Will it arrive in time to save us from total collapse?

I don’t know.

Let us pray that it does.

I wrote the following in response to Oui’s recent post RI Democrats In Power Not So Progressive, which was primarily about how neocentrist Dems fight to continue to hold power in Rhode Island…one of the bluest states in the country…as they try to eliminate three progressive women from contention.

Sigh…we need a new party.

And…sigh twice…we are not going to get it.

Sigh…

AG

I have reconsidered that statement.

We are not going to get it…yet!!!

But it’s on the way.

Watch.

Read on.
I ran into 2 separate articles after writing that pessimistic post. Combined with what I am seeing in the Bronx with Ocasio-Lopez’s victory over Joe Crowley…who was in serious contention to succeed Nancy Pelosi as the Dem House leader…maybe a “new party” is not so far off.

A new Democratic party.

Let us pray that it is so.

#1:

Summer of Rage

Rebecca Traister

White men are the minority in the United States — no wonder they get uncomfortable when their power is challenged.

It shouldn’t have been such a shock. After all, many of those most painfully poleaxed by the news of Anthony Kennedy’s retirement on Wednesday were the same ones who’d always understood the stakes; we knew that this was the risk, we’ve been scared for a long time. We knew that if it hadn’t been Kennedy it would have been Ginsburg or Thomas, and that it may still be. Yet there we were. Panicking. Nauseated. Heads and hearts pounding. Reminded, once again, that this country, our purported representative democracy, is ruled by a powerful minority population.

This too has been clear for a long time: that protecting the influence of that ruling minority — white men — has been the national priority from the country’s very founding. But these days, it’s easy to feel it in a way that underlines why we say that power is in someone’s grip: because the sensation on Wednesday was of just that, a grip so tight and unyielding that all the breath was being squeezed out.

Democrats have won the popular vote in four of five of the elections held since 2000, yet have only occupied the White House for two terms. Meanwhile, Republicans, as Jonathan Chait wrote Wednesday, are “increasingly comfortable with, and reliant on, countermajoritarian power.” Of course, as Chait outlines in his column, the Electoral College was intentionally designed to empower a minority: those in less populous areas of the country who wanted to protect the institution of slavery. The documents that encoded the participatory democracy of which Americans tend to be so proud expressly barred the electoral, civic, and economic participation of the nonwhite and the non-male.

White men are at the center, our normative citizen, despite being only around a third of the nation’s population. Their outsize power is measurable by the fact that they still — nearly 140 years after the passage of the 15th Amendment, not quite 100 years after the passage of the 19th Amendment, and more than 50 years after the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts — hold roughly two-thirds of elected offices in federal, state, and local legislatures. We have had 92 presidents and vice-presidents. One-hundred percent of them have been men, and more than 99 percent white men.

But it’s not just in the numbers; it’s also in the quotidian realities of living in this country. The suffocating power of our minority rule is evidenced by the fact that we’re always busy worrying about the humanity — the comfort and the dignity — of white men, at the same time discouraging disruptive challenge to their authority.

Consider the #MeToo movement, in which so much public sympathy has redounded to powerful men who lost their jobs (though not their millions) after being accused of harassment, a phenomenon that philosophy professor Kate Manne has smartly dubbed “himpathy.” Sometimes this himpathy has stretched the bounds of credulity, as when the former television journalist Charlie Rose, accused of harassment and assault by more than 35 women, many of them his former employees, was described in a recent profile as “brilliant,” “broken,” and “lonely.” These days, we learned, when Rose goes to the swank Manhattan media eatery where he used to be a star, he finishes his dinner alone, in less than an hour.

The problem is, Rose’s superficial social banishment can be presented as a grave sentence without any acknowledgment of how his behavior was the kind that keeps many women from ever becoming denizens of media hotspots in the first place, that blocks their chances for professional success, not to mention impinges on their bodily integrity. This same blindness is on display every day in the political press.

We’ve spent the last week hearing mewlings of concern over interrupted dinners and movie nights of Trump administration officials out on the town. In the wake of DSA protesters heckling Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and presidential adviser Stephen Miller at Mexican eateries, and the decision of one restaurant owner in Virginia not to serve Trump’s spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the Washington Post editorialized that these White House power players should “be allowed to eat dinner in peace.” After all, the Post wondered, “how hard is it to imagine” how those on the left might feel if “people who strongly believe that abortion is murder” decided not to let them “live peaceably with their families”?

The hold that the minority has on every realm of power — economic, social, sexual — is so pervasive and assumed that we don’t even notice when the few oppress the many.

