and well as National Maritime and IBEW. The Longshoremen were particularly effective with sympathy strikes - "We don't support how you use ships' cargoes, we're not unloading them - they can sit until they sink." The sympathy strike was indeed free speech and did indeed give working people a say in how the political economy operated.

I think it's no coincidence that the FBI tried every dirty trick in their book to deport Harry Bridges of the west coast dockworkers. The west coast was more militant than the east coast in my view.

You write as if capitalism has infinity as its limit. That is simply untrue because the one requirement of capitalism is that it must be in a state of growth. That's why stagnation is bad, right?

To grow infinitely means there must be infinite and increasing resources (supply) as well as infinite and increasing population (demand).

Capitalism is reaching its limits now. Resources are increasingly scarce and increasingly expensive to extract/exploit. The planet is overburdened with population and all of the damage to the planet can be attributed to overpopulation and resource exploitation.

One can read those limits by precisely what you identified:

The problem with current day capitalistic practices is that it is not profiting by R&D and investment for new products; (I exclude the relatively small group of angel venture capitalists from this scenario)--large corporations are profiting in stock buy backs (which used to be illegal) and speculation along with eating their young.

Exactly! They are not producing more wealth (growing), they are just pushing the money around that is out there. That cannot be defined as capitalism.

In addition, we should recognize that the big push for privatization means capitalism, as we know it, is dying - they are now exploiting the public treasure as quickly as they can. This does not provide growth.

The signs are there. Google "capitalism death throes" and you'll be astonished by the number that comes up. Reading a few of those articles will explain what I am trying to say much more eloquently and substantially.

The Department of Defense (DOD) reports that the United States spent about $168 billion (worth around $950 billion in 2011 dollars) in the entire war including $111 billion on military operations (1965 – 1972) and $28.5 billion on economic and military aid to Saigon regime (1953 – 1975).

If we just look at miilitary operations alone, that comes to nearly $16B/year from 1965-1972. By contrast, Sargent Shriver's budget for the first year of the OEO (Office of Economic Opportunity) was less than $1B.

As MLK once quipped, the War on Poverty was little more than a skirmish:

“A few years ago there was a shining moment in the struggle I and other have been waging in America. There a real promise of hope for the poor, both black and white, through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the build-up in Vietnam, and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew America would never invest the necessary funds or energies …so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demoniacal suction tube.” [Trumpet of Conscience, 1967]

Few Americans were aware of the costs of the war, though, as these things were then even less touted by the media than they are now. But because of the demagogic political agitation of the Right in the US, the attention of many Americans was drawn to the costs of "welfare", which of course were painted in blackface. Rhetoric like Reagan's "welfare queen" story was a consistent trope of the Right from 1964 on, and convinced many Americans that they were being hurt by "liberal" programs which took their hard-earned money and gave it away to undeserving people who didn't want to work for a living.

The take away from this article is: No Issues, No Politics

We are on the edge of loosing political speech.

This article uses linguistics and semiotics and was first published in in French in 2002

Abstract

Political enunciation remains an enigma as long as it is considered from the
standpoint of information transfer. It remains as unintelligible as religious talk. The
paper explores the specificty of this regime and especially the strange link it has
with the canonical definition of enunciation in linguistics and semiotics. The
‘political circle’ is reconstituted and thus also the reasons why a ‘transparent’ or ‘rational’political speech act destroys the very conditions of group formation.

The idea can be formulated simply: by attempting to explain politics in terms
of something else, we might have lost its specificity and have consequently
forgotten to maintain its own dynamics, letting it fall into disuse. To retrieve
the invaluable effectiveness of political talk, we need to start with the idea that,
as Margaret Thatcher so forcefully put it, ‘society doesn’t exist’. If it does not
exist, we have to make it exist, but in order to do so we need the means to do so.
Politics is one of those means

Strengths and Weaknesses of Political Talk

Political expression is always disappointing; that is where we must start. In
terms of the transfer of exact undistorted information on the social or natural
world, we could say that it always seems to be totally inadequate: truisms,
cliche´s, handshakes, half-truths, half-lies, windy words, repetitions mostly, ad
nauseam. That is the ordinary, banal, daily, limp, tautological character of this
form of discourse that shocks the brilliant, the upright, the fast, the organized,
the lively, the informed, the great, the decided. When one says that someone or
something is ‘political’, one signals above all this fundamental disappointment,
as if it were no longer possible to move forwards in a straight line, reasonably,
quickly, efficiently, but necessary to ‘take into account’, ‘a whole lot of’ ‘extrarational
factors’ of which one fails to clearly understand all the ins and outs but
which form an obscure, soft, heavy, round mass that sticks to those with the
best intentions and, judging by what they say, seems to slow them down. The
expression ‘that’s political’ means first and foremost ‘it doesn’t move straight’,
‘it doesn’t move fast’; it always implies that ‘if only we didn’t have this load,
we’d achieve our goal more directly’.

Why are the curved, the cumbersome and the slow so much part of this form
of talk? Since it is always evaluated by other forms which do not understand it.
It is impossible to use the word ‘political’ without immediately having to justify
oneself, as if it had to appear before a tribunal to receive permission to be used.

That's how he was known over at DK when I first joined. He was heading the Senate Banking Committee, and was a reliable tool of the big banks, who all had their Delaware credit card headquarters, of course.

I'd say Joe Biden's progressive credentials aren't as shiny as he'd like to think they are. Unless he's using the word "progressive" in the content-free manner most establishment Dems employ it today.

Leadership, from all that I see and read.

Folks may recall that Schumer not only put Bernie in a leadership position (Warren already was in one, since 2014), but he also appointed Joe Manchin, Mark Warner, Debbie Stabenow, and Amy Klobuchar to serve in new leadership positions.

And, at least three of four of them, are former DLCers and conservadems.

IOW, it was a strategic move, not a true change of ideological direction. (IMO)

Mollie

“I believe in the redemptive powers of a dog’s love. It is in recognition of each dog’s potential to lift the human spirit and therefore– to change society for the better, that I fight to make sure every street dog has its day.”
--Stasha Wong, Secretary, Save Our Street Dogs (SOSD)

The SOSD Fantastic Four

Available For Adoption, Save Our Street Dogs, SOSD

Taro

Thanks for sharing it. Any time people figure out ways to circumvent the system I get a jolt of uplift.

The fact that it appears to be that the reservations don't require building codes is the kind of loophole that we'd actually like to see exploited - for once, something in favor of the People, not the Corporations.

There must be more of such opportunities. Problem always seems, however, that we don't ever seem to have enough gutsy lawyers like William Kunstler or Michael Ratner, because they're mostly all employed to keep the status quo of making their firms money from protecting the rich and their property. Who wants to fight for the rights of the common people or be a public defendant when one can make really big money sucked up onto one of those thousands of teams of batteries of lawyers employed by the biggest global conglomerates to fight wars of attrition against smaller entities, and then settle out of court while admitting no guilt for "clients" such as the Economic Terrorists of Wall St? Bastards without consciences. Thanks Holder.

Pete's "Let's See Action" is the perfect tune for it too. One of my earliest music heroes also.

Let's see more action, by more permaculture folks, independent farmers/manufacturers, cooperative structures and community organizers working outside of this suffocating duopoly government which is run by the corporations and banks. Power To The People - Right On!