The Riots to Come… and The Revolution?

Well, who’s gonna rent/own all that empty property after evictions? No one. So it will be there empty and the same people will return as squatters. Mom and pop landlords will be lucky to have tenants — no free money for them from the Fed. Cut the rents down. People will adjust — build shanty towns, start growing food, develop underground economy. Engels — Condition of the Working Class in England — we have seen nothing yet.

Hunger riots — yes, revolution – no. Please accept my apologies for disagreeing. We are seeing now oligarchs behind the Ford Foundation funding protests that oligarchs behind Trump want to suppress using federal forces.

Watching craigslist, rents are already dropping in my town. For professionally managed multi-unit complexes the drops are still small. The biggest changes are coming from private landlords renting apartments in basements or atop garages.

NL, I agree, no revolution. Juan Cole has an article by Martin Powers about the British austerity and repressive rule of Hong Kong, with comparisons to us. There’s an irony in there somewhere about colonizing your own body politic.

Colonizing Portland Excesses

Plague Species, most revolutions are led by the elite, with the workers as soldiers. To use a less well-known example, most of the Southern Slavic revolts against the Ottoman (Turkish) occupiers were led by the elite in concert with the clergy with extensive financial and military support from Russia. The poor and working class do not have the resources.

gnokgnoh

For this reason, I do not support BLM or any of these protests that have been underway. They are not authentic. They are not real.

So veterans and moms and people are out getting beaten and teargassed for what—fun? A lark?

You guys are starting to sound SO like the old Southerners I know protesting that the Freedom Riders were “paid outside agitators”. BLM is nothing but authentic. While it’s easy to bus guys in to show off their AR-15s at no risk to themselves, it’s hard to get people to risk (perhaps permanent) bodily injury. BLM, I should remind you, started out with almost no support, even among Democrats; and in that way it’s similar to the 1950s and 1960s Civil RIghts Movement.

Seriously thinking about moving to Canada these past few days. Not just toying with it, as in past. Even though I’m not so sanguine about Canada either. If I did move there, I’d be a big proponent of ranked-choice voting. The Liberals and Conservatives aren’t much different from the Democrats and Republicans. RCV also would probably force NDP to become more serious.

BTW, these evictions benefit big finance in the long run, allowing them to consolidate control over huge amounts of property. That’s why this is happening.

This is the start because what they learn from the Great Depression is “Stop a liberal from being elected.” The elite did not care to notice the defects in the own behavior.

Side Note the Atlantic may soon spawn another tropical storm. “I” for any of you wondering.

I think passive immiseration is the more likely outcome.

They should have called it the Heels Act.

trump? how about all the single party leadership? (yah, trump’s a rallying point & folks need that.) what i find interesting is that most of the pro-bernie progressive talk/ dreams/ if-only subsided rather quickly after bernie repeated in 2020 his 2016 cave-to-the-party script. sad. (it’s said that when the viet cong would take over a village, they’d kill first the village leadership and second the teachers. strategy & tactics.)

ps,
mr brennan, resident critique par excellente, what do you think of the journalist max parry over at the off-guardian.org site? his latest “the-battle-of-seattle-was-fought-by-the-pro-war-left-in-northern-syria” is worth at least my lost time reading.

gnokgnoh: we are not talking about self-determination movement, we are talking about a change in political economy together with replacement of the elite that installed and solely benefited from this political economy. The new political economy will be benefit most people in the society (except of course the old elite) and be administered by a new budding elite that brought the change about.

StewartM : Agree regarding mom-and-pop. The people protesting right now are meaning well and feel the need for reforms and change. Unfortunately, the cold fact remains that BLM are funded and controlled by the corporations: https://www.fordfoundation.org/ideas/equals-change-blog/posts/why-black-lives-matter-to-philanthropy/. You can look for the grant in their database: https://www.fordfoundation.org/work/our-grants/grants-database/grants-all.

Ford Foundation president is a member a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a board member of the Arcus Foundation, Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, Friends of the High Line … in other words as up there as one can get.

BLM is tightly managed by some outside firm (read up) that was hired for this very purpose. Once the money dries up, the protest will vanish.

