KMO welcomes Keith Preston back to the program to discuss the difference between absolute and relative poverty. There are a lot of people who make less than the national average, but most of the so-called poverty in the US is relative poverty. Even so, social stratification and wide disparities between rich and poor, even when the poor are not facing starvation, erodes the sense of shared national identity and makes democratic government difficult to maintain.
This is a television interview I did with Press TV a couple of weeks ago. Watch here.
Hurricane Harvey finally hit the United States and destroyed the Gulf region, namely the states of Texas and Louisiana.
Flooding and ensuing rainfalls resulted in displacement of thousands of people and caused chaos. Like in any other natural disaster, the poor are doomed to suffer more both from the storm and its aftermath. At the White House, meanwhile, a nascent administration is being put to test amid the government’s response to the storm.
Battered by scandals, dismissals, and under pressure from many sides, the president mobilizes the government’s power in the wake of the devastation. But Hervey is not just any storm with expected consequences; it is a phenomenon occurring at a historical moment and could shed light into an ideological gulf in the US political system. What it has in store for the future of the Trump administration may not be perfectly clear, yet some officials are rushing to grab the opportunity to push their own agendas.
Handling such a crisis for an administration that is being pressured on many fronts over its performance could, of course, be a game changer but apart from that, how successful has the US government truly been in handling phenomena such as Katrina, Sandy and now Harvey? That and everything else notable about Harvey in this episode of We the People.
The Stark Truth. Listen here.
Robert Stark and co-host Sam Kevorkian talk to Kevin Lynn. Kevin is Chairman of Progressives for Immigration Reform and blogs at the CENTER FOR PROGRESSIVE URBAN POLITICS.
Topics:
Kevin’s political background as an unrepentant Perotista, a failed Green Party member, and a frustrated Progressive Democratic Party member
Creating a dialogue with Progressives on the key issues of how immigration impacts workers rights, income inequality, and the environment
The longstanding tradition of Progressives opposing mass immigration including the early labor and environmental movements
How immigration impacts the environment
The Sierra Club Vote on immigration and how it was sabotaged by a wealthy financier
The 1924 Immigration Restriction Act and The Immigration Act of 1965
Will The RAISE Act Raise Employment Prospects
PFIR Unveils Its H1-B Visa Database
The misconception that H1-B Visa holders are high skilled workers
The middle class exodus out of California
New Urbanism
The dilemma that progressives are misguided on immigration while Trump and the Republicans are anti-environment, and the need for a new political paradigm
Cracks in the PC coalition continue to show.
By Elizabeth Ames
FOX News
The mainstream media failed to see the rise of Donald Trump in 2016. Now it’s overlooking another grassroots movement that may soon be of equal significance— the growing number of liberals “taking the red pill.” People of all ages and ethnicities are posting YouTube videos describing “red pill moments”—personal awakenings that have caused them to reject leftist narratives imbibed since childhood from friends, teachers, and the news and entertainment media.
You might say that those who take the red pill have been “triggered.” But instead of seeking out “safe spaces,” they’re doing the opposite, posting monologues throwing off the shackles of political correctness.
Their videos can feature the kind of subversiveness that was once a hallmark of the left—before the movement lost its sense of humor.
Candace Owens, a charismatic young African American, posts commentaries on her YouTube channel whose titles seem expressly designed to make PC heads explode.
A sample: “I Don’t Care About Charlottesville, the KKK, or White Supremacy.” The commentary calls out liberal fearmongering over white supremacists. “I mean there are, what, 6,000 Klansmen left in our nation. You want me to actually process that as a legitimate fear every day when I wake up?”
Not insignificantly, her video got nearly 500,000 views and overwhelmingly enthusiastic comments. (“you rock, girl!” “this woman is awesome.”)
A later episode about Black Lives Matter got nearly 700,000 views and had the distinction of being briefly taken down by YouTube. Unapologetic, Owens responded with a follow-up commentary — “What YouTube and Facebook REALLY Think of Black People.”
