Book review: The Civil War in the United States: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (edited and with an introduction by Andrew Zimmerman) International Publishers, New York, 2nd edition, 2016

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“Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded”. – Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 1867

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(The following review by Barry York is from the latest edition of ‘Recorder’, the newsletter of the Melbourne Labour History Society. It is published here in its unedited form).

This collection of writings by Marx and Engels about the American Civil War was originally published in 1937 by Dr. H. M. Morais. Dr Morais lost his college teaching job as a result. It’s good that in 2016 it can be published as a second edition without any job losses. Zimmerman, a professor of history in Washington DC, provides very useful introductory contextualisation to each section. There are nine parts in all, from Marx and Engels on slavery and abolition before the civil war through to ‘Slavery and the Civil War in Capital’.

Zimmerman’s introductions are helpful for those of us who need reminding of the significance of the various places, battles, politicians and military figures.

Marx and Engels certainly knew their stuff. Considering they wrote from England, Marx’s knowledge of American geography and topography is astonishing. It’s remarkable to read the extent of their detailed knowledge of the unfolding struggle against the “oligarchy of 300,000 slave holders”. They drew on wide sources of information, including correspondence with German communists who had fled to the United States following the defeat of the 1848 European revolutions and who took up arms for the Union. But they also read the American newspapers, including the New York Tribune. And Engels even communicated with a Confederate major.

This is how it should be, of course. ‘No investigation, no right to speak’. They did not see it through the lens of dogma, or force the events into some formula or ideological schema. Their letters and other writings reveal a materialist dialectical approach, an understanding that things unfolded as they did, influenced by human thought and motored by action, but not as one might wish they should. Revolutions are innovative and experimental, devising their own strategies and defining their own nature.

We must keep in mind that the American Civil War was Marx and Engels’ equivalent of ‘Vietnam’ (for those of us politicized in the 1960s). It was the big issue – “the most momentous thing happening in the world today” – especially for internationalists who see no distinction between ‘them’ and ‘us’. The US struggle against slavery was also a source of inspiration following the dispiriting rise of Bonapartism in Europe.

It was also inspiring for Marx and Engels to witness the great support by the English working classes for the Union forces, at a time when the British ruling class was sympathetic to the Confederacy.

I was surprised by the extent of Engels’ military knowledge. He sure loved guns. Marx, by contrast, comes across as more adept at political and economic analysis. Engels emerges as less optimistic than Marx. But for Marx there was no doubt of Union victory. In a letter to his uncle (yes, he had one), Marx knew that the North had “a last card up its sleeve in the shape of a slave revolution”.

Marx and Engels were great pro-war ‘hawks’. Not for them the ineffective non-violent tactics of naval blockades. They supported and welcomed military invasion of the South.

The edited selection of writings reveal how Marx and Engels saw through the false argument that the emerging war was not about slavery but rather tariffs.

And they contended with the ‘ultra-leftists’ who were highly critical of Lincoln. It took 18 months before Lincoln issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in September 1862, but Marx and Engels recognised him as a strategic thinker who was creating conditions to take his class, the working class, with him against the pre-industrial slave owners.

Lincoln was their ‘Ho Chi Minh’. Marx’s letter to Lincoln on behalf of the International Workingmen’s Association in 1864 can be read here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/iwma/documents/1864/lincoln-letter.htm

Revolutions do not always succeed, they can fail, but they can push things forward. When one fails, you have another. Marx and Engels were very disappointed by Andrew Johnson’s presidency, following Lincoln’s assassination. He restored plantations to ex-slave owners and reversed the planned land reform program. Slavery was abolished but racial and class hierarchies kept in place. It took another century, marked by Jim Crow segregation and lynchings, before the next leap forward in 1965 with the Civil Rights Act.

The faint-hearted should be warned that Marx and Engels sometimes used the term ‘Nigger’. They used it infrequently and ironically, usually.

Of all the great quotes by Marx in this book, one stands out for me: “Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded”. (Captial, vol. 1, 1867)

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Toronto Museum – An exercise in ‘education’, irritation and Bertolt Brecht

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‘We do not want to be depicted in the way we were when we were first discovered in our homeland in North America. We do not want museums to continue to present us as something from the past. We believe we are very, very much here now and we are going to be very important in the future’.

– North American Indigenous exhibit, Toronto Museum

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(by Tom Griffiths)

Recently my wife and I had the opportunity of visiting the Toronto Museum at the invitation of a Toronto based colleague of hers, in order to see a Viking exhibition. Well, historical remnants and explanations thereof – if you want to see the long boats you need to go to the Viking Museum in Oslo. We did not expect this to be able to match the Viking museum, not a fair ask in any case and in this sense our expectations were met.

Before moving on to the purpose of this post, which is not really about the Viking exhibits, two comments about it, both positive, are worth making, especially since they affected my expectations (and disappointments) of what I would be exposed to in the rest of the museum, or rather those parts I visited. And these left me peeved and irritated with Brecht buzzing around my head. But more on this later.

The two positives, while modest in themselves, showed an attempt being made by either the curating bods at Toronto or Oslo to engage the visitor in the life and times of the Vikings. And having vicariously visited Valhalla courtesy of Dirk Gently’s adventures in The Long Dark Tea-Time of The Soul I was ready to be engaged.

The first positive was an obvious attempt by the curators to explain aspects of context, specifically social and economic, that helped shape the Vikings. As one would expect these days particular attention was placed on the place and role of women, making them visible. This aspect painted with a broad brush. The other positive was about fine detail. As one would expect after a thousand odd years many of the exhibits were showing their age and associated brittleness. One, a sword, made decrepit and fragile by rust, was partnered by a reproduction that had been placed in front of it. Above the repro was a sign saying Touch Me. I didn’t need to be asked twice. Briefly, for a fleeting second, I was able to imagine myself there. I will leave it to your imagination to decide whether ‘there’ was somewhere in the former Viking territories or in Valhalla.

While it would be an exaggeration to say that I was buoyed by this experience, it had certainly lodged somewhere in my head as my wife headed off to work leaving me to explore the rest of the museum. At this stage Brecht was, shall I say, keeping a low profile.

Whilst I did not ‘do’ the whole museum I did see three of their substantial exhibitions. In order of my seeing them these were an exhibition of 1stC to 20thC AD Korean sculptures and artifacts, a North American Indigenous section and a series of 16thC to early 20thC bed and sitting room furniture in ‘typical’ domestic settings. A legacy of European style as the Museum put it. Hint: the inverted commas serve as a warning. By the time I had finished Brecht was buzzing furiously.

Leaving Odin, Thor and their Viking worshipers behind I headed off to a Korean exhibition, the focus of which was mythology, mythological figures (the King of Hell, for example), furnishings and residential representations of the wealthy and … I don’t know what the collective noun is for numerous Buddha statues gathered in a small space is – a chill of Buddhas perhaps? – and a chill of Buddhas.

An O.D. of Buddhas- insouciance for all

I entered this exhibition curious but without any specific expectations. I left it Buddha’d out, having been through a Charge of the Light Brigade moment – Buddhas to the right, Buddhas to the left … The benefit of this over dose was it forced me to think and what follows is a distillation of that.

There were several aspects to this, the most immediately obvious being the historical, the retreat inward in the face of powerlessness. Whilst not true in any absolute sense the old boy himself and his many followers were, like the Stoics of ancient Greece and the Brahmin aesthetes, to name but a few, suffering an acute on chronic shortage of places to go with any dissatisfactions or grievances they had with the material world. And more importantly the people generally had even fewer places to go – they had no choice other than to put up with it and figure out ways to survive.

Hobbes’ dystopian description of the primitive world where life outside society was ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’ could also have been applied to the social conditions surrounding Buddha et al because life inside these societies wasn’t much better. From such materially and spiritually impoverished soil, “a heartless world” as Marx put it, sprang both need, “the sigh of the oppressed creature” and solution.

Withdrawing into the inner self was something they could do – and proselytise about – and they did. And yes, I know that proselytising about it is an external act and a defacto, if not intentional, political act but we moderns have Buddha et al at a considerable disadvantage when it comes to passing judgement on the value of what he or others were promoting as solutions to the miseries and injustices of social life.

So what is my gripe about confronting these ‘chilled out’ stone figures? None. As just mentioned, judging those times by today’s values and insights wouldn’t even make the grade as picking low hanging fruit; my gripe with the museum’s display is with how these concrete historical figures have been removed from their actual, material conditions and the human needs these ‘nurtured’ and gave birth to and rendered them abstract.

Museums all around the world, including Toronto, promote themselves as having an educative function. Unlike their Viking display, this was not education, but mystification. The saving grace, if I can put it that way, of the Buddas one can see in temples across South and SouthEast Asia – my favourites are the giant, recumbent Buddhas I’ve seen in Thailand and Sri Lanka, whose eyes peer lazily beyond, looking like they’ve just had a shot of heroin – is that they make no attempt to educate in a rational, secular sense; they are religious figures at places of worship.

There the term education takes on an entirely different meaning, one that is part of a religious faith’s ‘job description’. I disagree with the message but have no gripes with their honesty. I am unable to be so generous with the museum and this connects it with the following.

Another aspect is quite contemporary, a comment on the times. At the dawn of the modern era we see someone like Bacon revolutionizing philosophy by turning it outward, to the objective world of things. He took more than a passing swipe at medieval predecessors and ancient Greek philosophy alike for their looking inward and took a very direct swipe at Plato and Platonism generally: “when you taught us to turn our minds inward and grovel before our own blind and confused idols under the name of contemplative philosophy; then truly you dealt us a mortal injury.”

