Jill Stein is Seriously Dangerous

[Novem5er]

The inability to make distinctions is a form of derangement.

90% of the attacks on Clinton are bullshit. Or worse than bullshit. Basically misogyny, hatred of high culture, and just sheer personalized hatred, such as the stuff relating to her activity as a defense lawyer. Defense lawyers have the job of defending terrible people. If they didn't do that, we would live in a (incomparably worse) tyranny (than we already do).

The other 10% of the attacks are thus obscured, and they are far more serious. We are talking about the security of e-mail servers, and not the content of the e-mails (unless they're about Marina Abramovic, or some other right-wing Culture War obsession). The real and very serious crimes of Hillary Clinton are crimes of state. They are collaborative, class crimes. They are power elite crimes. A whole apparatus of control is incriminated, one that includes the Republicans and the ruling class and the billionaires. One that includes the former Clinton ally, the Kayfabe Hitler, of course. That is why we don't want to talk about Libya, we want to talk about "Benghazi." Jesus fucking Christ.

It's almost as if this were by design, huh? Whenever I voice opposition to Hillary to people I know in real life, they automatically start defending the bullshit attacks against her. I always stop them and say, "I agree, most of that is utter crap . . . but I don't like Hillary because of X,Y, Z and it's usually some combination of drone wars, Saudia Arabia, and Lybia. They have no defense. They almost always say something like "that concerns me too, but . . . " and the "but" is usually something about how war is inevitable, etc.

[Morty]

Hedges recent speech deserves to be printed out in full (Thanks for pointing it out, Luther):

Defying the Politics of Fear
Posted on Nov 6, 2016

By Chris Hedges

Chris Hedges gave this talk Saturday evening at a rally in Philadelphia for Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein and her running mate, Ajamu Baraka. Watch Hedges’ full speech on our YouTube channel.

No social or revolutionary movement succeeds without a core of people who will not betray their vision and their principles. They are the building blocks of social change. They are our only hope for a viable socialism. They are willing to spend their lives as political outcasts. They are willing to endure repression. They will not sell out the oppressed and the poor. They know that you stand with all of the oppressed—people of color in our prisons and marginal communities, the poor, unemployed workers, our LGBT community, undocumented workers, the mentally ill and the Palestinians, Iraqis and Afghans whom we terrorize and murder—or you stand with none of the oppressed. They know when you fight for the oppressed you get treated like the oppressed. They know this is the cost of the moral life, a life that is not abandoned even if means you are destined to spend generations wandering in the wilderness, even if you are destined to fail.

I was in East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Romania in 1989 during the revolutions, or in the case of Romania an interparty putsch. These revolutions were spontaneous outbursts by an enraged population that had had enough of communist repression, mismanagement and corruption. No one, from the dissidents themselves to the ruling communist parties, anticipated these revolts. They erupted, as all revolutions do, from tinder that had been waiting years for a spark.

These revolutions were led by a handful of dissidents who until the fall of 1989 were marginal and dismissed by the state as inconsequential until it was too late. The state periodically sent state security to harass them. It often ignored them. I am not even sure you could call these dissidents an opposition. They were profoundly isolated within their own societies. The state media denied them a voice. They had no legal status and were locked out of the political system. They were blacklisted. They struggled to make a living. But when the breaking point in Eastern Europe came, when the ruling communist ideology lost all credibility, there was no question in the minds of the public about whom they could trust. The demonstrators that poured into the streets of East Berlin and Prague were aware of who would sell them out and who would not. They trusted those, such as Václav Havel, who had dedicated their lives to fighting for open society, those who had been willing to be condemned as nonpersons and go to jail for their defiance.

Our only chance to overthrow corporate power comes from those who will not surrender to it, who will hold fast to the causes of the oppressed no matter what the price, who are willing to be dismissed and reviled by a bankrupt liberal establishment, who have found within themselves the courage to say no, to refuse to cooperate. The most important issue in this election does not revolve around the personal traits of Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. It revolves around the destructive dynamic of unfettered and unregulated global capitalism, the crimes of imperialism and the security and surveillance apparatus. These forces are where real power lies. Trump and Clinton will do nothing to restrict them.

It is up to us to resist. We must refuse to be complicit, even in the act of voting, with the fossil fuel industry’s savaging of our ecosystem, endless wars, oppression of the poor, including the one in five children in this country who is hungry, the evisceration of constitutional rights and civil liberties, the cruel and inhumane system of mass incarceration and the state-sponsored execution of unarmed poor people of color in our marginal communities.