Pan-anarchism for Amazons?
TheLilly.Com
On Thursday, an earthquake devastated parts of Mexico, killing at least 65 people in what President Enrique Peña Nieto called the country’s most powerful tremor in the past 100 years.
Approximately 50 million people felt the 8.1-magnitude earthquake, which was centered more than 600 miles from Mexico City in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Tapachula, a town in Chiapas famous as a way station for Central American migrants headed to the United States.
But one of the worst-hit towns appeared to be Juchitan, located in the state of Oaxaca. At least 36 people have been killed there. Entire streets have been turned into rubble; the town’s white city hall has been reduced to debris.
Juchitan plays a special role in Mexico. The city of 100,000 is home to the country’s indigenous Zapotec people, who run a matriarchal society.
“Women are public figures here,” Marina Meneses, a sociologist and Juchitan resident, told the Los Angeles Times. “Women are the main organizers.”
Many of the city’s men work as fishermen or farmhands, which leaves women to run the market. That economic freedom translates to social freedom.
Robert Stark talks to Keith Preston of Attack the System for a written interview.
Topics include:
It could be that Trump has started a trend where the political class, corporate class, and celebrity class are increasingly blended into each other. Also, a Zuckerberg presidential candidacy would be significant in that he represents social and economic forces outside the traditional WASP plutocracy to a much greater degree than Trump in that he is both a minority (Jewish) and part of the rising class of the “newly rich” (i.e. those from outside the traditional elite who have acquired enormous amounts of wealth in newer, high-tech industries.)My suspicion is that Trump’s upset victory in 2016 largely represents “WASP America’s last stand” and that the trend begun by Obama of political leaders increasingly being drawn from the ranks of those outside the traditional elite (e.g. ethnic minorities or the newly rich from outside the traditional plutocracy) will continue in the future.
By Shawn M. Carter
CNBC
There’s increasing speculation that Mark Zuckerberg, the self-made billionaire chairman, co-founder and chief executive officer of Facebook, may one day run for office. And though it’s unclear that he will make a bid for to be the next U.S. President in 2020, he could certainly afford it.
The clues
According to Politico, some of the signs that he does plan to run are there.
Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan have hired Joel Benenson, a Democratic pollster, adviser to former President Barack Obama and chief strategist of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, as a consultant for their joint philanthropic project, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.
The pair also hired David Plouffe, campaign manager for Obama’s 2008 presidential run; Amy Dudley, former communications adviser for Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va.; and Ken Mehlman, who directed President George W. Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign.
Zuckerberg is on a yearlong “listening tour,” where he is traveling to all 50 states and meeting with leaders and constituents in each — and, to document the trip, he has hired Charles Ommanney, a photographer for both the Bush and Obama presidential campaigns.
Some interesting comments from Lorenzo Komboa Ervin posted below.
I would agree with much of his analysis, except to say that Trump is not a fascist. He’s more like the Republicans we had back in the 70s like Nixon and Nelson Rockefeller (which is bad enough). It’s possible to criticize the establishment without exaggerating. All of the things that are being criticized in this statement have been generated by the neoconservative/neoliberal Center, and not by “fascists.” Radicals need to forget about these loopy fringe groups and start focusing on attacking the state/corporate/imperialist Center. The most dangerous thing about the far right at present is that some of them commit individual violent crimes (which makes them no different than tons of other violent criminals in US society). Other than that, the neo-Nazis and other similar tendencies are irrelevant pariahs. And the Antifa are Maoist and Trotskyist infiltrated gangsters that are just as worthless as commie terrorist groups from the past like the Weathermen.
From Lorenzo Komboa Ervin
My point of differentiation with Antifa, the ARA, and many Anarchists is that I have always considered the state and monopoly capitalist corporations as the greatest threat of fascism, not fascist street forces. A pro-fascist coalition now runs the state itself with the Trump administration, which screams out for new strategy and tactics.
