Sanders Comes to Save Capitalism, Not Destroy It

I agree. Sanders is FDR 2.0 and with enough backing he could pass regulations that would slow our rapid decline. He is sensible, and it really seems like he listens. There are ways in which government regulation could benefit, and ways in which deregulation or legalization could help people a lot. For example, Medicare for All, and decriminalizing alternative modes of healthcare. European countries legally allow TCM, for example. I know someone in the US who was getting tension headaches and the doctor gave her muscle relaxers instead of telling her to get a massage. In a for-profit industry, the Hippocratic Oath doesn’t mean much.

There are so many cases in which small tweaks to the tax code and deregulation could make it much easier for Americans to survive. One of my online acquaintances is on his city council in rural Wisconsin and his battle over the years has been to allow people to grow their own food and keep chickens. The victory garden should never have been made illegal, that’s insane. There’s a lot of underemployed people who have time on their hands and could be using it to grow their own food, but that’s literally against the law.

I wish Bernie had run decades earlier.

Ten Bears is right. Political labels are notoriously (mis)applied in sloppy and slipshod fashion. They are usually thrown out like so many ape feces, not to be accurate but to stink up the place.

I continue to think that Sanders needs to hammer the point that the best parts of the New Deal, the ones that made a difference then and are the best loved now, were democratic socialist in nature. He should talk about the democratic socialism of the New Deal often. It’s easy to slam socialism in the US. The New Deal, not so much.

American mythology which is often called history glosses over that FDR came into office as essentially an anti-New Dealer. He adopted and vigorously pushed the New Deal for as long as he felt capitalism was at risk. But in 1936 with capitalism saved and the economy out of depression, FDR chose to deep-six a lot of the New Deal plunging the country back into depression for 4 more years until WWII and the runup to it finally ended the Great Depression.

Кейтлин Джонстон:

“. . . if Democrats want to beat Trump, they need to nominate a centrist . . . who espouses sensible, middle-of-the-road values like endless war and military expansionism, rapacious ecocide, corrupt plutocracy, crushing domestic austerity measures, new cold war nuclear escalations, continued deregulation of sociopathic financial and commercial institutions, police militarization, unprecedented levels of imprisonment, Orwellian surveillance programs, internet censorship, and ever-mounting authoritarianism.”

Economic ideologies are an interesting feature of modern politics, one closely connected to the phenomena of political parties and movements and arising in reaction to rapid social change and novel, emergent economic organization. They have been hijacked by academics and professional propagandists, as the activities of those new professions have emerged as part of the new orders of political economy.

I am not sure they do us much good, being neither a source of knowledge nor political power.

FDR was suited to his times. He was governor of New York when he was elected to the White House. He used the power of the presidency and his commanding majority in Congress to overhaul the US government, intimidate the courts and bring long-lasting changes to and government participation in and oversight of the US economy. He could not accomplish everything he felt was necessary to remake the world. The War exhausted him and ultimately killed him. If only Truman had not replaced Wallace as FDRs vice president in 1944. The world would be a very different — and possibly better — place now.

Truman was unable and perhaps unwilling to move FDRs more comprehensive progressive agenda against congressional opposition. Eisenhower didn’t try. Kennedy wanted to but then is term was cut somewhat short. LBJ took on the challenge of continuing FDR’s program and had an overwhelming congressional majority to boot, but there was that little fracas in Vietnam that caused him no end of grief, the cities were burning, and the youth of America were in revolt. LBJ said no mas, Hubert Humphrey lost to Nixon — who now seems incredibly progressive compared to more recent Republicans — and Nixon was forced out to be replaced with the first unelected US president (but I bet not the last), and it’s been one… unfortunate… presidency after another ever since. Some have been less bad than others, but none have been up to the standards set so very long ago by FDR.

Instead we’ve seen an increasing perversion of those standards.

