Take Your Victories Where You Get Them

By Marc Cooper (November 7, 2018)

I don’t know about you, but I wasn’t expecting a revolutionary seizure of power in the midterms. I was hoping that a significant step would be taken to stop forward movement by Trump.

It did. Taking the House by the Dems means that Trump is a legislative lame duck for the rest of his term. NO funding for the The Wall. No cuts to Medicare or Social Security. No more tax giveaways to the rich. No birthright bullshit. No funding for nor passage of ANY mad hat scheme. It also means a reopening of the House inquiry into the Russian portion of Trumpland. It means oversight and scrutiny and I would bet several resignations from the feudal empires that some of his cabinet secretaries have built. The Dems also won a number of Governorships in the Trumpian Heartland.

And mostly it means preservation of the basics of Obamacare and further expansion of Medicaid.

Look, I am not now and I have never been a Democrat. Personally, I expect(ed) NOTHING from them. In spite of their incapacity to build a robust opposition party, there were enough voters to jam up congress for Donald Trump. I’m sorry, but even for a non-Democrat that’s a huge victory!

WE now have two years to build a movement that speaks to the millions who still do not vote and feel abandoned that could lead to a better outcome for 2020.

Let me also remind you that the same people lamenting this wasn’t a blue tsunami, are mostly the same people who two years ago were crying that we were on the verge of fascist dictatorship and we would soon be locked up in FEMA camps. Please get a hold of your expectations!

The Senate was NEVER in play. Even taking the House was little more than a mirage two years ago.The map this year did not allow it. Electing black statewide Democratic officials in the deep south is still a steep climb but we came a lot closer then ever before. Beto was a good candidate but, frankly. I think he ran a poor campaign tacking too far to the left for Texas. He still made Ted Cruz sweat it out and gave him notice that this is Cruz’ last term as a US Senator.

In politics, there are NO short cuts. You don’t wish movements for deep social change inot existence, you have to do the hard work of building them brick by brick. They are not delivered to you from Nancy Pelosi via room service.

And, finally, I would say that every day you live in fear, in fear of Trump doing this or that, is one more day you have capitulated to Donald Trump’s agenda.

Take your victories where you can get them and keep pushing forward and with more effort.

Now is the moment for Trump, despite, his bluster, to live every day in fear. Whether he does or does not depends on YOU.

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For Fellow White Women, After the 2018 Mid-terms

By Nicole Berland (November 7, 2018)

To other white and white-passing women, here goes a long and potentially unpopular post:

I’m stoked on many of the results from yesterday’s election, but, per usual, the returns saw the majority of white women voters cast our ballots for Republicans who legislate against women’s interests in places like Texas, Georgia, and Florida. Whether or not *you* voted Republican (if you’re reading this, you probably didn’t), *we* ww are responsible for the violence our demographic continues enact upon marginalized groups.

A few things:

If you’re wondering why white women vote Republican:
The reason ww vote for candidates who seek to consolidate power for rich white men is because we derive most of our privilege from our whiteness. The ww who vote Republican fail to recognize the ways in which our lives would all be immeasurably enriched by moving toward a more equitable society.

If you are still surprised that voting for Hillary wasn’t enough:
First, she was not a progressive candidate, and she’s proven time and again that she would have actively upheld white supremacy, probably without recognizing it as such. That being said, IMHO it’s great that you voted for her. Trump’s policies are caging children and killing countless more. It’s not that you shouldn’t have voted for her, it’s that voting isn’t enough, and her winning wouldn’t have been enough, especially in a two-party system that has functioned primarily and historically to consolidate power in the hands of white men.

What to start doing now, the day after election day:
1) Learn the difference between interpersonal and systemic racism, and fold it into your observations of every institution and interaction to which you’re party.
2) Press for actual progressivism in your political candidates, and begin at the local level. Hold your Democratic politicians accountable for policies that seek to redistribute privilege.
3) Follow WOC and other BIPOC activists, educators, and artists on social media, and pay them for your education via Patreon or Paypal, but don’t comment or send them DMs unless they explicitly request it. You don’t need to tell them how their work makes you feel or ask them to elaborate anything. Work out that stuff on your own or with your other white/white-passing friends, and let them focus on themselves and their communities. This is the first way to practice letting go of your privilege. I like @rachel.cargle, @kendrianaspeaks, @ihartericka, @shishi.rose, and others.
4) Start working on your “apolitical” friends and relatives or anyone who thinks that “staying out of politics” is possible. This doesn’t mean you should be hostile, but these are people who either don’t realize: a) that inaction supports the status quo; or b) that supporting candidates who are explicitly hostile to marginalized populations is a form of violence. Elaborate the stakes.

