We the American people who in the vast majority want the regime to not only collapse but be prosecuted and know we are being robbed are the final say. But what we witness being done to any one of us will be done to any of us in short order. The Treasury has been breached to the level the gentleman in charge resigned.
We know -- finally in the majority we all know. The regime is running scared and it will get ugly and we must be brave. As to this ridiculous mind boggling mainstream media tossing up words like Communism what we can do is be just as offensive in our retort but stay on the streets!
Democratic Socialism is not Strictly Socialism, or Communism, or for that matter Trumpism. It is in fact not new to America and has been the power behind so much of what we identify as American. Social programs that serve the people within a Democracy.
What amazes me is the ignorance. Not long ago if you wished to be informed one read at least 3 to 5 newspapers and magazines to boot. And if you needed any information, it meant a trip to the local Library or a visit to Washington DC to search with the help of a Librarian available to pave the way at the Library of Congress. I'm 75 and have done all of that to find out more and to stay informed. Not only that it was the norm. People were informed.
Today every one of us has a computer glued to our hand with which we doom scroll and send memes 24/7. The ignorance is what slays me. Ignorance by choice. It amazes me. The window of opportunity is closing, and no one will remember that cute meme you just sent when it is all over.
Actually, Rick, the Trump Administration, through Donald Trump, has already given the ICE shock troops the dog whistle (all democrats are communists) they need only to attack the Election polling stations and demand your voter registration card, identify you as a potential communist, and cart you away. Remember, They Don't Need No Stinking Badges! (I'm glad I re-read my posts when someone comments, I changed a couple of words after the word "Communist" to clarify my thought. My fingers are capable of rebellion at times.
Unlike in '19 and '20 when there was an inflamed protest movement afoot over the George Floyd police murder, protesters have behaved impeccably. All the wingnut "citizen journalist" influencers packed up and left Minnesota, LOL. No riots, no car-be-ques, no Antifa ruffians for a new Kyle Rittenhouse to shoot 'em up. So nobody can make a case, not rhetorically, not visually, not on FOX News, that ordinary voters are a danger to the community.
And if there's a serious danger of this, state governors will call out their National Guard.
We have a time warp wormhole. It wasn’t Teddy R DJT was talking to: it was Roy Cohen of the Joe McCarthy trials. Trump’s old mentor Roy Cohen. When everything else fails, call out the old standby. Goes right along with fins on cars, poodle skirts and the gold standard. I guess DJT believes in some version of recycling
Kinda like this article and congratulate Rick for his recovery process. My criticism is his not naming the real trajectory ongoing: Fascism. He ignores presenting the comparative definitions which makes me wonder if he actually knows the difference. Fascism is what we are seeing developing here and in many, if not most of the western nations. Fascism, the classic and simple definition as per Mussolini (and many today) is the Cooperation between the Corporation and the State. This is exactly what Trump means when he talks about Public/Private relationships. Mind you, the Dems do this as well as the GOP. Translate to the ways it expresses itself and we see the kind of inflation, the corruption of politicians that see their roles as the ladder to more wealth and power and the destruction of the people's power; ie, unionism, criminalization of free speech, the withdrawal of funding services for the people like well funded schools, day care, universal health care that is not controlled by the very profiteering industry that has been killing people by the millions annually, etc. Communism is simply the collective decision making by the people; socialism is the people's ownership of the production processes. Lets get our definitions straight and learn how to talk with each other with respect despite differences. Truth be told, the people have more in common than not.
Socialism: A catch-all term that's used for everything from entitlements like Social Security to the lifetime sinecures for heroin addicts (with free clean needles) they tried in the Netherlands a couple decades ago. Basically, any form of government aid can be described as an aspect of "socialism," which people associate with the various bureaucratic obnoxiousnesses of the tax man and the DMV. So much of the objections reduce to people who don't like being told what to do.