Comes Bernie now, and it seems as if some of what FDR set out to do might be possible again. Somehow we might return to those thrilling days of yesterday when almost everything seemed possible. He evokes so much of what people found positive during FDR’s long time in office. But there is very little living memory of FDR and what the world was like back then, what he was trying to do, and how he got as much done as he did. Evoking FDR is great, but our situation is so much different now, and the challenges are so much greater. Bernie is saying a lot of the things that need to be said but is he prepared to do what needs to be done? I’m not convinced any Senator is.

So Bernie’s stupid branding himself a “democratic socialist” was dumb politics? No shit. but at least Bernie thought it was cute at the time.

@ edmondo

Maybe with “democratic socialist” Bernie was hoping people would think Scandinavia and not North Korea. So I agree. With so many citizens apparently unable to differentiate between the two, he might have been hoping a bit too much.

Well, shit. I wasn’t expecting to end up hoping Trump won, but now I do. Thanks for the clarification.

“If it’s too late…”

Need to cut back.

Ha! Marxists might as well be Cathars. There are no real ML states kicking around any more; I really don’t know what North Korea is, but doubt it’s got communes and all that stuff.

There is a need for a new ideology, vigorous but allows DemSoc to blend in with gracefully degrading imperialism.

I just wish Bernie would stop calling himself a socialist and go with something like “I am a social Democrat.” Push the social contract between business and the community. It isn’t all just about profit.

They like socialism and want more of it.

Ha! They wouldn’t know socialism if it bit them in the ass. Just like the oligarchy, they want something for nothing, and sorry, but that’s not socialism. It’s a moot point either way. Putin has spoken and he’s said without saying to these naive numbskull cultists, “no socialism for you.”

Bernie and Bernie’s burgeoning cult is defenseless and clueless against KGB mindf*ckery. Oh, fyi, Putin’s goons are all over Naked Capitalism. I tested the waters at that venue. It’s crawling with KGB. Yves is a fraud and a traitor. A collaborator and that means Strether is too. I welcome the day when both and more are thrown to the curb and are forced to eat from dumpsters to survive. They can’t and don’t speak for the poor and dispossessed. They’re living the good life. They’re akin to privileged suburban white kids embracing Rap.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/20/us/politics/russian-interference-trump-democrats.html

It’s not hard to make a case for policies that restrain the pathologies of capitalism. It’s hard to enact those policies, to enforce them if enacted, and to maintain them in the long term. In U.S. history, it happened only when a set of circumstances came together that we hope won’t be repeated. Communism/socialism had taken over the government in one country and was sufficiently successful to encourage parties around the world. Capitalism virtually collapsed, and fascism was taking its place. The labor movement was strong, getting stronger, and bringing active violence against the violence of capital. The failings of the system in producing sickness and poverty inspired idealism in a generation, from the social work of Frances Perkins and Eleanor Roosevelt to the populism of Huey Long and the commitment of Henry Wallace. Ironically, FDR said the only thing they had to fear was fear itself, but fear was what drove the New Deal. The policies created then defined people’s view of government and helped it last for 40 years, helped along by the capitalists’ ongoing fear of commies.

Can capitalism get there without extraordinary fortuitous circumstances? I kind of doubt it. I can see an active market-driven segment of small firms/businesses, but large enterprises should almost certainly be under tight oversight. Large enterprises will have enough power to start the politically corrupting process that we’ve seen for the last 40 years.

FDR saved capitalism. I will note that he still deserved canonization for what he did for the people.

@450

Aurora Advisors hasn’t been active in years. Smith only keeps the site up because it hosts the PDFs of articles she’s written.

You talk a lot but don’t know much at all.

I’d vote for Putin if he were eligible and on the ballot. Better man than Bloomberg.

We’re talking Bernie versus Trump. I’m guessing bruce would vote for Putin then too and will. Putin is eligible. Trump is Putin for all intents and purposes so Putin is eligible to run and is in fact running as the incumbent.