The other thing is that Antifa do not unite with the history of Black anti-fascism and unite with communities of color. I have had this criticism for many years, and I think for Antifa to go to the next stage, it must build a mass movement, not just serve as a vanguard paramilitary force alone.
We have seen the war on drugs and rise of mass imprisonment of Blacks/POC, 30 + years of mass murders of Blacks/POC by paramilitary police, austerity attacks against the poor, the rise of corporate power and consolidation with the state, and so on, all of which opened the door for Trump’s corporate fascist regime.
William Schnack is an author, philosopher, and community organizer. On the show we discuss Pierre-Joseph Proudon’s mutual credit bank (mutualism), Henry George’s land value tax (Georgism), and how these two schools can be married under the libertarian philosophy of geo-mutualism.
By Chloe Farand
Independent
Peter Temin says 80 per cent of the population is burdened with debt and anxious about job security.
America is regressing to have the economic and political structure of a developing nation, an MIT economist has warned.
Peter Temin says the world’s’ largest economy has roads and bridges that look more like those in Thailand and Venezuela than those in parts of Europe.
In his new book, “The Vanishing Middle Class”, reviewed by the Institute for New Economic Thinking, Mr Temin says the fracture of US society is leading the middle class to disappear.
The Baby Boomers were the product of the largest and most prosperous middle class in world history which has subsequently been destroyed by the convergence of dozens of factors.
By Lauren Messman
VICE
Despite being the largest and best-educated generation in the country, millennials are far worse off financially than baby boomers were, spelling out a troubling financial future for young people throughout their lifetime, according to a depressing new analysis from the advocacy group Young Invincibles.
After looking at 2013 Federal Reserve data for 25- to 34-year-olds and comparing it with the same age group back in 1989, the analysis found that millennials today are making a median income of around $40,000—a whopping 20 percent drop from what baby boomers were earning when they were just starting out. Baby boomers also had twice the number of assets that millennials have now.
By Alexander Kolokotronis
ROAR Mag
A municipalist revolution is impossible without the support and cooperation of labor unions. In some cases, labor unions might themselves take the lead in promulgating a municipalist shift. To effectively pursue this path, the left must grapple with the diverse composition and structure of the working class — joining calls for union democracy with nascent municipalist movements. Experiments in participatory democracy can then be tried and tested at the intra-union level, nourishing possibilities for subsequent municipal-wide implementation.
Developments in the United States and Spain are showing that municipalist participatory platforms can win. Examples include the mayoral election of Chokwe Lumumba Jr. in Jackson, Mississippi on a three-pronged platform of building peoples’ assemblies, a solidarity economy and a network of progressive political candidates. A number of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) candidates are running on platforms of expanding participatory democracy and the workers’ cooperative sector. Municipalist movements are proliferating as a means of resisting Donald Trump and a rising far-right.
Political battles of the future will be between the forces of global capital and city-states where non-state actors manage to gain hegemony.
By Jamie Bartlett
Aeon.Com
If you’d been born 1,500 years ago in southern Europe, you’d have been convinced that the Roman empire would last forever. It had, after all, been around for 1,000 years. And yet, following a period of economic and military decline, it fell apart. By 476 CE it was gone. To the people living under the mighty empire, these events must have been unthinkable. Just as they must have been for those living through the collapse of the Pharaoh’s rule or Christendom or the Ancien Régime.
We are just as deluded that our model of living in ‘countries’ is inevitable and eternal. Yes, there are dictatorships and democracies, but the whole world is made up of nation-states. This means a blend of ‘nation’ (people with common attributes and characteristics) and ‘state’ (an organised political system with sovereignty over a defined space, with borders agreed by other nation-states). Try to imagine a world without countries – you can’t. Our sense of who we are, our loyalties, our rights and obligations, are bound up in them.
Todd Lewis joined by Keith Preston to discuss US foreign policy during the interwar period and WW2.
Press TV. Listen here.
Although the official US narrative on the September 11, 2001 attacks does not give away the real perpetrators behind the operation, it can be safely assumed that “Wahhabi” elements from Saudi Arabia provided direct support to them, says an analyst in Virginia.
