@divineorder 'the time is always right to do the right thing’

Too bad she didn't do this during the election, but still, I welcome it.

Her "centrist" critics ignore that it is precisely their willingness to trade principles for power that got us here. https://t.co/Aav6i7kUrr

— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) August 13, 2017

@The Aspie Corner

when it comes to how the money and power isn't working in this country. We each blame someone or something else for it, but we're pissed off over the same issues. Other things we will never agree on - not an inch. Those need to be put aside until we can wrest power from their cold hands.

Right-wing enablers love to propagate the lie that the far-left and far-right have a lot in common and even help each other out because 'they both want to burn the system down'.

Fuck that. Even if the far-left wanted to burn it down, you can't blame them. After all, this is a system that goes out of its way to keep very few people very wealthy at everyone else's expense. Those at the top do all they can to keep that social order going, and if they manage to get a few plebs like skinheads, neo-nazis and the KKK to act as their shock troops, all the better. Especially when their centrist enablers want any peaceful left-wing movements punched down.

This capitalist empire needs to die a quick death. The sooner, the better.

@dkmich They did in the county where I live. Every single Dem switched parties. The Dem party consists of some widows having pot luck lunches once in a while. Our former Democratic chair is Dale Everett. Haven't Googled him lately, but he was a DC lobbyist, had Hill and Bill on his speed dial. San Jacinto County resident, is a liason for veterans. He never served. oops. He is banned from the VFW or Legion Hall, do not know which, in Cleveland,Liberty County, TX.

He and the others are a bunch of damn limousine liberals rich-splaining why everyone should vote for crappy Dem candidates and against their own best interests. This is perfect.

"We called you all racist, misogynistic, white men (even when you were people of color, women, or both) to get you to shut up about single-payer health care, and you still persisted. So now we are doubling down and calling you all Nazis."
Something tells me it isn't going to work.

I think it is probable that Dems will quit being closet Republicans and join forces with the GOP officially. They are already coming together to protect corporate war and the deep state. Trump is living proof that sooner rather than later, the GOP has got to throw their crazies overboard. The Dems have already gotten rid of their base. How perfect a marriage can that be?

@WoodsDweller
I vote for The Harlem Generals.
The two parties have been playing the same game as the Washington Generals and the Harlem Globetrotters.
Same game, new name.

is the next step for corporate Dems simply to align themselves with Republicans?

If we have enough time left, this is exactly what I expect to happen.
The Tea Party / fascists / alt-right or whatever we're calling them this week are going to break away from the Republican party and form their own. If Trump is still around he will be their fearless leader and he will (of course) call it the Trump party. Their money will come from a handful of fascistic plutocrats.
The establishment Democrats and the establishment Republicans will unite. Call it the Washington Consensus, call it the Neoliberal/Neoconservative consensus, call it the DINO-RINO party, call it the Centrist party, whatever you like. Neither wing will have enough voters to hold power, but together they will have many voters and a tidal wave of corporate money.
I'm still looking for the New Socialist party to arise. The voters are there, the platform (basically Bernie's platform) is there, enough money can be raised through small donations to be viable.
And we'll have to learn to run the government in a three party system.

@dkmich
But someone on DK wrote a diary about his tweet and called him out for it.
I'm sure you can imagine the shit storm that created.
So many people were defending him and their comments were ridiculous.
However, our little site got some exposure. A poster said that he checked us out (he made sure that it wasn't his idea to do it, someone suggested it to him) and he told everyone that we don't think that Russia interfered with the election. He just couldn't believe it

Wonder if he is still there. How these people can eat shit just to publish on a large blog even if it is full of @ssholes is beyond me.

On Charlottesville: Why the Center Is Okay with Nazis but Hates the Left
2017 AUGUST 13
by Ian Welsh

Look, the Charlottsville march of Nazis (they had the swastika and the salute, they’re not alt-right) showed very clearly the difference between how Nazis and left-wingers are treated. Left-wingers march, and the riot police are in their faces. Nazis march, and the police don’t even intervene while they are beating up counter-protestors.

Then, of course, we have the Nazi who drove his car into the crowd, and much of the media calling it a “clash with counteprotestors” (no) and saying things like “amid violence” rather than “in an act of terrorism.”

The center, which includes what is laughably called the “center left,” may condemn Nazis, but they certainly prefer them to left-wingers. They can do business with Nazis. The people they hate are those they call the “alt-left” in an attempt to pretend that wanting universal healthcare and cops to not kill blacks is the same thing as being a Nazi.