NL

I am quite sure that while corps may be putting *visible* money into BLM (gawd only knows where their real money, the dark money, goes). I am also sure that this is an attempt to gather both good publicity and co-opt or influence the movement.

That however does not apply to its origin and the fact that BLM was originally given the standard Dem establishment response to progressive groups; i.e, “shut up and clap louder”. Nor what you posted apply to all of BLM, as it is decentralized and some chapters accept *no money* for fear of either being or seeming to appear to be co-opted; so it is not “tightly controlled”. Finally, no amount of money can get people to put their bodies at risk.

An analogy can be made with the gay rights movement, that; despite having some rich donors too, was undeniably grassroots. 25 years ago, even the friendliest politicians gave gay issues a wide berth; most were either mum or actively hostile. That was change that occurred largely because people in essence “voted” in mass.

highrpm; I saw your note, took a glance but can’t get to it ’till tonight….

The Medical Mafia (and TDS) affiliated censors are going crazy. About 8 doctors, members of a new organization called American Frontline Doctors, gave a Capitol Hill press conference. Apparently, they did something similar yesterday, but the video was taken down by youtube. Also, their website, americanfrontlinedoctors.com, was taken down (supposedly by squarespace). I’m not sure if this was the subject of a tweet by Trump, Jr., but some tweet of his was recently taken down because it contradicted science (according to CNN).

It’s mostly a hydroxychloroquine (and sanity) advocacy group, apparently.

Meanwhile, unless my lying eyes deceive me, neither Trump nor Pence nor anybody else from the Trump Administration bothered showing up. How’s that for leadership skills, huh?

https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2020/07/27/facebook-censors-viral-video-of-doctors-capitol-hill-coronavirus-press-conference/

Stella Immanuel is part of a team of Medical professionals attended the America’s Frontline Doctors Summit in front of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C. on Monday, July 27.

According to her Facebook, Dr. Immanuel is based in Houston, Texas, and is a physician at Rehoboth Medical Center in Houston. She is also a deliverance minister and founder of Fire Power Ministries. In the video above from the summit, Immanuel says, “In the past few months, after taking in over 350 patients, we have not lost one. Not a diabetic, not somebody with high blood pressure, not somebody with asthma, not an old person. We’ve not lost one patient.”null

She then says that in addition to this, she and her staff at the clinic and “many doctors that I know” are on hydroxychloroquine as a preventative measure. She says the medication works as a preventative drug, and despite seeing around a dozen patients each day and only wearing a surgical mask, none of them have gotten sick.

She says, “I came here to Washington, D.C. to say: America, nobody needs to die.” Immanuel says it’s upsetting to see people struggling to breathe and thinking that COVID-19 is a “death sentence.” She then says, “I hug them, and I tell them that it’s going to be okay you’re going to leave. And we treat them, and they leave. None have died.

She goes on to claim that it’s “fake science” to say hydroxychloroquine doesn’t work. “This virus has a cure,” she says. “It is called hydroxychloroquine, zinc, and zithromax.” Immanuel also says that no one needs masks or to shut down schools because there is a cure.

Why is the media suppressing the success story of this Wonder Woman? There Is A Cure! Nobody needs to invest a red cent in the dangerous masks. Send the kids back to school. Tell those meat-cutter workers to shut up and get back to work. There Is A Cure!

Bring back all the professional and college sports. All the crowds at their events. There is no no longer anything to fear. There Is A Cure. Doctor Trump is undoubtedly going to be re-elected and awarded the Nobel Prize. Those who make it inside the Pearly Gates will surely see The Orange Leader at the Right Hand of God. The Trump Cure!!

Our Glorious Leader needs to be Tweeting the other discoveries of the Nigerian Doctor.

Immanuel, a pediatrician and a religious minister, has a history of making bizarre claims about medical topics and other issues. She has often claimed that gynecological problems like cysts and endometriosis are in fact caused by people having sex in their dreams with demons and witches.

She alleges alien DNA is currently used in medical treatments, and that scientists are cooking up a vaccine to prevent people from being religious. And, despite appearing in Washington, D.C. to lobby Congress on Monday, she has said that the government is run in part not by humans but by “reptilians” and other aliens.