Communism: In the idealistic early Marx of the 1844 manuscripts, the ideal final stage of society where the state will peacefully wither away. When Lenin got his dirty little hands on Marx, Communism became permanently associated with advocacy of violent revolution to seize the means of production and enact the dictatorship of the vanguard party *cough* proletariat. This is why nobody sane or who isn't a psycho is a Communist anymore. It means you'll kill people.
Hint: None of the DSAiest of the new DSA candidates are remotely Communist, LOL
Social democracy: The main form of government and political economy in the developed world, with public and private sectors. Tattered and disrespected as it may be, the US has a social safety net. Social democracies have different flavors. The US needed birthright citizenship to flood the new country with immigrants to settle a vast frontier; Europe has no tradition of birthright citizenship and tends to be strongly in favor of welfare for strictly their own citizens (producerism); their immigration issues are, minus Trump, structurally more severe than ours. So don't go looking to Scandinavia as some sort of Socialist utopia or, as I love to say, someone will hurl a bucket of cold lutefisk at your head ;). The countries all have a more equitable tax base than ours, but they all recognize (including severe neoliberalism despisers like Yours Truly) that a market economy is the most efficient allocator of resources ever devised by the human mind.
Democratic socialism: A dorm room ideology disrespected for decades by the hard Marxist left and one which has never existed in nature. Like the Commies, they need the workers to control the means of production but they have an Underpants Gnome Theory of how they'll get all those factory owners to give it up like that, nonviolently. Give the Commies credit for honesty, anyway ;) The closest thing to it is corporate syndicalism and maybe the best example is the Mondragon Corporation in Portugal, a high-tech manufacturing concern where the workers are essentially also the shareholders and new ideas brought to the company that profit will benefit the innovators. I fully support that kind of high-level, integrated worker ownership. It's not Marxism. It's not founded on Ricardo's flawed labor theory of value. It demands a highly skilled, highly trained workforce who can think about what they're all doing holistically. Rick would love it ;)
The DSA: In my view, after years working with center-left social change groups and observing the internecine hijinks of the sectarian hard left, the DSA are an entirely benign organization and not a stalking horse for machine gun toting Commies at all, LOL. Nor are they aligned in any way with anarchist direct action cells (calling themselves Antifa or otherwise). They're like a left youth debating society and their foundational principle is nonviolent social change. This means they tend to adapt some of the cultural neomarxism that was popular in the 60s and 70s, that people are, in their true selves, socialists and if we could just scrape away all that false consciousness they'd see it and a violent revolution wouldn't be necessary. As a former sociology minor, I find that naive. As the DSA has now become a political force, I think we need to judge it by its works. How's Mamdani's NYC? You think he's building gulags for Rudy Giuliani superfans? ;)
Is Trump building gulags for Rick Wilson superfans? Maybe :(
Great read Rick Wilson. The American president is stealing from corporations, countries and the American people, and no one is holding him accountable. His Court Justices gave him Executive privilege for official acts. Only he cannot be reined in on his grift and enriching family and friends
I scroll past Trump. He is already history. Tossed in front of me by mainstream media to distract Americans from what we must do now. Hit the streets! Protest! Strike!
No one will remember the amusing whatever Trump did today when we reach our tomorrow. But only we the people can determine what that tomorrow will hold. No one is coming to save us either.
So, I say with the humility and awareness I am only one in a crowd of many that we stop doom scrolling in the hunt for a savior. Only the people united can save a nation folding under the oppression of a king, a dictator, a fascist, a monster -- and that horror will be your child's and their children's reality if we the adults in the room don't disconnect and engage!
I suffered a medical setback so have backed off physically protesting, but I donate to campaigns across the nation to unseat MAGA and in support of those fighting to hold on, and I am volunteering at the polls. Let's share what we are doing about the threat and generate the energy we need to win!
Good points. My dissertation on the system of real property shows that we basically have a mixed economy. The question should be: what is the best mix of the public, nonprofit and market sectors to address human needs, consistently with human rights and constitutional rights.