While not directed against Buddha or what his adherents stood for it could easily have done so. There was a world to conquer. The means to do it were emerging and these means were accompanied by and encouraged a spirit full of confidence and vision. This bullish spirit (or should that be Bolshie spirit?) of the young bourgeois revolution, so admired by Marx, is now in an almost apologetic retreat. Where once a critique of the shortcomings and hypocrisies of this revolution created elbow room for proletarian promise and daring do, there is now among ‘informed opinion’ and the broad spectrum of bourgeois ideology a de energised, timid state characterised by a sense of diminished hope and glumness if not outright funk.

And just when we thought things had reached rock bottom who should step, or rather who is pushed, onto the stage, but Buddha, eyes closed or glazed over telling us to focus on the inner self. Now in whose interest could that sage advice possibly be I wonder?

Tellingly, perhaps, my favourite figure in this section of the museum was the King of Hell, a diabolical little chap who at least displayed a sense of vitality. And here Brecht made his first appearance. As I looked and smiled at the King I was reminded of Brecht’s Mask of Evil: “On my wall hangs a Japanese carving/ The mask of an evil demon, decorated with gold lacquer./ Sympathetically I observe/ The swollen veins on the forehead, indicating/ What a strain it is to be evil.”

As with my little ‘mate’ the King there is tension, there is contradiction, there is life. And thank heavens for that! Or should that be thank hell?
After entering this exhibit with casual interest I found myself relieved to be leaving it and without consulting the museum map soon found myself outside (and then inside) the North American Indigenous Exhibit.

The North American Indigenous section

It may be odd to say this but these exhibits had a certain familiarity courtesy of my childhood and adolescence watching westerns on TV and Saturday arvo matinees. That being said the exhibits were of interest and some attention had been paid (not enough as I was soon to discover) to explanation of context.

Then it happened, an exhibit that not only caught my attention (seized it was more accurate) but made me audibly laugh in surprise and approval. This was the highlight of the museum and demonstrates how the dead and buried can be made to live, for their living descendents to embrace the challenges of modernity without sacrificing their heritage and how easy this transformation can be. But I’m getting a little ahead of myself.

This exhibit was of three native Americans, life size plaster cast figures, two men and a woman, originally installed about 100 years ago. The male figure to my left was squatting and reaching for something with his left hand; in the middle, and standing was the female figure and to her left the second male figure in a semi squatting pose. An unremarkable exhibit of the past and a defeated past at that. Comforting for the victors perhaps, but not so for the vanquished and it was this discomfort (pissed offness is probably more accurate) that transformed what was before me into something exceptional. What I actually saw and what had given the exhibit life and relevance was the male figure to my left reaching for a power drill, the female figure holding a tripod and camera and the remaining figure wired up with a ipod.

After my initial ‘wow’ response my gaze fell to an explanatory note at the base of the trio. It said it all:

‘We do not want to be depicted in the way we were when we were first discovered in our homeland in North America. We do not want museums to continue to present us as something from the past. We believe we are very, very much here now and we are going to be very important in the future’.

European Style through the Ages

I left the Indigenous display in a buoyant mood and soon ended up, in more familiar territory, in the Samuel European Galleries where I was assailed and increasingly irritated by the ‘legacy of European style through the ages’ – the ages here meaning the late middle ages – the birth of the modern period – to the 20thC. I later discovered, courtesy of their website, that during the period covered, “Europe witnessed agricultural, social, economic and industrial innovation that would change how Europeans lived, worked, and viewed with the world around them” and was invited to “examine the influence these changes had through the lens of decorative arts development in central and Western Europe. Walk among period rooms and vignettes, including those of the Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo, Neoclassical, and Victorian periods, and discover the different stylistic signatures of each.”

Now, I need to disclose that I gained this information after my visit and after the irritation I increasingly felt as I walked “among the period rooms and vignettes” conversing in my head with Brecht as I went. Had I had this info with me at the time my irritation would have been greater.

The problem I had was not with what was there but with what was not. The period rooms and vignettes displayed were, not surprisingly, either the “stylistic signatures” of the emergent bourgeoisie (landed or otherwise) or of the decaying aristocracies of Europe. This fails to surprise on two levels. The first is that the display artifacts were made by skilled craftsmen using quality materials and these have a tendency to last and to be handed down across generations. The second is political, or ideological more broadly and ironically sits in the same camp as that identified and rectified by the Indigenous activists referred to above. In much the same way as the common working people – you know, the ones that actually make all the stuff and keep it working – are written out of history, the lens employed at the museum airbrushes them out too. The pity of this is that their signature appears in every single exhibit, but remains unseen and devalued. As I traipsed my way through the centuries, looking at these rooms with their ‘stylistic signatures’ the one signature that emerged as dominant was that of class, of ownership.

On the one hand this is all rather ho hum – what had I expected to see anyway? But on the other, consigning it to the ‘ho hum’ department is itself a problem because it colludes with the obscuring of social relations. The question that kept repeating in my head was ”where are the people?” And I mean all of them – the property owners, the quality sort of chap with his quality sort of wife, their servants (who cooked the meals? who changed the sheets and cleaned? who…?) the craftsmen who had built everything before me. Where were they? And what were their quarters like? where and how did the craftsmen live?

The Indigenous example – the power drill, the camera and the ipod – demonstrated how the past can be made highly pertinent to the present, how the gap between them shrinks and can be traversed. With curatorship guided by curiosity and social awareness and how these are shaped by the times, we can be given the opportunity of asking questions of history. We can tackle, like our indigenous friends, how we can bring these questions into the present and ask ourselves what aspects of this past remain tangled in the present, holding us up and what aspects have opened doors and propelled us forward.

But why Brecht? Why him in my head, needling me? Brecht is one of my favorite poets and the answer lies in one of them, Questions From a Worker Who Reads:

Who built Thebes of the 7 gates ?
In the books you will read the names of kings.
Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock ?
And Babylon, many times demolished,
Who raised it up so many times ?
In what houses of gold glittering Lima did its builders live ?
Where, the evening that the Great Wall of China was finished, did the masons go?
Great Rome is full of triumphal arches.
Who erected them ?
Over whom did the Caesars triumph ?
Had Byzantium, much praised in song, only palaces for its inhabitants ?
Even in fabled Atlantis, the night that the ocean engulfed it,
The drowning still cried out for their slaves.
The young Alexander conquered India.
Was he alone ?
Caesar defeated the Gauls.
Did he not even have a cook with him ?
Philip of Spain wept when his armada went down.
Was he the only one to weep ?
Frederick the 2nd won the 7 Years War.
Who else won it ?
Every page a victory.
Who cooked the feast for the victors ?
Every 10 years a great man.
Who paid the bill ?
So many reports.
So many questions.

 

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Marx Supported Capitalist Globalization

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Marx Supported Capitalist Globalization

Thanks to David McMullen. 

Today’s “Marxists” share with the rest of the pseudo left an opposition to capitalist, indeed any, globalization. This puts them totally at odds with Marx. The following quote from The Communist Manifesto leaves no doubt about Marx’s pro position:

The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.

Then in a letter to Engels of October 8 1858 he wrote:

The proper task of bourgeois society is the creation of the world market, at least in outline, and of the production based on that market. Since the world is round, the colonisation of California and Australia and the opening up of China and Japan would seem to have completed this process.

In his other writings, Marx supported Europe’s colonial conquests, the “process” that got globalization going.  In his view Europe was the only source of capitalism which in turn was the necessary  precursor of communism. Support for this historical necessity did not prevent him from expressing his disgust at the barbarity and hypocrisy of the Europeans as they went about this conquest nor was he impressed with the tardy pace at which the old societies were being replaced by the new. What he was doing was recognizing that capitalism has a dialectical or contradictory nature. Only capitalism can create the conditions for its own demise. You have to support it in order to oppose it.  In “The British Rule in India” New York Daily News of June 25, 1853, he wrote:

These small stereotype forms of social organism [autonomous villages] have been to the greater part dissolved, and are disappearing, not so much through the brutal interference of the British tax-gatherer and the British soldier, as to the working of English steam and English free trade. Those family-communities were based on domestic industry, in that peculiar combination of hand-weaving, hands-spinning and hand-tilling agriculture which gave them self-supporting power. English interference having placed the spinner in Lancashire and the weaver in Bengal, or sweeping away both Hindoo spinner and weaver, dissolved these small semi-barbarian, semi-civilized communities, by blowing up their economical basis, and thus produced the greatest, and to speak the truth, the only social revolution ever heard of in Asia.

Now, sickening as it must be to human feeling to witness those myriads of industrious patriarchal and inoffensive social organizations disorganized and dissolved into their units, thrown into a sea of woes, and their individual members losing at the same time their ancient form of civilization, and their hereditary means of subsistence, we must not forget that these idyllic village-communities, inoffensive though they may appear, had always been the solid foundation of Oriental despotism, that they restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath traditional rules, depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies. We must not forget the barbarian egotism which, concentrating on some miserable patch of land, had quietly witnessed the ruin of empires, the perpetration of unspeakable cruelties, the massacre of the population of large towns, with no other consideration bestowed upon them than on natural events, itself the helpless prey of any aggressor who deigned to notice it at all. We must not forget that this undignified, stagnatory, and vegetative life, that this passive sort of existence evoked on the other part, in contradistinction, wild, aimless, unbounded forces of destruction and rendered murder itself a religious rite in Hindostan. We must not forget that these little communities were contaminated by distinctions of caste and by slavery, that they subjugated man to external circumstances instead of elevating man the sovereign of circumstances, that they transformed a self-developing social state into never changing natural destiny, and thus brought about a brutalizing worship of nature, exhibiting its degradation in the fact that man, the sovereign of nature, fell down on his knees in adoration of Kanuman, the monkey, and Sabbala, the cow.

