AP News: Trump campaign’s Russia contacts ‘grave’ threat, Senate says

Bagginski said:

Starting to look A LOT like T-bag *WANTS* to spend the rest of his life in jail…I say we *let* him: in a perfect world I’d get to kick his fucking ass myself, but it’s more important that he & his receive lifetime-achievement-award level asskickings.

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hanimmal said:

Yup, I think he has set himself up to troll America for Putin as some bullshit version of being our "political prisoner" so they can pull a 'but Navalny' troll.

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Bagginski said:

I’ll take a real trial over a show trial any day - here or there.

At this point there just no hiding the puppet show that fascist actors worldwide are engaged in, and their local/regional quislings are up to their necks in it. Even the most diehard are finding it harder and harder to cling to the bullshit they’ve believed so fervently for so long: some get more extreme, still more drop into silence.

On this level, it seems to be happening across the globe, populations spontaneously hitting their limits…not totally unlike the stillborn ‘Arab Spring’, but just as fascist actor gain support from each other across borders, so do those who have had ENOUGH OF THIS SHIT.

IIRC Marx predicted that eventually capitalism will fail due to its own destructive, consumptive nature & to the flaws and weaknesses specific to it in practice, and be replaced by a system that prioritizes the well-being of people and their communities equal to or above business. It remains to be seen, but among the many things hanging in the current balance is the question of what happens to *US*. There is no longer any play in the socialism v capitalism game: we’re facing existential crises concurrently, many hinging on whether or not the USA actually survives as anything like what we’ve been doing these last ~250 years.

IMO that intensity is a major part of the suddenly-transparent ruling-class cover story. T-bag’s signature brand of trolling can only become more naked and more obvious with every passing day.

The blowhard has blown his own cover. Oops.

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cannabineer said:

Marx’s belief baffles me. What basic human force drives the rich and powerful to become team players? It’s the central failing of every single utopian construct.

That said, we need a whole lot more social democracy in this country.

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Bagginski said:

Belief? Having given an exhaustive analysis & critique of specifically (but not exclusively) industrial capitalism in Das Kapital, he seems to have arrived at it as an inescapable conclusion. I don’t have notes at hand on the topic, but his conclusions ring pretty true for the most (IIRC): the drive to commodify labor and reduce workers into interchangeable cogs, to depress wages, limit worker mobility & restrict their economic options; the eventual exponential increase in the power that wealth has always been able to command, leading to the existential dilemma of freedom vs enslavement - success vs survival - in societies dominated by capitalism.

The impulse to freedom, to survival, to having a productive, chosen life is a basic human drive - and sufficient to have led to the disturbing mess we’re in. It’s not fundamentally different in my view from the effort in Ukraine of people who would like to not be killed, thanks, and are fighting like hell to survive (on the one hand) - and on the other hand, the same existential drive to survive and maintain control on the part of the Owners, the Managers and their enablers (republicans, Putineers here *and* there, billionaires/oligarchs (no meaningful difference), preachers, bankers, etc).

His conclusion (IIRC) was not particularly faith-based or utopian, he suggested no perfect world: merely one in which ~80% of the population stops trying to bargain with ~20% for better wages, better living conditions, better prospects, etc and takes direct action, such as general strikes, work-stoppages, genuine organization for the purpose of changing things instead of talking about change; and in which they prevail. There was no suggestion at all that the permanently wealthy would somehow ‘get religion’, rather that they would not be able to extract wealth from their employees by the now-classic means: low wages relative to actual cost-of-living, wage-theft, job insecurity, extortion of personal or inappropriate actions or services thru abuse of the power imbalance between employer and employee.

For perspective, consider that the Founders were deeply suspicious of corporate power and influence, and initially, EVERY state strictly circumscribed the options, permissible actions, and scope of operation available to chartered corporate entities. Corporations were forbidden to engage in activities outside the chartering state, or unrelated to the purpose for which they were charted (building/maintaining a bridge, a dam, a mill, a ferry, whatever); They were also forbidden to buy other businesses, and they were forbidden to engage in speculative profit-making for its own sake. The cherry on top, was that in every(?) state, they were required to have up-to-date bookkeeping available for public examination during business hours. This was the rule until one railroad wanted to merge with/buy another railroad, so they maneuvered & manipulated the legislature of (I think) Rhode Island until the state passed and authorized a change in the law to allow A + B to become AB. This drew big campaign donations, other states wanted to get into the act. Delaware won the scrum, allowing any company to get chartered without any restrictions at all except fees. To this day, the bulk of US corporations are incorporated (chartered) in Delaware - and as long as their money’s good, Delaware won’t get in their way.