I would add we have a massive employee benefit system as well. But the benefits do not accrue to the citizens in the secondary labor market of small firms and self-employed people. They, like my barber, resent the employees and managers and owners of the large public, private and nonprofit firms, who have good health benefits and so forth.
Trump draws on that resentment and claims the communists are coming. No, it is mainly young democratic socialists furious about poverty and economic inequality--which they think is produced by capitalism--and the spreading of hatred against peole of color, immigrants and LGBTQIA folks.
One of the huge problems is to recognize is that we do not have a free market economy really; large entities are typically dependent on public funding and often "externalized their costs" onto the society, an issue Charles Perrow wrote about in Organizing America.
I posted this on the last thread after it died. It's more relevant here:
The "Communism" discourse is going to be very enjoyable for me to watch. Rick spent most of his political career calling guys like me traitors because we were born with a God-given empathy for our fellow man and then had the nerve to claim it had something to do with a 19th-century German philosopher, LOL. Rick's gonna have to eat a lot of crow for this and I'm here for it ;)
Mitt Romney Himself, may Moroni bless his milk-drinking ass, nuked the prevailing American consensus on social welfare, something we inherited from the Victorian era of workhouses and debtors' prisons -- which sanctioned government assistance for the Deserving Poor. You know, blind people, cripples (I'm using the old language deliberately), widows, orphans and any able-bodied folk who society might benefit from giving them, in Bubba's immortal words, "a hand up, not a handout." But ol' Mittens, grousing to his big donors in that delightfully passive-aggressive Mormon way, lamented that a whole 47% of the American population depended on government assistance. (He certainly didn't intend such a rude comment to ever be made public, though, LOL)
This not only makes the whole game of getting poors to narc on each other for being welfare cheats that much harder, it's also a concrete measure of how ever-more-difficult it has become to make it on your own. The 47% "gaffe" came two years after the housing meltdown. Imagine that number after years of covid assistance. And what it means is that people are slowly, ever-begrudgingly, accepting that activist government does good things in their lives. This is why the broligarchy wants to convert them into biomass fuel. Seriously. Elon thinks the poors are subhuman.
The standard attacks on "Socialism" thus no longer work. The attacks on Communism have a niche appeal but they're clownish. Let them explain why Jesus would oppose universal healthcare ;)
OMG this entire post is an ad for Ground News. Sorry Rick, I don't need to subscribe with payment to an AI algorithm service like some benighted King of the Midwits in order to figure out who benefits.
The only advocate for Ground News I'd ever take seriously is one who isn't paid by Ground News. Apparently that creature doesn't exist in nature, LOL
Real socialists are getting elected to political offices in the US. That ought to be a genuine concern. However, the greater concern by far right now is MAGA fascism.
Pedant alert. Communism is a stateless society where the people jointly own and control means of production. Socialism is public ownership of the means of production via the state. Marxist ideology sees socialism as a stage toward communism.
Communism == "Something that no longer exists, not even in "communist" China, but MAGAs label everything they don’t like as communist - which includes eating vegetables and brushing their teeth." Hey MAGA the 1950s are calling they want their Red Scare back."
Republicans have been calling Democrats socialists since at least as far back as FDR. No, no country calling itself socialist has every actually carried out real socialism. However, whether in theory or practice, socialism is bad, and there are many around the world who seek to impose an authoritarian system they call socialism on society.
Reds are reds!
https://substack.com/@gemmettbeaver/note/p-209158285?r=sqx9x&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-actionS
We the American people who in the vast majority want the regime to not only collapse but be prosecuted and know we are being robbed are the final say. But what we witness being done to any one of us will be done to any of us in short order. The Treasury has been breached to the level the gentleman in charge resigned.
We know -- finally in the majority we all know. The regime is running scared and it will get ugly and we must be brave. As to this ridiculous mind boggling mainstream media tossing up words like Communism what we can do is be just as offensive in our retort but stay on the streets!