England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindostan, was actuated only by the vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of enforcing them. But that is not the question. The question is, can mankind fulfil its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution.

In “The Future Results of British Rule in India” New York Daily News of August 8, 1853, he wrote:

England has to fulfill a double mission in India: one destructive, the other regenerating – the annihilation of old Asiatic society, and the laying of the material foundation of Western society in Asia.

He expressed a similar view when writing about  Britain’s beastly treatment of China. So that  in “Revolution in China and In Europe”, New York Daily News, June 14, 1853 we read:

It is almost needless to observe that, in the same measure in which opium has obtained the sovereignty over the Chinese, the Emperor and his staff of pedantic mandarins have become dispossessed of their own sovereignty. It would seem as though history had first to make this whole people drunk before it could rouse them out of their hereditary stupidity.

and then:
All these dissolving agencies acting together on the finances, the morals, the industry, and political structure of China, received their full development under the English cannon in 1840, which broke down the authority of the Emperor, and forced the Celestial Empire into contact with the terrestrial world. Complete isolation was the prime condition of the preservation of Old China. That isolation having come to a violent end by the medium of England, dissolution must follow as surely as that of any mummy carefully preserved in a hermetically sealed coffin, whenever it is brought into contact with the open air.

In an article published in the Deutsche-Brüsseler-Zeitung No. 7, January 23, 1848, Engels expressed his delight at America’s victory in the war with Mexico and the conquest of California, Texas and areas in between. In their footnotes the editors at Progress Press in Moscow try to make out that both Engels and Marx later took a different view. They cite an 1861 article by Marx called “The Civil War in North America”. Here Marx mentions how expansionism at the time was driven by the slave owners. Although he makes no actual mention of the Mexican-American War. In hindsight we can see that one good thing about the annexations was that they contributed to the outbreak of the Civil War which the slave-owners went on to lose. Their attempt to spread slavery to the new territories was the last straw.  And we can now say without fear of contradiction that capitalist development greatly benefited from the switch in sovereignty. Here is a link to the 1861 article. It is no use on the Mexican-American War but it is a very illuminating exposition of the expansionist threat posed by the slave states and a very good argument against British “neutrality”.

Marx was quite unsupportive of rebellions by reactionary or backward elements in colonial societies. These included the Taiping Rebellion in China and the Indian Mutiny.

In “Chinese Affairs” Die Presse, No. 185, July 7, 1862, Marx has nothing positive to say about the Taiping Rebellion that rocked southern China from 1850 to 1864:

They have no slogans. They are an even greater abomination for the masses of the people than for the old rulers. They seem to have no other vocation than, as opposed to conservative stagnation, to produce destruction in grotesquely detestable forms, destruction without any nucleus of new construction.

“Marxists” have tried to tell a different tale. Over at The Marx and Engels Internet Archive they have a section entitled  Articles on China 1853 – 1860.  It has other articles that deal with rebellion but not the  Die Presse article for copyright reasons. In their introduction they paint the Taiping in glowing colors:

At the same time, the Taiping rebellion broke out in 1850 and attacked the status quo Confucianist Manchu Dynasty — which had ruled since 1644. The rebellion was based in social revolutionary ideas of equality and was popular among the masses. It abolished private property, established sexual equality, and banned drugs (from alcohol to opium). By 1853, it dominated much of SE China. It would not be until 1864 that the Taiping capital of Nanking was captured by the imperial Manchu government.

Progress Press also have this rather gratuitous footnote in Volume I of Capital:

 In 1850-64, China was swept by an anti-feudal liberation movement in the form of a large-scale peasant war, the Taiping Revolt.

The fairly uncontroversial Wikipedia entry on the Taiping Rebellion gives a far less flattering picture.

There is also an attempt to paint the Indian Mutiny as a national liberation movement. The Soviet  Foreign Languages Publishing House in 1959 brought out a collection of articles by Marx on the Indian Mutiny entitled The First Indian War of Independence, 1857-1859. Also the The Marx and Engels Internet Archive has a web page entitled The First Indian War of Independence (1857-1858)  
Marx does not explicitly repudiate the Mutiny in the way that he did in the case of the Taiping Rebellion. However, the total absence of any explicit statement of support is just as telling. He is very concerned to expose British military incompetence and brutality. He is also pleased by the financial and political strain it is placing on Britain.  But that is as far as it goes. It is hard to imagine him supporting a pack of princes who wanted to reinstate the Mogul empire after what we know about his view on the role of the British in India.

The editors of Progress Press were also embarrassed by an article by Engels called “French Rule in Algeria” (The Northern Star January 22 1848). Here he wrote:

Upon the whole it is, in our opinion, very fortunate that the Arabian chief has been taken. The struggle of the Bedouins was a hopeless one, and though the manner in which brutal soldiers, like Bugeaud, have carried on the war is highly blameable, the conquest of Algeria is an important and fortunate fact for the progress of civilisation. The piracies of the Barbaresque states, never interfered with by the English government as long as they did not disturb their ships, could not be put down but by the conquest of one of these states. And the conquest of Algeria has already forced the Beys of Tunis and Tripoli, and even the Emperor of Morocco, to enter upon the road of civilisation. They were obliged to find other employment for their people than piracy, and other means of filling their exchequer than tributes paid to them by the smaller states of Europe. And if we may regret that the liberty of the Bedouins of the desert has been destroyed, we must not forget that these same Bedouins were a nation of robbers,—whose principal means of living consisted of making excursions either upon each other, or upon the settled villagers, taking what they found, slaughtering all those who resisted, and selling the remaining prisoners as slaves. All these nations of free barbarians look very proud, noble and glorious at a distance, but only come near them and you will find that they, as well as the more civilised nations, are ruled by the lust of gain, and only employ ruder and more cruel means. And after all, the modern bourgeois, with civilisation, industry, order, and at least relative enlightenment following him, is preferable to the feudal lord or to the marauding robber, with the barbarian state of society to which they belong.

Progress Press in its footnotes refers to this resistance as a liberation struggle. They also then claim that in an 1844 article Engels had made commendable noises about the resistance and that an article “Algeria” written for the New American Encyclopaedia in 1857 reverses the position expressed in the 1848 article. There is nothing in either article that can be construed in this way. An editor’s footnote to the latter article claims that the relevant material was left out by the encylcopaedia editors and this is conformed by a letter from Engels to Marx on 22 September 1857. The letter shows nothing of the sort. The reader is invited to read those three  pieces to make up their own mind.

These views of Marx are not at odds with support by communists for the 20th century anti-colonial movement. By that stage the movement was primarily lead by western educated elements who sought to modernize their countries rather than take them backwards.  Although there were some oddities such as Mahatma Gandhi, and  independence brought many monsters like Idi Amin in Uganda and Mobutu in Zaire, and the whole process was badly affected by the Cold War.

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“From that moment on, we were beaten, and we knew we were”… Robert Smillie, quoted by Nye Bevan in Bevan’s memoir, ‘In place of fear’ (1952)

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Aneurin (‘Nye’) Bevan (1897-1960) is best known for his achievement of bringing in the National Health Service (NHS) as Minister for Health in the United Kingdom’s Attlee Labour Government (1945-1951).

Bevan was an avowed socialist, though not a communist or Marxist. He saw the NHS as a socialist measure, of providing health services for everyone regardless of wealth and funded by everyone via the democratic state.

When I was growing up in Melbourne, his name – always ‘Nye Bevan’ – was often referred to reverentially by my working class father who had lived and worked in London after World War 2 and supported the Attlee Government that, to the great shock and surprise of most commentators, had defeated Churchill’s Conservatives. My dad told me more than once that, having put their lives on the line to fight fascism, ex-servicemen like him expected a much better world and social system after the War. They hadn’t fought to keep things the same.  (He demobbed in 1953, as the Royal Air Force, which he had joined in his native Malta in 1940, provided secure employment and opportunity for advancement). In Australia, when I was young, he would sometimes say: “Australia needs a Nye Bevan!” or “The Labor Party needs a leader like Bevan!”

Bevan was the real deal in the sense of being a working class man through and through. Born in a town in the southern coalfields of Wales, he went to work in a colliery at the age of thirteen. He hoped that socialism could be achieved through the ballot box, which made sense given that adult men had finally won the vote, without qualification, in the UK in 1918 when Bevan was twenty-one.

For women, the universal franchise came later – 1928 – and I love the way Bevan states early in his memoir, In place of fear (Simon & Schuster, New York ,1952) that he was elected to Britain’s first democratic parliament. The General Election of 1929 was the first based on universal adult suffrage.

* * * * *

I thought I’d revisit Bevan’s memoir after recently hearing John Hewson on ABC-TV. Hewson said that we might be heading for a big economic crisis. Hewson was leader of the Opposition in the early 1990s and had been an economics adviser to two Liberal Treasurers.

I’m not good at economics but I can see how ‘the big one’ might be coming. Of course, I’d heard this many times before, mostly from old communists. Every periodic crisis in the boom and bust cycle was seen as the beginning of the end of capitalism. But now, things do seem different, and everyday people feel it, as the rate of profit has steadily declined over the decades, with wages recently more or less stagnant, the standard of living in decline and government increasingly reliant on debt to fund services.

But I hadn’t heard it from a prominent conservative before.

What leapt out at me from Bevan’s memoir wasn’t the reassertion of socialism as a good thing, an extension of democracy into the social and economic realms, so much as the depressing reality that in the C21st the left in the advanced capitalist countries (ie, those requiring state funding to keep the system going) still faces the same dilemma as it did in 1919, when the UK seemed to be approaching a revolutionary moment. There was even unrest in the Army, and massive discontent and strike action – some of it violently suppressed – among the working class. The Russian revolution of 1917 had also put the fear of God into the British ruling class.