Julien Benda reminds us that we can serve two sets of principles. Privilege and power or justice and truth. The more we make compromises with those who serve privilege and power the more we diminish the capacity for justice and truth. Our strength comes from our steadfastness to justice and truth, a steadfastness that accepts that the corporate forces arrayed against us may crush us, but that the more we make compromises with those whose ends are privilege and power the more we diminish our capacity to effect change.

Karl Popper in “The Open Society and Its Enemies” writes that the question is not how do you get good people to rule. Popper says this is the wrong question. Most people attracted to power, he writes, have “rarely been above average, either morally or intellectually, and often [have been] below it.” The question is how do we build forces to restrict the despotism of the powerful. There is a moment in Henry Kissinger’s memoirs—do not buy the book—when Nixon and Kissinger are looking out at tens of thousands of anti-war protesters who have surrounded the White House. Nixon had placed empty city buses in front of the White House to keep the protesters back. He worried out loud that the crowd would break through the barricades and get him and Kissinger. And that is exactly where we want people in power to be. This is why, although he was not a liberal, Nixon was our last liberal president. He was scared of movements. And if we cannot make the elites scared of us we will fail.

The rise of Donald Trump is the product of the disenchantment, despair and anger caused by neoliberalism and the collapse of institutions that once offered a counterweight to the powerful. Trump gives vent to the legitimate rage and betrayal of the white underclass and working poor. His right-wing populism, which will grow in virulence and sophistication under a Clinton presidency, mirrors the right-wing populism rippling across much of Europe including Poland, Hungary, France and Great Britain. If Clinton wins, Trump becomes the dress rehearsal for fascism.

A bankrupt liberal class, as was true in Yugoslavia when I covered the war and as was true in Weimar Germany, is the great enabler of fascism. Liberals, in the name of the practical, refuse to challenge parties that betray workingmen and –women. They surrender their values for political expediency. Our [failure] to build a counterweight to the Democratic Party after it abandoned the working class with the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994 was our gravest mistake.

Hillary Clinton embodies the detested neoliberal establishment. She can barely fend off one of the most imbecilic and narcissistic candidates in American history. Matched against a demagogue with brains and political skill, she would lose. If we do not defy the neoliberal order, championed by Clinton and the Democratic Party elites, we ensure the conditions for a terrifying right-wing backlash, one that will use harsh and violent mechanisms to crush the little political space we have left.

The tactic of strategic voting begs the question “Strategic for whom?” Our money-drenched, heavily managed elections are little more than totalitarian plebiscites to give a veneer of legitimacy to corporate power. As long as we signal that we are not a threat to the established order, as long as we participate in this charade, the neoliberal assault will continue towards its frightening and inevitable conclusion.

Alexis de Tocqueville correctly saw that when citizens can no longer participate in a meaningful way in political life, political populism is replaced by a cultural populism of sameness, resentment and mindless patriotism and by a form of anti-politics he called “democratic despotism.” The language and rituals of democracy are used to mask a political system based on the unchallenged supremacy of corporate power, one the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls “inverted totalitarianism.”

We must build structures of open defiance to the corporate state. It may take as long as a decade for us to effectively confront corporate power. But without a potent counterweight to the neoliberal order we will be steadily disempowered. Every action we take, every word we utter must make it clear that we refuse to participate in our own enslavement and destruction. The rapid disintegration of the ecosystem means resistance cannot be delayed.

Our success will be determined not by the number of votes we get in this or any other election but by our ability to stand unequivocally with the oppressed. The enemies of freedom throughout history have always charged its defenders with subversion. The enemies of freedom have often convinced large parts of a captive population to parrot back mind-numbing clichés to justify their rule. Resistance to corporate power will require fortitude, an ability to march to the beat of our own drum.

No revolutionary abandons, no matter what the cost, those he or she defends. We cannot betray those murdered by police in our marginal communities. We cannot betray the courageous dissidents—Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden and the great revolutionary Mumia Abu-Jamal. They have not betrayed us. We cannot betray the dissidents in North Dakota who are defying a fossil fuel industry that is orchestrating the sixth great mass extinction, melting the polar ice caps and raising carbon emissions to over 400 parts per million. We cannot betray the 2.3 million men and women locked in cages across this nation for years and decades. We cannot betray the Palestinians. We cannot betray the Iraqis and Afghans whose lives we have destroyed by state terror. If we betray them we betray ourselves.

