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by Scott Creighton
The Leftwing blogs (the few that remain) are all a dither over President Obama’s announced 3 year discretionary spending freeze and they are right to be upset.
Most of these sites were heavily pro-Obama in the run-up to the 2008 general election and for many months afterward as they continued to blindly support him in spite of his neoliberal leaning policy decisions. But some of the regular contributers and administrators of these sites shouted down or banned outright the “far left wing” dissenters who were warning against what we are seeing right now; an extension of the Bush regimes’ criminal activities under President Obama, the protection and even the hiring of former Bush officials who could and should be investigated for various crimes (including but not limited to; election fraud, making false statements to congress, false imprisonment, systematic torture, embezzlement, tax evasion, banking industry RICO Act violations, fabricating false evidence, crimes against humanity and war crimes), the continuation and even the expansion of illegal wars of aggression in service to the imperialist agenda of the military/banking/industrial complex, and the dire consequences of putting more DLC type Clintonistas in charge of our already failing economy.
Being angry about President Obama’s apparent Hooveresque announcement is all well and good, but the fact is, you’re still missing the point just like you did nearly two years ago when the “radical left” tried to warn you and you paid them back for their courage and their integrity by banning their IP addresses from your sites so as to silence progressive dissent prior to the election (Remember such classics as…”don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good”? “He’s just faking to the center-right in order to win the election” “He’s playing chess while you’re playing checkers”? Remember those? Ring any bells? How’s that “he’s just faking center-right” theory working out for you?).
In a follow-up article I am going to explain to you exactly why you are incorrect about your current assessment of Obama’s most recent and most painful neoliberal IMF structural adjustment policy. Why it is not, in fact, “stupid”. Why it is not, in fact, “just a rouse”. Why it is not, in fact, a “mistake”. Why he is, in fact, going to follow through with it because it is exactly what the neoliberal IMF/World Bank supporting Clintonistas have been planning and working towards since 1996.
But before I do I would just like to say that right now most of the “progressives” administrators who are currently beating their breasts and gnashing their teeth in the left-wing echo chambers they call “open forums” should probably take this opportunity to look back over the period leading up to the election in 2008 and unban many if not all of those “far left wing radicals” they dismissed so easily and insultingly back in the days of “HOPE for CHANGE”.
The truth is, those radicals were right and you were wrong and the progressive movement, which is absolutely littered with institutionalized partisan “yes men”, needs all the qualified help it can get these days.
Perhaps an email or a public apology would be in order. By arbitrarily banning such critical voices at such an important time, you played a part in getting this administration into power by silencing dissent; important dissent, that everyone should, by now, know was a completely accurate warning of things to come.
This is not about exacting a pound of flesh or hindsight being 20/20. It’s not about the fact that people back then had no real other “viable choice”, as was the common last ditch argument made by blinded partisans without any arguments left to them.
This is about accepting responsibility for ones actions; the exact same thing many “progressives” on these sites are demanding our congressional representatives do on any given Monday. This is about recognizing a structural flaw in our electoral system, one that pits logic against emotion and leads to some rather undemocratic results regardless of political party affiliation.
This is about reconciliation and finally getting it right.
More importantly though, this is about bringing back into the fold, those disenfranchised people who were bright enough and aware enough years ago to see this coming when most “progressives” didn’t or simply refused to.
Bright, unafraid people, those willing to step up and stand up for what they know is right, those willing to take the heat even from their own in order to try their best to warn others of the mistake they were making 2 years ago, those kinds of people couldn’t possibly be harmful for the progressive movement right now.
They could be just what the Progressive movement needs; a partisanship-free unblinking analysis of the current state of the union, devoid of Democratic party loyalties or White House PR machine created talking points and committed, really committed to true liberal ideals not just Party affiliation.
These bright, articulate, forward thinking deconstructions of ideological authority that have been systematically disassociated from the Progressive movement need to be consciously approached, actively cultivated, and brought back into the fold. Because quite frankly, the institutional self-censoring of the Progressive movement leading up to the 2008 election has left us with a number of status-quo supporting institutionalized voices incapable of the kinds of critical thinking and/or courage we desperately need right now.
So those of you whom can relate to this call to action, you know who you are. Eat your humble pie, put your ego in check for just a moment, and do whatever it is you have to. But while it is becoming more and more obvious that the true enemies of the people of this nation are allied together (in the Supreme Court, the Republican and Democratic Parties, Wall Street, the corporate board rooms, the corporate media industry, the military industrial complex, the Insurance industry, as well the White House) and currently working in complete harmony with one another, you had better learn that divisions within our ranks only serve to make our adversaries stronger and our impact weaker.
In order for the Progressive movement to survive the gathering storm it must progress and as any adult knows, there is no progress without painfully honest self-evaluation.
The selective disenfranchisement of critical (and now understood to have been acutely accurate) progressives was a mistake that must be corrected if for no other reason than to ensure it won’t happen again now that many previous nay-Sayers are joining the ranks of the “radical far-left”.
The upcoming elections are going to be polluted with the same, populist-dividing talking points fed to us from the same PR agencies by the same institutionalized pundits posing as “progressives”.
Are we going to be smart enough to let the perfect be the enemy of the good this time? I certainly hope so. The people of this country can’t take much more of this kind of “good” that’s for damn sure
82 Comments
great, valid, and vital diary there willyloman.
I hope my NKVD apparatchik moderator will allow my simple supportive comment to be seen on these ‘open’ ‘diverse’ forums, but in even numbered years, when ‘progressive’ turnout matters a little to the Democratic Party, major blogs like this one get a lot stricter on permissible points of view.