Keith Preston, director of the attackthesystem.com, made the remarks while discussing new evidence in a lawsuit that holds Saudi Arabia responsible for the attacks that killed more than 3,000 people 16 years ago.
The lawsuit alleges that the Saudi embassy in Washington paid for two Saudi nationals, living undercover in the US as students, to fly from the city of Phoenix to Washington “in a dry run for the 9/11 attacks” two years before their occurrence, the New York Post reported on Saturday.
Veteran anarcho-communist writer Wayne Price has offered a critique of my summary of the 2017 conference of the National-Anarchist Movement in Madrid on the Anarkismo site. Read my original article here, and Price’s reply here. My response to price is below.
By Keith Preston
This is the response to Wayne Price’s critique of the N-AM conference that I posted on Anarkismo.
Given that I am both the author of the original article that Wayne Price critiques, and one of the presenters at the conference in Madrid, I should offer a response to Price’s criticisms.
The individual presenters at the conference are capable of speaking for themselves, which Sean has already done, so I won’t take it upon myself to offer a defense of anyone’s specific views. Instead, I will point out that there were a range of perspectives presented at the conference by people of divergent backgrounds, and the same was true of conference attendees as well. For example, there were people present who expressed both positive and negative views of anarcho-primitivism, and I met at least one self-identified anarcho-capitalist among the attendees and another with pro-Israel sympathies.
Wayne says, “The article is written by one Keith Preston, who has claimed to be trying to pull together left and right libertarianism, anarchist-communism and national-anarchism.” This is correct. Those who are interested in the contents of my own presentation can watch a video of the whole thing here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1Q94OT2JSA&feature=share
Wayne says, “The Nazis denounced capitalism and big business (especially their “left wing” which stupidly believed this rhetoric, until Hitler got into power and had “left Nazis” killed).” This would seem to be a selective criticism. Could not the same thing be said of the the followers of Lenin, Caballero, Mao, Kim, Castro, Ho, Pol Pot, and, indeed, virtually every leading Marxist revolutionary of the past century?
Wayne says, “So these pseudo-anarchists denounce the state, the international capitalist ruling class, imperialism, and the dangerous misuse of technology by capitalism. Preston summarizes, “much of what was said was highly relevant to the ideas of the libertarian-left and the libertarian-right alike, as well as those affiliated with anti-globalization, environmental, anti-imperialist, indigenous, anti-state, and anti-corporate movements generally.”How does this make anyone a “pseudo-anarchist”?
Wayne says, “The NA propose replacing the centralized state and mass society by more-or-less autonomous communities. The communities will form themselves on whatever basis they want, but (surprise!) the NA suggest forming them on the basis of “ethnicity.” The idea is that N-A communities can be based on any foundations their members wish, from animal liberation and veganism to Star Trek fandom, with the recognition that ethnicity (along with culture, geography, language, religion, family, socioeconomic status, and occupation) is among the predominant factors in human social organization, as any freshman-level social science student should be able to recognize.
Press TV. Listen here.
he United States is planning to include Ukraine in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), suggests an American analyst, arguing that the move would separate Moscow and Kiev forever and serve Washington’s ultimate goal of “encircling” Russia.
“The relationship between the US and Russia is bound to be strained because the two nations have entirely different geopolitical interests,” Keith Preston, director of the attackthesystem.com, told Press TV.
“The ambition of the United States, when it comes to Russia, is to encircle Russia and isolate it militarily and politically in the sense of extending the NATO alliance straight up to Russia’s borders so all of the Easter European and Baltic States would be included” in the military pact, he argued.
Russia, on the other hand, is seeking to salvage relations with Ukraine to protect its own geopolitical interests.
“So, essentially, Ukraine as a nation is caught right in the middle in this geopolitical rivalry between the United States and the NATO alliance on the one hand and Russia on the other,” the analyst continued.
Ukraine has applied to join the alliance.