Democratic Socialism is not Strictly Socialism, or Communism, or for that matter Trumpism. It is in fact not new to America and has been the power behind so much of what we identify as American. Social programs that serve the people within a Democracy.
What amazes me is the ignorance. Not long ago if you wished to be informed one read at least 3 to 5 newspapers and magazines to boot. And if you needed any information, it meant a trip to the local Library or a visit to Washington DC to search with the help of a Librarian available to pave the way at the Library of Congress. I'm 75 and have done all of that to find out more and to stay informed. Not only that it was the norm. People were informed.
Today every one of us has a computer glued to our hand with which we doom scroll and send memes 24/7. The ignorance is what slays me. Ignorance by choice. It amazes me. The window of opportunity is closing, and no one will remember that cute meme you just sent when it is all over.
Actually, Rick, the Trump Administration, through Donald Trump, has already given the ICE shock troops the dog whistle (all democrats are communists) they need only to attack the Election polling stations and demand your voter registration card, identify you as a potential communist, and cart you away. Remember, They Don't Need No Stinking Badges! (I'm glad I re-read my posts when someone comments, I changed a couple of words after the word "Communist" to clarify my thought. My fingers are capable of rebellion at times.
Unlike in '19 and '20 when there was an inflamed protest movement afoot over the George Floyd police murder, protesters have behaved impeccably. All the wingnut "citizen journalist" influencers packed up and left Minnesota, LOL. No riots, no car-be-ques, no Antifa ruffians for a new Kyle Rittenhouse to shoot 'em up. So nobody can make a case, not rhetorically, not visually, not on FOX News, that ordinary voters are a danger to the community.
And if there's a serious danger of this, state governors will call out their National Guard.
Trump never heard of communism before, so he thinks it's like antifa.
We have a time warp wormhole. It wasn’t Teddy R DJT was talking to: it was Roy Cohen of the Joe McCarthy trials. Trump’s old mentor Roy Cohen. When everything else fails, call out the old standby. Goes right along with fins on cars, poodle skirts and the gold standard. I guess DJT believes in some version of recycling
Roy Cohn, but yeah.
Ees gud article, tovarishch. Hero of Soviet Union—I mean, Russian Federation—for you!
Kinda like this article and congratulate Rick for his recovery process. My criticism is his not naming the real trajectory ongoing: Fascism. He ignores presenting the comparative definitions which makes me wonder if he actually knows the difference. Fascism is what we are seeing developing here and in many, if not most of the western nations. Fascism, the classic and simple definition as per Mussolini (and many today) is the Cooperation between the Corporation and the State. This is exactly what Trump means when he talks about Public/Private relationships. Mind you, the Dems do this as well as the GOP. Translate to the ways it expresses itself and we see the kind of inflation, the corruption of politicians that see their roles as the ladder to more wealth and power and the destruction of the people's power; ie, unionism, criminalization of free speech, the withdrawal of funding services for the people like well funded schools, day care, universal health care that is not controlled by the very profiteering industry that has been killing people by the millions annually, etc. Communism is simply the collective decision making by the people; socialism is the people's ownership of the production processes. Lets get our definitions straight and learn how to talk with each other with respect despite differences. Truth be told, the people have more in common than not.
Some thumbnail definitions:
Socialism: A catch-all term that's used for everything from entitlements like Social Security to the lifetime sinecures for heroin addicts (with free clean needles) they tried in the Netherlands a couple decades ago. Basically, any form of government aid can be described as an aspect of "socialism," which people associate with the various bureaucratic obnoxiousnesses of the tax man and the DMV. So much of the objections reduce to people who don't like being told what to do.
Communism: In the idealistic early Marx of the 1844 manuscripts, the ideal final stage of society where the state will peacefully wither away. When Lenin got his dirty little hands on Marx, Communism became permanently associated with advocacy of violent revolution to seize the means of production and enact the dictatorship of the vanguard party *cough* proletariat. This is why nobody sane or who isn't a psycho is a Communist anymore. It means you'll kill people.