Isn’t this always the case?
The threats of Republican victories if we don’t support Obama and the Democrats, the insults, the childish censorship of dissenting views from angry lefties, all of these things continue unabated. These cretins are incapable of learning.
They were certainly in evidence a few weeks back when some of us decided to work against Martha Coakley.
Excellent. I remember the very first time I tried to post a response online. It was on Huffington Post. It was polite, but pointed. The mods deleted it. I thought “ut oh” so this is how it’s going to be? I haven’t had the same experience here yet, but I have pulled my punches quite a bit. Still, it is pretty obvious that firedoglake has limits on discussion that go beyond stopping cranks. In that gap, firedoglake is harming the truth and harming the progressive movement. Most of the FDL community as a whole is great, but there is more than one inconvenient truth that this country has to face and if progressives are serious about motivating people, then progressives need to be brutally honest. The only way to do that is to have real robust discussion.
Again, excellent post.
I’ve got to say that Jane’s policy so far appears to let the discourse take place. Hopefully this will continue.
nope, not if you try to use her own words to make a point of your own.
held for 1 hour before being released by a moderator.
Absolutely. FireDogLake is one of the few that never banned me in the run-up to the election. I didn’t comment here alot back then, but I do remember that they were pretty open. I think it will continue. I hope so.
Excellent post and truly on target. Excellent comments all with one qualification that I don’t really want to ease up on the banks, they should be brought to heel just as should all public utilities and have durable government oversight.
The same thing — purging of the so called radicals (is a surgeon radical when he amputates a necrotic leg?) — has happened in unions and as a result we get the seeming schizophrenia we see in the AFL-CIO supporting the recent SCOTUS decision. (With this proviso, in a knife fight with corporate power, Rich Trumka, more than any person I have ever known, is the one I would want guarding my back.)
The Justice Party? Good idea. Maybe it will be one of the pieces of this train wreck of a democracy left standing when that heretofore unforeseen deus ex machina finally presents itself catalyzing change. It will come. Let’s just hope it is not the type of event Cormac McCarthy has envisioned in The Road.
Obama is a corporatist. The common word is Fascist. Obama supporters calling themselves progressives or referring to themselves as “the left” are either ignorant or liars. Dennis Kucinich and the Progressive Caucus in the house are the ONLY Democrats who deserve to be called progressive. There is no virtue and no future in being a partisan Democrat. Republicans are not the problem. The Oligarchy, our corporate masters, are the problem. The Republican Party, the DLC, and the corporate media are making serfs of American workers. Anyone still playing red state/blue state is part of the problem.
This is true, what you write, for corporatism is the subserviation of government to business interests. That is the very definition of fascism. So why not just call a duck a duck? Obama, his fellow Republicans, and now most Democrats are fascists. The last illusions that America is anything more than a fascist police state are being stripped away. George W. Bush’s grandfather and his Nazi allies succeeded, through their unholy descendents, where Hitler and the third reich failed.
BINGO !
I love this post but it is posted on the wrong blog. The people who need to read it will never see it here.
For all we know, it was posted on the blogs where most people need to read it and got pulled.
A cogent must-read article. Thanks willyloman.
That being said, even on this side of the issue [left of the left], I fear that the veils are still drawn. How do I know? Because Obama would barely be mentioned, if at all. In reality, this has nothing to do with him.
Once our Corporate Overlords fully ascended to the all powerful Fourth branch of Government — the Financial Branch — the rest of government became an entertaining play of shadow puppets. I, for one, warned before the election that there was nothing Obama could do. No president has control over the Military Branch or the Financial Branch — and universal health care was always a non-starter. What’s more, the US economy had entirely collapsed in the early months of 2008, after being dealt its final death blows in 2005 and 2006.
The fact that the Progressives seem clueless to this reality and that they have an emotional connection to a non-player from the start, Barack Obama, is baffling to me. (McCain, of course, would be a non-starter, as well, and we would be in the same situation regarding health care, war escalations, and Wall Street run amok. Thus, he and Palin make poor bogeymen to justify getting caught up with the shadow puppet show and GOTV.)
Things can change, but only when we pull the veil back and shine the harsh light of reality on the simple truth. It’s an easy thing to do, you know. One need only follow the Dollar (or the drugs when the Dollar can’t be seen).
And here is where the entire Progressive circus fails the reality-based bloggers. There is no base where a base needs to be — rooted in the fundamentals.
figaro:
“I love this post but it is posted on the wrong blog. The people who need to read it will never see it here.”
I couldn’t post it on Kos, HuffPo, Think Progress, Open Left, or OpEd News… to name a few… because I was banned… This is the only shot I had. Heck, I was even banned from a progressive blog that I helped start. They said, and I will never forget this, “Do you want to be right or have friends?”
with friends like that…
To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.
William Shakespeare
Post this on my blog, which is linked to in my user handle at the top-left of this comment reply. I guarantee you it will be put on the front page. I’ll also post a link at open left in their quick hits section, even though it will probably get me banned from there. This entry needs to be posted on as many sites as possible, especially the ones guilty of stomping all over progressives.
Great article.
And then there’s this from an article from glen greenwald today :
“Amazingly, the Bush administration’s policy of merely imprisoning foreign nationals (along with a couple of American citizens) without charges — based solely on the President’s claim that they were Terrorists — produced intense controversy for years. That, one will recall, was a grave assault on the Constitution. Shouldn’t Obama’s policy of ordering American citizens assassinated without any due process or checks of any kind — not imprisoned, but killed — produce at least as much controversy”
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/01/27/yemen/index.html
I’m a radical anarchist in political persuasion, and don’t expect that merely showing up with “right” ideas is any reason for anyone else to support me or those ideas.
