The Republican Party Must Be Destroyed #1

It might already be happening. Trump, whose plummeting poll numbers seem inversely linked to the the spread of the coronavirus, is getting plastered in swing states, tomahawking any chance of Republicans maintaining control of the U.S. Senate. Dire indeed this is for the GOP because it has allowed itself to become a cult of personality. If Trump can't brake his descent, he's going to take the Republican Party with him.

You wouldn't think that the removal of John C. Calhoun's statue yesterday in Charleston has more to do with today's Republican Party than it does with the rival Democrats, with whom Calhoun, as Andrew Jackson's first vice president, was affiliated. Read Joseph Lowndes' From the New Deal to the New Right: Race and the Southern Origins of Modern Conservatism (2008) and you understand why this is the case.

Segregationists after World War Two started their migration out of the Democratic Party and into the Republican Party because the national Democratic Party favored integration and civil rights.

It took several decades to complete this migration but the die was essentially cast with the Brown decision in 1954. 

Before their was #Resistance to Trump there was the Resistance to federally mandated integration. A key doctrine of the segregationist Resistance was interposition, basically a reboot of nullification, the idea that a state can void a federal law it finds objectionable. The greatest champion of nullification was John C. Calhoun.

From the battles over integration in the South, Lowndes tracks the movement of white supremacists into the mainstream Republican Party via the '64 Goldwater campaign, George Wallace's '68 presidential run culminating in Nixon's "Southern strategy" landslide victory of 1972, and finally the Sweet Beulah Land of the Reagan 1980s.

Make no mistake the GOP is a White Man's Party through and through and has been for 40 years. The fact that statues of great white slave owners are coming down not exclusively at the instigation of the mob but at the behest of local grandees and with almost no sign of push back is a very bad sign for the Republican Party and a very good sign for the rest of us.

COVID Efflorescence

The number of confirmed coronavirus cases yesterday rocketed past 9 million as the pandemic accelerates in every corner of the world, an increase of one million cases in seven days. The number of known deaths now stands at more than 469,000. Both these figures are on track to surpass the ghastly milestones of 10 million cases and 500,000 deaths later this week.

The sharpest uptick in new cases continues to be in Eastern Europe, South Asia, North America and South America. The United States has the most new cases of any country, closely followed by and sometimes exceeded by Brazil. And while India has a lower count of new cases, that number is increasing sharply, and the official figures are undoubtedly a gross underestimate in a country of 1.3 billion people with only rudimentary health care infrastructure.

These countries similarly lead the world in number of new deaths, along with Chile, Peru, Russia, Pakistan, the United Kingdom and Iran. Globally, the seven-day moving average of daily deaths has never gone below 4,000 since the beginning of April and is again trending upwards. The seven-day moving average of daily cases has not gone below 100,000 since March 27 and will soon surpass 150,000.

The dangers of the pandemic were sharply expressed on yesterday’s edition of NBC’s “Meet the Press” program by Dr. Michael Osterholm, the director of the Center of Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. “I don’t think this is going to slow down. I’m not sure the influenza analogy applies anymore,” he said, developing his position from his earlier work which attempted to model the spread of the coronavirus based on how the flu spreads. “I don’t think we’re going to see one, two and three waves—I think we’re just going to see one very, very difficult forest fire of cases.”

Dr. Scott Gottlieb, a former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, noted on CBS’s Face the Nation: “We’re seeing the positivity rates go up. That’s a clear indication there is now community spread underway, and this isn’t just a function of testing more.”

Bryan Dyne, "World coronavirus cases rocket past 9 million as pandemic accelerates"

Big Police Defeat in Seattle Last Night

If statues of Christopher Columbus and Thomas Jefferson are being toppled with nary a complaint,  the United States is in dire need of a rebranding. Surely you would think that this is obvious to the ruling elite, but apparently it isn't, judging from the Republican policing proposal introduced yesterday.

Cities are sprinting ahead of the national government. A good example is here in Seattle where last night the Martin Luther King, Jr. County Labor Council (MLKCLC), my former employer, ousted the Seattle Police Officers Guild (SPOG). I recall a lot of council work went into SPOG, backing the guild in its contract negotiations with the city, etc, with little to show for the effort.

Now it's coming to light (see longtime city councilman Nick Licata's "Inside CHAZ: An 'Autonomous' Three Block-Long Seattle Street Threatens America, What?") that the decision to abandon the East Precinct police station was something of a wildcat strike by the guild, a petulant reaction to criticism over excessive use of force:

A resident of one of the nearby apartment buildings, whom I know very well, told me of her interactions with a police officer. She was standing in front of her building on Monday, June 8 at noon asking people what was going on. A police officer came by and announced, “We are all pulling out, and you’re all going to be on your own. We are not coming back in and you are not going to get help and bad elements will come in.” Then he added, “And who would want to work in Seattle [as police]?”