Conflict erupted in eastern Ukraine after people in the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea voted for unification with Russia in March 2014.
The West brands the unification as annexation of the territory by Russia. The US and its allies in Europe also accuse Russia of having a major hand in the crisis in eastern Ukraine, an allegation denied by Moscow.
During a news conference on Tuesday, Russian president Vladimir Putin warned Washington against supplying arms to Kiev, arguing that the decision would fuel the conflict in eastern Ukraine.
Putin said arming Ukraine will possibly prompt pro-Russia forces to expand their campaign, stressing that the move would not change the situation and would only add to the number of casualties.
The crisis has left over 10,000 people dead and more than a million others displaced, according to the United Nations.
Preston said Washington was also seeking to curb Moscow’s influence in the Middle East through a similar policy.
The Underground Reporter
Are police necessary? Although this existential question often produces a knee-jerk ‘of course they are, who would protect us?’ a growing call for the abolition of police — and working examples to back it up — deserves more than scornful dismissal, particularly amid epidemic-level violence by agents of the state.
Police are under no obligation to protect the public they putatively serve — a series of state and Supreme Court decisions stretching back more than three decades indisputably establish this fact — so the lingering question, ‘who will protect us?’ is of no consequence to the case for dismantling every police department in the nation.
On the contrary, police kill, maim, intimidate, harass, and generally brutalize the citizenry with alarming frequency — and rarely face consequences beyond a paid vacation farcically termed ‘administrative leave’ for doing so.
Rather than fight and solve violent crimes, police act as little more than heavily militarized code-enforcers, or as David Graeber of the London School of Economics aptly terms, “bureaucrats with weapons” — protecting us from broken tail lights, missing front license plates, and imperfect lane changes more often than from robbery, homicide, and rape.
Give police the equipment and weapons of war under the premise of fighting terrorism, when terrorism is all but nonexistent, and predictably, they will go to war. As Abraham Maslow posited in 1966 in a concept known as the law of the instrument, “I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.”
We, the citizenry, are not nails to be forcibly and violently coerced into submission over the tiniest of nonviolent and inconsequential infractions — but, whether or not we’re inclined to admit as much, that summarizes our current situation in the eyes of an overbearing state and its criminalization of, in essence, daily life.
Trump goes predictably full Nixon/Reagan on drug policy. Expect a backlash in the future given the racial implications of drug policy and the racially controversial nature of the Trump presidency.. The next Democratic President will likely be the furthest left the US has ever had. Just like Bill Clinton seems rather conservative by today’s standards, the next Democratic President will likely make Obama seem comparatively right-wing.
By Lois Beckett
The Guardian
Shauna Barry-Scott remembers the moment she felt the American fever for mass incarceration break. It was an August morning in 2013, and she was in a federal prison in the mountains of West Virginia. She remembers crowding into the TV room with the other women in their khaki uniforms. Everyone who could get out of their work shifts was there, waiting. Good news was on the way, advocates had told them. Watch for it.
Some of her fellow inmates were cynical: it seemed like millions of rumors of reform had swept through the federal prison system to only then dissolve. Barry-Scott did not blame them, but she was more hopeful.
At age 41, she had been sentenced to 20 years in prison for possession with the intent to distribute 4.5 ounces of crack cocaine. “Think of a 12oz can of Coke, cut that in a third,” she explains. “And that’s what I got 20 years for.” The sentence made no sense to her. Barry-Scott’s son had been murdered in 1998, and the men charged with shooting him to death had to serve less time than she did – six and seven years each, she says.
But the amount of drugs in her possession had triggered a mandatory minimum sentence, part of a now-infamous law passed in 1986 to impose punitive sentences for certain offenses amid a rising panic over drug abuse. In 1980, some 25,000 people were incarcerated in federal prisons. By 2013 after four decades of America’s war on drugs, there were 219,000. Yet this population was just a small fraction of the estimated 2.3 million Americans locked up not only in federal prisons, but also in state facilities and local jails.