Blaming those whom you were unable to convince for your inability convince them shifts the burden from yourself and your own failings onto others.
Blaming others for political failings is political poison and explains why “the far left” has been unable to make inroads into American politics.
In framing my political approach down to that which is achievable given the position of the pieces on our local chess board has allowed me, as part of a broad decentralized coalition of progressives and liberals, to succeed in increments where we had failed before.
Politics is all about approaching people on their terms and building an easy gradient between you and them. Shame, guilt and out-smarting them on policy doesn’t cut it.
The polls prove that progressive ideas can carry the day by capturing the imagination and becoming mainstream, but it is another task entirely to convince people to take a stand for those ideas.
Willy , I have reread the article you posted here and on your own blog , where I read it first .I think it is very accurate .
I still occasionally post at think progress but find that even links to progressive articles carried by sites on their own blog roll are fanatically voted down unless they are unabashedly flattering and uncritical of the administration and the party.
I am the last of a dying breed there as all my favorite posters have either been banned or are fled due to the bad treatment they have recieved there over the last year and a half .
Would you object to me posting your piece at think progress ?
The radical left was the hammer that forced real change in the 60′s and early 70′s. But having achieved a few goals including the end of the war in Vietnam and faced with the rising wave of Republican Revolution, the soft left dropped the hammer and scurried right, toward the static center. Big mistake. Lesson learned: Want to build something, be holding a hammer.
The “soft left”of the ’60s and 70′s dropped the hammer when confronted with the Republican Revolution? No way. Many of us are still here and not at all soft. Others of us lost heart when one after another the leaders of the Left
were assassinated. JFK, Malcolm X, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Fred Hampton, etc., etc., etc.
marcos:
“Blaming those whom you were unable to convince for your inability convince them shifts the burden from yourself and your own failings onto others.”
You seem to miss the point of the artice, marcos. This article is about several “progressive” blogs that banned vast numbers of “far left” commenters because they didn’t want their opinions discussed in their open forums. So their “inability” to convince others would be greatly hampered by a moderators banning of their IP addresses, don’t you think?
“Blaming others for political failings is political poison and explains why “the far left” has been unable to make inroads into American politics.”
Ah, the good old “blame the victim” ruse. Nice choice.
Fact is, there were many websites, let’s take The Daily Kos for instance, who deliberately and systematicly silenced liberal members who spoke out against the conventional wisdom of the time that was heavily in favor of supporting Obama’s assention to the presidency no matter what he said or did.
To someone who thinks like you do, that decision might stem from a mindset that thinks you are “… framing my political approach down to that which is achievable given the position of the pieces on our local chess board…”
it’s a nice way to look at it I suppose. I think the Obama team called it “pragmatism” though that seems to be a dirty word these days since most people see it for what it really is now.
I guess from your point of view marcos, “I’m playing checkers while you’re playing chess”, huh? If that’s a nifty way of saying I’m not smart enough to sell out, I guess you are right.
Well, guess what marcos, progressive ideas don’t just carry the day, they are the day. They are the only way we are going to fix this nation before Obama and his team of Clintonista neoliberals sell it off part and parcel to the corporations and the big banks for pennies on the dollar like they have every other nation they have forced their IMF/World Bank reforms on.
“but it is another task entirely to convince people to take a stand for those ideas”
Yes, it is. Especailly when that person is a president or the leadership of the congress and it’s especially hard when leaders of the very types of blogs who should be fighting for those ideas are finding ways to justify silencing the good people who post there.
get it?
Expecting capitalist tools to be willingly used for cross purposes is misplaced, no? Demanding that people accommodate you is only possible once you’ve organized to give them no other choice.
So you want to call public policy but are unable to organize to tie your shoes? Who’s going to buy into that?
Come, see the violence inherent in the system. Help, help, I’m being repressed.
Sell out? Where’s my paycheck? We’ve contested elections against capital here in SF, both candidate and ballot measures, winning more the half the time. Yes, it is SF, but yes, it does prove that communities can organize to contest electoral political power against a very strong business community and DLC democrat power structure.
Look at the polls, people support progressive solutions to problems for the first time in 30 years. Whether that support translates into action is another matter. Yet folks agree with us now. Are you suggesting that the sectarian left did that heavy lifting?
You are positioning yourself as a victim and that makes you look powerless, pathetic and unsympathetic to voters, unable to play the hand you’re dealt to your advantage. Whining about how bad the dealer is does not cut it. The goal is to become the dealer, and you can’t get there by whining.
Kos is irrelevant to progressive success, blogs are irrelevant (sorry, Jane). The internet is virtual, elections are contested and won in the real world, with real people doing real things in real time with real money and real outreach and real GOTV.
Whining that others are impeding you without building progressive structures to replace them is just whining and nobody wants to hear it, especially from the unreconstructed Marxist far left.
Why not just wait it all out? You will win in the end. The Historical Imperative says so. For me, I prefer the Hysterical Imperative.
The left is the working class. The working class is the left. The American working class has not yet been heard from. When we can no longer feed our children we will take matters into our own hands.
What we have here is revolution justified by “argument through the waving of the hands.”
agreed
The problem with the hard left is that it devolved into Leninism which left it under the impression that it was indeed the vanguard of the working class, and that the historical imperative meant that they were going to “win” irrespective of “the material conditions” of society.
The problem with that approach is that the working class remained unconvinced that the sectarian left was indeed its vanguard, and the working class in turn, in the view of the Leninists, were too lumpen to realize the gift that the vanguard was bestowing upon them.