My vote is for Bernie in the Dem primary and Bernie in the general. But my vote and your vote may not mean sh*t in the general.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/02/let-the-voters-decide-doesnt-work-if-trump-fires-his-national-security-staff-so-russia-can-help-him-again.html

The intelligence was gathered and reported by his own god-damned administration and he’s blaming on the Democrats and calling it a hoax.

Well, that really puts a button on it, doesn’t it? The voters are going to get their chance to decide who the president is, but only after they’re subject to a Russian-authored propaganda campaign being covered up by the incumbent administration. (On Thursday, Trump referred to reports of renewed Russian support for his campaign as a “hoax” that is “being launched by Democrats in Congress.”)

It will be the end of liberal and progressive politics in America.

Is the next president, if it isn’t Sanders, going to in any way improve the lot of the vast majority of people? Of course not. Progressive politics isn’t going anywhere in this country. The majority of the younger generation is thoroughly entrenched in its ideas. Sanders may not be the vessel going forward, but the ideas and the movement aren’t going away. Where are they going to go? Back to working for shit wages, going into massive debt for college, and continuing to endure the horrors of an increasingly pitiful “healthcare” system.

Their lot is the same. They’re not suddenly going to forget everything they’ve learned and just put their head down and resignedly accept their fate.

The younger generation may not be the Red Army, but they’re mad.

And they’re not going anywhere.

I agree with Dan. Boomers are schizophrenic on socialism in that they grew up in the Cold War era when socialism was identified with the USSR and the Eastern European dictatorships even as they are the biggest supporters and beneficiaries of two home-grown socialist programs, Medicare and Social Security.

Millennials and Gen Xers, on the other hand, have grown up under a capitalism which hasn’t delivered for them. Debt, opioids, shit jobs, shit lives, they’re supposed to be grateful to capitalism for all this? And as Dan notes, absent real change these problems aren’t going away. The Millennials and Gen Xers are younger than the Boomers, and they aren’t going away. It’s the Boomers who are. In a lot of ways, you can see both capitalism and our political structures as fighting rearguard actions against generational and demographic shifts in the country which will sweep these old orders away. And they will do so because these old orders have not only not represented these new generations but have sought to screw them over and disempower them to the maximum extent possible.

We can all give up now, go home if we will still have one, and wait for the end, or we can fight. I prefer fight, even if we lose, even if we fail. Sanders is organizing, creating a movement. What is important about this is that even if he disappears there will be those in the movement who can move up to replace him. Will they immediately have his visibility? No, but they will build their own and continue to build the movement.

“Warren comes to save capitalism from itself” is a major reason to vote against her, here.

“Sanders comes to save capitalism from itself”? Apparently a reason why he is the only candidate worth voting for.

At least one of them is honestly labeling themselves a capitalist.

For context, I’d vote for either of them in a heartbeat over any of the other candidates, but to me it’s not as cut and dried as to which I would prefer.

@Hugh

Don’t you attempt to lecture me on the war in Syria.

The Syrians and Russians aren’t ‘trying’ to take the M5 highway. They took it back over a week ago, as well as cutting the M4 highway, and then went on to secure a comfortable buffer zone along its entire length. They then secured the entirety of Western Aleppo city and its suburbs.

They’re currently taking a rest, while being regularly bombarded by Turkish artillery, which is openly coordinated with assaults by the militant ‘rebels’.

The ‘Turkish controlled areas’ are Idlib province, a part of Syria.

‘Pushing US and Turkish forces to see how far they can get’? *It’s part of Syria.* The Turkish forces and their Al-Qaeda proxies are by definition there illegally.

I also like how apparently the Syrian army just doesn’t exist in your mind. The SAA is doing the bulk of the fighting, you idiot. Russia is just providing air support.

Turkey is a NATO member. The US keeps issuing statements about how it backs Turkey. The Turkish military and Russia have engaged in open combat with each other in the last 24 hours. How this ends is that Erdogan either insanely continues to escalate, or he see’s his bluff has been called and backs down.

