Tag: Political History

From Debs To The DSA

As we count down to our next election and then the next general we should start looking beyond the silliness that is this two party system that has actually given this country nothing but grief.

Just have to throw some light on the Left in this country from late 19th century and into the 20th….yes it is a boring history lesson but a lesson that should be taught and learned….there is so much we can do as Americans and we need to be reminded of our strenth and power.

Eugene Debs….a tireless fighter for worker rights and unions….jailed several times for his work and even ran for president from prison….actually he ran for president 5 times starting in 1904 through 1920 and each time he got over 3% of the vote.  He was a tireless antiwar spokeman which got him arrested again for his opposition to American involvement in WW1….his voice lead the way for countless others, like myself, to see the problems and protest for a better nation.

Much of U.S. political commentary today oozes with pessimism: red-blue tribalism, the government shutdown, the alt-right … the list of fracture points is long. But for revolutionary socialists—those of us who believe an equitable world is possible if working people rise up and end capitalism—the picture is not all bad. A historic strike wave of teachers rolled across many regions of the country last spring, followed by the recent L.A. teachers’ revolt. Class struggle remains on the agenda, and many want an alternative to capitalism.

Given the increased interest in socialism, it’s worth defining the S-word: Does it refer to European Social Democracy (a la Sweden), the early Soviet Union, Cuba or something else entirely? Many people believe that socialism is foreign to the United States, a view that only reinforces the bourgeois status quo. In reality, socialist politics has a rich tradition in the U.S. and has influenced, as well as led, a variety of social movements. Today’s generation of radicals have the challenge of rescuing the best elements of the American socialist tradition from oblivion so we can effectively learn from the past and prepare for tomorrow.

When Bernie Sanders identified himself as a democratic socialist, Google searches for “socialism” spiked. Millions want to understand the legacy of socialist politics—what was achieved and what failed. In the United States, the Democratic Socialists of America has become the greatest beneficiary of renewed interest in socialism, with membership surging beyond 50,000. As a multitendency organization, the DSA has certain commonalities with the old U.S. Socialist Party (SP), the first anticapitalist party with real influence on American soil.

Most radicals today recognize the important achievements of the SP in the first decades of the 20th century. It led historic strikes, elected hundreds of its members to local and national offices and developed an array of newspapers—in a word, it made socialism relevant to American workers. That Eugene V. Debs, the SP’s most notable public figure, gained about a million votes for president while sitting in a jail cell for opposing World War I is proof positive that the Socialist Party is worth learning from.

https://www.leftvoice.org/from-debs-to-the-dsa-rescuing-americas-revolutionary-tradition/

The argument will be that the US is not going to embrace socialism…..and that is true only because of the distorted visions that the centrist want to present as facts.

Eighty-four percent of independent voters told pollsters last fall that “the United States is in a political crisis.” Democrats and Republicans flip back and forth on these kinds of questions depending on which team won the most recent election. But unaffiliated voters, the largest part of the electorate, are deeply concerned in ways that can’t be soothed by the next swing of the pendulum. Indeed, each “vibe shift” further convinces them that the system is see-sawing out of control.

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5873079-american-dissatisfaction-political-system/

All this leaves open for a new way of politics….but will the American have enough energy to find the alternative?

AS it is today I do not think they will….they are too set ion their ways to change…..but as the society deteriorates all things are possible…..and now is the time to start the search for a better tomorrow.

Will we?

Or will we just pick ‘not the other guy”?

What will it be?

Change or more of the same?

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Not Much Change Since Jefferson

I have heard some call the election of 2024 a sea change in American history…..it was very interesting election but nothing was a sea change….not much was different than any other election in our history.

Let’s step back 200 years to the election of 1800….Jefferson vs Adams….

The most extreme accusations Democrats and Republicans hurl at one another today would be familiar to the Founding Fathers.

In fact, the election of 1800 alone featured almost everything that’s made Donald Trump’s three presidential contests a wild ride.

Accusations of foreign interference?

Check—John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, the candidates in 1800, each thought the other was subservient to a foreign power.

The French Revolution divided Americans as bitterly as any foreign-policy crisis today.

Jefferson’s Republican Party, which is actually the ancestor of today’s Democratic Party, thought Adams and his Federalist Party were monarchists and traitors to the American Revolution because they were pro-British and anti-French.

The Federalists thought Jefferson’s pro-French party was as radical as France’s own revolutionaries: The phrase “godless communists” didn’t exist yet, but Federalists perceived Jeffersonians as atheists who would abolish private property if they got the chance.