Leninism? On what grounds do you make that blanket assumption? I mean, sure, there are actual communists here in America and they make no pretense of being otherwise, but their number is so low as to be virtually infinitesimal in terms of having enough numbers to influence anything beyond dog catcher. I don’t know about anyone else, but I base my ideology on a series of questions I ask myself: is [fill in the blank] right or wrong? If it’s right, I support it. If it’s wrong, I oppose it.
I was baptized Russian Orthodox Christian and raised Lutheran, and today I take much of my previously Christian ideology from a mix of protestant theories (the age-of-decision stance on baptism from the Anabaptists, the recognition of the Eucharist as a symbolic ritual and not a literal transformation into the flesh and blood of Jesus from the Zwinglians, the refusal to deify the so-called saints from Calvinism). Most of all, I take my ideology from the teachings of Jesus. He could be considered an early socialist, because he preached against the accumulation of wealth and for the helping of the poor and downtrodden. Such beliefs about reducing, fighting social inequality are not new; they have been around for nearly two thousand years, and they are not limited to disciples of Lenin. So your blanket condemnation of leftists you think are extreme as Leninists is odd considering the history of progressivism even in the last century.
You said far left correct? Are you all now reconfiguring the language?
Most folks here are liberals and progressives. We are not far left.
Is anyone around these parts challenging the fundamental contradictions of capitalism?
No, YOU accused leftists who refuse to toss their principles out the window of having fallen into “Leninism” — which, while not necessarily a good or a bad thing, really was made without evidence and with essentially a casual dismissal of the left’s concerns regarding Obama and the Democrats. I am simply asking you to support your argument.
No, you said far left. Liberals and progressives are not far left, they are liberals and progressives. Some liberals and progressives forfeit their values to cut a deal and some do not. Whether or not someone drives a hard bargain and promotes their values or themselves has nothing to do with how far left or right someone is. That is more a measure of the intersection between integrity, shrewdness and astuteness than it is of the magnitude of anyone’s position on a political vector.
Far left means acting to end capitalism or to revolution over the industrial capitalist state. There are no leftists in the Democrat Party. The Green Party was founded precisely as an antidote to the sectarian authoritarian left, yet was sabotaged by them this past decade.
Would you care to quote that with a link to where I said it? Might help. And you still need to prove Leninism on our part.
Did not mean “you,” apologies, meant the blog author. See above for discussion on what far left means and how that term, one that has relatively immutable semantics, is inapplicable.
freeman;
“Would you object to me posting your piece at think progress ?”
be my guest. but it will be voted down. I admire your tenacity. I was banned by Faiz himself over there long ago. I started pointed out that Think Progress was owned by a guy who’s brother ran a think tank in DC and that Think Progress was nothing more than a free marketing tool for them. Faiz didn’t like that. But he kept me around till one day I could someone over there erasing comments after they had been up for a day and forgotten about. These guys were not only banning people that said unpleasant things about Obama, but they were actually erasing them from their site.
That happened to me as well , you were unable to see my comments at all unless you were logged in and posting , then I was banned and I made a lot of noise in other places about it and I was allowed to post a few days later by their staff again .
I believe i was my assault on the podesta group which incidentally showed a 60% rise in profits in 2009 , far greater than any other lobbying firms increase that year.
Guess it pays to have connections in the government even if they campaign on ending such practices ….. LOL .
It’s time for a new party – the Nemesis Party.
Nemesis was the Greek goddess of retribution. She punished greed and hubris.
That’s what we’ve got now which needs to be dealt with.
Good diary, willyloman. It is important to acknowledge and reconcile with those who ‘got it right’ in the face of criticism, whether that criticism originated from the right or from the ‘left.’
It is always valuable to give visibility to a whole range of views, otherwise it becomes too homogeneous after a while.
Sporkovat, it’s always good to see your opinion expressed, even though I do not always agree with it. Sorry to learn in a previous thread that the ‘mods’ have limited you to the Seminal.
This brings to mind an exchange I once had with a profeesional colleague during a discussion about Democracy Now. He was critical of the fact, in his persepective, that Amy Goodman ‘always finds a way to blame America.’ I pointed out that this was just his opinion, and that Amy performs an important and vital function in speaking out; I asked that if not for her and Democrcy Now, where would he, or anyone, ever hear about the kinds of things that she brings to light – it certainly wouldn’t be from NPR or the MSM.
He had to agree on that point.
No marcos, I think the “hard left” is everyone who refused to sell out the ideals of the Democratic Party when Bill Clinton decided to strike his neoliberal contract with corporate America to bring big business into the Blue side of the political divide.
Now you can obfuscate this issue all you want with talk of Leninists and lumpen till you’re red in the face, but the fact is, the DLC and the New Dems sold us out; they took the cash and it’s just that simple.
Now we got those same sell-outs running the Obama administration and lo and behold, we are continuing the shift to corptocracy. For most dems these days, it’s pretty clear. So quote Lenin, quote Marx, quote Rush L. if you like and call us all “pinko commies” if you like, but that fact remains… we know we were sold out by the centrist dems. It’s called the Washington Concensus. Look it up.
I can imagine the hilarity that ensues once people get labelled with the designation of “far left.”
If showing up with “good ideas” were sufficient, we’d have seen President Nader in 2001.
marcos;
“If showing up with “good ideas” were sufficient, we’d have seen President Nader in 2001.”
well, good ideas and: 1. a campaign manager who was in charge of certifying Florida’s vote count. 2. a cousin who worked on Fox News’ election desk 3. Supreme Court Justices who were determined to help him get into office 4. partisan and propriatary Diebold software owned by a man who would promise to deliver republican votes the next go round 5. open and fair access to honestly run debates 6. support from the “progressive” community rather than the constant “not a viable candidate” refrain…
Used to be that “good ideas” and a lifetime of honest public service like Ralph Nader has were enough for someone to get a fair shot at any public office. Not anymore.