Hint: None of the DSAiest of the new DSA candidates are remotely Communist, LOL
Social democracy: The main form of government and political economy in the developed world, with public and private sectors. Tattered and disrespected as it may be, the US has a social safety net. Social democracies have different flavors. The US needed birthright citizenship to flood the new country with immigrants to settle a vast frontier; Europe has no tradition of birthright citizenship and tends to be strongly in favor of welfare for strictly their own citizens (producerism); their immigration issues are, minus Trump, structurally more severe than ours. So don't go looking to Scandinavia as some sort of Socialist utopia or, as I love to say, someone will hurl a bucket of cold lutefisk at your head ;). The countries all have a more equitable tax base than ours, but they all recognize (including severe neoliberalism despisers like Yours Truly) that a market economy is the most efficient allocator of resources ever devised by the human mind.
Democratic socialism: A dorm room ideology disrespected for decades by the hard Marxist left and one which has never existed in nature. Like the Commies, they need the workers to control the means of production but they have an Underpants Gnome Theory of how they'll get all those factory owners to give it up like that, nonviolently. Give the Commies credit for honesty, anyway ;) The closest thing to it is corporate syndicalism and maybe the best example is the Mondragon Corporation in Portugal, a high-tech manufacturing concern where the workers are essentially also the shareholders and new ideas brought to the company that profit will benefit the innovators. I fully support that kind of high-level, integrated worker ownership. It's not Marxism. It's not founded on Ricardo's flawed labor theory of value. It demands a highly skilled, highly trained workforce who can think about what they're all doing holistically. Rick would love it ;)
The DSA: In my view, after years working with center-left social change groups and observing the internecine hijinks of the sectarian hard left, the DSA are an entirely benign organization and not a stalking horse for machine gun toting Commies at all, LOL. Nor are they aligned in any way with anarchist direct action cells (calling themselves Antifa or otherwise). They're like a left youth debating society and their foundational principle is nonviolent social change. This means they tend to adapt some of the cultural neomarxism that was popular in the 60s and 70s, that people are, in their true selves, socialists and if we could just scrape away all that false consciousness they'd see it and a violent revolution wouldn't be necessary. As a former sociology minor, I find that naive. As the DSA has now become a political force, I think we need to judge it by its works. How's Mamdani's NYC? You think he's building gulags for Rudy Giuliani superfans? ;)
Is Trump building gulags for Rick Wilson superfans? Maybe :(
Great read Rick Wilson. The American president is stealing from corporations, countries and the American people, and no one is holding him accountable. His Court Justices gave him Executive privilege for official acts. Only he cannot be reined in on his grift and enriching family and friends
I
Did anyone besides me see the presser Trump held today at NATO?
My God. If gramps acted like that at Thanksgiving you’d have started the embalming process right there, pre turkey
I scroll past Trump. He is already history. Tossed in front of me by mainstream media to distract Americans from what we must do now. Hit the streets! Protest! Strike!
No one will remember the amusing whatever Trump did today when we reach our tomorrow. But only we the people can determine what that tomorrow will hold. No one is coming to save us either.
So, I say with the humility and awareness I am only one in a crowd of many that we stop doom scrolling in the hunt for a savior. Only the people united can save a nation folding under the oppression of a king, a dictator, a fascist, a monster -- and that horror will be your child's and their children's reality if we the adults in the room don't disconnect and engage!
I suffered a medical setback so have backed off physically protesting, but I donate to campaigns across the nation to unseat MAGA and in support of those fighting to hold on, and I am volunteering at the polls. Let's share what we are doing about the threat and generate the energy we need to win!
Has anyone here NOT had a 20min convo with Mitch?