And that is the tale of how corporations swindled their way out of their chains and became 1000# gorillas . Our nation and the world have suffered a lot at the hands on unbridled and politically-enabled corporate power and the virtual immortality corporations achieve. Like the East India Company, the equivalent Dutch operation, or any serious criminal enterprise. Only worse, and owning members of congress and state legislatures, judges, think-tanks, media outlets etc just makes it much, MUCH worse.

TL;DR = if the collapse of capitalism is happening, it will only survive by either subjugating the workforce completely (cue your favorite totalitarian nightmare) or capitulating to the limits that will have to be (re-)imposed on corporate persons, just as we place limits on the actions of real persons (no stealing, killing, defrauding, etc).

Gawd I talk a lot…. Hope that makes sense.

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Bagginski said:

I get what you’re saying, and I agree. I have tried to differentiate between the belief system we *call* ‘capitalism’ and the economic model used by limited liability corporations since Adam Smith got popular with unnecessary noble sons who were out of the inheritance lineup…but only by staying on the economics.

Same sort of thing seems to happen when I try to speak on Christianity as a population-management/wealth-extraction scheme, rather than as a spiritual path based on the teachings of OG Jesus. Touchy subject….

I’m actually much more accustomed to discussing Christianity from a religious/spiritual frame. It’s been, no shit, 50 years since I was hanging around with socialists, so I never mean to present as some kind of scholar on the topic & I’ve mostly hung with neutral/a-political (music) crowd until the last ~10-15 years; I was a constitution-affirming strict-constructionist, far-too-‘liberal’ AND far-too-conservative kind of genuine conservative free-thinker at the time.

TL;DR = what I know about “socialism” is NOT from reading the communist manifesto, reading ALL of Das Kapital (what a fucking chore that would be) or studying it as a ‘movement’ particularly; it’s from years of conversation in college days, when I was an antiwar activist - some of those conversations lasting days and even weeks; poring through a ton of stuff *about* it, trying to reconcile conflicting ideas about it, watching any substance of it be lost in the arena of politics & social engineering.

I’m open to correction, but my knowledge of the subject is my own work product.

That said, discussions of socialism real or imaginary are a bad idea in a socio-political context.

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cannabineer said:

I will go slowly here, because I’m trying to avoid making assumptions of the “what you say vs. what I hear” type. I don’t want to put words in your figurative mouth.

On the first paragraph, I wholly agree. Marx saw that capitalism is inherently the enemy of a free or egalitarian society. I agree with that assessment.

2) I contend that the impulse toward freedom is selfish. That is why the same selfish impulse in one of the ruling class is powerfully illiberal.
Balancing this tug-of-war is difficult. It seems to go better in a constitutional monarchy. A constitutional monarch appears to act like the governor (!) on a steam engine. In a republic like ours or France’s, the elected legislators are the keepers of the rights of the citizen, but the election process selects for the sort of ambition that runs against a liberal state.

I quite agree, it IS a selfish impulse, as are the impulses to survive personally, and to control. The will to control may be universal like the others, but we could certainly frame it as being THE THING that originates abuse and violence. It’s what makes Somalia such a garden spot…there are aspects to monarchy that are unique for both good and bad; however, their origins are in eras of aristocratic dominance of societies. The weakness of electoral systems is that they can be suborned - as we’ve learned to our grief, and we’re yet to find out whether that subornation will lead to a new feudal state here, or not.

Seriously, I blame the racist backlash for the general state of ignorance regarding how our system is supposed to work - civics was a school subject starting in like third grade. It disappeared following the school desegregation ruling, and didn’t come back, not even in HS. We CAN guard against overthrow by realizing it CAN happen, learning to recognize the need, and sending people into government specifically to fix it.

If the mid-terms put Dems in a better position in house and senate, they should absolutely use it as a mandate to close off avenues of future subornation. The OP have had their way when they’ve held majorities, and they have given not a single shit about the rest of the country. Enough, I say.

3) (the meat of it imo) it’s more like 98% under the 2% now.
We had something like you describe until circa 1960 when Ike prophetically warned us about the military-industrial complex. Captains of industry are even more ruthlessly selected for an absence of altruism or compassion. They saw an existential threat in Kennedy. I don’t know if they planned it or plain got lucky. But here we are on the downslope of the slow coup. The crimes you list toward the end: the leaders have managed to step up the extraction of wealth despite the collapse of our rights and wages. How to reverse this without revolution, I do not know.