@Benjamin

Assad destroyed his country and his legitimacy and the massive refugee spill over and increase in PKK terrorism inside of Turkey plus a side of IS terrorism inside Turkey made Syria’s Civil War Turkey’s problem. And under International Law, Turkey has the right to intervene, especially as Assad is committing mass war crimes.

That said, Covid-19 will make it moot as Iran just went into lock down and its forces are the ones doing all the heavy lifting as the SyAA is utterly hopeless at fighting. Without reinforcements and Lebanon also confirming cases, Assad is effectively done as Putin can’t logistically supply enough troops to keep Assad fighting when he has to guard his borders with China.

That said, due to defective testing kits, only 3 US cities can test for Covid-19. One of our crews had a suspected case, but the Hospital can’t confirm it and insurance refuses a CT Scan and CDC won’t return our calls. Other places are reporting the same problem, especially Hawaii which can’t test anyone despite having had a known case pass through. Luckily we have military grade NBC gear back from the Ebola scare and my boss is okay with us going around in the M50 Mask if someone reports a symptoms associated with the disease.

Which gets me back to another thing. Don’t bother with N95s. The virus is .13 microns and will pass through the filters. Military grade NBC gear or Hazmat Suits. If you have a beard, shave or vasoline the beard fully (What I do) for the M50 or equivalent to fit.

Finally, a sneeze can travel 200 feet with microscopic particles. This what they believed happened with the South Korean Super Spreader in her church. The Hospital Super Spread they are still trying to determine. 72 hours ago South Korea had 36 cases, it has now increased nearly a 1000% to 346 with a recorded death.

@Benjamin

Assad isn’t secular. He has Sharia Laws on the book and it is illegal to insult the Prophet Muhammad or his wives or Ali in Syria and you will be tortured. Assad has killed more civilians by a massive margin than anyone else has, including IS, and has killed more Minorities including Christians than IS has. By the way HTS is a minority of Rebel Groups in Idlib and they did not start this war:

Assad did when his security forces raped Schoolboys over a joke, fired on peaceful protesters, double-tapped the funerals, initiated mass arrests and tortured people to death, including pregnant women and children.

Social Media is replete with Assad Forces beheading people, lighting animals and people on fire while alive, sniping non-combatants, and deliberately targeting civilian infrastructures and populations. They even dig up the dead and defile the bodies. None of Assad’s thugs are punished for this, while the FSA and HTS have arrested and punished it troops for excesses on multiple occasions.

And now more than half of Syria’s population are refugees.

Your inability to get past cognitive dissonance over the US’s own failings is allowing yet another genocide to occur by another Tyrant.

If Americans won’t stand for Democracy and against all Tyrants then we don’t deserve the former and will have the latter. And if you side with Assad, you damn your yourself in this life and the next.

@ bruce

“But, it would be foolish not to recognize that though the tide may yet rise, we have not seen high water marks, let alone the collection of more persistent pools inland.”

Well put, lol. Furthermore, it seems plausible that even if Bernie did somehow manage to get a genuine populist movement rolling in a significant way, Obama and his friends would find some way to shut it down overnight (insert that green-vomiting-emoji-thingy here) (Oy!)

More seriously, maybe it is time we had a serious discussion/consideration about whether a repressive corporate dominance might now, tragically, be the only way to exert an acceptable level of behavioral control over population masses in the billions that seem to have lost the capacity for reasonable self-control entirely? (Never thought such an idea would seem worthy of discussion, and I hate it, but just look around the world as it is today.)

Of course, we won’t have such a discussion, just as we won’t seriously discuss the consequences of
‘over-technolozation’ (sic, sick, or both?) or, gasp, gasp, rampant robotization, until they are so firmly entrenched that our feeble opinions will be “like farts in a blizzard” (Old Yiddish metaphor).

It’s just a lovely ride . . . (h/t J.T.)