Federalists were anti-democratic, said Republicans.

Republicans were against the Constitution, Federalists shot back.

Each side fervently believed the other was “illiberal” and in league with foreign regimes antithetical to America’s principles.

Immigration was a red-hot issue then as well and tied to fears of anti-American influences from abroad.

Under President Adams, Congress raised the number of years a foreigner would have to live in the United States before being naturalized as a citizen.

The Federalist-controlled Congress also gave the president broad powers to deport immigrants—or “aliens,” as they were then called.

How Politics Hasn’t Changed Since Jefferson

You see BS from both sides….same as today….

And the fact that the government is controlled by plutocrats has not change since day one of the republic.

Plutocracy?

Plutocracy is a government controlled exclusively by the wealthy, either directly or indirectly. A plutocracy effectively allows only the wealthy to rule. This can then result in policies exclusively designed to assist the wealthy.

Plutocracy doesn’t have to be a purposeful, overt format for government. Instead, it can be created through the allowance of access to certain programs and educational resources only to the wealthy, thereby making it so that the wealthy hold more sway. The concern of inadvertently creating a plutocracy is that the regulatory focus will be narrow and concentrated on the goals of the wealthy, creating even more income and asset-based inequality.

In a plutocracy, access to political power is limited and requires one either to possess wealth or to have the support of the wealthy by being willing to serve their interests. This may be a matter of official rules and restrictions that explicitly require that a person have some specified level of economic affluence in order to exercise political authority, such as voting or holding public office. However, plutocracy more often arises informally and is implicitly embodied in constitutional, legal, or regulatory measures that create barriers to participation in politics and political life that can be met only through the possession or expenditure of significant wealth.

And this incoming administration will be the most plutocratic of all….and that is saying something….considering all our presidents have had wealth on their side….

Somethings never change….history can teach us that.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Swiftboating Returns

Swiftboating?

For those with short memories let me take you back 20 years to 2004….

The term swiftboating (also swift-boating or swift boating) is a pejorative American neologism used to describe an unfair or untrue political attack. The term is derived from the name of the organization “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” (SBVT, later the Swift Vets and POWs for Truth) because of their widely publicized—and later discredited—political smear campaign against 2004 U.S. presidential candidate John Kerry.  Since the 2004 election, the term has come to commonly refer to a political attack that is dishonest, personal, and unfair.

(wikipedia)

I bring this blast from the past up because the Trump minions are swiftboating Walz…..

JD Vance appears to have settled on a line of attack against his rival to be vice president, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz—and it revolves around military service. The details:

  • Walz served in the National Guard for 24 years before retiring in 2005 to run for Congress in Minnesota. Politico notes that Walz filed his paperwork to run in February 2005, roughly a month before reports came out that his unit might be deployed to Iraq and about five months before the official orders were issued.
  • A former Guard colleague, Al Bonnifeld, says Walz knew of the potential deployment and wrestled with whether it was the right time to run for office. “He told us that he wanted to run for Congress, and he was in a tough spot, because he was pretty sure we were going to Iraq,” Bonnifield told NewsNation, per the Hill. But, Bonnifield noted, “we didn’t have orders. We didn’t have any kind of orders at all.”
  • The Washington Post has one of the most thorough explorations of all this here. It includes the views of those such as Bonnifield, who praise Walz’s service, as well as those who served with Walz and are critical of him.
  • Vance is essentially accusing Walz of cowardice and of inflating his service, attacks reminiscent of the infamous “swift boat” attacks on John Kerry in the 2004 election over his Vietnam War record, per USA Today. The story notes that Chris LaCivita, who led the attacks on Kerry, is now a senior adviser to the Trump campaign. The criticism of Walz on this front has surfaced previously in his Minnesota elections, without success. (Two Guard retirees wrote this scathing letter in 2018.)
  • Vance also is calling attention to a Walz quote from a campaign event a while back in Minnesota (and being trumpeted by the Harris-Walz campaign) in which he referred to the “weapons I carried in war.” Walz never saw combat, prompting Vance’s jab: “Well, I wonder. Tim Walz, when were you ever in war?” For the record, Vance served four years in the Marines and went to Iraq, but he served in a communications role there and did not see combat, either, per the New York Times.

This is not all that surprising for when you have no defined policies then you personally attack your opponent hoping that the idiots will fixate on the BS and not on their lack of direction.

It worked well when used against Kerry and Trump hopes it will once again be a death blow.