How to do it without *violent* revolution, yes, that is the trick…

The danger extends back to at least the robber barons of the Mauve Era: the railroads, the mine-owners the factory-owners, the Pinkertons…the ‘30s plot to depose FDR…which failure was followed by the establishment of the John Birch Society…the T Party…up to today. once it became legal for corporations to follow their directors’ whims, corporations took a definite turn toward - well, the criminal. And having packed statehouses with their agents, they’ve never let up on owning as many politicians/judges/laws/lawyers as they needed.

You point out that wealth-extraction (farming the population) has increased even as pressure on wages, rights has increased: I don’t find it odd, because trapping as many as possible on a treadmill of debt and ever-increasing expense *IS* the business model in place now…and they’re really good at making those hardest-squeezed angry at the wrong people.

4) history new to me; thank you.

Always a pleasure to be able to add to something useful

5) I agree. I would be fascinated to hear an idea for putting that cat back in the bag incrementally via due process. It amounts to that most ancient scourge of recorded history: corruption.

More tangentially, a great man once told me that every great empire was built on the backs of slaves. That remains true, with the wrinkle that the human liberation politics of the early (Britain, France) or late (US) 19th century were made conceivable by technology: machines that could do the worst slave graft better and cheaper than chattel.

That great man was correct. It’s WHY empires fall: there is no “willing slave”, and in time all slaves will rise up - whether to freedom or to death

The Industrial Revolution made human-liberation politics inevitable. Smith’s Wealth of Nations was published in 1776, smack in the middle of industrialization…and the Luddite Rebellion. Until the introduction of Blake’s “dark, satanic mills” weavers were respected as skilled craftspeople, able to support themselves and their families. With the introduction of the mills, weavers were suddenly out of work and unemployable, too proud to look for work from their crushing competition. This was when women and children began working inhuman hours tending the mill the machines, and the fabric; people were starving because starvation wages was all they could get, never mind the conditions and subsequent losses of life. (This was the period when child-labor got its well-deserved bad name). Luddites weren’t ‘afraid’ of technology, they struck out at an existential threat to their families, their communities, and themselves. The poet, Lord Byron, rose to defend the weavers in his first speech before the House of Lords.

(I seem to be saying the word ‘existential’ a lot lately…)

The devil’s bargain is that it put certain industries (rail, oil, steel, electricity, entertainment) in a position to give their bosses immense power. Oil is opposing (existentially!) necessary changes to how we live, work and travel because they have a great racket wholly in place and don’t want the party to end just because the little people.

Add banking, meat-packing/production, shipping…all are cozily ensconced under the current regime (NOT talking about the BIDEN administration) - they and their business partners and large investors are, well, invested in maintaining those cozy positions & are not about to let a bunch of *people* mess with their grift

I fear a corporatocracy. If it’s rich, it’s Orwell. If it’s not, Road Warrior.

Right there with you, though I imagine something more HandmaidsTale/Rollerball/SoylentGreen on the one hand & like you say, post-apocalyptic/WalkingDead on the other

We are in a corner and I see no compelling way out or forward, especially since the political party to which almost all the 2% belong is enthusiastically partnering in the annihilation of the republic of, for and by the little people. That man is not an aberration. He is a warning.

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cannabineer said:

I briefly hung with radical evangelicals when I was in college. I got a glimpse of the harsh conformism of the movement, the antiliberal and antiintellectual (someone please tell Apple to fix the prefix disarticulation glitch!) core attitude, and of course the whole loyalty through celibacy horse-ola. It set me on a slow drift to my current irreligion.

I’ve read that the distinctive feature of socialism is the collectivization of the means of production, essentially mining, manufacturing and agriculture. But without a stable and incorrupt executive board for that collective (and that is the thing nobody has been able to show) the system is unstable, as Lenin demonstrated. Communism simply became fascism with a different coat of paint.
I’m curious if you agree or can offer corrections.

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Bagginski said:

Agreement, no corrections I know to make

Don’t blame you for ditching ’em - was scared by my mom into saying the majik words when I was 7; I’d had enough by the time I hit 15. Spent the rest of my life working to undo the damage.

I honestly think that Marx’ focus on industry narrowed his view a bit too much; WOTMoP must have seemed the only way he could imagine to replace capitalist bosses with ‘something better’. It all really does start to break down around there, becoming more contrived, less realistic. His ‘solution’ requires changing nothing else that I remember seeing.