On the same day, June 12, that I visited CHAZ, Michael Solan, president of the Seattle Police Officers Guild, told Fox News “This is the closest I’ve ever seen our country, let alone the city here, to becoming a lawless state.” It would lead one to believe that the police union had lost faith in receiving political cover for their use of excessive force, if the city council and mayor were to allow protesters so close to their precinct station.

Police officers in Seattle are not allowed to strike, but they may have actually adopted an old fashion factory “walk-out” by letting the police chief know that they could no longer execute their usual police practices if they remained there.

The corrupt, feckless nature of large urban police forces is being exposed. Let's hope the "lawlessness" continues.

Our Dystopian Present

Nations are ending lockdowns despite the persistence of COVID-19. The original talking points of comprehensive testing and contact tracing have been abandoned. Now the unspoken policy is herd immunity. Workers will be forced back into the job market. Auto manufacturers are increasing production despite a spike in COVID cases in their factories.

The problem with herd immunity is that we don't know what level of protection COVID antibodies provide. As Benjamin Mateus explains in "Studies on COVID-19 antibody response undermine US 'herd immunity' policy":

The immunity to the virus is not as robust as had been hoped by investigators, and no one yet knows what level of neutralizing antibodies are required to offer protection. This has considerable implications for vaccine productions, as vaccine efficacy seems to hinge on the ability to demonstrate consistently high levels of neutralizing antibodies.

As the virus expands its reach in Africa and India, it appears that after six months of COVID we are just at the beginning.

States are writing austerity budgets. There will be no let up in joblessness and apparently no further lockdowns. The only way for the state to prevent a revolution is by means of massive violence.

Is This Time Different?

Last night at dusk, around 9 PM, protesters marched on the side street beneath my apartment chanting "Out of your home and into the streets!"

Even though I have lived in this neighborhood, sort of  radical Seattle's Ground Zero, for decades, that has not happened before. Usually protesters march down Broadway, a block to the West.

Certainly the size of recent marches has been robust.

Maybe what we have here is indeed a rebellion. Caitlin Johnstone thinks a shift in consciousness is underway (see "I Reckon We Can Win This Thing").

Having recently read Charles Reich's The Greening of America in honor of its 50th anniversary I am aware of the shortcomings of heralding the arrival of a new consciousness. Reich cherry-picked and oversold the transformations the Hippies were bringing about. For some reason in 1970 Reich could not foresee that there would be a huge reaction to the cultural revolution of the 1960s, one that would usher in our current, now zombie, neoliberal paradigm.

I do think things might be different this time. Because of the persistence of COVID-19, because of the economic calamity hurtling our way, the pre-pandemic status quo is not going to be rehabilitated.

The temptation of the ruling class will be to bat away calls for change with military force. But the ruling class is split, and one half wants Trump out. So a violent crackdown isn't an obvious, ready-made solution here.

Is it different this time? Yes. But that doesn't mean we're necessarily headed for someplace better.

The Democratic Party Must Be Destroyed #2

In the first installment of "The Democratic Party Must Be Destroyed" I mentioned reading recently Robert Remini's Martin Van Buren and the Making of the Democratic Party (1959).

For me the book was a revelation because I was unaware what a stalwart Jeffersonian Republican Martin Van Buren was and how strongly he conceived of his mission to elect Jackson as the standard bearer of the new Democratic Party as a way to salvage Jefferson's legacy.

What is Jefferson's legacy?

To answer that question I next turned to Roger G. Kennedy's Mr. Jefferson's Lost Cause: Land, Farmers, Slavery, and the Louisiana Purchase (2003), a eye-opening formidable piece of scholarship.

In a nutshell Jefferson's legacy is a massive expansion of slavery and the re-colonization of the American South by the British Empire a few decades after the Treaty of Paris ended the American Revolutionary War.

Jefferson accomplished this by appropriating Indian lands under a cloak of expanding yeoman farmer homesteads but in reality the lands were raped with mono-culture cash crops (cotton, tobacco) destined for the English export market and harvested by brutalized African slave labor. 

At the very root of our party system in United States is the left of tribal lands, the expansion of African slavery and the British Empire.

As the statues are torn down, let's hope Jefferson's is one of them.

Planet of the Humans

Jeff Gibbs' Planet of the Humans documentary -- the one that was removed from YouTube for a spell; the one produced by Michael Moore; the one that has mainstream enviros quaking with rage -- is quite good and very cogent.

