Is this some kind of joke?
Call Your Senators This Morning to Object to the Continuing Resolution That Will Enable Cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Veterans Programs and More
Posted on March 14, 2025 by Yves Smith
Yours truly, like many Americans, tends to tune out Federal budget funding cliffhangers as largely theatrics. This is not one of those times. The currently proposed continuing resolution, which the truly horrible Chuck Schumer has just said he will back, is set for a vote in the PM or evening Friday. This is absolutely not a routine short-term funding extension but includes several disastrous provisions which would give Trump the keys to the kingdom in terms of spending and a blank check on tariff powers, which he also has been abusing.
If at all possible, call your Senators at their local office ASAP. A call to the DC number is the next fallback, and then an e-mail if you can’t get through.
As Matt below said:
Tell them to OPPOSE CLOTURE FIRST.
No on Cloture. No on the dirty CR.
Be short since the fact of you being an in-state voter and firmly objecting is more important than a recitation of reasons (one will suffice; you can say you have more but this is more than enough reason to oppose it). I was not able quickly to find a register of Senators’ local (as in in state) phone numbers; the Senate website deters that sort of thing. Rather than providing those details, it only says “Phone numbers are available on each state’s page or on your senator’s website.” If anyone does locate such a guide, please pipe up in comments and I will update the post accordingly.
In the interest of getting this alert out on a timely basis, forgive me for doing a cursory job on the fine points. Please call your Senators this morning or early afternoon to voice your decided objection to this continuing resolution. Be sure to mention Congress otherwise giving up its power over spending via authorizing impounding and over tariffs. Further stress that failure to oppose the continuing resolution will pave the way for gutting critically important programs like Social Security and Medicare.
One reason that it is urgent to oppose the continuing resolution is that it contains a provision that allows the Administration to impound funds, as in refuse to make expenditures voted through by Congress. This would come close to vitiating Congress’ and therefore democratic control of the power of the purse. Think that ever gets rolled back once given away?
The continuing resolution is our Enabling Act of 1933. Congress delegating the power of appropriation to the executive is an unconstitutional breach of our government's fundamental structure. Democrats voting to pass it are consigning the party to the same fate as Zentrum. pic.twitter.com/gceOocyCyc
— Dan Thomas-Commins (@DanTheRulesNerd) March 14, 2025
In particular, this continuing resolution would give Trump and Musk the authority to cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid:
To my Democratic Senate colleagues, please vote NO on the Continuing Resolution. The CR gives unprecedented powers to Trump and Musk and gives them a green light to slash Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security. It is an affront to our Constitution and will wreck our economy.
— Dave Min (@DaveMinCA) March 12, 2025
2 things on Senate deliberations:
1. The GOP funding bill is NOT a continuing resolution. It is a 100% Republican funding bill that strips funding from veterans, food safety, public safety & gives Musk the keys to do everything DOGE is currently doing & strip Medicaid, Medicare…
— Rep. Pramila Jayapal (@RepJayapal) March 13, 2025
Another reason to oppose the continuing resolution that is sufficient in and of itself is that it would give away Congress’ power to intervene on Trump’s tariffs. Recall that his actions on that front are already an abuse via repeatedly invoking an emergency when there is none to be found.
One of the worst provisions that Republicans slipped into their sham continuing resolution?
They’re taking away the power Congress has to fight back against Trump’s trade war. pic.twitter.com/QylTH45XXs
— Senator Peter Welch (@SenPeterWelch) March 13, 2025
Folks—is NOT a same-as-before “continuing resolution”—it’s a full scale Trump+Musk revamp bill with massive cuts to healthcare, homeless, child programs, environment, and more. Nobody should vote for this “CR” nonsense. pic.twitter.com/6QCBRtH9DU
— Eric Feigl-Ding (@DrEricDing) March 13, 2025
Let's be clear: House Republicans' funding bill is Congress rolling over for the billionaire arsonists by rolling out a slush-fund filled, year-long continuing resolution that empowers Trump and Musk to pick winners and losers with YOUR taxpayer dollars. I will vote NO. pic.twitter.com/upphdtriuN
— Senator Patty Murray (@PattyMurray) March 13, 2025
Let’s debunk this with 2 simple questions.