What remained unimaginable to the editorial writers was the reality that those who protect abortion rights — not to mention those who simply avail themselves of reproductive health-care services — face regular death threats, are screamed at while walking into clinics; reproductive health-care workers have been among the victims of clinic shootings and bombings and, of course, abortion doctors have been assassinated. In 2014 the Supreme Court enshrined the right to harass women entering clinics by ruling that buffer zones between protesters and patients weren’t required. In a brilliant New York Times column, Michelle Goldberg argued that the Post’s failure to acknowledge these forms of harassment was symptomatic of the “reflexive false balance” of the mainstream political media, but I think it’s more than that: The hold that the minority has on every realm of power — economic, social, sexual — is so pervasive and assumed that we don’t even notice when the few oppress the many. It’s invisible, and any show of defiance against that power is what stands out as aberrant and dangerous.

Just look at how freaked out the Democratic Party leadership got about California representative Maxine Waters. Last weekend, she urged supporters in California to “show up wherever we have to show up,” suggesting “if you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.” Waters was not advocating violence; she was calling for assembly and pushback, a refusal to normalize the abuses being enacted by an administration that has separated more than 3,000 migrant children from their parents, and is building detention centers in which to hold asylum-seeking families indefinitely.

Waters was not popping off, making some careless remark. She has a long history of respecting the fury of the politically, socially, and economically powerless, of understanding how feelings of hopelessness can heat to a boiling point. Back in 1992, after the acquittal of four white cops in the brutal beating of black taxi driver Rodney King provoked looting and fires in Los Angeles, many in the media and local politics were quick to label the events as riots, to throw around the term “thugs.” The original violence done to King by white male agents of the state — and the lack of consequences they faced — was practically forgotten, while black fury in response to the toleration of police brutality was framed as the only violence being done.

Waters was then in her first term as a congresswoman, representing part of the South Central Los Angeles neighborhood where the unrest was unfolding. “There are those who would like for me … to tell people to go inside, to be peaceful, that they have to accept the verdict,” Waters said at the time. “I accept the responsibility of asking people not to endanger their lives. I am not asking people not to be angry.” What Waters grasped was that the anger being expressed was a rational response to injustice. “I am angry and I have a right to that anger and the people out there have a right to that anger,” she declared. She’d later label the events not as a riot, but an “insurrection,” recognizing that the unleashed fury of an oppressed people is a form of political rebellion, one not so distant from the revolution that led to the creation of the United States.

But so electric was Waters’s take on insurrection, circa 2018, that leaders of her own party censured her. Senate Leader Chuck Schumer chastised Waters directly, noting that “no one should call for the harassment of political opponents” and describing such a suggestion as “not American.” (It is, in fact, deeply American; see again, the American Revolution.) House Leader Nancy Pelosi also chimed in, calling the “lack of civility” of protesters “predictable but unacceptable.” Neither Pelosi nor Schumer defended Waters against the implicit threat in a tweet sent by the president, in which he called Waters “an extraordinarily low IQ person” and accused her dishonestly of advocating “harm to [his] supporters,” concluding with the grim admonition “Be careful what you wish for Max!”

To publicly rebuke a black woman’s support for protest and not the powerful white patriarch’s thinly veiled call to violence against her is to play on the very same impulses that Trump himself plays on: racist and sexist anxiety about noncompliant women and nonwhites, and the drive to punish them. It’s one thing that Waters’s opponents on the right have casually referred to her as “unhinged” and that Fox News host Eric Bolling once told her to “step away from the crack pipe,” but that her own colleagues fall into casting her as too much, as too combative and fearsome, is a goddamn travesty.

—snip—

Of course, the kind of fury that both the press and political Establishment in 2016 deemed so important, so American, was the fury of white men: angry at the diminishment of their status, angry at the ways in which the economy was not working for them as it once might have, but also angry at their fantasized sense of devaluation in a country that had elected one black president and was considering a woman for the job. And Sanders and Trump weren’t the only candidates who seemed to direct much of their messaging toward white men. Hillary Clinton picked a dull white man with a bad history on abortion rights as a running mate, in an effort to placate the white male voters everyone was so petrified of offending.

The handwringing over white men is what has kept newspapers publishing endless stories about Trump’s base and their unwavering devotion to him, all while ignoring the grassroots rage spreading through the majority: the young, often female, and often women of color candidates who’ve been streaming into American politics for the past year and a half, winning in special elections and Democratic primaries, sometimes — as on Tuesday, when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez beat Joe Crowley in a New York City primary — toppling old, powerful favorites.