The central thesis is that renewable energy is not going to save the planet from the ravages of climate change. Solar and wind energy are not really renewable in that photovoltaic cells require plenty of toxic industrial fossil fuel inputs and have a limited life cycle. The same can be said of the turbines that generate electricity from the wind.

The biggest target of Planet of the Humans is biomass. Gibbs convincingly documents that a green giant like Germany, a country lauded for producing a high percentage of its energy from renewable sources, owes its stature to burning biomass and biofuels. Biomass is just a fancy name for cutting down trees and burning them in a furnace; garbage, too.

Gibbs illuminates the extent to which high finance has prostituted 350 and the Sierra Club. Most are aware that Al Gore is an untrustworthy, venal character, but who would have expected the same from Bill McKibben?

Our only way out of this mess -- COVID-19 is just a hint of the pain and suffering coming our way -- is a significant reduction in population combined with a massive reduction in consumption. 

Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone

About ten blocks south of my apartment building the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) has been created.  The East Precinct building, which the Seattle Police Department (SPD) abandoned earlier in the week after repeatedly saturating protesters with tear gas despite an announced tear gas ban by Mayor Jenny Durkan and Police Chief Carmen Best, is at the center of the newly created autonomous zone.

After a few days of celebration things are starting to heat up with Trump making threats, The New York Times posting a story on its homepage, and the SPD making noises that it wants its station back. (If you want to keep up with the latest CHAZ news from local sources, let me suggest that you follow Rich Smith on Twitter and you bookmark Capitol Hill Seattle Blog. Both are excellent sources.)

Even if Trump doesn't invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807 and dispatch troops from Fort Lewis, it's likely, once things die down a little, that the odious Mayor Durkan will send in riot police a la Mike Bloomberg and Zuccotti Park nearly a decade ago.

I have yet to visit CHAZ despite living nearby. I am trapped in this cycle of going to the office and then recovering at home. My lungs have still not healed. If I am improving, it's in tiny barely perceptible increments. I did work four days in the office last week, and the one day worked last week from home was a full day, 7 AM to 5 PM. So that's good news. I couldn't have done it in May. Nonetheless I'm growing concerned that my lungs might be permanently damaged.

What's particularly worrisome is that countries are ending lockdowns despite rising rates of infection. The state of Arizona might run out of hospital beds in July. The principal rationale for locking down back in March was that COVID-19 could overwhelm and collapse the health care system. I don't see how that has changed. Furthermore, what about a testing regimen as we emerge from lockdown? Nothing of the sort. It's a tacit admission, at least in the United States, that government is unable to manage the pandemic.

The Democratic Party Must Be Destroyed #1

After reading the latest from Caitlin Johnstone, the unassailable "The Democratic Party Exists To Co-Opt And Kill Authentic Change Movements," I am introducing the first of what I hope to be a series of posts arguing that the Democratic Party ought to be destroyed posthaste.

Soon after Super Tuesday and in the run-up to the nationwide pandemic lockdowns I devoured a copy that I had lying around the apartment of Robert Remini's first book, Martin Van Buren and the Making of the Democratic Party (1959).

What was a revelation to me was that the Democratic Party, the supposedly transformative, egalitarian "Party of Jackson," was actually a salvage operation for the listing "Era of Good Feelings" Republican Party of Jefferson, the primary political vehicle of Southern slavocracy.

The Democratic Party was a creation of Martin Van Buren, Bucktails party boss of New York. He used the Tariff of Abominations and Jackson's 1828 presidential campaign to rejuvenate the old planter Republican Party coalition.

In other words, the origin of the Democratic Party is synonymous with  the rejuvenation of the political power of slavocracy, not to mention the genocide of indigenous peoples.

Bear that in mind when you consider legislation proposed by congressional Democrats to address the policing crisis in the United States. If we can create a new federal department post-9/11, why can't we re-imagine how we police ourselves? Let's defund and abolish police departments as presently constituted.

When Does the George Floyd Rebellion Get Co-Opted?

After reading JEFFREY ST. CLAIR's "Roaming Charges: Mad Bull, Lost Its Way" I believe we're at a tipping point. If fence-sitting city councilmembers are joining the barricades and demanding the mayor pull back her troops, something has shifted.

What comes next is an attempt to co-opt and muffle the rebellion. The New York Times, for instance, has been very supportive of the uprising. Read the editorial by Jamelle Bouie, "The Police Are Rioting. We Need to Talk About It." It's excellent. But let's not forget what happened to the Women's March, splintered by turf wars and the obligatory charges of anti-Semitism, or the #Resistance, smothered in years of mainstream Russiagating. 