Bevan recalls (pp. 21-22) how the leader of the miners’ union, Robert Smillie, described to him a meeting at that time by the leaders of the ‘most formidable combination of industrial workers in the history of Great Britain’ – the miners, the transport workers and the railway workers  whose industrial action had brought the government of the day – headed by Liberal Lloyd George – to its knees.

Here is the full quote, and the lesson learned:

“Lloyd George sent for the Labour leaders, and they went, so Robert (Smillie) told me, ‘truculently determined they would not be talked over by the seductive and eloquent Welshman (Lloyd George, the Prime Minister)’. At this, Bob’s eyes twinkled in his grave, strong face. ‘He was quite frank with us from the outset’, Bob went on.

“He said to us: ‘Gentlemen, you have fashioned, in the Triple Alliance of the unions represented by you, a most powerful instrument. I feel bound to tell you that in our opinion we are at your mercy. The Army is disaffected and cannot be relied upon. Trouble has occurred already in a number of camps. We have just emerged from a great war and the people are eager for the reward of their sacrifices, and we are in no position to satisfy them. In these circumstances, if you carry out your threat and strike, then you will defeat us.

“‘But if you do so’, went on Mr Lloyd George, ‘have you weighed in the consequences? The strike will be in defiance of the Government of the country and by its very success will precipitate a constitutional crisis of the first importance. For, if a force arises in the State which is stronger than the State itself, then it must be ready to take on the functions of the State, or withdraw and accept the authority of the State.

“‘Gentlemen’, asked the Prime Minister quietly, ‘have you considered, and if you have, are you ready?‘

“‘From that moment on’, said Robert Smillie, ‘we were beaten and we knew we were'”.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notes on Trump 24

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1. Removing the spending caps to enable larger deficit budgets without regular crises over threats to default was a major development that may have been an important trigger for the stock market “correction”. Wages already rising with inflation and interest rates widely expected to follow.

Not noticed any discussion of the coalition emerging in the House of Representatives. Democrat leader Pelosi spoke for 8 hours against avoiding another shutdown but only 119 Democrats voted no with her. Another 73 joined with 167 GOP yes votes, outnumbering the 67 GOP no votes (presumably Tea Party/Koch brothers but I haven’t checked).

https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/115-2018/h69

This tends to confirm my expectation that the program of deficits Trump needs for 2020 will get through. Perhaps with more “noise” than this first major step, but with similar bipartisan majority that relies on Democrats to offset GOP fiscal hawks. Even the Atlantic can see it:

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/02/trump-populism/552923/

Interestingly all officers of the Sanders wing Progressive caucus (with the fascinating exception of their whip) voted no. I would expect them to be more inclined to support deficits for infrastructure, healthcare etc so bipartisan majority could be more comfortable than it currently looks. I haven’t checked the non-officer members.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_Progressive_Caucus

Also of course the 8 hour drama from Pelosi was purely posturing about DACA and does not imply any serious intention for Democrats to block larger deficits. Presumably the Sanders wing officials also felt obliged to participate in the DACA posturing.

In fact Pelosi told the Democrat caucus they could vote their conscience and was “relieved” her no vote was defeated.

As the GOP Chief Deputy whip said:

“To me, it’s a fascinating display of a bipartisan win and at the same time Democrats ripping themselves apart about a bipartisan agreement. It doesn’t make any damn sense.”

http://thehill.com/homenews/house/373168-winners-and-losers-from-the-overnight-shutdown

2. But it does make sense, once you grasp that the Democrat leadership is absolutely paralysed and purely engaged in posturing. The above spectacular stupidity was actually exceeded in response to the FBI and DOJ requesting redactions from a Democrat memo. If they were only mildly incompetent they would simply undertake to make the necessary redactions, which have been provided to them by the FBI and DOJ, while repeating their theme that their memo is defending the FBI and DOJ from Trump. Embarassing, but what else could they do under the circumstances? Indeed the ranking Democrat responsible for their memo did just that:

http://thehill.com/homenews/house/373234-schiff-dems-will-to-review-recommended-memo-redactions-from-doj-fbi

But of course he couldn’t resist “blasting” Trump for “hypocrisy” and other Democrats could not resist joining in

According to Pelosi:

“President Trump’s refusal to release Intelligence Committee Democrats’ memo is a stunningly brazen attempt to cover up the truth about the Trump-Russia scandal from the American people,” Pelosi said in a statement.

“The President’s decision to block the Democratic memo from release is part of a dangerous and desperate pattern of cover-up on the part of the President,” she added. “Clearly, the President has something to hide.”

Pelosi: Trump ‘has something to hide’

“The Hill” has a whole stream of this stuff. Follow the links from above to sample the whole chorus. Then you can get more of the same from MSNBC et al.

Best one I noticed was Blumenthal saying Trump not releasing the memo provides the much needed evidence of Trump obstructing justice – “happening in real time”!

http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/373239-blumenthal-trump-refusing-to-release-dem-memo-is-evidence-of

CNN’s Cilizza explicitly highlights that Trump ignored FBI complaints of “material omissions” from Democrat memo as proof of hypocrisy in accepting FBI requests for redactions on “national security” grounds of revealing sources and methods. Presumably assumes people who read him dont think about what he’s saying any more than he does. Basically the same mentality as a Trump rally chanting “build the wall” and “Mexico will pay”.

So not only have they enthusiastically continued helping Trump keep them tightly focused on “Russia” as usual. That is merely short sighted.

After all “the Russia thing” might not collapse in a heap for weeks, possibly months and no matter how stupid they end up looking, at this point they cannot really make things much worse by more carrying on this way.

But Trump will release their memo within DAYS, not weeks. So they aren’t just strategically and tactically inept and shortsighted but completely blindly, blitheringly stupid and just going through the motions of issuing press releases without any thought whatsoever.

Of course Trump cannot release the memo within days if the Democrats refuse to make the redactions requested by the FBI and DOJ or can only do so unilaterally while they present the omissions as political censorship. So one theory is that instead of blind stupidity the whole stunt could be a tactical ploy deliberately intended to prolong not releasing their memo so they can continue complaining about it:

https://edition.cnn.com/2018/02/09/politics/democratic-memo-trump-wont-declassify/index.html

Either way, this is not the behaviour of a party leadership that is confident of winning the mid-terms, but of panic stricken losers.

But it isn’t just Democrats, here’s some brilliant strategic calculation by an anti-Trump GOP staffer:

“The White House’s failure to declassify the House Intelligence Committee minority memo – particularly in the face of unanimous bipartisan vote by the committee – represents a massive strategic miscalculation,”

http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/373243-former-bush-lawyer-trumps-memo-decision-was-a-massive-strategic

I really hate explanations of political developments that are based on implausible levels of stupidity on the part of participants.

But the only other theory I can think of would be some desperate attempt by the Democrats to avoid ending up with a majority after mid-terms and having to unsuccessfully impeach Trump in 2019 thus helping him get elected again in 2020. Nope I don’t believe that either. This whole situatiom is fascinating because it is all so completely inexplicable.

Here’s the Associated Press version which seems to be a reasonably accurate account of US politicians carrying on about nothing in particular:

http://www.cbc.ca/beta/news/world/trump-memo-russia-probe-1.4530079

Update: Just saw comment from Trump staff that suggests a less implausible level of stupidity:

“We believe that Congressman Schiff potentially put in there methods and sources that he knew would need to be redacted,” he said. “And if we redacted it, then there would be an outcry that said the White House is trying to edit it. So we said take it back, work with the FBI, clean it up, and we’ll release it.” Asked if Democrats drafted a memo they knew would be blocked, Schiff said “of course not”.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/feb/11/house-democrats-to-clean-up-trump-russia-memo-in-bid-for-release

That does seem plausible. It could have just not occurred to them that the natural response to this ploy would be to not comply with their hopes of Trump issuing redacted version while they bleated that he was hiding something and instead send it back for them to make the redactions requested by FBI and DOJ themselves. All the indignant press statements from both Democrats and GOP anti-Trumpers were ready to roll so they just issued them anyway, relying on fact that media would still report it as Trump refusing to release (which they did).

That would just reflect the ordinary level of Democrat and media stupidity and tactical ineptitude that we have become used to rather than the implausible “completely blindly, blitheringly stupid” explanation I was worried about.

Story seems to have promptly disappeared from the headlines. Only noticed this guy today who hadn’t got the memo to move on:

Van Jones to Trump over memos: You are ‘cherry-picking’ the facts

Meanwhile Trump is happily tweeting that even the New York Times has run a story on US intelligence agents paying Russian hackers to return hacked NSA tools plus “unsolicited” kompromat on Trump.

U.S. Secretly Negotiated With Russians to Buy Stolen NSA Documents — and the Russians Offered Trump-Related Material, Too

https://edition.cnn.com/2018/02/10/politics/trump-tweet-drain-the-swamp/index.html

CIA denies that US intelligence paid Russian scam artists for Trump kompromat. Some hint in reports that others did.

http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/cia/373323-cia-pushes-back-on-fictional-report-that-it-was-bilked-by

3. Resistance broadens. Snowflakes and butterflies form coalition against wall:

http://abcnews.go.com/US/endangered-butterfly-threatened-trumps-wall-environmentalists/story?id=52973359

4. Collapse of mainstream media into total incoherence is not confined to USA with Trump.

Just seen in today’s Sunday Age p29:

There can be few greater examples of the double standard of reporting in Australian politics than that of Barnaby Joyce’s “love child”.

If it were, say Barbara – or Joyce – Joyce, a married female party leader and deputy prime minister who impregnated a younger staffer, the story would have been pursued with great vigour and determination months ago.

Indeed the first impregnation by any female would no doubt have been headline news worldwide. Even proofreaders at Fairfax would have noticed it.