The Russian trolls and their enablers kill me. On the one hand they are consistently advocating for America to greatly diminish its global footprint and extract itself from forever wars and then on the other hand they stoke fear & loathing like Benjamin (one word — plastics) is doing here over Syria’s and Turkey’s little kerfuffle. Hey Benjamin, per Russian propaganda directed at clueless naive Trump supporters and Sanders supporters, America should not be concerned with Syria and Turkey or the Baltics or former Yugoslavia or the Middle East or Asia or you name it. America has too many important crises at home that need to be addressed to worry about kerfuffles on the other side of the planet. So why are you bringing the scare tactics? Let Turkey & Russia work it out. Putin and Erdogan are cowards. They don’t have the balls or the inclination to escalate this to a true war with one another. So shut up with your warmongering bullshit. Take that sh*t to Putin apologia central be it MoA or Naked Capitalism.

Jessica, well said. I agree. Bernie is the first step. That is why all care must be taken not to create a cult around Bernie’s personality or lack thereof. The focus must be on Bernie’s policies and what he and a budding movement represent, not the man himself. MLK is instructive. He created a movement that ultimately centered on him rather than his word and that was quickly remedied by the powers that be. MLK’s movement and vision ended with his death. Bernie’s wins, if he wins the Dem nomination and the general election, should not be celebrated as victories. It’s only the beginning. There is so much more that needs to be done. This is a track meet with hurdles. You don’t stop and applaud yourself after you’ve successfully traversed one hurdle or even two or three. It’s not until you traverse all hurdles on the course and proceed past the finish line that you can celebrate success with the idea in mind the race is never really over.

Juxtapose this latest from Naked Capitalism with Benjamin’s fear & loathing over WW3 started by a kerfuffle with Russia & Turkey. It’s called burning both ends of the candle. You can’t have your cake and eat it too, Benjamin. It’s one or the other. Either America greatly diminishes its military footprint and presence across the planet, or it doubles down on being the world’s policeman and defense contractors continue to realize massive ROIs feeding at that trough.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2020/02/why-no-retired-generals-oppose-americas-forever-wars.html

Yves censored my comment to that post where I call Danny out as an opportunist from Lawrence, Kansas (no place like home Trump country) who found a niche to exploit to sell yet more books as if the world needs any more books at this point when people don’t read anymore.

Hugh’s last comment was excellent. Despite his trolling of me with Bloomberg taunts and his overall cowardly disrespect of me where he plays to the crowd here, I respect a lot of what he writes not because I want to be his friend (I could never be friends with Hugh — his appeal to the crowd renders him a coward in my mind but his observations and opinions otherwise are valuable and instructive nonetheless) but because right is right.

“A thoroughly first-rate man in public service is corrosive,” the former president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce argued in an interview published in the journal Nation’s Business in 1928. “He eats holes in our liberties. The better he is and the longer he stays the greater the danger. If he is an enthusiast–a bright-eyed madman who is frantic to make this the finest government in the world–the black plague is a housepet by comparison.”

@Tom

“By the way HTS is a minority of Rebel Groups in Idlib”

Stop lying:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-45401474

“In January 2019, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), an alliance of jihadists groups, launched a large-scale offensive against rival rebel groups in the area.

HTS has now become one of the strongest militant groups in northern Syria. It largely controls Idlib province, including the provincial capital and the border crossing with Turkey at Bab al-Hawa.”

Naked Capitalism claims to be the place that: “chronicles the large scale, concerted campaign to reduce the bargaining power and pay of ordinary workers relative to investors and elite technocrats”

Sounds good to me. I’d hope there’d be more places like that.

Most normal people agree that assholes do asshole things and that for the common good, this needs to be limited. But most normals also seem highly susceptible to being fooled by assholes.

At Naked Capitalism, somebody says that there’s far more to worldwide assholery than just Trump and Putin. Focusing on them is good but there is so much more do deal with. But then nefarious types of dubious origin and/or character show up and try to red herring that idea into a debate over whether Trump and Putin are even assholes at all. And FUD ensues.