This inattention to — and, at worst, disregard for — the political exertions of a furious and often female left is what led many major news outlets, including the New York Times and MSNBC, to be caught by surprise at the upset win of the 28-year-old former bartender and organizer for Sanders’s 2016 primary campaign over ten-term incumbent Crowley. In its story about the upset, the Times reported that Ocasio-Cortez had not been covered by “national” publications, and only in places like “Elite Daily, Mic and Refinery29,” publications that were “popular among millennials and women.” The Times issued a correction, acknowledging that those publications, which are indeed aimed at young people and women, were also national, but the ease of the original locution was telling: Women are more than half the population (and millennials a quarter of it!) but news outlets that cater to them are not considered national, also a code word for “serious.”

—snip—

But that’s also why [the] liberal political leadership should perhaps pay closer attention to the women who are staging electoral coups, to the rage that Maxine Waters is wisely attempting to harness, and to those Democratic lawmakers — including the House’s Pramila Jayapal, the Senate’s Kirsten Gillibrand, Mazie Hirono, Tammy Duckworth, and Elizabeth Warren — who joined 600 female activists in the Hart Senate office building on Thursday, wrapping themselves in the foil blankets used to cover children in detention centers and shouting “We care! We care! We care!” Perhaps the press and the politically powerful should consider more seriously the call to abolish ICE by candidates such as Ocasio-Cortez and Cynthia Nixon and already elected politicians like Jayapal and Gillibrand. They should listen hard to the women (and men) who are doing everything in their power to express their wholly righteous rage on behalf of Americans who’ve been crushed by minority rule.

One reason that the fury of women is regularly dismissed as theatrical and marginal and unserious is precisely because, on some level, the powerful must sense that it is the opposite of all of those things. That, in fact, it presents a very real threat. Not just to Charlie Rose’s seat at Michael’s or Joe Crowley’s seat in Congress or to the notion of “civility.” The reason the anger of a majority gets suppressed is because it has the power to imperil the rule of the minority.

Enjoy your dinners, guys.

#2:

Glimmers of Hope: the Death of the Old and Arrival of the Young

Chris Wright

If there is a silver lining in Donald Trump’s sadistic presidency, we saw it on vivid display on June 26. The victories of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ben Jealous against establishment candidates confirm what many have been saying since last year, that Trump is one of the greatest recruiting tools the left has ever had. He is, as it were, a personification and distillation of all the evils of neoliberal capitalism, all the decadence, the corruption, the awe-inspiring greed and misanthropy, the savage disregard for humanity and all things living in the cause of a debased and orgiastic self-glorification whose telos is the self-immolation of civilization itself. Combined with the success of Bernie Sanders’ campaign, the barbarity of the Trump administration is inspiring a new generation of leftists.

Let’s just take a moment to revel in and reflect on the victories of June 26. In themselves they might not seem like much, at least in light of the enormity of the crises we’re facing, but it’s clear, at any rate, that Nancy Pelosi is wrong: it isn’t just one or a few districts we’re talking about, it’s a nationwide groundswell of activism against the kind of politics she symbolizes, namely obedient service to the corporate sector. She and her fellow decaying sacks of skin at the summit of the centrist power-hierarchy are on their way out, both politically and, happily, even existentially.

The `age’ factor is of interest and importance. On one side there are the flesh-piles and skeletons: Pelosi, 78; Steny Hoyer, 79; Jim Clyburn, 77; Maxine Waters, 79; Diane Feinstein, 85; Chuck Schumer, an impressively young 67; Patrick Leahy, 78; Dick Durbin, 73; Bill Nelson, 75; Richard Blumenthal, 72. You get the point. The 115thCongress is among the oldest in history, with an average age in the House of 58 years and an average age in the Senate of 62. (The Republican House leadership is over two decades younger than the Democratic House leadership. Fascism is a youthful, virile creed.) Given the senescence of the Democrats, the stillborn quality of their leadership is hardly a surprise.

On the other side, with the notable exception of Bernie Sanders, is relative youth. Ocasio-Cortez is 28; Jealous is 45; Kshama Sawant in Seattle is 44; Keith Ellison is 54; Dana Balter, who defeated the DCCC-supported Juanita Perez Williams in a race in New York, is 42; Chokwe Antar Lumumba, left-wing mayor of Jackson, Mississippi, is 35; and in general, a tidal wave of millennials is poised to engulf local and state politics. National organizations have sprung up to help young progressives run and win, and groups like Indivisible and the Democratic Socialists of America are proving effective in their advocacy of candidates. Young women are running in record numbers.