SMH has a slightly different version:

If it were, say Barbara – or Joyce – Joyce, a married female party leader and deputy prime minister who became pregnant to a younger staffer, the story would have been pursued with great vigour and determination months ago.

http://www.smh.com.au/comment/the-remarkable-privilege-of-being-a-male-politician-20180209-h0vtwc.html

5. Some hint of gap opening between Trump and Netanyahu

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-43025705

(Separate reports indicate Netanyahu could be charged with corruption soon)

6. Psychological explanation of why Trump core supporters don’t care what he actually delivers:

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/trump-s-core-supporters-won-t-reject-him-it-would-ncna846456

Some plausability. Irresistible comparisons with similar phenomena among liberals. But misses key point that bigger factor for both is how much they despise each other.

7. Fox preparing for efforts to increase Hispanic support for Trump or at least reduce their mobilization for Democrats:

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2018/02/10/as-trump-derides-dems-for-using-daca-battle-for-hispanic-votes-reignites.html

Seems plausible to me that if (when) Trump actually delivers some comprehensive immigration reform while Democrats posture about it they will lose a lot from their “identity” based strategy. (Ditto for both blacks and hispanics with employment and wages improving).

8. Sound advice that Democrats should shut up about impeachment at least until after the mid-terms:

http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/373362-scarborough-democratic-party-should-pull-funds-from-candidates

Doubt that they are capable of enforcing it.

9. Brookings institute offers some comfort for those worried about decreased levels of dysfunctionality – “Trump is becoming irrelevant”:

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2018/02/09/is-president-trump-irrelevant/

They are also correctly confirming that public opinion doesn’t support the nativist hostility Trump promoted in campaign but not registering that he can easily adapt to that and shows every sign of doing so (and would need to for any reduction in Hispanic mobilization for Democrats):

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2018/02/07/voters-to-trump-youre-on-thin-ice-with-immigration-policy/

Lots more open windows to close but I will just post this.

Notes on Trump 23

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0. Gallup overall approval of Trump touched 40% again 4 Feb. Been below since May 2017 and above only briefly after inauguration.

The increase last week was coincident with the president’s Jan. 30 State of the Union address, in which he touted the strength of the economy and reminded Americans he kept his pledges to cut taxes and reduce business regulations. Although it is impossible to determine definitively whether the address was a factor in the approval ratings uptick, his approval among Republicans did rise to 90%, the highest rating from this group since he took office. Republicans’ approval had been at 87% the week before the speech. Democrats’ approval [of Trump] remained extremely low at 6% last week, while independents’ 33% approval [of Trump] was unchanged.

http://news.gallup.com/poll/226736/snapshot-trump-weekly-job-approval-edges.aspx

Seems to be widespread acceptance that Trump and GOP incumbents are reconciled and will be defending each other against Democrats in midterms incuding primaries. This is consistent with the significant uptick to 90% Republican approval among potential Republican primary voters following more “Presidential” speech to Congress and lots of analysts claiming he has been delivering a traditional GOP agenda (especially taxes) and not the populist measures promised to his base as feared.

That could be right but I doubt it. He can’t win in 2020 without delivering on populist policies that are opposed by GOP incumbents over remaining 3 years. Even when only 80% approval among Republican primary voters the incumbents had little chance in a direct confrontation with Trump so had to avoid it. With 90% approval he can afford to just pose as party leader against Democrats and leave those incumbents he needs to get rid of unsupported against their Trumpist (and/or Sanders Democrat) challengers, without having to openly campaign for Trumpist replacements. It seems to me mainly Democrats fantasizing on what would suit them best who believe he will just deliver unpopular GOP policies instead of the populist policies he was elected on.

Update: Everything up in the air with stock market developments. Have lots of other Trump links open from last couple of weeks which I intended to add to those below, but will put this out now as there may be too much else going on for next couple of weeks that could clarify or obscure things.

1. Had to pass on guessing what Democrat leaders were up to with doomed shutdown. Still perplexed on what they have in mind for Feb 8.

Schumer has just withdrawn offer of token funding for token portion of Trump’s bullshit wall. If serious that implies they have to do another shutdown shortly since both sides understood that was to be the deal. Here’s Trump spelling it out late last year.

https://www.politico.com/story/2017/12/29/trump-dreamers-daca-deal-border-wall-319627

and again right now:

https://edition.cnn.com/2018/01/23/politics/mick-mulvaney-daca-exchange-cnntv/index.html

Here’s Talking Points Memo right now saying that withdrawing offer of wall funding will placate outrage from liberal base. This is the site for “Talking Points” discussed by Democrat staffers and their “activist” colleagues. They should have a far better grasp of maneuverings to placate outrage from liberal base than I do. But this doesn’t make much sense to me.

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/schumer-takes-back-wall-funding-offer-immigration

If Democrats were actually willing to fight on the absurdity of wasting money on the wall they would not have gone through the elaborate ritual of pretending that Trump wants to deport dreamers when that was never plausible and he had already admitted it.

Majority of Americans know a border wall won’t work. But they also know the opposition cannot shutdown government based on having different budget priorities. So do the Democrats base.

But oddly, the fight is still being reported as about DACA and whether GOP will agree to it – by Murdoch press as well as liberal media.

Plainly silly as only a small minority of GOP need to agree with Democrats on legislation for DACA in order for it to go through both Houses. However big the nativist wing of GOP incumbents might be they could not sustain deportation even with Trump’s support, let alone without it and there is already an interim injunction removing any urgency.

Not sure why Murdoch press is also pushing this. Perhaps to entrap Democrats? If they were really as stupid as they appear to be they might imagine that near unanimous focus on DACA instead of actual differences over border security in all sides of the media means they could hope to score some “win” with another shutdown?

Or perhaps its supposed to help make it easier for them to announce that they won some concession of DACA in negotiations and call off the next shutdown?

They have just given their base an opportunity to digest how futile a real shutdown would be. So how does withdrawing offer already made help placate anybody? Seems more likely to fire up expectations from “the resistance”. So my guess is that they still seem to be going down a path that leads straight to another shutdown soon with no plausible expectation of healing rather than exacerbating their divisions when they have to cave again.

Anyway, if they do another shutdown on this I can confidently predict it will do them no good at all.

Here’s the sort of pathetic arguments coming from the very few still pretending it was a defeat for Trump instead of a blunder by Schumer:

https://www.theringer.com/2018/1/23/16922100/trump-immigration-government-shutdown

Some others are still spouting the line taken before the shutdown – that it confirms Trump’s lack of skills as a negotiator:

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/01/17/trump-credibility-capitol-hill-lawmakers-negotiating-342989

The sheer effortlessness of maneuvering Democrats into making idiots of themselves is quite remarkable. No skill required. But one does have to admit that enabling them to keep their focus on how clueless Trump is while they do it could not just be sheer luck. He does have real skill.

Trump already has the TV ads to roll again:

http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/369952-new-trump-ad-calls-democrats-complicit-in-all-murders-by-illegal

Above was only a couple of weeks ago and already seems out of date.

2. Even CNN could publish an oped late last year doubting that the FBI is the repository of all Americans hopes and aspirations.

http://edition.cnn.com/2017/12/29/opinions/fbi-leadership-to-blame-for-tarnished-reputation-callan-opinion/index.html

But TPM remains outraged at the sheer lack of patriotism of anyone hostile to FBI.

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/devin-nunes-will-do-anything-to-protect-donald-trump

Five hours earlier the same guy persuading himself that latest “revelations” from Mueller are “bigger” than anything for months.

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/todays-mueller-revelations-were-the-biggest-in-months

But he couldn’t quite say what was revealed. These are the people who actually draft Democrat “talking points”. It must be soul destroying to be have to deliver them with a straight face. Trump seems to enjoy keeping kayfabe. But his opponents clearly don’t.

Fox news Judge Napolitano is really enjoying himself discussing the “deep state”:

(VIDEO) Judge Napolitano: Donald Trump Was Victimized By The Deep State

Some GOP staffers writing a “bombshell” memo touted as likely to end the Mueller investigation has liberals in pre-emptive hysterics, even before release. If that is all it takes to provoke them, how could they NOT continue to believe Trump doesn’t want them to keep hoping Mueller will be their messiah?

Meanwhile the Atlantic heads towards identification of “dividing our national unity” with “the Russians”. Doesn’t spell it out but clearly inclined towards measures to protect national unity from both “black lives matter” and “blue lives matter” tweeters as Russians support both sides of this “divisiveness”. The Russian social media accounts theme also at TPM above. Tends to confirm my suspicion that the outrageous involvement of intelligence agencies doesn’t point to actual “deep state” effort but just some Obama admin clowns going nuts.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/01/trump-russia-twitter/551093/

What’s this about? “Russia linked twitter accounts” are pushing hashtag #ReleaseTheMemo. Some dastardly member of Congress has enlisted the Russians after memo was circulated to Congress members. How do we know? Twitter messages with that hashtag link to Wikileaks page requesting a copy. Wikileaks of course is “Russia linked”. The plot thickens.

https://www.businessinsider.com.au/release-the-memo-campaign-russia-linked-twitter-accounts-2018-1?r=US&IR=T

Here’s an indication of actual relations between Trump and “deep state”:

https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/20/16913534/president-donald-trump-signed-fisa-amendments-reauthorization-act-of-2017-section-702

Update: Unexciting House GOP memo has been released. Also more interesting Senate member referring author of “the dossier” for prosecution. House Democrats memo about to be released. Media has once again succeeded in remaining distracted about “Russia”. Not sure whether they can keep it up or return to “mentally ill/incompetent” but no sign of anything from them that doesn’t help Trump.

3. If the Democrats keep on the way they are going, they could even manage to not gain a majority of the House of Representatives at end of 2018.