When and where was that again?
Let’s not romanticize civics class, okay?
marcos;
Agreed. But we must not be afraid of organizing on the hard subjects, the difficult subjects, that run the risk of exposing flaws in our hero’s veneer. No matter what the election cycle or the polls say. If we won’t stick to our guns on important matters and demand that our resprentatives do as well, we will be sold out by the Clintons and the Bushs every single time.
The certainly never will if we don’t force them to choose. The only way to do that is to spotlight their weaknesses, not ban people who point them out. Agreed?
Now you see, that is just funny. I love Monty. But again, you miss my point. This is not about “poor little old me”… this is about… “those of you misused our trust should cowboy the f-ck up and own your actions”. But I still like the Monty Python link. Perhaps you’re insinuating that Obama is as hapless as Author was riding around on his coconut shell horse professing his “kingship” to the masses of the autonomous collective? Perhaps not.
Now that is the most telling thing you have said so far.
In your opinion, “whining” about rigged elections and corporate influence and candidates selling us out is pointless. To you, the point is to rise to the occasion and game the corrupt system as best you can. Democracy be damned.
Well, that one is hard to argue except to say that the only way to defeat a system like this is to revive democracy, not join the sell-out brigade.
So why do you spend so much of your time chatting here with me?
Why is Cass Sunstein focusing on the internet and the blogs so much?
Why are PR companies like Burston-Marstellar using Tru-Cast and other software internet monitoring systems to comment and blog in real-time?
What exactly was the Twitter Revolution?
And if Jane is so “irrelevent” why is her opinion more and more sought after on MSNBC and others?
Fact is, this is the world, marcos. It’s our world. and you just live in it.
There is a difference between identifying areas of common ground between left and right, on one hand, and forfeiting progressive values in order to make common cause with the right wing. So much of politics in the US is deliberative obfuscatory of common interests rooted in progressive values.
These are not democratic institutions. Like folks try to view the antidemocratic Senate as democratic when arguing against the filibuster (sometimes a filibuster can allow 41 Senators representing 60% of Americans to stop a move by 59 Senators representing 40% of Americans) do not make the mistake of conferring democratic characteristics over authoritarian systems.
Corruption is what happens when politics is illegitimately intermediated, that is, when the stakeholders designated by those in power do not faithfully translate the political perspectives of those whom they would consider their constituents.
When I say that we deal the deck, that means that the democratic sovereigns deal out politics, cards falling where they may, based on the desires of residents and voters, not the wealthy, corporations and guvmint contractors.
Will progressives always win? No, but we’ll be able to work through our differences with our conservative neighbors in a way that relects popular sentiment rather than elite perversions of that.
I’ve been paid like $2000 over the past 10 years doing politics, by three campaigns, 2 won against corporate Democrats, 1 lost. Please do not call me a sell out. We’ve achieved more for SF workers here than you’ve dreamed of, living wage, sick time, health care, environmental protection, that you’ve got no place to comment.
I want to take SF’s tentative example at progressive and radical electoral coalitions with liberals and independents, as a lesson for other efforts.
Back in the 1990s, there was this great Mumia Abu Jamal march that went down during the Food not Bombs national convention. We headed out with torches from Civic Center to the Mission, passing under freeways, past housing projects with residents cheering us on until we got to the Mission cop shop. At that point, dumpsters were secured, fires were set, and the cops were very pissed. The march then headed up towards Market Street @ 15th, and at Market, the cops directed us to turn right onto 15th and then right onto Market. The Earth First! friends I was with and I decided to not do what the cop told us this time, turned left and headed back around in a big loop. Those who turned right, and then right again, ended up spending 4 days in Alameda County jail at Santa Rita.
The moral of this story is that whenever power directs your attention in any given direction, do the opposite. Blogging is great, but only as complement to real world activity, alone it is meaningless.
Change you can believe in?
Why again is corporate media presenting progressive voices for the first time since the 1960s?
marcos;
I asked you what the Twitter Revolution was for a reason. It was an artifice… a lie. Just like the CIA constructed Orange Revolution before it, it’s just another example of neoliberal regime change manifesting itself in the current vernacular of the day. That’s the power of the internet.
You work with the San Francisco labor movement?
When I’m not working around it, yes.
He’s got you there marcos. You are the one who interjected Leninism into the mix.
I hear all you folks criticizing, but not offering positive suggestions to change things.
Again, we need a new party – the Nemesis party.
A party of people who know right from wrong and won’t be afraid to act and get things straightened out.
Michael in Ohio;
I would be honored if you wanted to put this up on your site and I agree; putting it up on “Open Left” would be great. They probably have the second most censored site next to TP or the Daily Obama.
Dude, the honor is all yours. You are more than welcome to sign up and post there. I know, I’m being lazy; but being the site owner, I think it’s better if people besides me post. ;^)
How about the Cassandra Party?
As Justin Raimondo pointed out today in his article called “Old War-Bloggers Never Die; They’re Just Born Again as Obama-shills”
Her claim to fame was “Cassandra was a beautiful young woman, blessed with the gift of prophecy by Apollo, who was infatuated with her. Unfortunately, she shunned Apollo at the last minute and he added a twist to her gift; Cassandra was doomed to tell the truth, but never to be believed.”
ah, on second thought, I like Nemesis better.
marcos;
“Some liberals and progressives forfeit their values to cut a deal and some do not.”