We cannot betray the ideal of a popular democracy by pretending this contrived political theater is free or fair or democratic. We cannot play their game. We cannot play by their rules. Our job is not to accommodate the corporate state. Our job is to destroy it. “We think we are the doctors,” Alexander Herzen told anarchists of another era. “We are the disease.”

The state seeks to control us through fear, propaganda, wholesale surveillance and violence. [This] is the only form of social control it has left. The lie of neoliberalism has been exposed. Its credibility has imploded. The moment we cease being afraid, the moment we use our collective strength as I saw in Eastern Europe in 1989 to make the rulers afraid of us, is the moment of the system’s downfall.

Go into the voting booth on Tuesday. Do not be afraid. Vote with your conscience. Vote Green. If we win 5 percent we win. Five percent becomes the building block for the years ahead. A decade ago Syriza, the ruling party in Greece, was polling 4 percent. And after you vote, join some movement, some protest, some disruption, Black Lives Matter, the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign against Israel, an anti-fracking demonstration. Courage is contagious. Revolutions begin, as I saw in East Germany, with a few Lutheran clergy holding candles as they marched through the streets of Leipzig in East Germany. It ends with half a million people protesting in East Berlin, the defection of the police and the army to the side of the protesters and the collapse of the Stasi state. But revolutions only happen when a few dissidents decide they will no longer cooperate, when they affirm what we must all affirm, when, as Havel said, they choose to live in truth.

We may not succeed. So be it. At least those who come after us, and I speak as a father, will say we tried. The corporate forces that have us in their death grip will destroy our lives. They will destroy the lives of my children. They will destroy the lives of your children. They will destroy the ecosystem that makes life possible. We owe it to those who come after us not to be complicit in this evil. We owe it to them to refuse to be good Germans. I do not, in the end, fight fascists because I will win. I fight fascists because they are fascists.

[Luther Blissett]

I feel like you'll be hard-pressed to find too many posters here to share in your detraction of a hero like Alinsky, who really did make the world a better place. A lot more Alinsky fans than Clinton fans at least.

Glad you all liked the Hedges piece.

[Morty]

I feel like you'll be hard-pressed to find too many posters here to share in your detraction of a hero like Alinsky, who really did make the world a better place. A lot more Alinsky fans than Clinton fans at least.

Glad you all liked the Hedges piece.

I've never mentioned Alinsky. Your mixing me up with backtoiam, I think.

[MacCruiskeen]

This is by the ever-excellent Jonathan Cook, and I think it. too, deserves to be reprinted in full. I also think this is the right thread for it, because the non-stop scaremongering, the corporate-media freeze-out and the whole lesser-evilism scam are preventing millions of people from even noticing that candidates like Jill Stein exist. I've bolded the bits where Cook mentions Stein by name, but the whole article is well worth reading.

No, Hillary Clinton is not less evil than Trump

7 November 2016

Tomorrow Americans get the chance to vote for a system – resource-hungry, war-peddling corporate capitalism – in two iterations: one has funny hair and a permatan, the other wears lipstick and trouser-suits.

Yes, there are some policy differences too, or rather emphases – and Hillary Clinton’s supporters are desperately exploiting them to try to persuade those who have grown deeply disillusioned with the system that a vote for Clinton matters. After all, Clinton is not going to make it into the Oval Office unless she can secure the votes of those who backed the far-more progressive Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries.

Clinton’s camp have wielded various sticks to beat these voters into submission. Not least they have claimed that a refusal to vote for Clinton is an indication of one’s misogyny. But it has not been an easy task. Actor Susan Sarandon, for example, has stated that she is not going to “vote with my vagina”. As she notes, if the issue is simply about proving one is not anti-women, there is a much worthier candidate for president who also happens to be female: Jill Stein, of the Green Party.

Sarandon, who supported Sanders in the primaries, spoke for a vast swath of voters excluded by the two-party system when she told BBC Newsnight:

I am worried about the wars, I am worried about Syria, I am worried about all of these things that actually exist. TTP [Trans-Pacific Partnership] and I’m worried about fracking. I’m worrying about the environment. No matter who gets in they don’t address these things because money has taken over our system.

Given that both Donald Trump and Clinton represent big money – and big money only – Clinton’s supporters have been forced to find another stick. And that has been the “lesser evil” argument. Clinton may be bad, but Trump would be far worse. Voting for a non-evil candidate like Jill Stein – who has no hope of winning – would split the progressive camp and ensure Trump, the more evil candidate, triumphs. Therefore, there is a moral obligation on progressive voters to back Clinton, however bad her track record as a senator and as secretary of state.