I still don’t expect that. But nobody can seriously expect them to get a 60% Senate majority to even get their legislative agenda vetoed by the President, let alone leaving Trump with less than one third of Senators willing to block impeachment.

So the best they could hope for when they get a House majority is endless hearings and subpoenas in one or both houses. Without both Executive and Supreme Court support they could not even enforce compliance with subpoenas. But they have neither. So their current orientation is headed towards just providing two years of daily confirmation of the Trumpist meme that Washington will remain gridlocked until there is a solid Trumpist majority.

Nevertheless they seem to be locking themselves in to that course.

Here’s an La Times oped on how Steve Bannon claim that sacking Comey was a spectacular blunder confirms how right they are to keep going for impeachment, even while ending with the prospect that it won’t actually result in removal from office:

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-litman-russia-year-review-20171229-story.html

4. Some perceptive analysis of “Trump Trauma”:

Donald Trump is staking his presidency, as he did his election, on nothing less than destroying the credibility of the news media; and the media are determined to do the same to him. This is not just a feud or a fight or a battle. It is scorched-earth warfare in which only one side can achieve victory. To a stunning degree, the press is falling into the president’s trap. The country’s top news organizations have targeted Trump with an unprecedented barrage of negative stories, with some no longer making much attempt to hide their contempt. Some stories are legitimate, some are not, and others are generated by the president’s own falsehoods and exaggerations. But the mainstream media, subconsciously at first, has lurched into the opposition camp and is appealing to an anti-Trump base of viewers and readers, failing to grasp how deeply it is distrusted by a wide swath of the country.

These are not easy words for me to write. I am a lifelong journalist with ink in my veins. And for all my criticism of the media’s errors and excesses, I have always believed in the mission of aggressive reporting and holding politicians accountable.

But the past two years have radicalized me. I am increasingly troubled by how many of my colleagues have decided to abandon any semblance of fairness out of a conviction that they must save the country from Trump.

I first got to know Donald Trump three decades ago and never made the blunder of underestimating him during the campaign. I saw all his weaknesses — the bluster, the bullying, the refusal to admit mistakes — but I also saw strengths that most of my colleagues missed, especially an ability to channel the anger of millions of voters who despise the press — including the old-guard conservative press — and other elite institutions.

This is, at bottom, a battle over the truth. Who owns it, who controls it, who can sell their version to a polarized public that increasingly cannot agree on basic facts. Everything you read, hear and see about Trump’s veracity is filtered through a mainstream media prism that reflects a lying president — and virtually never considers the press’ own baggage and biases. Everything you read, hear and see from the Trump team is premised on the view that media news is fake news, that journalists are too prejudiced, angry and ideological to fairly report on the president. Trump and his acolytes use these attacks on the Fourth Estate to neutralize their own untruths, evasions and exaggerations. What many journalists fail to grasp is that Trump’s supporters love his street talk and view the media critiques as nonsense driven by negativity. They don’t care if he makes mistakes. As paradoxical as it sounds, negative coverage helps Trump because it bonds him to people who also feel disrespected by the denizens of the mainstream press. The media take everything literally, and Trump pitches his arguments at a gut level. It is asymmetrical warfare.

Every president gets pounded by the press. But no president has ever been subjected to the kind of relentless ridicule, caustic commentary and insulting invective that has been heaped on Trump. I have a name for this half-crazed compulsion to furiously attack one man. It’s called Trump Trauma.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/how-trump-trauma-is-crippling-news-media-guest-column-1077062

Am reading related book “Media Madness” by Howard Kurtz. Torrent hash 759A0821B0AE7DC3C055F538C3F334E45789F533

includes small epub 1.1MB and large MP3 audio 261.4MB (torrent client can select either or both)

Am only one third way through but recommend it as more plausible than other accounts. (Though does only partially confirms my view that Trump actually wants the media hostility while also saying opposite).

5. If the “Russia thing” doesn’t seem to be working out, wait there’s more:

Jared Kushner is China’s Trump Card

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/01/29/jared-kushner-is-chinas-trump-card

PLUS a free set of steak knives!!!

6. More “breaking news” from CNN on Trump’s affair with porn star. Apparently she denies it and Fox had the (complete absence of) story before the election and failed to publish it. Source is impeccable – “four people familiar with the matter”.

The latest devastating bombshell is that Fox has failed to immediately respond to inquiries as to why they don’t behave like CNN.

Does Trump fear that the four are male eyewitnesses so he could get convicted of rape in a Saudi court?

http://money.cnn.com/2018/01/16/media/fox-news-stormy-daniels-trump/index.html

Ok I made that up, CNN said nothing like that. Far less creative.

In fact they even mention that their colleagues at Slate and The Daily Beast had the same “story” and also failed to publish it.

But now, after “Fire and Fury”, there is precisely nothing that liberal media won’t do to discredit themselves.

7. New York Times editorial board on January 19 – “Syria is now Trump’s War”.

Follows low key announcement that U.S. forces will remain in Syria indefinately.

Seems quite resigned to it. As far as I can make out Trump adinistration is only marginally better than Obama’s on this but is in a better position to avoid mobilizing opposition if they ever do decide to do something useful.

8. Newsweek doubles down on Trunp’s mental health. Outdoes TPM and Atlantic. Security of the nation doesn’t just need measures against “divisive” twittering. The National Emergency reuires a telepathic Psy Corps with psychiatric prisons to ensure public safety.

http://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-mental-health-exam-unsufficient-785818

9. George Monbiot at the Guardian announces the end of civilization. Not just “western civilization” he stresses. Today there is “nowhere to turn”.

But wait, there’s more:

The wild lands and rich ecosystems that once supported hunter gatherers, nomads and the refugees from imploding early states who joined them now scarcely exist. Only a tiny fraction of the current population could survive a return to the barbarian life. (Consider that, according to one estimate, the maximum population of Britain during the Mesolithic, when people survived by hunting and gathering, was 5000).In the nominally democratic era, the complex state is now, for all its flaws, all that stands between us and disaster.

So what we do? Next week, barring upsets, I will propose a new way forward. The path we now follow is not the path we have to take.

• George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/24/end-civilisation-take-different-path

Who could have possibly guessed that this was a Guardian columnist if they had not been so honest about it?

Another columnist “There is still hope amidst the horror”

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/20/year-donald-trump-hope-horror-women-hillary-clinton

10. “Is Money-Laundering the Real Trump Kompromat?”

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/01/theres-a-potential-for-russian-leverage-here/551024/

Leaving aside the the “Russsia” angle it does seem plausible that a special investigator ought to be able to come up with some financial crimes committed by Trump or even any milder con artist. Would tend to alarm the rest of the swamp and I haven’t seen any sign of prayers being answered. Seems more likely that Mueller will just end up with a “straight” report that leads nowhere.

11. Another State of the Union met with 70% approval by simply reading the usual boring “Presidential” tripe from a teleprompter.

A year ago a similar effort to make Trump look “Presidential” with a teleprompter address to a joint session of Congress was promptly countered by media hysterics over Sessions recusing himself from Russia investigation, Trump criticizing that and Trump twittering that Obama administration had wiretapped his campaign. More recently Trump presiding over televised “Presidential” bipartisan discussion of comprehensive immigration was promptly countered by hysterics over reports he privately referred to immigration from “shithole” countries.

But this time they seem to be too exhausted to come up with anything. So far all I’ve seen to counter 70% approval of the speech is:

11.1 More pre-emptive hysterics about Trumpists intending to declassify a memo hostile to FBI surveillance. Curiously this seems to be related to a continuation of the stuff used to counter Trump looking “Presidential” a year ago by expressing outrage at him claiming his campaign was put under surveillance. Now even more outraged at documents said to confirm it!

https://edition.cnn.com/2018/02/01/politics/donald-trump-fbi-justice-department-memo/index.html

Meanwhile Andy McCabe, Deputy Director of FBI has steppedaside, apparently because Trump’s complaints of Democrat bias are about to be confirmed either by an internal FBI Inspector’s report or by the memo.

No less than “9 historians” confirm that President undermining FBI is “uncharted territory”:

https://www.vox.com/2018/2/1/16956422/numes-memo-release-fbi-trump

Apparently most prefer the great tradition established by Herbert Hoover in which the elected government feared the secret police.

Actually buried in there, one of them, Ivor Greenberg, got it right:

The claim that the FBI’s “independence” is a thing to preserve is misguided. In the past, much of that so-called “independence” allowed the bureau to go rogue in its spying on Americans and evade congressional or Justice Department accountability.

Update: looks like FBI Inspector General starting to move against Obama administration clowns in FBI. Also one of the missing text messages from Clinton supporting FBI agent Strozk assigned to investigating both Clinton and Trump show him expressing reluctance to join Russia investigation because there doesn’t seem to be any big “there” there.

11.2 Ongoing breathless discussion of affair with porn star who has gone on TV to smirk while interviewer speculates about whether her signature was forged on the denial issued and confirmed by her lawyer.

11.3 Some twittering about Melania Trump travelling separately to the “Presidential” address which is “unprecedebted” and perhaps related to “revelations” about the porn star. This could also explain her wearing a “white dress” which might be joining the #metoo campaign in protest against Trump and/or showing ethnic white nationalism/racism against blacks.

https://edition.cnn.com/2018/02/01/politics/donald-trump-fbi-justice-department-memo/index.html

If you follow a link from there you too can know what present Melania Trump gave Michelle Obama:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/entertainthis/2018/01/31/michelle-obama-reveals-trumps-gave-her-frame-explains-awkward-inauguration-day-exchange-trumps/1082139001/

Fox responds with analysis complaining that the fake media is at it again – Melania’s dress was cream not white and their attempt to undermine her reputation for superb fashion taste has failed.

