Outgunned and Outspent: Why The Left DOES NOT EXIST in The United States
I will not stop saying this because it's the truth. The Left-Wing in the US is non-existent. Any attempt for one to rise up has been punched the fuck down by the right-wing and centrists alike. And yet, the dumbass reactionary manchildren who call themselves the alt-right will tell you otherwise.
You know what's funny about all this? The right-wing has never had to face punishment for jack shit. Ever. They tried to assassinate FDR in the 30s and no one even got a slap on the wrist. From the capitalists who financed the attempted coup to the Klan, Silver Shirts, not one person faced the punishment they deserved. Oh, wait. They let the New Deal pass. So fucking what. The only reason that even happened is because the US had the Soviets on their asses. Oh, and don't forget the deals made with southern racists to keep people of color from collecting Social Security. They did the same when Medicare passed.
But since the 60s, when people of color were finally granted rights they should have had to begin with, the right-wing have gone ever crazier. Meanwhile, the right-wing AND the centrists have punched down anything even remotely left. The hippies. The Black Panthers. Anti-war movements against Vietnam and Iraq. Martin Luther King. Malcolm X. Medgar Evers. Unions. Single Payer. Occupy Wall Street. Fight for 15. Jesse Jackson. Howard Dean (Before he sold out). Bernie Sanders. All punched the fuck down. By the right-wing. By their centrist enablers. By the moneyed and corporate interests that now support the far-right and the alt-right (Richard Spencer runs a think tank backed by corporate interests).
We are outgunned and outspent. We have no means to fight back against it so long as money remains the driving force for power. What do we do? Where? When?
Ideas welcome.
See ya around,
Aspie
p.s. Something worth checking out:
Comments
I don't know what the
answer is. It might just be too far gone.
Yeah they let the New Deal pass and they've been fighting against it ever since. They've got it sewn up much tighter now than they did in the gilded age and they are not going to let that shit happen again. They have every angle covered.
When I think about a revolution, or hell, even a general strike, I just don't see how it's possible here. Try to talk to co-workers about unfair conditions and all that will likely happen is someone you're competing with for a promotion will tell the boss you're bad for morale. We're crabs in a bucket.
Take to the streets and most of the people who should be on your side will counter protesting with signs about how much you suck. We've been divided and conquered.
I don't think anything short of pitchforks, torches, and guillotines will change anything at this point and I just don't see it ever happening.
However end-stage capitalism collapses on itself will be our fate. Wherever this road we're on now leads is where we are going.
I wish I believed there was some other way this plays out, but I don't.
Ideas?
What is it you want? Until there is a common objective, nothing will happen except more elections. I think that's been a major problem, the inability to define an objective, versus a laundry list of demands.
Hillary's and Bill's goody-goody malarkey with the banks
The Clintons killed off what was left of the left when they took office. Hillary was just involved with this as Bill was. Remember they ran on a 'buy one, get one free' campaign. She was out there pushing for every one of his policies. I'm sure that you all remember what they were. This country is still feeling the effects from them.
Democrats: Can't Live With Them, Can't Live Without Them
If anyone is interested in articles that show how tied to the banks they were during their entire careers, let me know.
Banks and other financial institutions gave them between $24-96 million and after they left the WH broke, Citibank gave them a $1million loan for their house and then hired Bill for speeches. This home had a cottage on its property and that was where the secret service agents who were their details lived. Their mortgage payment was $10,000/month and that's what they charged the government for the secret service.
I haven't wondered why the men who tried to remove FDR weren't punished for it. I think he was threatened not to do it. Why else wouldn't they have been shot?
My opinion on how to change the direction of this country is massive boycotts and work stoppages. This will only happen when more people are unemployed, have more debt that they can't repay and they have nothing else to lose. Until then, the PTB will continue to transfer our money into their pockets with the help from their peons in congress.
Or until climate change has swamped major cities... or burned them down from massive forest fires.
I have defined an objective
Push the entire wreck over the cliff. As soon as posible.
We are like drug addicts, nothing will change until we hit rock fucking bottom. Knocking at deaths door. When we feel the lash of the whip on our backs, is when any resistance will develop.
How far down?
When they destroy the only union left, the police union, is when we will see our only window of opportunity. Only then will they switch sides.
IMHO
Neither Russia nor China is our enemy.
Neither Iran nor Venezuela are threatening America.
Cuba is a dead horse, stop beating it.
Amen, earthling1.
"Just call me Hillbilly Dem(exit)."
-H/T to Wavey Davey
I saw this on way of the bern
This pretty much says it all. Look at how years this crap has been going on. Far back to soon after the Declaration of Independence was signed, there have been people saying things like this. For over two centuries, people have done nothing while watching the ruling class taking more and more from us. There has to be a time when people say Enough!
Eugene Debs
even before
Do you know what book that image is from?
Sorry, no. I just came across it while
reading way of the bern. I didn't know much about Debs, but I've been reading up on him after seeing him mentioned in a couple of articles.
And I don't remember much about American
hypocrisyhistory I learned in school.I had a bizarre conversation with a right-winger
a couple months ago...
I was settling my tab at the bar after an evening of grooving to my local Grateful Dead cover band when a guy on the next stool says to me, "So, you're a liberal, aren't you?"
I paused for a second to determine how, or if, I wanted to respond, then said, "It's even worse than that. I'm a wild-eyed flaming pinko Socialist!"
"I knew it!" he replied. "They say you're not supposed to stereotype people, but I could tell immediately!" Flush with excitement, he dropped his bait. "And you could probably tell I'm conservative just from looking at me, right?"
"Actually," I said, "I hadn't given the matter the slightest consideration. It would never occur to me to size up people's political orientations based on their hair cuts or choice of footwear."
"Huh!?!" he said, genuinely surprised.
