Dear patient readers, since this is both a travel day for me and Martin Luther King Day, I’m going to be lazy and put up some MLK material only. Tomorrow I will return at full force. Talk amongst yourselves! –lambert
By Lambert Strether of Corrente.
That was then:
The FBI's 'suicide letter' to #MLK
“There is only one thing left for you to do,” the author warns vaguely in the final paragraph. “You know what it is.”
Part of J. Edgar Hoover's campaign to discredit the great civil rights leader.https://t.co/iyttrp4RQs pic.twitter.com/BmDkWfxY7J
— Mark Elliott (@markmobility) January 21, 2019
This is now, or not:
Today, on the anniversary of his assassination, the FBI honors the life, work, & commitment of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to justice. pic.twitter.com/WZInYKQx2g
— FBI (@FBI) April 4, 2017
Gamers who get the importance of the Oxford comma:
Sanders: it's all too easy to feel lost, these days. there are exits to the north, the east, the south, and the west. but my fellow americans, there are more verbs in this parser than austerity, greed, and the same neoliberal solutions. the american people demand more verbs!
— Just The Best Tweets (@bombsfall) January 21, 2019
Those bright young gamers really are crying out for a political figure to enter their maze of twisty little passages, all alike. Who will be the first? Granted, “austerity” is not a verb, at least not yet (and why indeed not?) But they have demands! We know what they are! More verbs! And this is a good demand, the best demand: You don’t take power with adjectives, for pity’s sake.
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MLK on BASIC INCOME so WELL DONE:
https://t.co/3dwsRwedxM
I would point out Chicago school proponents of a UBI perceived the need to limit democracy, so the mopes just don’t elect on the basis of increasing it or how those mentioned in the link above will just extract more rents off increased supply. Worst part is how some on the so called left take the bait and make it a human rights [tm] issue.
I think some of this might have been lost on MLK not to mention the changes post his death.
Just the idea that the right wing economic camp is so fixated on inflation – in money terms – makes any suggestion of a UBI something to be seriously concerned about. I mean its nothing new that inputs are sticky due to bargaining power and international price mechanics, which leaves labour as the only game in town to fiddle with [see Hudson], throwing a UBI at it does nothing to sort the fundamental problems which has manifested since wages and productivity diverged.
> throwing a UBI at it does nothing to sort the fundamental problems which has manifested since wages and productivity diverged.
Ding
If Mitch McConnell thinks that the government shut down and his role in it are popular in Kentucky, he may be mistaken.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Kentucky/search?q=McConnell&sort=new&restrict_sr=on
In a speech televised on C-Span this weekend, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said:
“The truth about this shutdown is that it is actually not about a wall, it is not about the border, and it is certainly not about the well-being of the American people. The truth is that this is about erosion of American democracy and the subversion of our most basic governmental norms.”
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/alexandria-ocasiocortez-aaron-sorkin-democrats-young-people-grow-up-statement-latest-a8737896.html
Bigger stakes in play in this engineered “crisis” than seem evident at first blush IMO.
While I would agree with her on the first part…. the end is both misleading for all (what democracy?) and meaningless to many. I’ve hardly heard people discuss the shutdown. In fact if I didn’t read places like NC and relied upon word of mouth I wouldn’t have known of a shutdown until about a week ago. And when I do hear talk it’s basically contempt for all of them. Contempt by all for all is the closest thing to “norm” around here.
The government being shutdown isn’t normal, never has been normal and never should be considered normal because a government can’t be effective if it can’t agree to be open. That’s pretty close to the definition of a broken government.
More importantly, a voting public who doesn’t understand why keeping the government open is critical to the proper functioning of a government or care to find out are even bigger issues than a government that can’t stay open.
Not disagreeing with you, but you will have to wait more than a month for most around here to notice, much more feel life is not norm.
It’s as if the norm which you speak drowned in a bathtub so long ago, few could even imagine it.
People who use the word “norms” are our enemies because the norm in D.C. is our enemy. The normal economy is inimical to the 99%. Let’s get really obvious and agree that civil war or whatever would be worse than what we have now. Sure, but declining life expectancy. This is not a good tweet by AOC.
Let’s motivate everyone to restore “norms”! Yeah! What a rallying cry. Sort of like “inequality”. Yeah, let’s get rid of that… What motivates people is precarity in their personal lives. Not the billionaire on TV.
Universal concrete material benefits or bust!
Perhaps not the quintessential quote from Dr. King, but one that shows his concerns went beyond just racial inequality (from 1967):
“The problem of racial injustice and economic injustice cannot be solved without radical redistribution of racial and economic power.”
(h/t to David Horsey of the Seattle Times).
The good Reverend was concerned with poor people of every race; an aspect of his legacy too often left in the shadows.
That’s not an accident. His blank check speech and Poor People’s Campaign is inconvenient for many. I am sure that the Black Misleadership Class along with the then nascent NeoLiberal Counter-Reformation’s theologians were happy to ignore it.
Cacti in January! Now, that’s enough to make me wistful.