11.4 Democrat speech in reply was given by a Kennedy. Even if he had actually said something memorable all that could possibly have been conveyed would be their dynastic helplessness. Even the daily roundup of the late night “comedy” version of Democrat talking points had this from Colbert:

“Nothing says ‘party of new ideas’ more than deploying the latest model Kennedy,” Colbert quipped. “Kennedy gave a stirring, thoughtful speech about the importance of fighting for all Americans.

But of course main “comedy” theme was also the main Democrat talking point – item 1. Defend the FBI from Trump (or the Russians).

(Lots of scope for comedy there, but it seems they just said it straight and meant it straight)

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/feb/01/late-night-hosts-call-trumps-state-of-the-union-a-glass-half-full-of-cyanide

12. So my guess is that Trump will successfully execute a switch to “Presidential” whenever he wants to. May have set the scene for attempting to defend GOP majority in 2018 then attempting to implement populist program together with Sanders wing of Democrats and Trumpist GOP minority and running as bipartisan unifier in 2020.

13. Bipartisan agreement on ending the budget caps and sequester ritual that GOP imposed on Obama administration. So Trump will get whatever deficits he needs for relection. First instalment 300 billion increase in budgets for next 2 years. With the basic pretense of attempting to reduce deficits gone, this will increase for many reasons (infrastructure, healthcare etc). Still has to go through House but that just means deficit hawk GOP rump can posture against comfortable Trumpist GOP and Democrat majority.

Update: Several reports that the last item above was major trigger for stock market “correction”. Some “investors” finally realised that Trump would succeed in getting big deficits to help with 2020 and this could result in subsequent major problems inconsistent with current absurd stock and bond prices and yields, so some started getting out now. Presumably they had thought the legal budget caps would be harder to remove.

So posting this now as stock market likely to drown out interest in other news.

“Il est interdit d’interdire”! It is forbidden to forbid! Free speech and the spirit of ’68.

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One of the most positive qualities of the great upheavals of the year 1968 was the assumption that people had a right to free speech. No-one was going to stop us speaking out, no matter how offensive some people found what we had to say – and we definitely were not going to allow the state to determine what could and couldn’t be said. Governments had forced the issue by banning publications – to protect us from ourselves – ranging from seedy crime novels to DH Lawrence’s ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’.

On the university campuses that helped fuel the ‘cultural revolution’ of that time, it was never doubted that we should have a right to say what we thought on any topic. The global student unrest had been sparked in 1964 by the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, where students and staff defied the University of California’s regulations restricting free speech.

In the People’s Republic of China a similar movement led by the young was underway, with ‘Big Character Posters‘ pasted up on buildings and in streets criticizing reactionary authorities within the Communist Party of China. Mao ZeDong said that  “The big-character poster is a very useful new weapon, which can be used in the cities and the rural areas, in factories, co-operatives, shops, government institutions, schools, army units and streets – in short, wherever the masses are to be found. It has already been widely used and should always be used.”

This was overturned in amendments to the Chinese Constitution in 1982, however, when reference to the right to produce Big Character Posters was removed.

One of my first defiant acts in ‘the Sixties’ took place in 1968, my final year at high school in Melbourne, when I unlawfully distributed to my fellow students a banned publication exposing US war crimes in Vietnam. I forget the exact title but it was banned under Obscene Publications legislation. I was very nervous giving out copies at school, without being part of any organised radical student group, as I was isolated and worried about getting into trouble – especially for distributing ‘obscene’ literature!

In my first year at University, in 1969, the free speech question again arose: a contingent of La Trobe students, organised by the Labour Club (not to be confused with Labor Party!), went to Melbourne’s City Square to defy with other protestors the Melbourne City Council’s bylaw 418, which prohibited the distribution of literature in the Central Business District. The bylaw claimed to be neutral but was really an attempt to suppress the handing out of leaflets opposing the US and allied aggression in Vietnam.

There is some irony in the fact that 50 years later, the assumption that individuals should be free to say what they think is in reversal. Groups who may think of themselves as ‘left-wing’ or ‘radical’ today seek to do what the overt right-wing reactionaries of the 1960s did: namely, protect us from ourselves in the interests of cohesion and harmony. It’s scary stuff – or should be. And especially worrying when it happens on campuses, usually through collusion between official student representatives and University authorities.

Perhaps Australia would benefit from its own version of the UK’s Free Speech University Rankings (FSUR), which are conducted by the on-line group, Spiked.

Spiked has just published its fourth annual report, and it shows that campus censorship isn’t going away. Their survey, ranking 115 UK universities using a ‘traffic-light system’, shows that 55 per cent of universities now actively censor speech, 39 per cent stifle speech through excessive regulation, and just six per cent are truly free, open places. What’s more, in some areas, the severity of restrictions seems to be increasing. The FSUR survey found that almost half of all institutions attempt to censor or chill criticism of religion and transgenderism. It concludes that ‘There are blasphemies on campus, new and old, that students commit at their peril’.

The spirit of 1968 – a spirit that boils down to the right to confront and engage in the open exchange and debate of ideas – in a word ‘to rebel’ – is in urgent need of revival, especially if the next global capitalist crisis is ‘the big one’.

The late 1960s to early 1970s were years of success for the Left precisely because we created a milieu in which reactionaries in power and within the movement could be exposed and challenged. There was meaningful debate about what it meant to be left-wing, set against the context of real struggle. We challenged the old revisionist farts of the Communist Party of Australia as well as the old conservative farts of the Coalition Government.

I commenced this post with the words “One of the most positive qualities”. It would not be accurate to say that the whole cultural and political movement from the late 1960s to the early 1970s in Australia, with its many factions and outlets for expression, was consistently imbued with the ‘free speech’ ethos. And after the movement’s quick decline, an authoritarianism set in – among some/too many (though not all) – that ran counter to the earlier rebellious ethos. At its worst, some of us turned into our opposites. I personally regret that very much. It applied to me, too – but not everyone. It’s what happens when you stop thinking and become obedient, a follower rather than a critical thinker. You can be obedient to the state or to the gods or God – or, in my case, to a party leadership. Big mistake.

There were some terrific – poetic – slogans from the French student-worker uprising of 1968. “Il est interdit d’interdire”! “It is forbidden to forbid” represents a certain spirit. Of course, if it is dissected clinically, one can immediately think of flaws and exceptions: is it forbidden to forbid murder? But it is the spirit of that slogan that mattered back then. And still does.

 

 

We need Marx!

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Arise, you independent artists!
Arise, fair users great and small!

Those evil cartels and their jurists
Have, through their exploits, chained you all!
(To the tune of “The Internationale”)

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The following, written by Bill Kerr, originally appeared in 2005 at LastSuperpower. The context was a challenge at a blog called Harry’s Place to discuss whether Marx and Engels are still relevant in the C21st.

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We need Marx and Engels because they understood things and said some things better than anyone else has since. It’s important to read the original because people who call themselves Marxists have always been in violent disagreement with what it means. If you don’t read the original then you have no chance of working it out for yourself.

Communism has had bad press following the failures of the Soviet Union, China etc. It’s seen as a dull grey world, with no variety in the shops, controlled by faceless, heartless apparatchiks- freedom of thought and expression is not allowed. At one time (the 1930s- WW1, The Great Depression, fascism in Spain destroyed faith in capitalism) it was fashionable to be communist or fellow traveller, but nowadays it is definitely not fashionable.

Personally, I draw these insights from the Manifesto, which help me understand the world today:

  • Capitalism is progressive relative to feudalism/ religious fundamentalism

It’s far better to live in our bourgeois democracy than to live under the rule of fascist Saddam or the religious fundamentalism of the Taliban.

Marx was very clear about the historical progressiveness of capitalism, a point also made by Marcus [who was one of the contributors at Harry’s Place blog] with this quote:

The bourgeoisie historically has played a most revolutionary part. The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations, It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man his “natural superiors:, and has left no other nexus between the people than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned out the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade.

  • The melting, dynamic vision of capitalism and progress

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all the earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All this is solid melts into air, all that is holy of profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his, real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

http://www.marxists,org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/cho1.htm

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We live in a world where things change, everything changes due to the continual development of productive forces and scientific progress. This provides the material basis for the elimination of poverty and a feeling of optimism and excitement about the future.

‘All that is solid melts into air’ is also the title of a great book about modernity and modern interpretation of Marx and others, by Marshall Berman, which I would highly recommend. Here’s a quote from Berman:

To be modern is to live a life of paradox and contradictions. It is to be overpowered by the immense bureaucratic organizations that have the power to control and often destroy all communities, values, lives; and yet to be undeterred in our determination to face these forces, to fight to change their world and make it our own. It is to be revolutionary and conservative; alive to new possibilities for experience and adventure, frightened by the nihilistic depths to which so many modern adventures lead, longing to create and to hold on to something real even as everything melts. We might even say that to be fully modern is to be anti-modern: from Marx’s and Dostoevsky’s time to our own, it has been impossible to grasp and embrace the modern worlds potentialities without loathing and fighting against some of its palpable realities. No wonder then that, as the great modernist and anti-modernist Kierkegaard said, the deepest modern seriousness must express itself through irony. Modern irony animates so many great works of art and thought over the past century; at the same time, it infuses millions of ordinary peoples lives. This book aims to bring these works and these lives together, to restore the spiritual wealth of modernist culture to the modern man and woman in the street, to show how, for all of us, modernism is realism. (pp 13- 14)

  • Productive forces are held back by capitalist productive relations

After praising capitalism for developing the productive, Marx and Engels then tear it down because the property relations of capitalism periodically (boom and bust) produces slow down and crisis:

                 The productive forces of the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of the bourgeois society; endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of the bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them.