—snip—

The Democratic Party’s leadership for the last generation has served its heinous historic function of overseeing, in partnership with Republicans, the shredding of the postwar social contract, the decimation of organized labor, the global triumph of the capitalist mode of production, and the inauguration of a new Gilded Age. That was the service rendered by the likes of the Clintons, Obama, Biden, Pelosi, Schumer, Harry Reid, Tom Daschle, the whole rotten lot of them. It was an almost wholly negative service, except in that–as Marx might see it–the class struggle has been brought to a screaming pitch of intensity and the door to radical change has once again been opened. At the nadir of the neoliberal era, with a buffoonish man-child capitalist-poster-boy at the helm of the ship of state, popular movements are beginning–one hopes–to point the way to a new political economy. Leaders can, it seems, be elected even without funding from the corporate sector, which makes them beholden only to their popular constituency. The worse things get under Trump and afterwards, the more people will be radicalized, and the better things may get in the long run.

Again, it’s worth pausing at this moment of the changing of the guard–a moment that will, of course, last years, as we wait for the old guard to die off or lose elections–to consider just how abject the leadership of the Democratic Party is. Insofar as it was ever even nominally committed to helping the poor, the working class, and minorities, it has failed abysmally. It gave us Bush and it gave us Trump, and it gave us the Bush-lite and the Trump-lite administrations of Bill Clinton and Obama. Obama wanted to be a transformative figure, and in a sense he succeeded: he transformed millions of hopeful idealists into disillusioned cynics.

But in substance the Democrats were never committed to anything like genuine populism, so their “failures” are in reality a reflection of their priorities. By their fruits ye shall know them. (It’s also true, though, that there is a remarkable amount of incompetence at the top of the Democratic Party. Hillary Clinton’s campaign, for instance, was stunningly incompetent.)

Whether the Party can, even on local or state levels, be transformed from an agent of reaction to one of democracy remains to be seen. The strategy of “boring from within” has, historically, yielded disappointment after disappointment, from the Populists of the 1890s to countless attempts by organized labor to push the Party left. On the other hand, one cannot simply extrapolate the future from the past. History is not a science; with changed circumstances can come changed outcomes. In all likelihood, left-wing leaders will emerge in the context both of third parties and of the Democratic Party, which in the long run will itself become more leftist–while at the same time full of internal conflict (much as the Labour Party of Jeremy Corbyn has been–and the Republican Party, for that matter).

But for now, I think we’re entitled to some savoring of Joe Crowley’s defeat and some cautious optimism about the future. God knows we could use a bit of hope, after decades of defeat.

While I am at it, here’s a little tidbit upon which to chew:

The U.S. labor shortage is reaching a critical point

Jeff Cox

#####################################################


Private payrolls grew less than expected in June, likely due not just to a slowdown in hiring but also a decline in the labor pool.

For the first time, there are more job openings than there are eligible workers to fill them.

Economists expect wage pressures to continue building as part of increasing inflation.

#####################################################


America’s labor shortage is approaching epidemic proportions, and it could be employers who end up paying.

A report Thursday from ADP and Moody’s Analytics cast an even brighter light on what is becoming one of the most important economic stories of 2018: the difficulty employers are having in finding qualified employees to fill a record 6.7 million job openings.

Truck drivers are in perilously low supply, Silicon Valley continues to struggle to fill vacancies, and employers across the grid are coping with a skills mismatch as the economy edges ever closer to full employment.

“Business’ number one problem is finding qualified workers. At the current pace of job growth, if sustained, this problem is set to get much worse,” Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, said in a statement. “These labor shortages will only intensify across all industries and company sizes.”

Private payrolls grew by 177,000 in June, a respectable number but below market expectations. It was the fourth month in a row that the ADP/Moody’s count fell short of 200,000 after four months at or above that level.

The reason for the tick down in hiring certainly isn’t because there aren’t enough jobs.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that April closed with 6.7 million job openings. May ended with just over 6 million people the BLS classifies as unemployed, continuing a trend this year that has seen openings eclipse the labor pool for the first time. At some point that gap will have to close. Economists expect that employers are going to have to start doing more to entice workers, likely through pay raises, training and other incentives.

—snip—

So maybe Trump has dug himself a hole with the immigration thing?

Just asking…

If he can get away with it politically, will he begin to back off the whole anti-immigration shtick because jobs are simply not being filled?

I mean…really!!!

“Truck drivers are in perilously low supply!!!???”

How long does it take to learn how to drive a truck?

Weeks, maybe?

A month?

Hell, I learned how to drive and operate a dump truck in a few hours when I was 18 and had a summer job breaking roads and working in Nassau County, Long Island Parks.

I can see it now…after a couple of “new approach” tweets from Trumpybird…the head Tweetsident…of course.

ICE officer: “Can you drive a truck? How well do you speak and understand English?

Immigrant: “Yes. To both.”

ICE officer (holding up a sign): “What is this?”

Immigrant: “A stop sign..”

ICE officer: “WELCOME TO AMERICA!!! You and your family!!!”

How absurd can it get?

Is there no end to the bullshit?

Later…

AG

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