I couldn’t agree more.
Take for instance, the owner of the Daily Kos. Here is a guy who moved to SF to run a dotcom and it went bust, so he started his own site and at first the guy was hardcore liberal.
Now, his site background is a massive “Siemens” advertisement, with the quote “Somewhere in America you will find Siemens at work” plastered over the Daily Kos logo.
This guy has parleyed his liberal political blog into an ATM with a company that is a Military Industrial Complex member, a Healthcare/Insurance Company, and a big time player in the oil and gas industries as well as the coal fired power generation industry.
Now I don’t know if that add is there all the time or if they switch back and forth with other MIC/Oil/Coal/Insurance companies, or not.
It is quite funny that right under a box advertisement for Siemens Healthcare there is an article about whether or not Obama will commit to “comprehensive” healthcare reform.
It’s too bad you only made $2,000 in your stint helping some people get elected, marcos.
You should hook up with this Daily Kos guy. That guy made a fortune off turning his liberal blog into an actraction for a massive corporate powerhouse.
Hell, it’s not even Daily Kos anymore… now it’s DailyKosLLC. He’s a gosh darn corporation. Guess he gets to spend whatever he wants on the election this time around.
You mean he opposed Bush?
Has anything that has remained inside the political orbit of the Democrat Party ever challenged the Democrat Party? Perhaps, like Obama, you projected your politics onto someone else because they tickled your fancy (intentionally) or you agree on one area of policy?
I’ve never been banned here, or on Salon, and in both cases I’ve said some pretty strident things. (Joan did her undies in a twist over one comment of mine and we ended up in a brief comments battle, but that was it.)
I’ve never tried to post on HuffPo. I did have one post on TruthDig that didn’t make it past the mods, but otherwise, so far so good.
Congrats on this post. Much truth spoken here.
In fact marcos,
Your take on the “Leninist” far lefties sounds kinda like the Daily Kos guys.
His opinion about the “far left radicals” seems to have been sealed when his family left El Salvador after the Salvadorian Revolution of ’79. Though he often made reference to the “communists” who drove his family out of the country, I don’t think he ever says too much about the corrupt neoliberal regime that they kicked out of power or for that matter, the paramilitary private death squad ORDEN..
“ORDEN was founded in 1961 and officially disbanded in 1979. It was originally founded to monitor the rural population for signs of left-wing organisation, and it was the intelligence-gathering instrument of the Salvadoran armed forces (FAES) while also acting in anti-insurgent operations and helping in military recruitment.”
“The death squads’ most infamous assassination was of a Catholic Archbishop: on 24 March 1980, Archbishop Óscar Romero was shot during mass — a month after publicly asking the U.S. Government to stop military aid to the Salvadoran Government. At his funeral, bombers and snipers massacred forty-two mourners.”
You know, were it me, if I were the head of a big time liberal blog, I think I might be more inclined to sympathis with the people who rose up against oppression, rather than with the people who killed Oscar Romero.
But I guess that is just my naive “checkers” approach to politics, huh?
Only because I’ve seen them either coopt into uselessness or downright sabotage independent radical political movements for the past 25 years.
There is a lot to learn from the Marxist/Leninist tradition for radicals. But those who still cling to unreconstructed Marxism through Stalinism and Trotskyism have a track record that is equal and opposite to that of the Democrats, but as ineffective for working Americans.
My B.A. is in political science and Latin American studies in the late 1980s. I cut my radical political teeth on solidarity politics at that time, including South Africa, Nicaragua and El Salvador. In no instance were any of the ANC, FSLN or FMLN lead and run as Leninist operations. There were Leninists in the coalition. But the reason why they were so successful was because they had much broader social and economic bases.
I did not get arrested all of those times for all of those actions, travel overland from Austin to Managua and back in 1987 to see matters for myself, for some fucking liberal to come along and dismiss me as a right winger.
The Democrat Party does not incorporate the far left into its coalition. This article is predicated on that. The more you allow the right wing to frame your own political self-conception, the mor you lose before even starting to fight. The American political spectrum is artificially compressed and right shifted. That does not change the fact that liberals and progressives are not far leftists.
I don’t know marcos, are we playing checkers or chess yet? or should I call you marcosLLC?
to Pluto @ comment 9:
Though I wish I could, I certainly can’t disagree with that. Though the death-blow was dealt in 2005 and 2006 the head-fake that set it up came much earlier.
Chris Hedges recently compared our political system to a performance of the WWE. You have “faces” and “heels” running around enacting terrible soap-opera scripts in flashy colors to the delight of millions and millions nationwide.
But perhaps the most troubling comparison is the recent shift in wrestling scriptwriting which seems to blur the traditional lines between good and bad. Now a days it’s expected of the “good guys” to cheat. Everyone cheats. Success is it’s own reward while virtue seems to be a lost cause.
You are damn right about that. Follow the money or follow the heroin. Thanks for posting this on Kos. Should get a reaction.
Michael in Ohio;
will do. Thanks again.
done.
http://www.progressive-independence.org/diary/479/making-amends-why-the-progressive-movement-needs-to-reclaim-its-far-left-radicals
And I mean seriously, what is far left radical? Medicare for all? A Public Option?
marcos;
Since you got me got involved with this, let me just say, that uh, no… you and I did not discuss what the “far left” means those terms. Heres what I said.
The “hard left” (as you refered to them) being anyone anyone unwilling to bend over for their corporate pit-bosses. i wsn’t calling them communists or “Leninists”… you did. out of the blue.
Sorry, willyloman, but again this is projection. Most folks who:
do not consider themselves “far left” politically.