What not to do:
1) Don’t get defensive. To quote ShiShi Rose and others, if this isn’t about you, it isn’t about you. If you are worried about all the specific traumas white women suffer, think about how helping WOC dismantle the violences they experience at higher rates would also benefit you.
2) Don’t talk to POC or other marginalized populations about how their suffering makes you feel or ask them how you can help. There are plenty of educational resources online about how you can help. Read those.
3) Don’t take issue with a POC’s tone or methods; just listen.
4) Don’t think it’s on you as a white person to solve racism. When we’re upset, many of us want to organize actions, without realizing that there are already plenty of ways to support POC who have already been doing this forever. Even though it isn’t flashy, the best thing to do is probably to educate yourselves, give money, amplify WOC and other BIPOC voices, and collect your people to the best of your abilities.

If you feel guilty, remember that we are not born into this world with an understanding of our own privilege and how it impoverishes our humanity. The more you sit with these feelings, the easier it will be to start acting more justly.

Dystopia Can Offer Caution But Utopia Brings Hope

By Joseph Orosco (November 5, 2018)

The folks at Futurism Studios feel that we have become too entranced by dystopian stories about technology and political developments.  These stories can be good as tales of caution, they say, but too much can nurture cynicism and nihilism.  We need utopian stories to offer us hope:

“So fiction — of the dystopian and optimistic varieties — both have their value. Dystopian stories can be a powerful motivator for societies headed down the wrong path to right themselves. In the same way, utopian fiction illuminates a possible right way forward — the ones that lead to the kind of society we all wanted in the first place.”

They’ve produced a series of short videos that explore how technology might improve our futures rather than mutilate them.

Check them out here.

The Great Crusade of Our Time

By Mark Naison (November 5, 2018)

There are going to be a lot of people who are going to wake up November 7 shocked at how many people voted for candidates who embraced a message of hatred and division.

I won’t be. I am an historian of race and immigration in the United States. Electoral majorities passed the Jim Crow laws, the Chinese Exclusion Acts, and draconian immigration laws of 1921 and 1924 which sharply restricted immigration from from Southern and Eastern Europe, Asia and Latin America for over 40 years. Moreover, all of these electoral campaigns were marked by violence against the groups targeted

There will be signs of hope in the coming election- great victories, great candidates coming forward with positive messages. But many people will look around at who their neighbors and family members voted for with horror and dismay.

It will take years, maybe decades to undo the damage being done to our communities and our country by those promoting fear of Blacks, immigrants, Muslims, LatinX people, Jews, and LGBTQ people. In many parts of the country , those who want the US to be a beacon of unity in a world filled with hate may find themselves feeling very alone

But no one said this would be easy.. It is our job to challenge those promoting fear and division every day, where we work, where we live, where we worship, where we gather with friends. For as long as it takes

This effort will define us as a nation for the foreseeable future.

It will be the Great Crusade of our time.

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Science Fiction Can Tell Us What We Need to Know About Space Force

By Joseph Orosco (November 2, 2018)

Mark Bould shows us that if you know the science fiction of alien invasion you can pretty much analyze the reasoning behind Trump’s proposal for Space Force:

“Vice President Mike Pence’s August 9 Space Force press junket made clear that this great big bullying blustering pussy-grab for space, this effort to Make America Great Again and recover all that was lost to the perfidy of previous administrations is about just one thing: occupying the high ground. Getting out of the gravity well so as to be able to rain down shit on anyone who gets out of line. It is just a tired reboot of the old imperial fantasy of control from above. It can be traced through nineteenth-century science fiction about airborne anarchists and dirigible dictators, and through Winston Churchill’s bombing of Iraqi Kurds; it can be seen in the fruity fascist overtones of the Wings Over the World global law enforcers in Things to Come (1936), and in the Strategic Defense Initiative first advocated by sundry SF writers and then by Ronald Reagan; and it can be seen in the murderous drone program overseen by Bush, Jr., Obama, and Trump.”