You’re now OK to ditch the mask, but try very hard to avoid dreaming about sex with demons and witches. Doing THAT could get you into some real trouble.

So let’s all praise the efforts of the American Frontline Doctors, and this one in particular.

https://digbysblog.net/2020/07/hows-that-new-tone-going/ (internal link for above quote)

A big part of our current problem in the US is that there is no obvious way to get off the Road To Ruin. What we have now in DC is a disaster on all fronts, and Biden isn’t going to do anything to change that.

Google Headline One: Biden’s VP shortlist comes up short

The Democratic presidential nominee wants to pick someone who is like him (or at least the way he saw himself as vice president): loyal, trusted, experienced, apolitical, someone with whom he will bond.

Somebody Just Like Him! Only wearing a skirt. (And maybe not yet losing it upstairs.) Biden has his fingerprints on every recent American disaster. The Bushies even copied the Patriot Act from some of his failed legislation.

Google Headline Two: Former Sanders campaign co-chair Nina Turner compares voting for Biden to eating ‘bowl of sh–‘

Hillary and her neocon buddies hand-picked Trump to run against her because they couldn’t imagine finding anybody worse. THAT part they got right! Despite Biden being the most awful Democratic candidate in 2020, the DNC chose him to be the person to replace Sanders.

The US power elites think they can manage this crisis with a few token gestures and some strategic bandaids placed here and there. Totally Unqualified (R) vs Totally Unqualifed (D) is NOT the way to recover from the current mess. But the two of them are our only choices. I fear Mr. Welsh’s pessimism isn’t misplaced.

StewartM: There can be any sort of movement in the US, except for labor interests. Those who sell their labor are ‘discouraged’ from organizing and pursuing their interests. The same play was pulled in 2008 to cover up misdeeds in the preceding real estate scheme. We were told that an African ancestry president will solve all our problems and we should just hope. And nothing happened, here we are… The president was hand-picked, groomed and closely supervised by the oligarchy.

gnokgnoh: From what I understand Lenin was all about political economy and productivity. He lived abroad a lot and studied in detail the Western way of business. His thinking was not just based on Marx (monopoly capitalism), he also saw financialization and dominance of banking and (seems to me at this point) came to the conclusion that capitalism is good at extracting resource for the owners but not at ensuring productivity (not so surprising for us now). He believed (probably correctly) that the most productive economic system wins. When he lived late 1800s and early 19oo, things were not that much different from now. Oligarchs known as “robber barons” ran the show, finance dominated, various schemes flourished (read the Titan by Theodore Dreiser). Lenin might have tried to pull off something like what CCP did in the recent decades, and allegedly Deng was influenced by Lenin a lot (https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/978-1-137-51650-3_18).

But he also did a lot of expediency things. There were actually a revolution and counter-revolution in Russia. The 1905 was the oligarchic revolution pulled off by a conspiracy of oligarchs. It was supposed to overthrow the monarchy, establish a parliament of oligarchs, displace peasants from land (thus creating a class of poor unattached labor sellers) and permit the rising group of industrialist to exploit the labor to the fullest. Curiously, it is the Monarch who was in favor of laws at that time to protect labor. The 1917 was the counter-revolution of peasants who understood what was in store for them. So, one of the first decrees Lenin signed after taken power was to give land back to the peasants.

Oligarchy/capitalism is a stable system in the context of English-speaking ancestry. No revolution any time soon. It is just not necessarily a most productive, advanced and forward looking system and it produces a lot of suffering and grief that could be avoided. It holds the man to be a beast driven by fear and greed. And I strongly disagree with those who claim it is not perfect but the best — no. It is only the ‘best’ because we refuse to image and create better. We still to a large extent live in the version of capitalism created for us by Roosevelt. He was an oligarch that broke off the oligarchy. He should have been made a king. Instead the oligarchy passed presidential term limits and branded him a class-traitor. Now, we are simply going back to a type of capitalism that existed before Roosevelt…

Via Twitter:

Dr. Simone Gold
@drsimonegold
UPDATE: We have just met with Vice President Mike Pence to request the administration’s assistance in empowering doctors to prescribe hydroxychloroquine without political obstruction.

