despite all the media programming, these countries are the product of European peoples, and they still are the majority populations in thes lands, for now. Yet, not one of the major figures in either of these causes made it an explicitly white event- a very wise tactical choice. Populism allows you to save the white man and his family without actually saying that you are saving the white man and his family. Yes; sometimes the populists cuck and you identitarians may cringe with resentment, but if that cuck lowers immigration by 50% then there is no reason not to get behind him.

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In the modern world, where an Englishman can be locked up for saying something controversial or a parent can have their child taken by social services simply because they have a bruise on their arm, a certain flexibility is needed. You need to achieve your goals without ever stating what your true goals are. The left have always done this; their centre-left candidates are quite often secretly communist, yet they will never admit that. You need to enter movements and help push through legislation that is similar to your beliefs or which will help lead to the implementation of your goals. Populism is the ‘big tent’ that allows you to do this.

Purity spiralling will get you nowhere, and cutting yourself off from the political process or people who even slightly disagree with you is stupid.

In other words, it is time for the Alt-Right to be pragmatic, as well as idealistic.

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An Obama Staffer's Parting Note To Progressives

For eight years I had the indescribable honor of serving in President Obama’s White House, most recently as Special Assistant to the President & Director of Rapid Response. I played a lot of different roles, but going back through the 2008 transition and even back to the DNC during that campaign, I’ve served as a nexus between the White House and progressive advocates, bloggers, journalists, and pundits — I thought it might be worth sharing some of my perspective publicly with any progressive that cares to read it.

First and foremost: I say in all honesty that very little would have gotten done without you, and it’s become even more clear to me in these final days that your constructive criticism/pushing/occasional outrage helped make this White House a better White House, and this president a better president.

Looking forward, as bleak a moment as this is in many ways, I’m optimistic for the future of progressives and the Democratic Party.  As contentious as things can sometimes seem within our side, I think there’s remarkable consensus on the kind of progressive change we need, captured in great detail through the hard work of the unified Democratic platform. I think a lot of the goals we had coming into 2009 have seen immense measurable accomplishment, more so than virtually any pundit would have thought possible at the time.  On so many issues, progressives and President Obama have helped move the Overton window in the right direction (take some time to reflect on political conventional wisdom in 2008 and I think you’ll agree).

But part of progress is having to defend that progress, sooner or later, with your back against the wall. That time came sooner than expected, but it was always going to come. And reversing it is going to be a lot harder than Republicans advertised, because the benefits are just so damned real.

As we all continue to grapple with the election’s aftermath, there’s one critique that I’ve heard from the media, from some supporters of the incoming administration, and from some folks on the left who I truly respect, that I want to take on — namely that the Democratic Party and/or Obama “didn’t fight for working people.”

That I can’t abide.

― When Obama passed the Recovery Act, a bigger stimulus than the New Deal, the infrastructure spending, the investments in clean energy manufacturing, and the Making Work Pay tax cuts were for working people.

― When we passed the Affordable Care Act, that was aimed straight at working people — white working people, black working people, Hispanic, Asian, and tribal — and Republicans are now finally having ‎to face up to that fact. Not just the 20+ million who got coverage, but the ~150 million with pre-existing conditions and the vast majority of Americans who get their coverage through work who were always at risk of getting screwed by some insurance company loophole. It was for people like my parents who are self-employed and could never afford real insurance for our family while I was growing up.

― When we passed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, that was for working people who were getting screwed every which way by predatory financial industries.

― When Obama executed the auto bailout, despite shudder-inducing unpopularity at the time, a million working people kept their livelihoods.

― When Obama ended the Bush tax cuts for millionaires, even as he ‎extended working class tax cuts like the Child Tax Credit, Earned Income Tax Credit, and the new American Opportunity Tax Credit, that was for working people.

― When we repealed Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and helped make marriage equality a reality, that was for working people who wanted to live free of discrimination in a loving relationship or serving their country.

― When we implemented Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), that was for working people who just wanted‎ to come out of the shadows and contribute to this country in the light of day.

― When Obama signed the law to reduce crack/cocaine sentencing discrepancies, and pushed the sentencing commission for reform, and made a cause out of his presidential commutation power, and pushed to “ban the box” on employment forms, that was for working people who wanted to ‎make a living for themselves and their families, and not have their lives destroyed by some drug offense that a wealthy kid might have gotten a slap on the wrist for.

― When the president brought more than 90 percent of our troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan, stayed out of a full blown ground war quagmire in Syria despite constant criticism, ‎and used diplomacy to block Iran’s nuclear program and avoid another war, that was for the working people who make up America’s military — white working people, black working people, Hispanic, Asian, and tribal — who want to serve their country and get an education they might not otherwise be able to afford, and who are treated like cannon fodder by Washington’s war “hawks.”

― When Obama took on toxic pollution on things like mercury‎ and countless other rules, that was for working people, who are the ones who bear the brunt of that toxicity, saving tens of thousands from sickness and death.

― Setting aside the fact that climate change will destroy the planet that working people work on, he has also pushed against widespread skepticism, constant political criticism, and even mockery,‎ to make clean energy a source of manufacturing jobs for working people for decades ahead, and there is now widespread agreement that the clean energy revolution has begun — and can’t be reversed.

― When Obama took major executive actions and pushed to make fair pay and paid leave central to the political debate, to recognize them as economic issues and not solely gender equality issues, that was, obviously, about working people.

― Executive actions on overtime pay, payday lenders, crooked retirement brokers: working people.

― And when Obama pushed for the American Jobs Act, for immigration reform, for universal background checks, for universal pre-K and free community college and for minimum wage increases, and was blocked by Republicans, that was all for working people.

Obama wasn’t perfect; with any president you can find shortcomings, and more people that could have or should have been helped; we owe it to those people to learn lessons and do better in the future.  But I honestly believe he will be remembered as one of our greatest presidents, precisely because fighting for working people is literally what got him (and his staff) out of bed in the morning, what made him love and cherish the job up to the very last day.  And the Democratic Party, which buckled down and sacrificed huge numbers of its members for the sake of insuring tens of millions of people, and which in vast majority stood strong to stop war in Iran, has been a party I can believe in as a vehicle for change, for all its warts.

All of that is to say that I’m proud, and I hope you’ll be proud too of what you’ve been a part of and witnessed.  Because it is now all under threat from the party that actually disdains the working class. Take stock of what we’ve done together, because the time to defend it has already come. And the fight is not for Obama’s legacy, nor would he want it to be.  It’s for working people, be they white, black, Hispanic, Asian, tribal — even Trump’s own voters.

First posted on Washington Monthly.

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