This election is all about jibes and insults not policies and solutions.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

“We Need Another Reagan”

That was the title of an article I read……it is no secret that I think the slide of the GOP into the far Right stupidity began with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980…..

I thought that I needed something to get my blood raging…..my opinion of Reagan is not positive in any way.

Seeing the title I just had to see what was all the hoopla……

The United States today is in a new Cold War with China, and our current administration gives every indication that it is not up to this challenge. China’s geopolitical threat cannot be wished away. At stake in this struggle is the future world order, which will either be a U.S.-led order or one led by the Chinese Communist Party. It is a time for strong, resilient, prudent, and perceptive American leadership. We need another Ronald Reagan.  

Forty years ago, beginning with his Westminster speech in London, President Reagan envisioned the collapse of the Soviet Union. The man who Democratic elder statesman Clark Clifford once called an “amiable dunce,” and who the mainstream press repeatedly ridiculed throughout his career as an unthinking extremist, had a better grasp of geopolitics than all of his Ivy League-educated critics. It is worth remembering this as we face-off against China in a new Cold War.

https://www.realclearhistory.com/articles/2022/01/23/reagan_envisions_collapse_of_soviet_union_813288.html

I was disappointed because I was expecting more….but then attacks on the USSR and demonizing poor Americans is all that Reagan and the GOP had in those days.

I disagree…Reagan was not a good president for the people….why?

Well let’s look at Ronald Reagan’s ‘accomplishments’…..

The boogey man of present day leftists, Reagan destroyed union power, furthered the power of the conservative right, cut social services to the bone, increased red-baiting, allowed thousands of people to die of AIDS, and helped create the blueprint for the current foreign policy of the United States. He famously fired 12,000 striking air traffic controllers, breaking their strike and their union. In addition, he increased the militancy and racial aspects of the War on Drugs, creating minimum sentencing for drug offenses, and choosing to make harsher penalties for “crack” cocaine than regular powder cocaine. He also refused to acknowledge the AIDS epidemic for years, and when he did, he suggested that children with AIDS could be kept out of schools. Despite being a monster, both Democrats and Republicans continue to hold him up as some sort of saint. The list of his crimes should be read out in schools instead of the Pledge of Allegiance.

So NO we do not need another Reagan…..because of Reagan and Clinton this country has suffered for 40+ years.

Turn The Page!

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

The Right Of Revolution?

AS we celebrate the day that the US entered into an armed conflict with Mother England…….a few thoughts on the right of revolution.

The term has been batted around by those in-bred slugs that stormed the Capitol on 06 January….that they were exercising their right to revolt based on the lie of some sort of underhanded moves to keep the other guy out of the White House.

But is this their right?

Let’s take a look at the early days of this country……

The American Founders believed themselves to be revolutionaries and gave much thought to what they called the “right of revolution”: the right of free and self-respecting people to overthrow an oppressive political order that endangered truly fundamental liberties and threatened to impose a permanent design of despotism upon a people. The exercise of such a revolutionary right does not entail anarchy and lawlessness but instead demands an appeal to the “law of nature,” to a standard of natural law and natural rights above the arbitrary will of any individual or group.

According to the American Declaration of Independence, people enter into political society for the sake of protecting their inalienable rights, which are otherwise insecure. The question then arises: what can the people do if the government betrays its trust, and violates their rights? The Declaration’s initial answer is “that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government.”

read on…..

https://www.realclearpublicaffairs.com/articles/2021/05/18/the_right_of_revolution_in_the_american_founding_777236.html

To be a successful revolutionary then you need a good grasp of history and a sound set of principles…..the problem here is that the insurrectionists have none….all they had was the word of a bitter old man that hates to lose.

Know you history people!

Be Smart!

Learn Stuff!

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

What Has Happened To The GOP?

College Of Political Knowledge

I have written many times that my maternal grandfather was a Republican and worked for Ike in 1956 because he believed that Ike would do a better job for the country……

Here is what the GOP stood for in the 1956 elections…..

How about a comparison of then and now…..

What the Hell happened?

Take a closer look at the platforms of 1960 and 1964…..

https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/republican-party-platform-1960

https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/republican-party-platform-1964

What the Hell happened to the GOP?

I blame the election of Ronald Reagan.

I personally think that his, Reagan, hateful rhetoric like lumping all welfare recipients as “Welfare Queens” stirred the latent racism that was simmering ever since the civil rights movement…..started the GOP down the path that brought it to Donald Trump and the events that occurred in the Capitol on 06 January.