I’ve had some thoughts on what else could be done, but they might seem extreme to some

*** WOTMoP = “Workers Owning The Means of Production”

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Bagginski said:

And once again, I agree. A warning we MUST act on.

THANK YOU for your excellent comments!

I’ve interpolated my responses in your quoted post, above

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cannabineer said:

So much here I’m gonna pick cherries a bit. Blue glosses are numbered, paragraphs are lettered.

1a) Somalia! I spent hours yesterday reading about the history and economy of that place. It appears to be a true example of a “failed nation” that has largely dissolved into a quasifeudal quiltwork of small and ever contested domains.

Using feudal society of the 11th and 12th centuries (I’m currently noshing on Cantor’s Civilization of the Middle Ages) as my template, I don’t know what form it would take. Feudalism was very much marked by the technology and the (largely papal) politics of the time.
It would be grimly amusing if the coalition of toxic dominionist evangelicals generated a primate of some sort who manages the fealty of the pious.
But what feudalism in the time of Facebook on a billion phones will look like, I’m not sure, but I surmise the recent abuse of Twitter suggests one modus. Imagine getting your daily antipapal Bull while it was still steaming!

1b) racist backlash: The durability of racism in the US has for a long time baffled me. But recently I had the insight that racism is like atomic theory. Everything is made of’ em, and “conservative” (our right is no more conservative than Stalin was a socialist) politics are built on them.

But atoms are made of smaller things, and the protons and neutrons of our neofascist (barely) minority are free-market ideology and dominionist religion. Both are led by kleptocrats: it’s about stripping the masses of wealth and freedom as we careen toward an authoritarian state. The threat to SSI got real personal for me.
The propaganda are so effective that the MAGA either didn’t pay attention or thought that, as the righteous and chosen, they’d be somehow kept solvent.

Racism here always leads to talk of slavery. Slavery here, ironically enough, has to do with asymmetric advance in technology. Before Whitney’s cotton gin, separating the fiber from the rest of it was laborious, and the throughput was small. Cotton was not enough of an economic engine to justify keeping slaves, and the choice tobacco lands were in decline. In 1820 it looked like slavery as an institution was naturally on its way out, and the federal gov’t thought it could stay loose on the issue and not need to piss off the plantation states with precocious illegalization of buying, selling and keeping people. Classifying n* as very much like humans, but not quite, was the necessary moral contortions of doing slavery while being a good churchgoer.

The driver is usually money. With the cotton gin, hand labor shifted to the fields, and it takes a LOT of slaves out there picking hundred-pound bags to feed a cotton gin. Cotton production, and thus cotton revenue principally from Britain, went boom.

Today the economic angle relies on Rs considering economics to be zero-sum, which sounds like just as severe a hypocrisy. So they focus furiously on not letting the lesser classes of “people” get any of the goodies. Sadly, a more generous state, and better-broken large corporations, reined-in megachurches lobbying to combine church and state, would generate more wealth and welfare than what they’re so stubbornly defending. The megachurches stoke racist and other grievance politics in tight teamwork with the politicos because they’re in on the big take and getting seriously rich. Sigh, shrug.

1c) If the Rs advance in the midterms, they might have the leverage to push their systematic advancement of treason past the tipping point. Lotsa history grad students in the next decades will look at just how close we came. Adolf succeeded with the Reichstag fire. I am certain that orange skeletor modeled Jan 06 on that event, figuring it would replace July 4 on the calendar. Frightening even at this remove.

More numbered entries later; wanna keep the posts from getting so massive the core begins to fuse.

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hanimmal said:

In 1b (I think it is) I think that the fallback to slavery is to be able to not talk about the still (mostly) acceptable(ish) forms of racism. things like "Illegals" and "radical Islam" come to mind.

Also interesting is that in the right wing propagandist economic 'theories', it is based on short run economic models and ignore the long run. Which is why they fall into the 'zero sum' trap. Also interesting is when you pair this mindset with the religious dogma that is preached in mega-churches that the world is going to end (and that it is a good thing somehow).

Anyways, 2 cents.

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Bagginski said:

More the unorganized religious type…

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Bagginski said:

More the unorganized religious type…

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cannabineer said:

I vigorously reject any religion that imposes strictures on (consenting adult human) sex and sexuality. Any such is not about welfare but draconian hierarchical control.

Well damn; that’s all of them, I believe!

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