But the reason is simple enough: Centrists make a lot of money from prisons and for-profit healthcare.

The left–people who want single payer healthcare and less people in prison–are a direct threat to the center.vv[more]

@dkmich

Nazis march, and the police don’t even intervene while they are beating up counter-protestors.

This shows that the Nazis and the police were in on this.

The FBI warned people about this group in March and they also had spied on their websites and knew all about their agendas, yet they didn't bother to pull their permit.

As others have stated, TPTB want us fighting each other instead of focusing on what they are doing.
This sure knocked the Russian propaganda off of people's minds, and this too was planned.

Every time you see someone call the Nazis the alt right, correct them and tell them that they are Nazis.

Wonder if he is still there. How these people can eat shit just to publish on a large blog even if it is full of @ssholes is beyond me.

On Charlottesville: Why the Center Is Okay with Nazis but Hates the Left
2017 AUGUST 13
by Ian Welsh

Look, the Charlottsville march of Nazis (they had the swastika and the salute, they’re not alt-right) showed very clearly the difference between how Nazis and left-wingers are treated. Left-wingers march, and the riot police are in their faces. Nazis march, and the police don’t even intervene while they are beating up counter-protestors.

Then, of course, we have the Nazi who drove his car into the crowd, and much of the media calling it a “clash with counteprotestors” (no) and saying things like “amid violence” rather than “in an act of terrorism.”

The center, which includes what is laughably called the “center left,” may condemn Nazis, but they certainly prefer them to left-wingers. They can do business with Nazis. The people they hate are those they call the “alt-left” in an attempt to pretend that wanting universal healthcare and cops to not kill blacks is the same thing as being a Nazi.

But the reason is simple enough: Centrists make a lot of money from prisons and for-profit healthcare.

The left–people who want single payer healthcare and less people in prison–are a direct threat to the center.vv[more]

@dkmich @dkmich
That's the cold, ugly truth about all of this:

Neoliberals are centrists.

It's all about the money. It's about their connections, their promised positions when they go round and round through the greased Revolving Door of DC, their summer homes, their toys, their status, the footsie games with Wall St, the private parties in the Hamptons, the helicopter commutes, their lavish lifestyles, the 5 start hotels $hillary insists on staying at, the quid pro quo manifesto of the Clinton Global Initiative, their stock portfolios and real estate holdings, and for the slavish sycophants of Kos's minions, a promise to scale the corporate ladder through various means of selling your soul.

It's easier more profitable to malign the true Left, the Socialists, the activists fighting for healthcare for all/free college education/tax the rich/end prison industrial complex and police brutality, etc.

Superpredators, the Crime Bill, Welfare Reform, the Telecommunications Act, The Commodity Futures Modernization Act - the face of fighting for the Poor, Minorities, the Middle Class, right?

Pose for a couple of public relations photos with very carefully selected identity signifiers, and drop a few milquetoast platitudes about them, but never really do anything about it. And if you finally do, only when it's been deemed safe for your career and the public has already been way in the majority with said issues, which is often decades after activists have given their sweat, blood and tears and died for causes.

Those willfully ignorant Neoliberals at TOP are the enemy in every way.

Wonder if he is still there. How these people can eat shit just to publish on a large blog even if it is full of @ssholes is beyond me.

On Charlottesville: Why the Center Is Okay with Nazis but Hates the Left
2017 AUGUST 13
by Ian Welsh

Look, the Charlottsville march of Nazis (they had the swastika and the salute, they’re not alt-right) showed very clearly the difference between how Nazis and left-wingers are treated. Left-wingers march, and the riot police are in their faces. Nazis march, and the police don’t even intervene while they are beating up counter-protestors.

Then, of course, we have the Nazi who drove his car into the crowd, and much of the media calling it a “clash with counteprotestors” (no) and saying things like “amid violence” rather than “in an act of terrorism.”

The center, which includes what is laughably called the “center left,” may condemn Nazis, but they certainly prefer them to left-wingers. They can do business with Nazis. The people they hate are those they call the “alt-left” in an attempt to pretend that wanting universal healthcare and cops to not kill blacks is the same thing as being a Nazi.

But the reason is simple enough: Centrists make a lot of money from prisons and for-profit healthcare.