For the time being the mainstream mind managers are unwilling to take their foot off the accelerator. They've got Trump right where they want him. He's looking increasingly vulnerable, as vulnerable as he looked in the torchlight of Charlottesville the summer of 2017.

But a reaction will come, probably at the same time that legislation starts coursing through city councils to defund the police and replace them with social workers. Shaky Nancy Pelosi, who has gone to ground during the rebellion, will reappear to declare systemic change impossible during an economic crisis.

People must stay mobilized and continue to take to the streets. Don't be fooled by those who try to brake this movement by saying it's all a Putin plot or tainted by anti-Semitic bias. So far criticisms of violent outside agitators and Antifa anarchy have fallen flat, and so too has the Russia bogeyman. But that doesn't mean that the "Mighty Wurlitzer" won't be switched back on.

Thin Blue Line Flag: U.S. Police State's "Old Glory"

The “thin blue line” flag is the known symbol of a social, cultural, and political movement that is inextricably linked to the country’s current unrest. The flag is the centerpiece in a world of merchandise and policing philosophy, all built around the idea that the police are an embattled tribe of warriors, maligned and reviled by a nation that fails to appreciate their unique importance. The blue line is a reminder that much of the policing community sees itself as separate from the rest of society — and as the nation has witnessed in recent days, in video after shocking video, this well-armed population, imbued with the power to deprive citizens of life and liberty, does not take kindly to those who challenge its authority.

“What we’re talking about here is a worldview that says that police are the only force capable of holding society together,” Alex Vitale, a professor of sociology at Brooklyn College and author of “The End of Policing,” told me. The view turns on the notion that “without the constant threat of violent coercive intervention, society will unravel into a war of all against all,” he explained. Seen through this lens, “authoritarian solutions are not just necessary, they’re almost preferable.”

In the wake of Floyd’s killing, with protests in every state in the union and U.S. security forces at every level called to respond, the country is now witnessing what years of militarized conditioning, training, and culture have wrought: a nationwide protest movement running up against a nationwide police riot. 

Ryan Devereaux, "POLICE ATTACKS ON PROTESTERS ARE ROOTED IN A VIOLENT IDEOLOGY OF REACTIONARY GRIEVANCE"

Master-Slave Dialectic

Scrolling through the morning news what jumps out at a reader are all the smartphone videos of police brutality, an issue that Caitlin Johnstone addresses in "Smartphone Cameras Are The Windows Into Society’s Soul."

If you have had a conflict on the street with an officer of the peace, you know that this is how things usually go. The police are trained to use overwhelming force if their authority is challenged.

Recalling my university days and Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, this is the dynamic that guides lordship and bondage, a.k.a., the master-slave dialectic. And, FYI, it doesn't work out for the master. Overwhelming force as a solution freezes the master's consciousness, while the overwhelmed slave has to use her noggin to figure a way out of her dominated state. Off she goes to a higher stage in the dialectic.

That's where we are at now. The neoliberal state -- absent all its bells and whistles -- is reduced to gross displays of brute force to maintain fealty.

It's hard to see how it survives, even if somehow jobs were added in May.

UPDATE: The latest from Caitlin Johnstone:

A police force which cannot respond to protests about police brutality without the internet being flooded with a steady stream of police brutality footage is a police force in sore need of drastic overhaul. It has already been proven that that is in fact the case. There’s no taking it back. There’s no fixing it. It’s done. The debate is officially over. Huge, sweeping changes must immediately be made, and there’s no valid reason for the protests to stop until that has occurred.

U.S. Military Reticent to Wage War on Domestic Population

According to The New York Times in "Esper Breaks With Trump on Using Troops Against Protesters":

Senior Pentagon leaders are now so concerned about losing public support — and that of their active-duty and reserve personnel, 40 percent of whom are people of color — that Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, released a message to top military commanders on Wednesday affirming that every member of the armed forces swears an oath to defend the Constitution, which he said “gives Americans the right to freedom of speech and peaceful assembly.”

American exceptionalism anyone? Or, as Peter Schwarz reports in "European media outlets fear bitter class struggles in the US":

“The image of the United States as the centre of Western civilisation is collapsing before our eyes. Will it be possible to rebuild the old image again?,” commented the Polish daily newspaper Rzeczpospolita on Tuesday with reference to the recent events in the US.

The only way to rescue U.S.-led global neoliberalism is at the point of a bayonet. Trump sees this. It won't work. But at this stage, it is the only thing that can keep the zombie ambulatory. I'm surprised it took us this long -- and a lethal global pandemic -- to arrive here.

Militarizing a Response to the George Floyd Rebellion Won't Work

Protests continue in Seattle. I can hear the helicopters from my apartment. 