Here’s to the end of winter, which unlike in Game of Thrones is, one hopes, going rather than coming.
Here in southern England we’ve not (yet!) had anything remotely describable as severe winter weather (hardly any days much below 40・F and only a handful of night frosts). So there’s plenty of snowdrops (Galanthus) and, for some reason, the Hebes are still flowering.
Hope ya’all toughing out the cold there are staying safe. We Brits are (like the Japanese, it has to be also said) are just hopeless in bad weather. An inch of snow falls south of Watford and the next day or so later there’s no milk in the supermarkets. After a week, you wonder if you’ll be reduced to strip searching mice for pieces of cheese.
> After a week, you wonder if you’ll be reduced to strip searching mice for pieces of cheese.
Your description of experiencing snow there still has me chuckling.
Thank you.
Tokyo isn’t prepared for snow. On the Sea of Japan side, it takes at least a meter of snow to slow people down much.
just had a foot of snow here and is bitter cold …. BUT would be very reluctant to swap for a wet, dark insipid winter in Northern Europe.
Well insulated wood framed houses, wood burners and a healthy investment in road clearing equipment allows us to fully enjoy those bitter cold sunny days with a daylight moon and the crackle of snow underfoot without hardship.
… while greasy Joan doth keel the pot ..
Kevin Gilbert – “Smash” Live at the Troubadour 1995
https://youtu.be/7hzCvo3k2ww
Paris – Guerilla Funk
https://youtu.be/-15gV2fDdvs
Soulive – Vapor
https://youtu.be/Y91lNSqBPYo?list=PLjeQtXQrIMvm9uBC_whw_UokrEyAPlNA0
Pierre Bensusan – Voyage for Ireland
https://youtu.be/nA3lFuQyFnk
Martin Hayes & Dennis Cahill – The Morning Dew
https://youtu.be/Kfyu67M8994
Irish fiddle tunes never get old. Another from Hayes and Cahill.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eP79jbOgbuM
Thanks RH.
Those guys are really good!
Paris! thanks for the Deep cut.
Some more Guerilla hip-hop:
Lench Mob – You and your Heroes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LenoJ2WAH3Y
Immortal Technique – Impeach the President
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGTb6I-qqCw
Killer Mike – Reagan
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lIqNjC1RKU
Austerity – verb (tr.) To deconstruct and loot public assets under the guise of fiscal responsibility.
Not a verb, however I do like the word “austericide” which I have heard before.
Austerity
Austericiting
Austericide
Maybe we already have a new verb.
I wonder if and when it appears in the Oxford or Webster’s dictionary?
Austeria?
Isn’t that a Def Leppard album?
Or maybe it was Debt Leppard?
I never liked Def Leppard, but man, that Debt Leppard group I really don’t like. Too bad I can’t turn off my aids or “lose” the LPs to get rid of them!
:-)
Auster* search possibilities
Austerlitz
Larry Auster
Nor’auster (destructive storm that flies in from the Right?)
there’s always good old: aus-terrorism. Like when Bernie Sanders talked about the real terrorism being what people are experiencing economically everyday. Yea, no kidding there.
“We austeritied some folks.”
What this world needs is more reverb, courtesy of Tommy Emmanuel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqhYIe9sunA
A. Tommy Emmanuel
Q. Alex, what is the Venn Diagram intersection of pickin’ and grinnin’?
Thanks for this.
That was great, I’ll definitely listen to some more of his videos. It is nice to find a new artist like him. With the percussion it reminded me a bit of Martin Denny’s “tiki lounge” music.
Am I the only one who thinks Kamala Harris’ announcement (today) on MLK holiday was absolutely dumb strategy/tactics? Talk about getting no play, no buzz, no boost…lost on a day no one, and I mean NO ONE, is paying attention.
Whoever is advising her is either a rank amateur or from the DNC. It smells ripe of Clintonesque hubris and tone-deafness to me….
Good luck with that campaign, neoliberal darling… I lay 4-1 odds she won’t make it past California’s primary.
I think there are two issues at play:
-one, the Democratic elite haven’t really grasped how wealth inequality has changed the electorate. What was once tolerable is no longer tolerable. The circle around those elites are protected and protect the elites in turn, but you have people who can rest easy because there have been slight improvements to the healthcare system as they won’t have a problem with healthcare or don’t believe they will.
-the other issue is the key to Obama’s victory over HRC. What Democratic elites have ignored all these years is it was HRC, Bill, or both depending on your perspective. It wasn’t Obama’s “soaring rhetoric” as much as he was new and openly challenging the Clintons and didn’t have a pro-Iraq War vote to his credit. Even in 2016, what was the key to Sanders? The answer is HRC not having a response to her hideous foreign policy and her husband’s Presidency. Sanders started way behind Obama, but it was the same problem.