I have read an article about the devolution of the GOP…..

https://theintercept.com/2016/07/18/the-long-sad-corrupted-devolution-of-the-gop-from-eisenhower-to-donald-trump/

…

the Republican Party of the past at least showed itself capable of responding to domestic and global issues, offering and implementing successful policies to deal with pressing problems like poverty, environmental degradation, and a refugee crisis.

So what happened?

There is no easy explanation, but there are a few key catalysts for the party’s slide into extremism.

Ultimately, the Republican Party’s drift away from inclusion and the public interest and toward a coterie of extreme donors and ideologies does have an electoral cost, one that could force reformation or perhaps the birth of a new political party — just ask the Whigs.

Now the big question is….where will the GOP end up?

For now I think they will stay in the grip of Trump…..and a recent poll confirms my fears…

A majority of Republican voters said if former President Trump were to start a new political party they would likely join, a new Hill-HarrisX poll finds.

Sixty-four percent of registered Republican voters in the Jan. 28-29 survey said they’d join a new political party led by the former president, including 32 percent who said they would very likely join.

What could happen to change the course the GOP has set?

It will not be Trump…..he says he is still in control….

Former President Trump will re-enter the political spotlight Sunday when he speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference. What to expect? If a report at Axios is any indication, the speech will be a “show of force” that makes clear Trump is still running the show within the GOP and remains the Republican candidate to beat for 2024. Details and related coverage:

  • One unnamed adviser sums up the theme for Mike Allen as, “I may not have Twitter or the Oval Office, but I’m still in charge.” Trump will position himself as the presumptive 2024 nominee—though it’s not clear whether he’ll run—and as more powerful than ever. Also expect lots of I-told-you-so about President Biden. And for now, “payback is his chief obsession,” writes Allen, which will take the form of backing primary challenges to Republicans who turned against him.
  • Trump may have a point about his support. A new USA Today poll finds that 46% of Trump voters would ditch the GOP to join a new party with him. Half think the GOP should be more loyal to Trump, even if that means losing more mainstream Republicans, compared with just 19% who think the party should be less loyal to Trump and embrace establishment Republicans.
  • At Hot Air, conservative Allahpundit takes note of other Trump surveys of late, including by Gallup, Rasmussen, and Suffolk. “This makes three polls in less than a month establishing the same two key facts about the current Republican Party,” writes the pundit. “One: There are many more Trumpers than there are anti-Trumpers. Two: There are enough anti-Trumpers to make life difficult for the GOP if things stay too Trumpy.” In Allahpundit’s view, 50% of the GOP is more loyal to Trump than the party, 30% back Trump but not enough to buck the party, and 20% want the GOP to head in a new direction.
  • At Red State, a post by Bonchie digests the recent Trump reports and issues a prediction: “Playing kingmaker may actually be Trump’s ultimate goal over the next four years. While I’d certainly not rule out a 2024 run for him, I think he enjoys the intra-party battle just as much.”
  • Trump, meanwhile, continues to maintain a relatively low profile at Mar-a-Lago. GOP Rep. Steve Scalise told ABC News on Sunday that he visited the former president recently, finding that he “was a lot more relaxed than his four years in the White House.” And in a sign of the loyalty Trump still commands, Scalise refuse to explicitly acknowledge that the election wasn’t stolen, when asked directly.

For those that think “unity” is possible…..WAKE THE HELL UP!

Watch This Blog!

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Today In 1811

Yep my friends…that time again….your history lesson…..

Ever heard of Ned Ludd?

No?

How about the Luddites?

Luddites are those people that see a scary future in technology and mechanization……

On this day in 1811 Ned Ludd lead a wild protest against mechanization…….

“Luddite” is now a blanket term used to describe people who dislike new technology, but its origins date back to a 19th century labor movement that railed against the economic fallout of the Industrial Revolution. The original Luddites were British weavers and textile workers who objected to the increased use of automated looms and knitting frames. Most were trained artisans who had spent years learning their craft, and they feared that unskilled machine operators were robbing them of their livelihood. When their appeals for government aid and assistance were ignored, a few desperate weavers began breaking into factories and smashing textile machines. They called themselves “Luddites” after Ned Ludd, a young apprentice who was rumored to have wrecked a textile apparatus in the late-18th century. There’s no evidence Ludd actually existed—like Robin Hood, he was said to reside in Sherwood Forest—but he eventually became the mythical leader of the movement. The vandals claimed to be following orders from “General Ludd,” and they even issued manifestoes and threatening letters under his name.