In the nation's capital there is what appears to be a complete military occupation:

Less than two hours before Washington’s 7 p.m. curfew went into effect on Tuesday, military vehicles assumed positions across the city.

A crowd of protesters in Lafayette Square near the White House appeared to be at least twice that of a day earlier, and swelling.

With the imminent arrival of military units and the use of helicopters to suppress protesters on Monday night — a tactic used for battles with insurgents abroad, now applied on U.S. soil — some in the crowd whispered that more soldiers were on the way.

Alec, a 32-year-old protester who spent two deployments in Afghanistan, said he had seen things over the past two days that he never expected to see in his own country.

“There are real problems here,” he said, declining to give his last name because he works for the government, “and no amount of uniforms or soldiers are going to fix them.”

While the evening ended with only flashes of confrontations, the city’s downtown is being flooded with agents from the F.B.I., the Bureau of Prisons, the U.S. Marshals, Customs and Border Protection, and several other agencies, along with the military. Transportation Security Administration officers have also been called out of airports to help protect federal property.

The militarization of the response to the protest has stirred deep concerns and drawn widespread criticism, including from retired Adm. Mike Mullen, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who said that “our fellow citizens are not the enemy, and must never become so.”

“I am deeply worried that as they execute their orders, the members of our military will be co-opted for political purposes,” he wrote in an opinion piece in The Atlantic published on Tuesday, adding that America’s cities and towns “are not ‘battle spaces’ to be dominated, and must never become so.”

Trump's Wallacite/Nixonian "law & order" response is not going to solve the problem. There are not enough troops to extinguish a nationwide rebellion. Remember Eric Shinseki? He was the Army Chief of Staff during the run-up to the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld invasion of Iraq who rocked the boat by saying that the occupation would require several hundred thousand ground troops. The United States has a population ten times greater than the size of Iraq's 2003 population; its entire active-duty and reserve force adds up to about 2.1 million troops. Is Trump going to abandon overseas bases to occupy the homeland?

In "The George Floyd Election," Thomas Edsall susses out the ongoing rebellion's impact on the presidential election, whether it will break for the right or for the left. Edsall starts off by looking at 2020 through the prism of 1968 and the riots in wake of the Martin Luther King, Jr. assassination. It is argued that Humphrey lost because of the protest and riots of 1968 and Nixon and Wallace won.

Edsall goes on to reject parallels between '68 and 2020. For starters, the percentage of the electorate that is white has shrunk by 23% since 1968. More importantly, Trump is completely boxed by an economic collapse that will only grow worse in the near term:

What makes the moment unique is that the combination of widespread racial discontent, the pandemic and the economic implosion is taking place at a time when the scope of deprivation and need is extraordinary.

The number of people who are out of work without income now tops 40 million. There is the prospect of an “avalanche of evictions” forcing millions of renters into homelessness as legal protections and government assistance come to an end. The University of Chicago’s Becker Friedman Institute estimates that “42 percent of recent layoffs will result in permanent job loss.”

Families will increasingly begin to experience the incalculable depth of loss as the election approaches, and traditional political maneuvering will be subordinated to the less familiar and highly volatile politics of scarcity.

Scarcity can being out the best and the worst in us, but with Trump in the White House for the next seven months the likelihood of a beneficial outcome is slim to none.

This is a presidential election that pits George Wallace (Trump) against George H.W. Bush (Biden) during a Great Depression.

It's Not All Looting

Protesters sat in the street outside the Minnesota governor’s residence in Minneapolis on Monday.Credit...Victor J. Blue for The New York Times

Silver Lining to George Floyd Rebellion

As COVID-19 spikes and the White House goes dark, consider this: This is just the beginning.

Civil unrest is our new normal. What happens when enhanced unemployment expires in July? What happens is a wave of evictions.

There is no indication that the federal government is able to provide leadership. States and municipalities will soon have to cut services and layoff workers. As we saw in post-Katrina New Orleans, police will simple vanish from their posts.

One silver lining to the George Floyd rebellion is that it has chased China-bashing from the front-pages of U.S. newspapers. It's hard to act as if you are a bulwark of civil liberties when the national guard is mustered and firing upon reporters:

In China, the state-run news media heavily featured reports about Mr. Floyd’s death and portrayed the protests as another sign of America’s decline. When a U.S. official on Saturday attacked the ruling Communist Party on Twitter for moving to impose national security legislation to quash dissent in Hong Kong, a spokeswoman for the Chinese government fired back with a popular refrain among protesters in the United States.

“‘I can’t breathe,’ ” the spokeswoman, Hua Chunying, wrote on Twitter.