The trash in the Democratic elite was never purged, and gerrymandering leads to safe seats where election victories over the other party are so easy. The “strategerists” of the Democratic Party who are connected to long term incumbents are never really tested, and you get the Peter Principle in politics. In a way this is a neat little date, like Obama announcing in Springfield, but Obama had a point (he wasn’t HRC who was a problematic candidate as confirmed in 2016). Harris is just there, but I’m sure she has hired the best people in the biz who didn’t see AOC coming but have figured out the key to her popularity. Expect Harris to share her trip to the dentist with us.
Here in California seats are not gerrymandered and the a Democrat’s have a supermajority in both houses. Hillary won the popular vote over Bernie and Donald. Hillary won the national vote by some 3M votes so she wasn’t all that terrible. I get it that you and some others don’t like her, but she did win the popular vote.
If I recall correctly, wasn’t the Dem primary called for
Hillary the day before California voters went to the polls?
https://twitter.com/ddayen/status/1087469155584884736
Harris had a small inner circle of political staffers that micromanaged everything the AG’s office did, and every decision was funneled up to her. This could leave even simple decisions unmade for weeks if Harris left town, as she frequently did on fundraising/political trips.
If this is accurate, well, break out some pop corn.
https://twitter.com/netanyahu/status/932684579097534465
CNN to host Iowa town hall with Kamala Harris CNN
I’m becoming more and more convinced that Harris will end up winning the D party primary, no doubt with some “help” from the DNC. She has the full-throated support of the liberal media establishment and impeccable identity politics credentials. She also has support from Netanyahu (which means Haim Saban, AIPAC, etc. will support her), Soros (he met her in the Hamptons to discuss 2020, and she declined to prosecute OneWest), CAP, etc. I also think she will end up choosing Biden for VP.
Remember their defense when they were brought to court (briefly) by people upset about them rigging the last primary? They didn’t deny the charges they simply claimed that they were under no obligation to follow their own rules and a handful of members could just meet in a closed room and choose whoever they liked as the presidential candidate. Unless the consequences of giving the nomination to someone like Sanders are perceived as so extraordinarily dire that they dare not do just that you’re going to have another “centrist” on the ballot. I believe you’re right and she probably has a good shot… unfortunately for us all.
Yeah, regardless of people like Sanders, Gabbard, Turner, and AOC, I think the D party is irredeemable. If Harris does end up nominating Biden as her VP it will be spun as the D party beginning the transition from the old guard to the new, and if Trump is the R party candidate, which is almost a certainty, the election is going resemble a civil war.
Happy Martin Luther King Jr Day!!!!!!!
Heres to a new year organizing class not identities…
Hear, hear!
Figured it would be a good day to visit the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, also known as the National Lynching Memorial. Powerful stuff. Also, free admission today – FedEx sponsored.
Somehow, three years after the 2016 election, which was as graphic a demonstration of the public’s well-documented disgust with Washington as we’ve ever seen, these waxen functionaries of the political class still don’t understand that their disapproval more often than not counts as an endorsement to most voters.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-media-781571/
I thought the Taibbi piece on AOC was very good:
>The Beltway press mostly can’t stand her. A common theme is that, as a self-proclaimed socialist, she should be roaming the halls of Rayburn and Cannon in rags or a barrel. Washington Examiner reporter Eddie Scarry tweeted a photo of her in a suit, saying she didn’t look like “a girl who struggles.”
High priest of conventional wisdom Chris Cillizza, with breathtaking predictability, penned a column comparing her to Donald Trump. He noted the social media profiles of both allow them to “end-run the so-called ‘media filter’ and deliver their preferred message… directly to supporters.”
Thanks for the link.
If you’re a commoner advocating for the poor, they call you greedy. If you’re rich they call you a hypocrite.
An excellent article. Taibbi nails it, as usual.
—–
As we’ve seen over and over with these swipes on Ocasio-Cortez, the people defending those ideas don’t realize how powerful a stimulant for change is their own negative attention. If they were smart, they’d ignore her.
Then again, if politicians were smart, they’d also already be representing people, not donors. And they wouldn’t have this problem.
—–
AOC’s new theme song
Because there is already a good verb: “To Impoverish.”
It also come complete with Subject: Impoverisher and Object: Impoverishee and History: Impoverished.
For example: The Walton family are Impoverishers, along with Jeff bezos, all of whom of whom extracted much wealth from the now Impoverished.
Notice the change in focus and meaning from “Rich” to “Impoverisher”.
++
Unearned Income
Is a term that should be used as often as possible. It will change the way average people understand these arguments. And, it happens to be true.
(it’s also been known to really hurt the feelings of rich people)
I can’t help but notice that the FBI letter misspells ‘behavior’. In the very first sentence.
America’s finest.
could be just a typo.
they may have had to hire a mafia type to type it (for security reasons)
who didn’t have the patience (or dexterity) to use the wite-out.\
those were tough times back then,
when the FBI was just proving its usefulness in our democracy.
the good old days…
And this is why you should always pay your contractors on time-
https://www.rt.com/uk/449374-digger-travelodge-liverpool-mini-killdozer/
In other news today, a 100 megaton thermoironic event was detected at FBI headquarters today. Casualties are yet to be reported.
Theyremoronic?
Of course not.