There is nothing new about this argument. It has been around for decades, and has been corralling progressives into voting for Democratic presidents who have consistently advanced US neoconservative policy goals abroad and neoliberal ones at home.

America’s pseudo-democracy

So is it true that Clinton is the lesser-evil candidate? To answer that question, we need to examine those “policy differences” with Trump.

On the negative side, Trump’s platform poses a genuine threat to civil liberties. His bigoted, “blame the immigrants” style of politics will harm many families in the US in very tangible ways. Even if the inertia of the political system reins in his worst excesses, as is almost certain, his inflammatory rhetoric is sure to damage the façade of democratic discourse in the US – a development not to be dismissed lightly. Americans may be living in a pseudo-democracy, one run more like a plutocracy, but destroying the politics of respect, and civil discourse, could quickly result in the normalisation of political violence and intimidation.

On the plus side, Trump is an isolationist, with little appetite for foreign entanglements. Again, the Washington policy elites may force him to engage abroad in ways he would prefer not to, but his instincts to limit the projection of US military power on the international stage are likely to be an overall good for the world’s population outside the US. Any diminishment of US imperialism is going to have real practical benefits for billions of people around the globe. His refusal to demonise Vladimir Putin, for example, may be significant enough to halt the gradual slide towards a nuclear confrontation with Russia, either in Ukraine or in the Middle East.

Clinton is the mirror image of Trump. Domestically, she largely abides by the rules of civil politics – not least because respectful discourse benefits her as the candidate with plenty of political experience. The US is likely to be a more stable, more predictable place under a Clinton presidency, even as the plutocratic elite entrenches its power and the wealth gap grows relentlessly.

Abroad, however, the picture looks worse under Clinton. She has been an enthusiastic supporter of all the many recent wars of aggression launched by the US, some declared and some covert. Personally, as secretary of state, she helped engineer the overthrow of Col Muammar Gaddafi. That policy led to an outcome – one that was entirely foreseeable – of Libya’s reinvention as a failed state, with jihadists of every stripe sucked into the resulting vacuum. Large parts of Gadaffi’s arsenal followed the jihadists as they exported their struggles across the Middle East, creating more bloodshed and heightening the refugee crisis. Now Clinton wants to intensify US involvement in Syria, including by imposing a no-fly zone – or rather, a US and allies-only fly zone – that would thrust the US into a direct confrontation with another nuclear-armed power, Russia.

In the cost-benefit calculus of who to vote for in a two-party contest, the answer seems to be: vote for Clinton if you are interested only in what happens in the narrow sphere of US domestic politics (assuming Clinton does not push the US into a nuclear war); while if you are a global citizen worried about the future of the planet, Trump may be the marginally better of two terribly evil choices. (Neither, of course, cares a jot about the most pressing problem facing mankind: runaway climate change.)

So even on the extremely blinkered logic of Clinton’s supporters, Clinton might not be the winner in a lesser-evil presidential contest.

Mounting disillusion

But there is a second, more important reason to reject the lesser-evil argument as grounds for voting for Clinton.

Trump’s popularity is a direct consequence of several decades of American progressives voting for the lesser-evil candidate. Most Americans have never heard of Jill Stein, or the other three candidates not running on behalf of the Republican and Democratic parties. These candidates have received no mainstream media coverage – or the chance to appear in the candidate debates – because their share of the vote is minuscule. It remains minuscule precisely because progressives have spent decades voting for the lesser-evil candidate. And nothing is going to change so long as progressives keep responding to the electoral dog-whistle that they have to keep the Republican candidate out at all costs, even at the price of their own consciences.

Growing numbers of Americans understand that their country was “stolen from them”, to use a popular slogan. They sense that the US no longer even aspires to its founding ideals, that it has become a society run for the exclusive benefit of a tiny wealthy elite. Many are looking for someone to articulate their frustration, their powerlessness, their hopelessness.

Two opposed antidotes for the mounting disillusionment with “normal politics” emerged during the presidential race: a progressive one, in the form of Sanders, who suggested he was ready to hold the plutocrats to account; and a populist one, in the form of Trump, determined to deflect anger away from the plutocrats towards easy targets like immigrants and Muslims. As we now know from Wikileaks’ release of Clinton campaign chair John Podesta’s emails, the Democats worked hard to rig their own primaries to make sure the progressive option, Sanders, was eliminated. The Republicans, by contrast, were overwhelmed by the insurrection within their own party.