1. How many votes does it take to pass a Continuing Resolution?
The answer is 60.
2. How many Republicans are in the Senate?
The answer isn’t 53 since some of them are independents but there certainly are not 60.
Are Democrats… https://t.co/EfDNzx1kpq
— The Older Millennial (@teameffujoe) March 13, 2025
So please, get to work!
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/03 ... -more.html
Any bets on this?
"The Democratic Party is the piss which set the Republican dye in the national fabric."
( on the personal side, who should I call, Lindsay Graham or Tim Scott?))
Sympathy for the Devils...
Re: Sympathy for the Devils...
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Sympathy for the Devils...
It’s An Awkward Time To Be A Liberal Israel Supporter
Being a liberal Israel supporter these days probably feels like being a defense attorney for an accused murderer who won’t shut up about how much he loves murdering.
Caitlin Johnstone
March 25, 2025
Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer said in a recent interview that his job “is to keep the left pro-Israel,” which is just sad. Being a liberal Israel supporter these days probably feels like being a defense attorney for an accused murderer who won’t shut up about how much he loves murdering.
A Palestinian co-director of the Oscar-winning film No Other Land was assaulted and injured by a gang of Israeli settlers in the West Bank village of Susya before being abducted by Israeli soldiers on Monday. Hamdan Ballal and two other Palestinians were reportedly transferred from the Israeli military to the police for questioning, and as of this writing are still detained.
No Other Land is a documentary about Israeli abuses toward Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, which makes the lynch mob assault by the settlers not only ironic but completely vindicating of Ballal’s work. These freaks are so consumed by hatred and Zionist brain rot that they actually thought they’d advance their cause by attacking Palestinians in the West Bank in response to a documentary about the mistreatment of Palestinians in the West Bank.
This happens as Israel adds two more bodies to the mountain of Palestinian journalists it has deliberately killed in Gaza. Al Jazeera reporter Hossam Shabat and Palestine Today TV correspondent Mohammad Mansour were both killed in separate airstrikes in different parts of the Gaza Strip on Monday, bringing the total number of Palestinian journalists killed in the Gaza holocaust to 208.
Israel is murdering journalists and persecuting documentary filmmakers because Israel hates truth. It kills press workers in Gaza for the same reason it blocks western reporters from entering the scorched Palestinian territory: because Israel doesn’t want people to see the full picture of its atrocities.
This comes after Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz made amazingly explicit statements of genocidal intent last week, telling the entire population of Gaza that they will face “total devastation” if they do not find some way to overthrow Hamas themselves and return all the hostages.
They’re just getting more and more brazen with this stuff. More and more often, to a further and further extent, Israel is showing its true face to the world.
The other day Israel demolished Gaza’s only specialized cancer treatment hospital and an adjacent medical school in its ongoing systematic destruction of the enclave’s entire healthcare system with the goal of making it unlivable.
Shortly thereafter, Israel bombed another hospital in Khan Younis, killing a member of Hamas’s political bureau as well as a 16 year-old boy. The imperial media fell all over themselves to churn out headlines announcing that Israel had targeted a Hamas leader in a strike on a hospital — as though bombing hospitals is this perfectly acceptable thing we should all view as normal now — but we all know these same media outlets would be shrieking their lungs out if any of the empire’s enemies did this exact same thing.
As Jonathan Cook points out in a recent essay, this is the same as if Hamas had bombed the hospital Benjamin Netanyahu stayed at earlier this year in retaliation for his crimes. And we can all imagine the reaction of the western political-media class if that had happened.
Speaking of Netanyahu, a new report from the Israeli outlet Ynet says that after the October 7 attacks the prime minister angrily ordered the IDF to massively expand its bombing campaign without intelligence on who they were hitting, demanding that they just bomb as many buildings as possible entirely for the sake of bombing them.