It needs to be made clear. Trump and Putin are assholes. And after we’re done with them there are many other assholes out there to deal with, so we can better help ordinary workers.

Benjamin states highly dubious things as if they are a given and then moves on.

Take for example “other people’s countries”: Syria is majority Sunni. Yet it has been run by an Alawite (a Shia splinter sect) mafia for nearly half a century. So if we are talking about the people of Syria, they’re country isn’t Assad’s country. But I think you knew that, Benjamin.

Same goes for “Syrian government.” If Russia, Iran, and Lebanese Hezbollah are the reason the Assad regime still exists, that’s OK because their interventions in Benjamin world aren’t interventions. And even though the Kurds and the US and to a lesser extent the Iraqis did the heavy lifting in taking out ISIS,their interventions are interventions. Go figure. It makes me want to ask what benefits you get, Benjamin, in the GRU?

Consultants can & do change the name of their firms like the KGB cowardly changes its name, but it doesn’t alter the fact of what and who they are which is handmaidens to the plutocratic oligarchy.

Here is a list of Aurora’s clients aside from the Forbes 400 wealthiest families. Too funny. Aurora and whatever it’s become or the consultants who comprised it have become, are by and for the plutocratic oligarchy. I despise the handmaidens at least as much as I do the plutocratic oligarchy if not more so. Yves also censored a scathing derogatory, albeit satirical, comment I made about Bloomberg’s teeth per the debate this past Wednesday. Why is she so hard-pressed to protect Mini Mike from little ol’ me? I just answered that question for you. See the client list. The only thing missing for these clever and zealously emphatic handmaidens are the white cap and the red gown.

American Express
Bankers Trust
Dresdner Bank
Industrial Bank of Japan
Lehman Brothers
McKinsey & Company
The New Republic
ShoreBank
Soros Fund Management
Swiss Bank
Tech Pacific Australia
The Weather Channel

@shorter Hugh

‘Using jihadist mercenaries to destroy countries in the name of saving their people is progressive, actually.’

Actually I have no dog in this fight. I do have a bone to pick with so-called progressives with an incoherent, naïve, and dangerously simplistic view of the world. And the idea that their childish takes on foreign policy are sellable to any but true believers is garbage. I do not see an advantage on either the left or the right, both live in their own echo chambers.

“And yes, Putin is very much a part of this conversation considering Trump’s foreign policy for America is Putin’s foreign policy for America.”

‘WW3 is part of Putin’s masterplan’ is probably my favorite of all the dumbass Russiagate conspiracy theories.

I mean, that’s not how any of you idiots frame it, but that’s effectively what you’re saying.

Putin is the embodiment of the USSR. He was a prized KGB agent and still is as far as I’m concerned, albeit a very wealthy and powerful one. Considering the USSR supported and aided Cuba for its own ulterior motives, it goes without saying although it must be stated to you and Benjamin, Putin, as the embodiment of the USSR considering his intractable indoctrination, supported the overthrow of the Batista regime once he was irreversibly indoctrinated.

How’s the Batista regime any different than the Assad regime? Both regimes were/are tyrannical and oppressive. In both Cuba and Syria, the people revolted. The arguments bruce and Benjamin and Putin make for Assad would also be arguments for the Dem establishment’s stance towards Cuba and the Cuban revolution. It seems both sides of this coin are hypocritical.

I’m all for the people of Syria revolting against oppression. What I’m not for is mutiple nations interfering in that revolt and gaming it as a proxy battle against one another. That didn’t happen in Cuba and as a result, the Cuban revolt was successful in overthrowing the Batista regime.

@450

Now you’re just making shit up.

Putin is the USSR? I’m sure the Russian Communist Party, which still exists and which is an enemy of Putin’s United Russia party, would vehemently disagree.

Congratulations 450. It’s not often that I come across someone who is literally an idiot.