The wave of disaffection Sanders and Trump have been riding is not going away. In fact, a President Clinton, the embodiment of the self-serving, self-aggrandising politics of the plutocrats, will only fuel the disenchantment. The fixing of the Democratic primaries did not strengthen Clinton’s moral authority, it fuelled the kind of doubts about the system that bolster Trump. Trump’s accusations of a corrupt elite and a rigged political and media system are not figments of his imagination; they are rooted in the realities of US politics.

Trump, however, is not the man to offer solutions. His interests are too closely aligned to those of the plutocrats for him to make meaningful changes.

Trump may lose this time, but someone like him will do better next time – unless ordinary Americans are exposed to a different kind of politician, one who can articulate progressive, rather than regressive, remedies for the necrosis that is rotting the US body politic. Sanders began that process, but a progressive challenge to “politics as normal” has to be sustained and extended if Trump and his ilk are not to triumph eventually.

The battle cannot be delayed another few years, on the basis that one day a genuinely non-evil candidate will emerge from nowhere to fix this rotten system. It won’t happen of its own. Unless progressive Americans show they are prepared to vote out of conviction, not out of necessity, the Democratic party will never have to take account of their views. It will keep throwing up leaders – in different colours and different sexes – to front the tiny elite that runs the US and seeks to rule the world.

It is time to say no – loudly – to Clinton, whether she is the slightly lesser-evil candidate or not.

tags:  corporations, Left politics

- See more at: http://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2016- ... OPEcE.dpuf

[Luther Blissett]

I feel like you'll be hard-pressed to find too many posters here to share in your detraction of a hero like Alinsky, who really did make the world a better place. A lot more Alinsky fans than Clinton fans at least.

Glad you all liked the Hedges piece.

I've never mentioned Alinsky. Your mixing me up with backtoiam, I think.

Yeah I should have said "Backtoiam," I just didn't want to quote that whole passage.

[Wombaticus Rex]

Glad you all liked the Hedges piece.

So much I'm revising my sense of who he is. Thanks for that.

[Luther Blissett]

For the first time ever I am using this emoji (maybe any emoji here):

[Luther Blissett]

Oh I didn't realize that photo is many months old. Has it already been discussed here?

[seemslikeadream]

interesting that Stein is sitting at a table with not only Putin but General Ledeen Yellowcake Flynn

where is that and what was the occasion?

[Luther Blissett]

It was a dinner at the 10-year anniversary conference for Russia Today.

https://www.rt.com/op-edge/324131-rt-10 ... onference/

[seemslikeadream]

thanks...I guess Thom Hartman had a previous engagement

[82_28]

interesting that Stein is sitting at a table with not only Putin but General Ledeen Yellowcake Flynn

where is that and what was the occasion?

How has shit gotten this far out of hand? Here is the thing though as well: RT puts out some shit I actually like, though very rarely check or watch. But I am left asking why do I "like" it? I always thought it was a paradox due to an entire lifetime of being told there was an entire country and people to hate. I have revised my theories on this because it is a sword that cuts both ways. Russians are fully under the self same propagandistic pressure Americans are. Why it comes down to "them and us" with an entire world that also exists will always confound me. There are a number of factors for sure. I think it, at base level, comes down to basically 0% of us English speaking people understand thing one about Cyrillic. Russian hackers gotz to have a working knowledge of English in order to interface with whatever they use.

That said, Russians are the saltiest, lamest people I have ever met. I certainly do not judge Russians on the whole. But fuck they are mean when they encounter "regular" American culture -- whatever the fuck that is. Fuck, I hate America too. I like that I live in a place that is just the place I live. However I don't give fuck one about this country. At least you can tell a "fellow" American or other English speaker to fuck off in a language they can understand.

[Belligerent Savant]

That said, Russians are the saltiest, lamest people I have ever met. I certainly do not judge Russians on the whole. But fuck they are mean when they encounter "regular" American culture -- whatever the fuck that is. Fuck, I hate America too. I like that I live in a place that is just the place I live. However I don't give fuck one about this country. At least you can tell a "fellow" American or other English speaker to fuck off in a language they can understand.

[82_28]

No dude, I have had many a Russian friend lo these years so they don't count. But one time I had to throw out a group of Russian sailors who were totally fucking lame. It was really difficult to get the courage to do it. Liquor license in jeopardy. They were just pouring their own shit and laughed at me when I told them they could not do so. Maybe it's just a sailor thing. I have no idea. But it is tough to toss out six Russians doing what they want. I did and it took me a long time to gather the bravery. So yeah, no biting my tongue and I am not judging. It is just an experience.