Good points. My dissertation on the system of real property shows that we basically have a mixed economy. The question should be: what is the best mix of the public, nonprofit and market sectors to address human needs, consistently with human rights and constitutional rights.
Trump is crying communism to stoke fears about socialism, when as the sociologist Nathan Newman has argued, we are already in many ways almost as social democratic as Western Europe: https://nathannewman.substack.com/p/the-democratic-party-is-as-socialist
I would add we have a massive employee benefit system as well. But the benefits do not accrue to the citizens in the secondary labor market of small firms and self-employed people. They, like my barber, resent the employees and managers and owners of the large public, private and nonprofit firms, who have good health benefits and so forth.
Trump draws on that resentment and claims the communists are coming. No, it is mainly young democratic socialists furious about poverty and economic inequality--which they think is produced by capitalism--and the spreading of hatred against peole of color, immigrants and LGBTQIA folks.
One of the huge problems is to recognize is that we do not have a free market economy really; large entities are typically dependent on public funding and often "externalized their costs" onto the society, an issue Charles Perrow wrote about in Organizing America.
I posted this on the last thread after it died. It's more relevant here:
The "Communism" discourse is going to be very enjoyable for me to watch. Rick spent most of his political career calling guys like me traitors because we were born with a God-given empathy for our fellow man and then had the nerve to claim it had something to do with a 19th-century German philosopher, LOL. Rick's gonna have to eat a lot of crow for this and I'm here for it ;)
Mitt Romney Himself, may Moroni bless his milk-drinking ass, nuked the prevailing American consensus on social welfare, something we inherited from the Victorian era of workhouses and debtors' prisons -- which sanctioned government assistance for the Deserving Poor. You know, blind people, cripples (I'm using the old language deliberately), widows, orphans and any able-bodied folk who society might benefit from giving them, in Bubba's immortal words, "a hand up, not a handout." But ol' Mittens, grousing to his big donors in that delightfully passive-aggressive Mormon way, lamented that a whole 47% of the American population depended on government assistance. (He certainly didn't intend such a rude comment to ever be made public, though, LOL)
This not only makes the whole game of getting poors to narc on each other for being welfare cheats that much harder, it's also a concrete measure of how ever-more-difficult it has become to make it on your own. The 47% "gaffe" came two years after the housing meltdown. Imagine that number after years of covid assistance. And what it means is that people are slowly, ever-begrudgingly, accepting that activist government does good things in their lives. This is why the broligarchy wants to convert them into biomass fuel. Seriously. Elon thinks the poors are subhuman.
The standard attacks on "Socialism" thus no longer work. The attacks on Communism have a niche appeal but they're clownish. Let them explain why Jesus would oppose universal healthcare ;)
OMG this entire post is an ad for Ground News. Sorry Rick, I don't need to subscribe with payment to an AI algorithm service like some benighted King of the Midwits in order to figure out who benefits.
The only advocate for Ground News I'd ever take seriously is one who isn't paid by Ground News. Apparently that creature doesn't exist in nature, LOL
The news came out that Trump is telling Walmart how much they can charge for ground beef.
Trump is seizing the means of production from private US companies, and he tells them how to run their businesses.
That's communism.
Real socialists are getting elected to political offices in the US. That ought to be a genuine concern. However, the greater concern by far right now is MAGA fascism.
Pedant alert. Communism is a stateless society where the people jointly own and control means of production. Socialism is public ownership of the means of production via the state. Marxist ideology sees socialism as a stage toward communism.
GOP Dictionary:
Communism == "Something that no longer exists, not even in "communist" China, but MAGAs label everything they don’t like as communist - which includes eating vegetables and brushing their teeth." Hey MAGA the 1950s are calling they want their Red Scare back."
By "real," I meant "avowed."
Republicans have been calling Democrats socialists since at least as far back as FDR. No, no country calling itself socialist has every actually carried out real socialism. However, whether in theory or practice, socialism is bad, and there are many around the world who seek to impose an authoritarian system they call socialism on society.