You can read more here.

We Can’t “Debate” with the Cruel and Sadistic

By William J. Jackson (November 1, 2018)

I’m so tired of that tacky azz saying that has gained popularity among the pompous left:

“If someone disagrees with you, it doesn’t make them evil”.

Fool. We ain’t talking pizza toppings.

We’re talking about if a person’s life matters, the school to prison pipeline, rapist and murderous cops investigating themselves.

We’re not talking about tapered vs boot cut.
This isn’t v-neck vs crew neck.

We’re talking about people that deliberately drive vehicles into protesters, people that hold others hostage by surrounding them in a church with lit fires on hand ready to do harm.

If a person is on a certain side of these things and SO MUCH MORE, they are incredibly EVIL.
THEY ARE CRUEL.
THEY ARE SADISTIC.

Every day someone should turn to the neighbor and say: “Neighbor”. “That person is EVIL and we need to keep an eye on them”.

And when we see them, we don’t glad hand them and play polite.
We don’t take pictures together and engage in a “debate” on Meet The Press.

We call them what they are, and keep it moving to take care of ourselves, and those among us in danger of those EVIL people.

William J, Jackson is the producer at Wineceller Media

In Mourning Pittsburg, Let’s Not Forget Systemic Racism and Violence

By Sean Gelles (November 1, 2018)

Hopefully it’s not too soon to address some of the reactions I’ve been seeing to the tragic racist attack in Pittsburgh on October 27th. I’ve been seeing a lot of ideas expressed which are the result not of conscious reflection but of sheer panic and dread. Perhaps right now is not the time to begin to problematize this affective response but, as a Jewish person in the U.S. committed to justice and equality, I feel it incumbent upon me to do so and sooner rather than later because rampant emotionality is very easily exploited. Just remember the Dreyfus affair which gave birth to the Zionist movement that has resulted in catastrophe for the Palestinian people.

 

Every day in this country Black, Latinx, Asian, and indigenous peoples, especially LGBTQ people within these communities, are forced to live in fear of police and paramilitary violence. For centuries they have had to survive slavery, genocide, deportation, fascism (a/k/a “Jim Crow,” lynching, and the Ku Klux Klan), police violence, etc. Every year dozens of Black people are murdered by police, dozens of indigenous women are raped and murdered with impunity by white men, and dozens of Latinx people are murdered along the southern border. These tragedies do not make the headlines, the names of the victims are not disseminated in the news media, and I would bet that very few of us in the U.S. Jewish community had panic attacks after their lives were extinguished.

 

Some of the posts I have seen across social media have mentioned the idea of obtaining firearms while others have talked about leaving the U.S. with no idea whatsoever of the destination. Wasn’t that the same response that the Zionists came up with after World War II? I wonder how many of us in the U.S. Jewish community similarly pondered such ideas after the Charleston church shooting in 2015?

 

Why don’t we feel the same panic when Palestinians are maimed, crippled, and murdered in Gaza and the West Bank, when Yemenis are slaughtered, or Asian Americans are beaten, killed, or detained? Can we admit that some of the emotional response we’ve been feeling stems from a certain degree of privilege? According to the FBI’s latest statistics (2016), 11% of hate crime incidents were against Jews. What does it mean when we reserve our sense of alarm for only that 11%?

 

In the current era, the murder of Jews is often publicized as cause not only for grief, but for outrage, and that outrage is always directed at people of color. Do not be surprised if this tragedy is deployed to garner support for more violence against Palestinians or war with Iran. Just watch your favorite cable news network. It’s already happening.