Successful politics identifies areas of commonality between the activist and the constituency, exploits those opportunities by working together and building the base for future cooperation based on the success of initiatives where the constituency and activist share interests based on progressive values.
Unsuccessful politics projects the values of the activist onto the constituency and throws fits when people don’t agree with them.
Words have meaning. I’d argue that there might be a far left of the Democrat Party, but those people are not far left by any other measure and most certainly don’t consider themselves far left.
If one were to actively solicit cooperation with the far left in any political project, one would find oneself rapidly inundated with the residue of the Leninist left.
The distinction is that the Leninist left might share some immediate policy choices with progressives and liberals, but their impulse towards authoritarianism in practice is incompatible with contemporary participatory American political practice as favored by liberals and leftists.
My read is that left and right have expired with the end of the Cold War, the ending of the American Empire that is going on right now is the second shoe to drop after the USSR fell 20 years ago. Further, the tendency is that those who radicalized before the fall of the Berlin Wall tend to be communists, while those who were radicalized after tend to be anarchists.
Anarchists tend to view power as the problem while leftists tend to view capital as the problem. Thus, the left/right designation is simply too limited for a newer, more nuanced radical analysis.
marcos;
wait a minute…
one minute you are calling me a “fucking liberal” and the next you are trying to say that only the “far leftists” have been excluded?
“I did not get arrested all of those times for all of those actions, travel overland from Austin to Managua and back in 1987 to see matters for myself, for some fucking liberal to come along and dismiss me as a right winger.” marcos @ 54
“fucking liberal”… “far leftists”
“fucking liberal”… “far leftists”
hmmm
That’s interesting. Especially since you equated the people who had been banned from some sights to “Leninists” when all I was saying was that in the run up to the election, people who raised serious questions about Obama’s neoliberal policies were banned.
hmmm.
Maybe what it is is that you don’t like it when President Obama’s neoliberal DLC policies are called into question so you think that the solution is to ban people that do that, call them “Leninists” or “hard Left”.
Maybe you think the answer is to convince democrats and liberals that the neoliberal free-market reforms are actually Democratic principles. Is that it?
Is that it? Is that what you are saying? People who are actually liberal and progressive, those who believe in human rights and justice, people who believe is a vibrant social contract are actually neoliberals in waiting?
do you actually believe that, or are you trying your best to convince us of it?
“fucking liberals”… “far leftists”
nice
(don’t look now, but I think your Siemens ad is down.)
I did not denigrate liberals and progressives, did I, except jokingly in comparison to far leftists?
We would all like to wave a magic wand and see our visions of progressive liberal utopia materialize but it doesn’t work that way. Politics works by convincing people, not yelling at them.
Again, terms like “far left” have semantics that you can’t just wish away.
I’m off to go hear Patti Smith speak at the Herbst. Hopefully she’ll do a requiem for Howard Zinn.
Willy i just posted your article at TP @ 10 on this thread…..
http://thinkprogress.org/2010/01/27/oregon-voters-approve-taxes/comment-page-1/#comment-5984759
Keep being a free thinker , we all need to do more of that. I will be out of the country for a month but plan on posting more(on topic)on your blog site when I return , please feel free to offer you comments on mine as well.
marcos;
ಠ_ಠ
I will do that freeman.
Marcos have you eve posted at sites like TP and been attacked for expressing a different opinion or being critical of the democrats and Obama ?
I think the difference you are having with each other is mostly due to semantics . Progressives are not moderates , but they are not advocating violent revolution either, Che Guevara style .
I have been verbally assaulted with personal attacks ,vulgarity, mischaracterizations and veiled threats for merely posting links to polls from other progressive sites on think progresses blog roll . It gets very ugly .
Willy,
I am certainly to the left of the majority of posters on that site and find myself wondering what their definition of progressive actually is . One might be tempted to think that by disagreeing with the regulars there you were a radical leftist but I believe that would largely be because the so called progressive on a site like think progress are actually largely moderates .
I’ve posted on policy based veal pen sites where my posts are not in sync with the veal pen and have been censored, yes.
I’ve worked within the local Green Party to elect candidates and pass ballot measures (along with many progressive Dems and labor folks) which has directly challenged the local DLC Democrats’ direct line to contracting and the profits it reaps. They do not like this and have responded in kind in ways that are much more real and consequential than being censored at a blog.
Again, words have semantics and those semantics are critical because the use of the language in mass political communication is essential. Progressives are somewhere between liberals and leftists. Bernie Sanders is a leftist. Lynn Woolsey is a progressive. Nancy Pelosi is a liberal. Perhaps the writer wanted to say “the far left of the Democrat Party?”
That means you are being effective.
I think it is a good idea to go to other blogger’s sites and offer opinions , it empowers our voices and and theirs and can help build greater community outside of the larger blogs , which even firedoglake is becoming,though I think it presently the best on the blogoshere .
Marcos , I looked at the posts at the beginning of this thread and I think you came out swinging right at the onset .Your criticised willy for doing what you do yourself in your first post on the thread .
That said I have found your posts in general on FDL to be very insightful and well thought out . You are both excellent bloggers with a very individualistic bent and I applaud you for it.
Look, I did not headline a thread about “the radical far left” when talking about liberal or progressive Dems, then claim that someone who called out that discrepancy was supportive of the Salvadoran death squad junta of the 1980s. Do you know what those people did, what atrocities they carried out? Fuck, I was involved in leading a protest to disrupt Jeanne Kirkpatrick speaking at UT-Austin in the late 1980s precisely because of the atrocities going on in Salvador.
The left worked, functioned for change back then. The system has adapted an immune response to that, so we need to look somewhere else.
