Militias as Police Proxies

Looking at some of the video from the Jacob Blake protests in Kenosha, it seems like this is going to be the new normal going forward. Armed pro-Trump Blue Lives Matter militia will act as proxies for police and national guard. Teenage gunman Kyle Rittenhouse passed through police lines unmolested after shooting three people, murdering two of them.

Even if citizens are successful in de-funding the police, these militias are going to pop up to terrorize the enlightened. It's not a stretch to imagine militias mustered to put down protests of Trump's refusal to leave office after a contested election in November.

The Decades Delayed Remote Work Revolution

I first took note of the promise of remote work when I was a lower-division undergraduate. This was probably 1984 or 1985. I saw a television news story that said in the next few years companies would be allowing, thanks to modems and personal computers, more employees to work from home. I was pleased because this meant by the time I exited the university and entered the workforce I'd likely have more freedom than those who had come before.

Needless to say the remote work revolution never arrived. Every so often another story would appear heralding a workplace paradigm shift thanks to the breathtaking speed of our digital transformation, but eventually even those petered out.

To be sure there was an elite class of workers who always enjoyed on-the-job flexibility, as well as a precariat of freelancers for whom remote work was not necessarily an enhancement, but it took the pandemic crisis of 2020 to deliver the fruits of stay-at-home work for the great mass of office workers.

This morning Yves Smith, "New York City Faces Another 'Drop Dead': How Many Other Cities Will Wind Up in Distress?," takes a look at the what the long-delayed but now here-to-stay remote work revolution means for the great urban centers of the United Stated, and the news is not good for real estate.

Smith mentions that large employers are trying to bring their workers back onsite and they're facing a rebellion. I can testify when that moment arrives for my office the same thing will happen.

So cities are facing an enormous drop off in tax revenue. That's really the issue that's impeding another bailout plan passing congress. The Republicans won't backstop states, counties and cities; they want a repeat of the post-2008 layoffs of government workers that helped to created a slow-motion recovery and stoked political division that they were able to take advantage of.

I for one am enjoying the empty streets. But I realize there is going to be huge price to pay.

Ben Norton of The Grayzone

Caitlin Johnstone's post this morning is a defense of The Grayzone. The Grayzone pretty much anchors online U.S.-based anti-imperialist journalism -- journalism, not merely commentary.

Consider Ben Norton. The guy is a colossus of productivity. Last night I watched his interview with Anya Parampril, another Grayzone contributor, about ongoing U.S. coup efforts targeting Nicaragua. The interview contains  eye-opening information about the 2018 coup attempt.

Johnstone notes that, 

Grayzone‘s Ben Norton wrote this past June that “in its more than four years of existence, including its first two years hosted at the website AlterNet… The Grayzone has never had to issue a major correction or retract a story.”

I am not citing Norton because I think taking the outlet’s word for it is a valid argument, I’m citing him because I’ve never seen a shred of evidence that what he said is false, and neither have you. There is so much spin going into discrediting The Grayzone at this point that we may rest assured that if it had ever been caught reporting something untrue, establishment narrative managers would have made damn sure we all knew about it.

But they haven’t, because they can’t. All they’ve been able to do is argue that The Grayzone reports things that other media outlets do not report, which are not in alignment with the approved viewpoint of the United States government. Which is to say, all they can argue is that The Grayzone is doing journalism.

In fact, if you believe as I do that journalism’s first and foremost function is to hold your government to account with the light of truth, you can easily make the argument that The Grayzone has published more real journalism just this year than all corporate media like Axios have put out this millennium. The outlet’s original reporting on the OPCW scandal and coverage of the US regime change operations in Nicaragua along with critical journalism on the persecution of Julian Assange, Venezuela, Bolivia, Syria, Russia, China and other unabsorbed governments, all just in the last few months, leave other publications far behind.