 

On Sunday after the attack, former President of Iran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad tweeted, “Terrorizing defenseless people is done by cowardly and selfish individuals. Terrorism is always condemned in any shape or form. #UnitedStatesTerrorAttack.” Ahmadinejad was communicating two main points with that Tweet. First, he was implicitly expressing solidarity with the victims. Second, he was making it clear that by any objective definition, this was a terrorist attack. It’s critical to note that the mainstream U.S. news media are not framing this attack, as Ahmadinejad does, as terrorism. The reason is obvious: the perpetrator was a white man. Had he been an Asian man, or probably even if he had been a Black man, the attack would be construed as terrorism and would be framed as an issue of national security. Ahmadinejad was using the occasion to express solidarity with the victims and highlight how systemic U.S. racism is as implicated in the tragedy as antisemitism.

 

Immediately after the Tweet was posted, Shane Bauer, Senior Reporter from Mother Jones responded, “Dude you don’t even believe the Holocaust happened.” Mr. Bauer has been active in Western Asia for a very long time. He was famously detained by Iranian authorities from 2009-11 for “hiking” along the Iran-Iraq border. It’s unlikely that he does not know enough Farsi to know that Ahmadinejad has never denied that the Holocaust happened. Bauer attempts to accomplish two important tasks with his response. First, he aims to reject any expression of solidarity from Ahmadinejad (something he, as an uber-goy, has no right to do). Second, by mentioning the Holocaust, he re-orients the event away from an interrogation of systemic U.S. racism and back onto the victimization of Jews.

 

If you watch cable news, something I try not to do but can’t avoid, you’ll see the talking heads paralleling Bauer in their effort to make this all about the Jews. What they won’t mention is the fact that police officers across the U.S. won’t hesitate to kill an unarmed Black while a white man armed with an AR-15 can waltz into a synagogue and open fire on the whole congregation without being gunned down by police (he’s already out of the hospital despite being shot several times – an indication the officers were not shooting to kill). Additionally, they won’t talk about how a white Christian man committing mass murder is framed as the act of a “lone nutcase” while an Asian Muslim man committing any crime is construed as a matter of national security as well as grounds for rounding-up all Asian Muslim men and excluding them from entering the country.

 

In conclusion, while we mourn the eleven men and women who lost their lives on Saturday, we should also remember those peoples whose murders were not counted, whose deaths were not even recognized as murders, and whose disappearances went unnoticed, and unmourned. While the names of the eleven victims are widely disseminated, and the on-air talent of the U.S. media industrial complex express righteous indignation over the mass murder, it’s up to us as Jews who care about justice and equality to demand that those in power address the murders of those peoples with no citizenship documents, no national ambassadors to express outrage over their murders, no marked graves, no tombstones, no epitaphs, in short, nothing left to tell their stories, to tell the world that they were people who lived and died. Let’s not panic and recoil into a reformulated Jewish nationalism, not even a more inclusive, softer and gentler Zionism, which I’ve seen proposed by some on the Jewish left in response to the attack. Instead, let’s take our outrage and use it to demand recognition for those thousands of peoples whose murders aren’t counted as criminal, racist, antisemitic, or terrorist, and whose deaths never make the headlines.

 

We Shouldn’t Assume Birthright Citizenship is Safe

By Joe Lowndes (October 31, 2018)

I’m unsure whether the question of whether Trump has the Constitutional authority to revoke birthright citizenship is the right one.

Almost all legal scholars from left to right appear to agree that he doesn’t. But it also seems like whistling past the graveyard to say that this is merely a ploy to rally the base for the midterms. The speed and velocity with which proto-fascism has entered mainstream politics, fully commandeering one of the two major parties, should give us pause in thinking that anything is off the table, particularly with regard to immigration. We have repeatedly watched the previously unimaginable become imaginable, and the imaginable become concrete reality.

Trump, through the militarized panic he is creating at the southern border, has already provoked violence and death. He now uses it to elevate Michael Anton’s bad interpretation of the 14th Amendment and make it sound like common sense to his base. In doing so he has likely moved the public discussion of birthright citizenship decisively rightward. Yes, it is about the midterms, but remember Trump as a populist-turned-fascist is a permanent campaigner.