The left–people who want single payer healthcare and less people in prison–are a direct threat to the center.vv[more]

@Mark from Queens And I will feel even better if I hear about even just one of those fucks you have so kindly mentioned reading it too.

their little sycophant minions splashing around in that pestilent Neoliberal cesspool.

They don't know a fucking thing about history - at all, or remain willfully ignorant.

That it was the Communists who stood arm in arm with Southern Blacks in the 1930's. That it was the Socialists that MLK, Bayard Rustin, and A Philip Randolph most identified with and were members of. That it was Paul Robeson and W.E.B. DuBois who eviscerated the duopoly fraud of American capitalist government and its attendant racism, militarism and economic inequality. They're willfully ignorant on all this stuff. Try to remind them of any of this and more, which I did for a couple of years, and they go mum, or obfuscate, or claim some bogus superiority.

Of course they all turned on Cornel West too, once he had the temerity to see through and publicly call out the smokescreen of Obama's Neoliberalism.

West was in Charlottesville the night before the murder and part of a pretty daunting situation, in which the church they were in was surrounded by torch-carrying white supremacists. He said this on Democracy Now:

Over 20 of us who were standing, many of them clergy; we would have been crushed like cockroaches if it were not for the Anarchists and Anti-fascists who approached over 300-350 Fascists. We just had 20. And we singing "This little light of mine...", if you know what I mean.

And it's crucial to say the Anarchists (and the Antifa), because they saved our lives. Actually, we would have been completely crushed. And I'll never forget that.

As he says, the woman who was murdered, Heather Heyer, was an organizer with the I.W.W. (and Bernie supporter, naturally).

Where is any of this context in the feckless media? Cowards, just like the fraudulent Neoliberals. It's all black and white to them. Propaganda thrives in such a fetid swamp such as that. It's all binary in their small worlds. While in the streets, in real life, it's always the other way. The 99% show up together, just as we did at Occupy, just as the BlackLivesMatter movement expressly didn't want to be labeled the "New Civil Rights" movement, but the "Oppressed People's Movement," to include LGBT, economic populism and the environment.

Here's the fucking bottom line, you coward motherfuckers at TOP - and yeah, I'm talking to you, you little, boot-licking, corporate-protectorate, $hillary zombie, lurker motherfuckers, directly now:

All you identity politics-driven, market-tested assholes, in your "safe spaces," with your pink pussy hats on like your Hollywood faux feminist heroes, none of you, have even a thumbnail of the courage that showed up and stood down these Fascists scumbags the way those beautiful, glorious, brave, strong BlackLivesMatter protesters, Democratic Socialists of America, IWW members, Anarchists, Bernie supporters, did in Charlottesville.

You, and your MSM lapdog cronies, fucking make me sick.

At the end of the day you're the incrementalist, apologists-for-your-corporate masters, platitude-filled, morally bankrupt, party Loyalists that Robeson, DuBois, Randolph, and Rustin spent their lives fighting against.

(Rant over...
Ah, that felt good too )

@HenryAWallace

It may be hard for your viewers to remember how difficult it was for people to talk about H.I.V./AIDS back in the 1980s. And because of both President and Mrs. Reagan – in particular, Mrs. Reagan – we started a national conversation, when before nobody would talk about it. Nobody wanted anything to do with it.

This is what gets me about Her, just because she's not goosestepping or blatantly supporting Nazis, doesn't mean she's some civil rights leader. Her record with women, minorities, LGBT isn't that fantastic, especially if you factor in worldwide conditions. They want to label "BernieBros" purists for daring to point out that Sanders was physically on the front line of Civil Rights while Her was a Goldwater Girl. And it's not like that's all in the past. The tonedeaf praise for the Reagans was just last year.

uglier than the right when hunting impurities. Hell, the liars shamelessly make up impurities, then pound on them self-righteously.

That the left demands purity is nonsense. Since this country began, the left of the left has helped elect politician after politician, getting little of what it would like and much of what it disliked. And by "helped elect, I don't mean just showing up at the polls. I mean donating, volunteering, bundling, etc.

The left of the left endured slavery, wars, Jim Crow, McCarthyism, etc. The left has always been the segment of U.S. society that most had to compromise its ideals, while the right was stubbornly unyielding--unless they felt physically threatened, as was the case prior to the New Deal and prior to the Great Society. Post Patriot Act, they have few reasons to feel physically threatened.