The first major instances of machine breaking took place in 1811 in Nottingham, and the practice soon spread across the English countryside. Sledgehammer-wielding Luddites attacked and burned factories, and in some cases they even exchanged gunfire with company guards and soldiers. The workers hoped their raids would encourage a ban on weaving machines, but the British government instead moved to quash the uprisings by making machine breaking punishable by death. The unrest finally reached its peak in April 1812, when a few Luddites were gunned down during an attack on a mill near Huddersfield. The army rounded up many of the dissidents in the days that followed, and dozens were hanged or transported to Australia. By 1813, the Luddite resistance had all but vanished. It wasn’t until the 20th century that their name re-entered the popular lexicon as a synonym for “technophobe.”

https://www.history.com/news/who-were-the-luddites

More Luddite stuff!

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-the-luddites-really-fought-against-264412/

Of course we are the future and we have to have our own term…..Neo-Luddism…….

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-Luddism

Now you know more than you knew yesterday……

Learn Stuff!

Class Dismissed!

Those Shifting Poles

There has been a murmur in the conspiracy world of the shifting of the magnetic poles will end all life on Earth and then NASA got involved…..https://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/2012-poleReversal.html

Now you can believe the hype or the science it is up to you.

My shifting poles are the poles in politics and especially with war.

For decades the GOP has been home to what we call the “war Hawks” and the Democratic Party has been the home of those that tried to push back on war we called the “peace-niks”….in the past couple of months there seems to be slight changing of the political poles.

I am not saying that the GOP has become anti-war…..only that Trump is pulling the party in that direction….

Imagine if, during President George W. Bush’s occupation of Iraq, someone had predicted that in about a decade, Republican voters would oppose war more than Democrats. Few would have believed it.

Yet according to new polling, it’s happening. It might even be President Donald Trump’s greatest accomplishment to date.

The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald broke down this new data in a recent piece in which he claims Democrats are “becoming far more militaristic and pro-war than Republicans.” Greenwald says that while the overwhelming majority of Washington elites opposed—or, more accurately, had a total meltdown over—Trump’s December announcement that he would withdraw U.S. troops from Syria, polling data from Morning Consult/Politico shows that 49 percent of Americans support the decision while 33 percent oppose it.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/hawkish-democrats-anti-war-republicans-thank-trump/

What this year has shown is that the Dems are becoming more war-like….just look at their reaction of Trump’s announcement of pulling troops from Syria and about half the troops from Afghanistan……the MSM went batcrap crazy and the Dems joined in…..

The GOP has not become totally anti-war….but their numbers are dwindling as Trump tries to move his “policies” forward.

Extinction Of The White Dinosaur

It appears that there is a movement that sees the end of the rule of the old angry white man, the white dinosaur, but could this country finally be moving beyond the rule of the white man?

In opinion piece that covers this phenom……

https://johnpavlovitz.com/2019/01/04/the-extinction-of-the-white-american-dinosaur/

The election of so many women in the last election is part of the process of the extinction……the problem is that these women need to carve out their spot in politics and stick to their guns.

I look forward to these young freshman representatives embrace their destiny and make their mark on the people and the country.

I wish them luck!

Leon Remembered

This post should have been written and posted on 03 September but I was lazy and worried about a doctor’s visit to pay attention….

This is the 80th anniversary of the 4th International…..this will mean very little to most people but as a student of political history I feel that he, Leon Trotsky, needs to be remembered….if not for his life then for is contribution to political discourse.

…the 80th anniversary of the founding congress of the Fourth International, held on September 3, 1938. The establishment of the Fourth International, under the leadership of Leon Trotsky, was an event of great historical significance and contemporary relevance. During the next three months, the World Socialist Web Site will be celebrating this anniversary with a series of publications and events explaining the significance of the Fourth International.

…..

On September 3, 1938, the Fourth International held its founding congress in a suburb of Paris. The conference agenda allowed for only one day of official proceedings, owing to—according to the minutes—“the illegal circumstances under which the congress was held…” The “illegal circumstances” to which the minutes referred were those created by the relentless persecution of the Trotskyist movement by the police of the bourgeois-democratic state in France, the armed gangs of fascists acting with legal impunity in much of Europe, and above all, the ruthless assassins of the Soviet secret police, the GPU, working to carry out Stalin’s instructions that Leon Trotsky and his closest collaborators be physically eliminated.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/09/03/four-s03.html

Like I side mean little to most people but to students it is a study in political discourse…..

Just felt I could drop some history on my readers….enjoy your day….chuq