We don’t really know how the Supreme Court would respond to an actual executive order, but we shouldn’t be sanguine about it given that the ground beneath our feet is slipping all the time these days. In any case, there are many ways to strip people of citizenship socially, culturally, and legally in an increasingly authoritarian society. For that reason, the question of birthright citizenship ultimately seems more like a political question – subject to the play of forces – than a safely sequestered Constitutional one. We shouldn’t assume that the institution will protect anyone here. We will have to defeat Trumpism in toto to defeat this latest attack, just like all the others.

joe

Post Modern Anarchist Revolution Coming (Hide the Meta-narratives)

By Joseph Orosco (October 30, 2018)

Ever wonder what the post modern anarchist revolution would look like?

“To have a successful post-modern anarchist revolution, it is necessary to pragmatically demolish, both conceptually and materially, bourgeois-capitalist socio-economic conditions; i.e., capitalist forces of production and capitalist relations of production, in order to install a patchwork plurality of autonomous-collectives, narratives and worker-cooperatives.

Specifically, a successful post-modern anarchist revolution will demolish the concept of private property and the bourgeois-state so as to foster forms of communal organization that maximize equality, autonomy and heterogeneity. To quote Bakunin, the goal is to have a society where all micro-narratives have equal access to resources, in relative equal measure, whereupon no-one is privileged over anyone else and “workers take possession of all [forms of] capital and the tools of production”, whether, these are conceptual tools and/or material tools. No meta-narrative must be allowed to have dominion over the plethora of micro-narratives, sharing the sum of capital, in relative equal measure.”

You can read more here.

 

What is “racial capitalism”?

By Joseph Orosco (October 29, 2018)

Robin D.G. Kelley explains Cedric Robinson’s groundbreaking concept from Black Marxism:

“Building on the work of another forgotten black radical intellectual, sociologist Oliver Cox, Robinson challenged the Marxist idea that capitalism was a revolutionary negation of feudalism. Instead capitalism emerged within the feudal order and flowered in the cultural soil of a Western civilization already thoroughly infused with racialism. Capitalism and racism, in other words, did not break from the old order but rather evolved from it to produce a modern world system of “racial capitalism” dependent on slavery, violence, imperialism, and genocide. Capitalism was “racial” not because of some conspiracy to divide workers or justify slavery and dispossession, but because racialism had already permeated Western feudal society. The first European proletarians were racial subjects (Irish, Jews, Roma or Gypsies, Slavs, etc.) and they were victims of dispossession (enclosure), colonialism, and slavery within Europe. Indeed, Robinson suggested that racialization within Europe was very much a colonial process involving invasion, settlement, expropriation, and racial hierarchy. Insisting that modern European nationalism was completely bound up with racialist myths, he reminds us that the ideology of Herrenvolk (governance by an ethnic majority) that drove German colonization of central Europe and “Slavic” territories “explained the inevitability and the naturalness of the domination of some Europeans by other Europeans.” To acknowledge this is not to diminish anti-black racism or African slavery, but rather to recognize that capitalism was notthe great modernizer giving birth to the European proletariat as a universal subject, and the “tendency of European civilization through capitalism was thus not to homogenize but to differentiate—to exaggerate regional, subcultural, and dialectical differences into ‘racial’ ones.””

Read more here.

It’s Hard to Intimidate Righteous People

By Mark Naison (October 27, 2018)

My heart goes out to the families and friends of those killed and wounded in the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, and to everyone who feels a little more vulnerable and a little less secure as a result of this horrendous act. Everyone stoking the flames of hatred bears some responsibility for the political climate that makes actions of this kind more likely. How can people feel safe in an atmosphere filled with so much rage and division? We desperately need healing; what we get instead is provocation. I hope that people will come to their senses and realize that the path we are on is destructive to everyone.

I come from a line of Jewish scholars on one side, and of Jewish warriors and justice fighters on the other. I carry the weight of a tragic history inside me, of people who have seen the worst that humanity has to offer.

And from that I make this proclamation- Nothing you do can make me cower in fear. Nothing you do can stop me from fighting for justice. Nothing you do can prevent me from identifying with all people fighting persecution, intimidation and violence.

Your bombs and bullets and threats have no weight against the moral and spiritual force I carry within me.

I’m not scared of pipe
bombs
Or threatening talk
It’s easy to incite
fools and cowards 
It’s hard to intimidate
Righteous people.

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