And what was the left's sinful wish anyway? Wanting equal rights for all people, an end to wars, a living wage and maybe at least a barely survival-level subsistence for Americans without jobs? Isn't that the kind of thing lying, hypocritical establishment Democrats ran on for decades, until alt Clinton showed up promising to end welfare? Was that a left position, a centrist position or a Pete Peterson position?

And, what is the alt right anyway, but the same people who we used to call the extreme right? I can play alt center right vocabulary games, too. Al From claimed that he had named the Progressive Policy Institute as he did because he got tired of reading that the Democratic Leadership Council was conservative. He figured people could not write about "the conservative Progressive Policy Institute."

Well, guess what? From was as wrong about that as he is about everything else, People can. The only fundamental difference between the conservative Progressive Policy Institute and the conservative DLC is the artifice and hypocrisy in naming the former. So, if we are changing vocabulary, why the eff are we leaving out the alt center right? The alt centrists? The ultra pure centrists? The alt hypocrites?

Stop letting them draw the boundaries of the fields of battle and making sure we stay in the lines they drew, as we fight back at their lying, anti-left propaganda. Screw their lies, their hypocrisy, their calculated self-righteous shaming and their putrid purity tests. Their sainted candidate for President:

Led Confederacy Month celebrations,

Joked about Gandi working in a US gas station

Affected a Southern drawl while speaking to black people in Harlem

Compared serving as a U.S. Senator to working on a plantation

Promoted for profit prisons,

Talked about "super thugs" and "hard working white people,

Ran one dog whistle racist Presidential primary campaign and one dog whistle anti-Semitic Presidential primary campaign while playing every victim card in the deck, including the race card--no small feat for a WASP

Laughed at attempting to make a teen rape victim of a forty year old man seem like the villain in court

Offered up Roe v. Wade to a Constitutional amendment.

Shamed the women her husband hit on while standing by her man,

Argued against equal marriage on the floor of the US Senate

In 2008, called DADT and DOMA having done "very well" by gays

Is a warmonger who voted for every war and surge she could and laughed on camera at the murder of Gaddafi and at the prospect of bombing Iran

Amorally did all the above and more--anything to advance herself.

Purity, my ass, alt PUMA hypocrites.

@Dopeman
here! Small p. I couldn't take the anti-Bernie crap from kos over there about his Ides of March horse$h!t, made a comment that Hillary's granny panties must be frosted (or some such) and got bojo'd soon thereafter. I'm hoping others there take your lead and follow you here. This place needs to grow with more folks like yourself.

with TOP for good over this alt-left bullshit.

All I've really done there for the past couple of weeks is recommended TomP diaries and post comment after comment after comment trying to explain that I'm not a Nazi and why anyone using the term alt-left is a Nazi enabler doing Steve Bannon's work.

It's no use. All I get is centristsplaining about how I really am a Nazi but just haven't come to grips with the Naziism inherent in my support for single payer health care and free college. Nazi privilege you know. Fuck those people. Fuck them all.

When a community you think you're a part of reduces you to explaining that you're not a Nazi it might be time to face the fact that you just don't belong in that community anymore, that's what I always say.

I stayed around to try and push back since the site showed its ass last March, but all I've really been doing is donating clicks to Markos' Tesla Liberal cause. No more.

Word is there's another purge coming and I have a feeling I'll be included. I'll never know for sure because I'll never visit that website again.

@NoOneOfConsequence You can edit your comments here. Also we have a thumbs up button to allow people to give the comment writer positive feed back. We do not list who gave the thumbs up. Also, we do not have a thumbs down button. The reason for both of these things is that it prevents roving gang atmosphere that permeated the other place and makes the thumbs up button much more meaningful when it is given anonymously.

We encourage interaction even when you do not agree, but we expect disagreements to be respectful and based upon facts and or policy. We also encourage folks to write on whatever topics they wish to do so. Most of us would like to see more essays (we call them essays) on science, environment, and sustainability. So if you have an interest in one of those areas, please consider writing an essay.

Jump in and feel free to participate.

... tried for a long time to offer sensible alternatives to the centrist views. With that tweet from Markos I made myself an account here. I don't know how well this place lines up with my views. I held my nose for Hilary in the general and I'd do it again because what I wanted to see was Trump lose so badly that all the racists who came out for him would see how small they actually were. I guess they showed me.

Anyway, I'll probably hit both sites for a while and see which one sticks.