We also discussed the recent censorship of doctors on social media platforms.

#WhiteCoatSummit
7:54 PM · Jul 28, 2020·Twitter for iPhone

Well if we think things are this dire maybe we should start sharing preparedness tips.

Here is a product I installed in my home:
https://www.amazon.com/Door-Armor-MAX-Complete-Reinforcement/dp/B01GWF2R70

Here is a cheaper alternative:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00D2K367Y/ref=as_li_qf_asin_il_tl?tag=philipc29-20&ie=UTF8&linkId=2704e071ec60dd50f4ef5fa0c553170f

An even cheaper alternative is to replace the screws in the plate connecting your deadbolt to the door with much longer wood screws. This will make it much harder for the plate to come loose from the door since you are connecting it deeper to the frame. The screws will only cost you a few bucks. (This option and the one directly above it will work for apartment living since most landlords won’t balk about these changes.)

Re: Housing

I mentioned before that out here in the wilderness, almost every housing unit/dwelling is now occupied — even the ones that had been abandoned for years. There are few jobs out here after all, and people leave, they don’t stay. Yet now, for some reason, people are moving in and some of them are doubling or tripling up households in one residence.

Close neighbors now have siblings living with them. Multi-generational households are proliferating. I know a couple of old coots down the road who now have their kids and grandkids living with them. They’ve mostly moved out here from “town” — and that could be any town, not just the nearest ones. They lost their jobs, like tens of millions of others, and didn’t see any point in sticking it out in town waiting for things to get better. They knew things wouldn’t get better any time soon. And they were right.

The few local properties I see listed for sale on the Zillow machine have amazing asking prices, in some cases double what would have been considered normal before the pandemic.

Another close neighbor has two Airstreams they were going to restore and sell but they never got around to it. They’re thinking of fixing them up just enough to live in — they need repairs and hookups, but otherwise are in good shape — and renting them out. There are no other rentals available in the area.

There’s an RV park behind one of the local gas stations. Every space is full.

If evictions in the cities commence on a grand scale in August, we’ll be in uncharted waters. It’s not just a matter of people being thrown out on the street, it’s a matter of nobody else moving in. Landlords with no tenants face a dilemma, don’t they? This situation has already affected commercial landlords and it’s a growing problem for them. What are they going to do? And when residential properties in the cities become vacant because of eviction or other reasons, and nobody is around to move in, what happens?

Squatting is likely, sure. Carving residences into smaller and smaller units was common during the Depression, and that’s likely to happen again. People will double up, triple up, do what they have to to stay housed. Moving out to the country is a thing, and not just where I am. But there aren’t that many places to live out in the boonies. Some of the locals are self-building “shops” and “garages” (we know what they’re for…) but nobody so far is building new houses out here. Maybe they will eventually, but then again, maybe not.

While the People are doing what they can to deal with this among so many other crises, our rulers are doing little but beefing up their suppression squadrons, preparing to do battle in the streets (Portland a harbinger of what’s to come) when the money runs out. And the food runs out. And there’s no place to live.

I was going to add a riff on what’s happened to Riot Ribs in Portland, but I’ll save it. Ian is right, however, to urge readers to prepare for what’s to come. Short term, it will work out for some, probably many, but as the situation deteriorates even the best laid plans and the best intentions will likely come to naught.

NL:

I share your frustration about identity politics; it’s why we ended up with sleepy Uncle Joe as the Dem nominee, after all, due to the shenanigans Obama directed in SC, and that was all convincing black voters that Joe-who-fought-desegregation in CT was really a far better friend of African-Americans than the candidate who was actually arrested protesting on their behalf, Benie Sanders. Just like Obama and the Clintons rushed into Arkansas in 2010 to similarly convince black voters that Senator Walmart (oops, Conservadem Blanche Lincoln) was the best friend black voters ever had, despite polling that showed Lincoln would be massacred in the general while her Democratic primary opponent Bill Halter, backed by labor unions and MoveOn, might actually win and keep the Senate seat blue. Lincoln won, but was beaten by almost 20 points in the general.