The dominant productive relations today in western society are boss/worker. No thinking person much likes working for a boss but it’s what we have to do to survive.

The point about boss/worker relations is that they are anachronistic, they hold back the further rapid development of the productive forces. Workers hold back and do not work at their full capacity, initiative and creativity. In a society where the workplace nexus between people (is) naked self-interest (and) callous “cash payments” it makes no sense to give it your best shot.

The real communist critique of capitalism is that capitalism social relations – boss/worker relations – holds back in the rapid development of productive forces.

For example, the dominance of Microsoft holds back the rapid development of  either superior or potentially superior software development such as the Linux operating system, which has been developed out of gift culture. We seem to have very significant groups of the open source software developers today who practise communist principles from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs- without even realising or connecting to the source.

This surfaced in a recent exchange between Bill Gates and his open source critics after Gates said:

               There are some new modern-day sort of communists who want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and moviemakers and software makers under various guises.

This led to a flurry of design activity in the open source/creative commons community, who renamed themselves “creative communists” and developed a series of red flags and logos in response to the gibe:

 One Gates critic has even adapted the words of ‘The Internationale’ as an anthem for the freedom of information movement.

‘The Free Culture Internationale’

(Lyrics by Andrew Mike (2005) To the tune of “The Internationale” by Pierre Degaytre, 1888)

Arise, you independent artists!

Arise, fair users great and small!

Those evil cartels and their jurists
Have, through their exploits, chained you all!

But we have thought up a new system,

To make the fairer through and through;

Right now, they say, “We’ll never miss them,”

But one day soon, they’ll say “We do!”

So Bill Gates calls us commies,

But he can’t stand the sight

Of information freedom,

Reform of copyright!

So we go on creating,

Joyous and full of mirth,

For our great newborn copyleft

Shall shine upon the earth!

The spirit of communism as envisaged by Marx is alive and well in the open source community but perhaps because communism has such a bad name and Marx is little read by software developers they have not made the connection.

4) Atheism, materialism, facing reality abandoning the hopeful, sentimental approach

The Communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional relations; no wonder that its development involved the most radical rupture with traditional ideas.

Before capitalism the rulers of society were the religious rulers.

With the development of science our Universe became far more interesting and beautiful place than anything envisioned by religion.

Atheism is strong in the Manifesto through its exposure of religious hypocrisy, as the transition was made into a society dominated by money. The Manifesto is an invitation to think for ourselves and to reject artificial soothings of religion.

Once again the most articulate exposures of these sorts of views comes from people like Richard Dawkins, who don’t personally identify with communism but who nevertheless show the relevance of the views expressed by Marx in 1848.

 

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Notes on Trump 22

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1. I don’t really have a good enough handle on American politics to comment on the shutdown. Items below may just express my prejudice on Democrats complete tactical ineptitude, but here goes:

“Whichever party starts to get hammered in the polls — like Republicans did in 2013 — will be more likely to cave.”

https://www.vox.com/2018/1/20/16912832/government-shutdown-trump-approval

Sounds plausible to me.

Despite recent uptick in approval for Trump there doesn’t strike me as a lot of room for Trump to get much more hammered than he has been. Within Democrat bubble pretending that they really needed to shutdown the government immediately rather than keep negotiating over border security for another few weeks (February 16) may sound plausible. Hard to see how it would impress anyone outside that bubble given Trump had clearly supported allowing “Dreamers” to stay and courts had already ordered temporary continuation. So Democrats more likely to get hammered.

Even if GOP does get hammered that would mainly hurt incumbents who would fear losing their seats at 2018 primaries from caving on border security more than they would fear losing their seats if they got past primaries.

Trump has nothing to lose whichever way the two parties entrench the popular view of Washington gridlock and whichever of them caves. So why should he be worried? Media and Democrats whipping up outrage at Trump provoking them just confirms they still don’t get it.

Trump is the least likely to cave, main thing the Democrats are achieving is yet another opportunity for him to posture about border security to his base while they posture about preventing non-existant prospects of deportation of Dreamers to theirs. GOP incumbents next least likely to cave (especially since that would leave them more vulnerable in primaries to anti-immigration trumpists). That leaves it up to the Democrats who are only making a gesture anyway and are less inhibited about looking ridiculous.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/18/donald-trump-the-only-man-in-washington-not-worried-about-a-shutdown.html

I was surprised it happened at all so any prediction from me is worthless, but I would not have been surprised if it ended as early as the next opportunity – Monday 1am.

https://www.axios.com/mcconnell-schedules-vote-to-end-government-shutdown-for-1-am-1516494185-b6536c54-cf3c-4437-b8d6-7cea1781f702.html

No real evidence, just a gut feeling, supported by a clueless commentary in the Guardian saying the opposite, that it “could run and run”:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jan/20/with-government-shutdown-republicans-reap-what-they-sow

Seems a bit less likely to end now as no sign of agreement yet, despite the vote on at 1am Monday being to keep government open only till Feb 9 while negotiating.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-22/shutdown-extends-into-third-day-as-senate-fails-to-end-impasse

Trump’s budget director says could last a week or could end immediately.

Trump’s budget chief says shutdown could last more than a week

I can’t guess. Should not have happened at all. It did, so who knows how long it could last? Requires estimating Democrat stupidity. Too easy to assume limitless stupidity based on past rather than present. Compensating for prejudice too hard to avoid overshooting and wrongly imagining they would act rationally just because it would be so stupid not to. I give up on prediction. Pass.

2. Certainly Democrat Senators in states that are not solidly “blue” seem to agree that it is bad for them and have already caved. None of them voted for the shutdown. The five who voted against it were ALL from marginal or Republican States where their fear would be defeat by GOP rather than being primaried by their own. Here’s the list:

http://edition.cnn.com/2018/01/20/politics/senate-vote-government-shutdown/index.html

(The 5 Republicans who voted for shutdown were insisting on immediate Democrat cave rather than the compromise resolution letting it drag on to Feb 16. Two already switched to accept Democrat cave by Feb 9 instead of Feb 16. None show signs of switching sides since Democrats pretence they are defending DACA rather than opposing tigher border control is sheer fantasy.)

3. This NYT oped confirms my prejudice that even the Democrats leaders don’t really have much illusions about it and are purely doing it to placate their “base” which they are just as threatened by at the coming Democrat primaries as the GOP incumbents are threatened by theirs.

Interesting idea that transformation of both parties could result in a shift to a Westminster style constitution. I take that to be about ensuring the Executive generally has a reliable majority in legislature. (Shutdowns don’t actually happen – instead executive government gets replaced by whoever can command a legislative majority).

But the historical accident of english speaking countries having a two party system based on single party electorates could itself be vulnerable in any unfreezing of the US Constitution. The two parties are not that popular.

“New parties would pop up in the center – at least one and I think probably two. Eventually the Constitution would get a revisit. It’s a potentially ominous road but for now the Democrats have no choice but to walk it.”

No possibility of revisiting Constitution before 2020 election. This supports my view that Trump is successfully creating conditions for a four way contest then, which would give him a much better chance with Presidency potentially thrown from deadlocked Electoral College to House of Representatives voting by States. Of course Democrats could start walking a different road after 2018. But I would have thought it would be easier to avoid the road they are walking down towards a split after 2018 if they could do it now rather than making symbolic pandering gestures for pretended unity.

4. Here’s some details on how completely the Trump obsession dominates US news. Fox is the only channel that does not devote more than half its airtime to Trump stories.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-12-13/donald-trump-news-media-coverage/9125810

5. Wired provides some rivetting analysis of Trump’s medical checkup. Why the obsession? My guess is that with hopes of removal by impeachment, incapacity or a coup d’etat from the intelligence agencies fading they have to analyse the prospects of “something” to save them.

https://www.wired.com/story/trump-physical-exam/

6. Why wapo imagines it could worry people by running “unverified” stories about Trump and porn stars.

http://www.smh.com.au/world/what-should-scare-us-about-trumps-porn-star-scandal-20180119-h0lec6.html

7. Plus, in a dramatic new breakthrough, a porn star has revealed that Trump is terrified by sharks:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jan/19/sharks-donald-trump

8. And here’s 8 “wild” details, “not for the faint of heart”.

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/01/19/stormy-daniels-trump-porn-star-interview-349311

9. But, woe is us “this is not likely to harm Trump politically”.

“That’s because the religious right has decided to ignore Trump’s personal failings, and it has already paid off forla  them.”

But its still great clickbait for liberals.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/19/stormy-daniels-sex-scandal-wont-harm-trump-commentary.html

10. In other news from La La land residents can be reassured that the Mueller inuiry will not be delayed by the shutdown.

https://www.lawfareblog.com/government-shutdown-wont-stop-mueller-investigation

 

The heat and the tennis – ‘Yes’ to team culture, ‘No’ to sheep culture

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Elite sporting people are put up as role models and one may wonder what that model is.

by TomB

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The recent case of tennis players in the 2018 Australian Open having to play in 69 degree celsius (reflected) heat at Rod Laver Arena in Melbourne is raising eyebrows at the minute.

Elite sporting people are put up as role models and one may wonder what that model is.

They are told what to eat, where to go and what to do. They are monitored on a potential 24/7 basis.

The culture seeps through all levels of sport. That culture of ‘do what you are told and don’t ask questions no matter how bad it seems’ is designed to develop a sheep mentality not a team mentality.

Team is about working together, making decisions together for the general good not for the good of the few who are paying you.

The idea that you are expendable and can be easily replaced and therefore have few rights is not limited to sport but is something organised sport tries to reinforce.

The culture of ‘don’t ask questions – others know better’, ‘let the rulers rule’, etc, is one that needs changing.

It is right to rebel!

 

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