Thanks. I’ve seen way too many radical progressive groups sabotaged by far left radicals over the years that the last thing progressives need right now is for the sectarian left to be poking their nose around.
That kind of patriarchal authoritarianism is not our strong suit.
As a progressive who was shouted down last year for dissenting from the “Saint Obama consensus” I have to say
THANK YOU for this entry!
Some times it is better to just seek high ground, or at least turn so that the bulk of your exposure is not facing the incoming tsunami than to waste resources.
It is more important to fight for democratic government through democratic venues such as FDL than it is to fight lords of the blogs.
And it must be pointed out that blogs themselves or their celebrity personalities are not instrumental, it is the combination of those two things, a participating community and direct electoral action tactics like polling, fundraising, challenger soliciting and the like which make this blog powerful.
It is testament to anyone, in this case Jane’s confidence in their own positions that they can allow essentially unfettered discourse on all sorts of contentious issues.
I’ve learned in my applied political work locally how difficult it is getting progressives and liberals to agree on policy responses, much less finding appropriate and effective language to present progressive and liberal policies to folks in the middle.
Glad to do it.
marcos;
Man, you just keep right on going, don’t you?
“Look, I did not headline a thread about “the radical far left” when talking about liberal or progressive Dems”
I put the term “Radical Far Left” in QUOTATION MARKS for a reason. That means I was calling attention to to the term because that is what WE were called when moderators and owners of websites like DAILY KOS banned us for not supporting OBAMA.
Do you understand marcos?
Do you get it?
I was obviously NOT insulting them, as you can tell from READING the article…
Now MARCOS here has called me a “fucking liberal”…
and refered to the people who were banned as “Leninists” and “hard left”
and suggested they don’t know how politics work and that they are damaging to the “progressive” causes.
Anybody here hear that kind of talk during the run-up to the 2008 election? Anybody here remember being told we didn’t understand the larger implications right before moderators like MARCOS banned us from their sites?
If marcos would actually read the post I put up there, he would see that I explain that the reason I wrote it was so we didn’t allow this kind of behavior again in the run up to the next election.
Guess what? Sounds like we can expect more of the same from marcos at least. He is already justifying it.
And yes, marcos, whenever you talk about El Salvador, you are quick to point out how the “communists” killed students, but I have yet to read about you condemning the Salvadorian Death Squads for killing Oscar Romero. If you would like to point out a link to your writings about that I would love to read them.
marcos
Wait a minute. Do you realize how many times you contradict yourself in a thread? You just said…
… but in an earlier comment you said that blogs are “irrelevent” and that Jane (our Jane) was “irrelevent”…
man, you just can’t keep your story straight, can you?
Oh, and by the way… I guess since you are one of those “Lords of the blogs” that we are talking about here, it’s not surprizing that you would take that attitude.
Might damage your page-views over at Kos right? And that would mean less money from Siemens, your defense contractor/insurance company advertiser.
So I can see your point. I mean, the Daily Kos is all about making money these days, right?
Blogs are irrelevant was the first thought. Then I realized, while working out at the gym–amazing how THC and moving iron focus the thoughts–that the blog was only one piece of the picture and that the entire apparatus needs to be functioning in order for it to produce anything resembling results.
I am so sorry for not getting it correct in my first post, I am awaiting the blog police to incarcerate me for my transgression.
FDL so far has had an impact on the debate, but that has not (yet) had palpable impact on the contours of legislative product. Then again, running primary challenges is a threat that requires follow through.
I have never visited the daily.kos as I’m a Green and Kos been the hotbed of anti-Nader/Greenism since they became under the impression that Bush II was somehow measurably worse than any other post-war US presidency.
It is preferable to me to lead by example, lead by doing, with a diverse collective of folks from my community in local politics. It is only in this human scale level of politics that progressives have seen any level of success.
In posting here, I try to relate how we’ve met with limited success in Pelosi’s backyard and what kind of response the Democrats have launched at San Francisco’s experiment in limited participatory democracy.
Politics is all about money, on both the progressive and conservative side and all through the middle. It is about raising money and spending money, about winning elections at all costs and then taking the public purse and directing its cash flow to your friends:
“Politics is about two things, money, and I forgot the second thing.” (Mark Hanna, William McKinley’s campaign manager)
“If you can’t drink a lobbyist’s whiskey, take his money, fuck his women and still vote against him in the morning, you don’t belong in politics.” and “Money is the mother’s milk of politics.” (Jesse Unruh, former Speaker of the CA Assembly)
The goal for most Democrats is to become the people in the big black cars.
marcos;
So you are a Green Party member? and yet you said this at comment 19
That’s a mighty odd position for a Green Party member.
You’re kinda missing the point there aren’t you? The Daily Obama didn’t dis Nader just because Bush II was arguably the worst presidency in our history, the DailyKos dissed Nader because they blamed Nader running for office in 2000 and 2004 for Bush winning.
Which is ridiculous knowing what we know about the stolen elections of 2000 and 2004.
I am glad to know that you are not the LLCed owner of the Daily Kos though. That guy went on MSNBC last night and just praised and praised Obama. Even went so far as to claim that Obama’s populist anti-bankers shift was political “Gold”. What a “marketing centered” sleaze-ball.
I am so glad to find out that you aren’t that political DLC collaborist Apparatchik. It was quite embarrasing watching him preen and posture last night as he relegated everything to the basest of partisan hackery at a time when our nation desperately needs real leadership.
Truth be told, it was “Democrats” like him that made me drop my official party affiliation. He’s embarrasing.
I’m so glad you’re not him. I thought you were there for a while.