"But if it makes you feel any better," I continued, "you can sleep easy at night knowing that absolutely none of my interests or causes will be advanced or even represented in Washington."
"That's true," he granted with surprising ease before continuing on his preferred tack. "I'm with an organization - people say we're racist, but we've got a Mexican and a Canadian..." I probably snickered audibly. "We're just out there fighting against leftist organizations, like Antifa."
"Antifa isn't an "organization"," I countered. "There is no leadership or structure..."
"Okay," he shut me down, "you don't know. You have a good night."
"Cheers!" I said and walked away. I'm not sure how he thought that would play out, but I was certainly glad to be rid of him.
I prefer LW advocates with tenacity and vigor too, such as
these two examples.
George Carlin, just before he died speaking with Olbermann (when he was sane and not a pathetic Neoliberal dupe), talking about how to handle the RW, and presumably oligarchs and fake liberals also:
The current crop of Neoliberal MSM comedians, such as Colbert, Stewart, Trevor Noah, Fallon, etc are a shameful bunch of dupes compared to folks like Carlin, Dick Gregory, Lenny Bruce, Bill Hicks and Richard Pryor.
And then there's the great Socialist author Jack London. Excerpt from "Jack London/American Rebel," by Philip Foner:
When we speak like this, that's when the Masses, the 99%, will become galvanized. A "tremendous ovation" and "carried on the students' shoulders." It was practically so for Bernie. He proved this kind of rhetoric is deeply resounding. It's a no-brainer that people are very pissed off. But they can't put their finger on the malaise. He masterfully narrowed it down to and laser-focused on Wall St and Money In Politics.
Where are today's artists, authors and musicians speaking with this kind of spine, temerity and fearlessness?
Read Jack London's essay "What Life Means To Me." It's a moving paean to Socialism, deeply inspiring in its complete demolition of the Capitalist economic model and how it contorts human beings out of their better selves.
I agree. We need to call these bastards out in no uncertain terms. They need to be made afraid that people are waking up to their game.
But the focus must be on the ones really pulling the strings.
"If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:
THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC"
- Kurt Vonnegut
I Don't Think It Has Anything to Do With Spending
Spending, from the Left, is feeding the enemy.
Receiving money from the Left is making a deal with the devil -- a trade of money that threatens marketshare is not a good trade from a business perspective.
The Left does not exist because the corporate media doesn't cover it. If the corporate media doesn't cover it, it doesn't exist. The corporate media can't cover the Left in honest fashion because the political opinion of the Left is antithetical to the corporate sponsor's message -- the Left is incompatible with corporate media.
Solving this problem means sidestepping and/or creating new media and political institutions that are not corporate sponsored.
It's as simple as that.
“Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” ~ Sun Tzu
@k9disc We're in a capitalist
Yes, I know barter exists. It's not always an option. It's great when it is, but it's not always available.
It's unlikely I will be able to barter tutoring somebody's kids in reading and writing for solar panels. Solar panels would be a very useful thing to have. As for the Left, it would be very useful for the Left to own some real estate and some small businesses, and it's unlikely the Left will be able to barter for that, or for airtime either. Don't like the idea of the Left owning real estate or businesses? In this country, owning real estate means you can dedicate that real estate to hosting events, housing people, raising food, or whatever else you need to do as the Left, at least until the ownership class decides to shove you out by raising the taxes so high you can't pay them. That process happens much more slowly than being evicted from a place you're renting. Having small businesses means you have venues where art, music, and material objects useful to the left can be acquired, and having people come to those venues can create communities.
When these things disappear, as they increasingly have since I was a child in the 70s, there are fewer and fewer places where Left people can show up and expect to find other Left people and possibly useful ideas, experiences, or things.
I already know what it's like for the Left not to have property. In this system, it sucks. It doesn't matter that the better system we'd rather have would not involve private property, at least not in the way this system defines it. In this system, to have no property is to have an anchor attached to one foot, if not to have your foot broken altogether. To deliberately attempt to have no property is to drop an anvil on your foot on purpose.
It's no accident that what brought Occupy to a halt (mostly) was the re-taking of the property they had seized with their bodies, but which they did not own through money. That didn't have to bring them to a halt, but it was like shooting them in the knees. The communities and movement dispersed.
Without territory, you cannot establish communities, except online. While obviously I'm an advocate for online communities, I think it's also obvious that online communities do not suffice for keeping a movement alive. Also, online communities are necessarily vulnerable in ways that the latest round of censorship exemplifies.
"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha
"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver
I can easily agree with you here:
But it's hard to imagine what else could conceivably be "the driving force for power".
If not money, then what? As far as I can see, literally everything costs money. Even virtue costs money.
native
In my view, there’s no genuine Left in Europe anymore, either.
Of course, that may be due to my understanding of what it means to be “Left.”
A “Left” that approves of NATO bases in Germany as the staging area for waging war all over the Middle East and Central Asia – a “Left” that sells taxpayer-subsidized submarines to Israel, knowing they will be outfitted with nuclear missiles — a “Left” that bows down to Federal Reserve 2.0 in the form of the European Central Bank — a “Left” that doesn’t acknowledge the additional pressure mass immigration puts on the already-strained ability of society’s bottom 20% to survive — is no “Left” at all.
At least in my book — YMMV.
Mass immigration
Modern education is little more than toeing the line for the capitalist pigs.
Guerrilla Liberalism won't liberate the US or the world from the iron fist of capital.
The Right wants to stop the immigration,
and the Left wants to stop the wars... but it might be wise policy to stop both at once.
native
Bombing people into poverty, then importing them...
I do not pretend I know what I do not know.
But it seems to have worked,
"I’m a human being, first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.” —Malcolm X
But it seems to have worked,
"I’m a human being, first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.” —Malcolm X