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:

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RtFTI719Bs]

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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.

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Big Al's picture

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.

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snoopydawg's picture

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

In the pre-Bill Clinton era, the Democrats were a “catch-all” party, in which left and “leftish” ideologies coexisted more or less comfortably with the usual Dreck. Left tendencies were discouraged, but they were usually, albeit grudgingly, tolerated.

The Clintons and their co-thinkers put the kybosh on that, effectively eliminating the party’s always feeble left wing.

For that, it is fair to blame both Clintons, not just Bill. Although, Hillary has a knack for getting herself identified with goody-goody malarkey, she, like Bill, has always been in Wall Street’s pocket; and, like him too, she has always despised her party’s leftwing.

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.

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There were problems with running a campaign of Joy while committing a genocide? Who could have guessed?

Harris is unburdened of speaking going forward.

earthling1's picture

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

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Neither Russia nor China is our enemy.
Neither Iran nor Venezuela are threatening America.
Cuba is a dead horse, stop beating it.

Hillbilly Dem's picture

@earthling1 Super post. Concise, succinct, but discouraging. Every time it seems that we're at, or at least near to rock bottom, we keep going lower.

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"Just call me Hillbilly Dem(exit)."
-H/T to Wavey Davey

snoopydawg's picture

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!

IMG_1406.JPG

Eugene Debs

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There were problems with running a campaign of Joy while committing a genocide? Who could have guessed?

Harris is unburdened of speaking going forward.

GreyWolf's picture

@snoopydawg remember the federalists/anti-federalists? (I remember writing a paper on the Constitution which included a quote about the great [under-handed] negative PR work to be able to label a diverse group, with various valid criticisms, all as the "anti" group)

Do you know what book that image is from?

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snoopydawg's picture

@GreyWolf

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 hypocrisy history I learned in school.

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There were problems with running a campaign of Joy while committing a genocide? Who could have guessed?

Harris is unburdened of speaking going forward.

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.

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Mark from Queens's picture

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:

“I like moving in and really hurting them. I don’t like this ‘let’s be cute, let’s be clever.’ I like smashing them, because that’s the only way to take care of them.”

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:

From Harvard University London went to New York where he addressed and exclusive group of extremely wealthy men and women. He was to use the incident several months later in the brilliant chapter of The Iron Heel, "The Philomaths."

"You have been entrusted with the world; you have muddled and mismanaged. You are incompetent despite all your boastings. 1 million years ago the caveman, without tools, with small brain, and with nothing but the strength of his body, managed to feed his wife and children, so that through him the race survived. You, on the other hand, armed with all the modern means of production, multiplying the productive capacity of the caveman 1 million times – you are in incompetents and muddlers, you are unable to secure to millions even the paltry amount of bread that would sustain their physical life. You have mismanaged the world, and it shall be taken from you.

Who will take it from you? We will!

And who are we? We are 7 million socialist revolutionists…

"There was a loud murmur protest and dissent," Wanhope continued, "and one or two respectable looking person's choked up, but it seemed as if they were about to have apoplexy. London walk down from the rostrum through a sea of blasted purple faces distorted with rage, but no attempt was made to detain him… it was not until he was well out of earshot that some of the stunned audience plucked up enough courage to remark that 'he ought to be in jail.'"

Jack was gleeful. He wrote back to Bamford: "Oh I have some stories to tell you when I get back about my clashes with the masters of society!"

In the middle of his prepared lecture at Yale, London interpolated a bitter comment comment on the role of American colleges and universities:

"I went to the University. I found the University, in the main, practically wholly so, clean and noble, but I did not find the university alive. I found the American university had this ideal, as phrased by a professor at a Chicago university, namely: "the passionless pursuit of passionless intelligence' - clean and noble, I grant you, but not alive enough…

And the reflection of this university ideal I find - conservatism and the unconcern of the American people for those were suffering, who are in want. And so I became interested in an attempt to arouse in the minds of our universities an interest in Socialism…We do not desire merely to make converts…If collegians cannot fight for us, we want them to fight against us. But what we do not want is that which obtains today and has obtained in the past of the university, a mere deans and unconcern and ignorance so far as socialism is concerned. Fight for us or fight against us! Raise your voices one way or the other; be alive!"

When he finished, London received a tremendous ovation from the students and was carried off the platform on the shoulders of a group of Yale men. Even some of the faculty members shared this enthusiasm. "A Professor of Yale," Dr. Irvine once remarked, "told me a few days after the lecture that it was the greatest intellectual stimulus Yale had and in many years, and he sincerely hoped that London would return and expound the same program in the same hall." The press, to say the least, did not echo these sentiments. The New Haven papers were furious that the students had been exposed to the "rantings" of a socialist and the New York papers took up the cry. The New York Times devoted a long editorial on February 1, 1906, to London's speech at Yale in which it paid Jack a left-handed compliment, commending him "for the perfect frankness with which he tells his audience what socialism is, and what it aims to accomplish."

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.

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"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

k9disc's picture

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. Wink

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“Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” ~ Sun Tzu

Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@k9disc We're in a capitalist system, which means we often have to spend money in order to acquire resources.

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.

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"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

...We have no means to fight back against it so long as money remains the driving force for power....

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.

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native

lotlizard's picture

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.

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The Aspie Corner's picture

@lotlizard that wouldn't be happening if it weren't for the constant bombing and pillaging in the Middle East and Africa to start with.

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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 Aspie Corner

and the Left wants to stop the wars... but it might be wise policy to stop both at once.

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native

detroitmechworks's picture

@native for cheap labor is quite possibly the most idiotic idea combination since the one about "Advisors don't count" war policies.

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I do not pretend I know what I do not know.

Bisbonian's picture

@detroitmechworks for a couple of centuries, anyway.

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"I’m a human being, first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.” —Malcolm X

Bisbonian's picture

@detroitmechworks for a couple of centuries, anyway.

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"I’m a human being, first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.” —Malcolm X