Many liberals and leftists that I know are currently in a state of panic over the rise of the Alt-Right, which they predictably regard as the onset of the Fourth Reich. In reality, the Alt-Right is a very small movement that is made to seem much, much larger than it is because of its provocative effect which is duly amplified by the sensationalist media.
The Alt-Right is an entirely predictable backlash against ongoing demographic transformation of the US, the entrenchment of political correctness, globalization, and the hegemony of the neocons in mainstream conservatism. The Alt-Right is to white nationalism what the Religious Right was to Christian conservatism, only with a lot less in the way of size, resources or influence. In nearly 40 years of its existence, the Religious Right has lost every one of its major issues (abortion, school prayer, gay rights, gay marriage, reversing the sexual revolution of the 1960s, gender roles, family relations, education policy, etc.) and the Alt-Right will be even less successful in the long run.
The Religious Right merely wanted to turn back the clock to the 1950s while the Alt-Right wants to go back to the 1920s when segregation, eugenics, and comprehensive immigration were the status quo. Ain’t gonna happen. In fact, neo-Nixonian Donald Trump may well turn out to be the right-wing’s last stand. (And unless anyone accuses me of libertarian bias, it is even more unlikely that the mainstream libertarian program of turning back the clock to the Gilded Age is going to happen).
By Thomas J. Main
Los Angeles Times
Inquiring minds want to know: What exactly is the “alt-right,” and how large is the audience for the movement?
The essence of the alt-right can be distilled to this catchphrase: All people are not created equal. That’s even more extreme than it may sound. Prominent alt-right thinkers don’t only believe that some are naturally taller, stronger or smarter than others, but also that some groups are more deserving of political status than others. They reject the concept of equality before the law.
Andrew Anglin is editor of the most popular alt-right web magazine, the Daily Stormer. He has written that “The Alt-Right does not accept the pseudo-scientific claims that ‘all races are equal.’” He also supports repatriation of American blacks to Africa or “autonomous territory” within the U.S.
Not all alt-right thinkers are so radical in their aims, but they all believe in some form of race-based political inegalitarianism. The unequal brigade includes in its ranks editors of and regular contributors to many alt-right web magazines, including Richard Spencer of Radix Journal, Mike Enoch of the Right Stuff, Brad Griffin (also known as Hunter Wallace) of Occidental Dissent, Jared Taylor of American Renaissance and James Kirkpatrick of VDARE (named after Virginia Dare, the first British child born in America).
The exact size of the alt-right is perhaps not of the utmost importance. As an ideological movement, the alt-right seeks not immediate policy or electoral victories, but longer-term influence on how others think about politics. Still, it’s possible to get a sense of the scope of this netherworld through web traffic.
From September 2016 to May 2017, I analyzed visits and unique visitors to scores of political web magazines of various political orientations. (One person accessing a site five times in a month represents five visits but only one unique visitor). Through interviews and using the site Media Bias / Fact Check, I identified nine alt-right sites, 53 sites associated with the mainstream right, and 63 with the mainstream left. I excluded left- or right-leaning general-interest publications, such as BuzzFeed, the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. Data were obtained from SimilarWeb, a well-known provider of web-marketing information. All audience figures given here are monthly averages for the nine-month period I studied.
An interesting and massive new study on religion and culture. Obviously, the Left has no reason to fear a Christian theocratic takeover of America.
By Daniel Cox and Robert P. Jones
By Public Religion Research Institute
The American religious landscape is undergoing a dramatic transformation. White Christians, once the dominant religious group in the U.S., now account for fewer than half of all adults living in the country. Today, fewer than half of all states are majority white Christian. As recently as 2007, 39 states had majority white Christian populations. These are two of the major findings from this report, which is based on findings from PRRI’s 2016 American Values Atlas, the single largest survey of American religious and denominational identity ever conducted. This landmark report is based on a sample of more than 101,000 Americans from all 50 states and includes detailed information about their religious affiliation, denominational ties, political affiliation, and other important demographic attributes.
Among the major findings:
