After several weeks of intensive reading and discussion on class, capitalism and socialism in my undergraduate course, The Politics of Labor, we would do following exercise: Standing before the blackboard (google it) I encouraged the students to list existing, objective and determining conditions that might prompt the American working class to seek the abolition of capitalism.
There’s one reason why it’s a good thing that Wall Street billionaire Michael Bloomberg is trying to buy the Presidency: it could remove the issue of age for those concerned about candidates in their 70s. Bloomberg is 79, the same age as Bernie.
Bloomberg’s desperate move is happening following Biden’s persistent stumbles and weaknesses, and after Buttigieg’s 0% level of support from African Americans in a Quinnipiac poll. Zero percent!
Over the last decade, a national consensus has developed for a progressive left agenda on the economy, social services, the climate crisis and ending wars but the movement has not yet built the power to make that a reality. The next decade will be ripe with opportunities for transformational change due to a combination of expanding popular movements as well as escalating crisis situations.
West Point Professor Tim Bakken’s new book The Cost of Loyalty: Dishonesty, Hubris, and Failure in the U.S. Military traces a path of corruption, barbarism, violence, and unaccountability that makes its way from the United States’ military academies (West Point, Annapolis, Colorado Springs) to the top ranks of the U.S. military and U.S.
In the December 4th statement that was made by Stanford University law professor Pamela Karlan was this:
The personal is political for Donald Trump, even though he is certainly no feminist. The president, who was a young adult at the time this women’s liberation slogan was popular — to point out that what happens in a woman’s private life was part of a larger political problem of male supremacy — may have unintentionally absorbed the words, but never understood their meaning.
“I have found that, to make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason.”
— Fredrick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave (1845): 99.
In his 2007 classic Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War—a book that, in the age of Donald Trump, is more relevant than ever—Joe Bageant makes an observation that cuts to the nub of the matter. America, he says, isn’t composed of some great middle class; it is an overwhelmingly working-class country.