That taught me that corporate Dems would far rather have a movement Conservative R win than see anything like a progressive Dem win. But their trick wouldn’t have played at all if black voters (who are disproportionately older females, probably less likely to get their news from non-corporate sources but from corporate Democrat-friendly sources like CNN) hadn’t bought it based on tribalism and the mis-reporting of these sources (polling sources showed that black voters wanted a return to Obama policies, even though his presidency was objectively bad, for both black economic prospects and saw the blackslide of black civil rights and voting rights). Younger African-Americans, by contrast, are less likely to buy the BS and vote for their best interests.

Still, there are quite legitimate concerns that BLM addresses, it originated as a grassroots movement, and despite corporate Dems attempts to co-opt it at least parts of if still are. Moreover, there are also grassroots movements which are indisputably labor-friendly, like the Fight for 15.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fight_for_$15

To me, BLM is worth supporting as any movement that brings out secret Federal police to crush it needs to be supported, by everyone. That’s my bottom line. I’m not going to quibble about any faults.

I feel ambivalent about BLM.

As a slogan, “Black Lives Matter” has the hypnotic structure of a sentence completion exercise: it invites hearers to silently supply another beat, a response. And, the movement does not seek to supply one, to displace some of the ugly possibilities. Rather, I think some of the early BLM leadership wanted a fight.

I want universal rights, not idpol synthetic grievance. There is a very real legacy of racism, but the ideological lens of idpol used to focus attention seems badly distorted to me.

It is almost a cliche now to observe that the insistent narrative of “anti-racism” blocks the development of narratives of class that might open the possibility of coalitions broad enough to graduate from impotent protest and virtue-signalling to governance.

And, it isn’t simply that the racial frame placed upon, say, murderous police violence, silo’s interest, though it does that. The narratives used by journalists that begin and end with race and racism exclude a lot of murderous police violence where the victim is not black from public attention. The definition of “the problem” must focus exclusively on racial animus as a trigger, because that is the approved script for journalists to follow. And, racial animus as trigger puts the problem in the imagined depravity of the character of the individual officer. Class analysis, by contrast, would question the motives and competence of authority structures and management, the governance of policy and procedure. The NY Times “Here’s What You Need to Know About Breonna Taylor’s Death” does not mention the real estate development that may have motivated the police campaign to “clean up” the neighborhood.

The culture of idpol protest is rooted in a hothouse ideology bred among college students. Its virtue-signalling aspect is a fashion statement, a form of conspicuous consumption designed to distinguish the initiate from plebs with simpler ideas and untutored prejudices. That brittle righteousness and the need to feel superior in one’s thoughts contributes to the “outrage” of cancel culture. I saw someone — I think here on this blog — describe the New Deal coalition as a Popular Front of the left. The reality is that some of the most enthusiastic New Dealers were rabid white supremacists. That is not a criticism of the New Deal, which gained power from its openness to alliance, something a protest movement with no ambition to govern need not consider.

Ian points out the coming crisis of homelessness (and crowding) and hunger and unemployment. The French Revolution and the insurrections of 1848 were driven at important points by the willingness of the hungry to join in riot. Finding a new class able and willing to govern responsibly in the interest of a larger public was a bit more of a challenge.

I agree with other commenters that we will get the riots. I just do not think there are enough competent people with a shared “consciousness” to graduate from the theatre of protest to wielding power in governance. So, I, too, will say, no revolution. Not this time.

Hey Lex…I’m sure your bs works with the gulable but, give it a rest around here.

“June 15, 2020 Update: Based on ongoing analysis and emerging scientific data, FDA has revoked the emergency use authorization (EUA) to use hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine to treat COVID-19 in certain hospitalized patients when a clinical trial is unavailable or participation is not feasible. —->We made this determination based on recent results from a large, randomized clinical trial in hospitalized patients that found these medicines showed no benefit for decreasing the likelihood of death or speeding recovery. Those studies were shown to be fraudulent, they were retracted by the publishing Journals <—

https://www.fda.gov/drugs/drug-safety-and-availability/fda-cautions-against-use-hydroxychloroquine-or-chloroquine-covid-19-outside-hospital-setting-or