According to the report, on October 9, 2023 the IDF told Netanyahu that they were bombing 1,500 targets per day because that’s what they had the intel to justify, and Netanyahu angrily demanded to know why they weren’t launching 5,000 airstrikes instead, telling them “I’m not interested in targets. Take down houses, bomb with everything you have.”
So that’s what Israel has been up to lately. It’s just getting uglier and uglier, and people who purport to stand for equality and justice are having a harder and harder time squaring their ideological positions with their steadfast support for the genocidal apartheid state.
Liberal Zionists like Bernie Sanders have tried to reconcile their support for Israel by pinning the blame entirely on Netanyahu. A recent tweet by Sanders reads, “Netanyahu has not allowed any aid into Gaza in 22 days. He broke the ceasefire, resuming a bombing campaign that has killed more than 50,000 people. Now he is threatening a long-term occupation of Gaza. NO MORE MILITARY AID TO NETANYAHU’S WAR MACHINE.”
One of the biggest scams being peddled by Democrats today is this frantic campaign to spin Netanyahu as meaningfully separate and distinct from everything Israel is — instead of the perfect embodiment of it — to protect Israel’s image while it commits genocide and ethnic cleansing.
They’re working overtime to hang this whole mess on the prime minister, so that when it’s all over and the final solution to the Palestinian question has been carried out, he can take the sins of the Zionist state and the entire US-centralized empire with him when he leaves office without anything ever needing to change about status quo US foreign policy. They’re repeating the George W Bush playbook.
Netanyahu didn’t create the genocidal racism in Israel, the genocidal racism in Israel created Netanyahu. He rode already-existing sentiments within Israel to power, and has relied on them to stay in power ever since. You could not ask for a better representative of everything Israel is than Benjamin Netanyahu — nor indeed a better representative of everything the US empire stands for.
Liberal Zionists are having a hard time reconciling their positions of antiracism and social justice with their support for Israel because at the end of the day western liberalism is just as fraudulent and deceitful as Zionism is. We all watched them passively allow the Democratic president to turn Gaza into a pile of steaming blood-soaked wreckage and then demand everyone vote for his vice president. Democrats hold their worldview in place by psychologically compartmentalizing away from the atrocities their government commits in the here and now, while singing fondly about innocuous whitewashed historical revisionist versions of their civil rights heroes who died decades ago.
Democrats are an inseparable part of the US empire and its abuses, just as the US empire is an inseparable part of Israel and its abuses. It’s all one big mess of depravity, with liberals tasked with the increasingly difficult assignment of placing a warm progressive face on one of the darkest chapters in human history.
https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2025/03 ... supporter/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Sympathy for the Devils...
Bernie and AOC Sheepdog for the Democrats
Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist 26 Mar 2025
Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are trying to re-engage disaffected voters who are rightly disengaged from the Democratic Party. Big rallies can’t hide the fact that the Fighting Oligarchy Tour leads misguided people right back to oligarchy.
“Bernie Sanders is this election's Democratic sheepdog. The sheepdog is a card the Democratic party plays every presidential primary season when there's no White House Democrat running for re-election.”
Bruce Dixon
The late Bruce Dixon, Black Agenda Report co-founder and Managing Editor, is credited with coining the term “sheepdog” to describe Vermont senator Bernie Sanders when he challenged Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in 2016. Dixon was correct and prescient. Sanders lost the nomination to Clinton and as promised, endorsed her anyway. She went on to lose to Donald Trump that year and Sanders’ loyalty was for naught. He was blamed for Hillary Clinton’s defeat and was demonized by her and others as being responsible for Trump’s victory.
Ten years later, Sanders is still playing the sheepdog role, not as a presidential candidate but now as a reliable party elder and loyal company man with the help of congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is popularly known as AOC. They are holding rallies across the country, the Fighting Oligarchy Tour , and drawing large crowds of liberal white people in their thousands.
Alas, there is nothing about attending a rally with a crowd of other people that will in any way defeat the U.S. oligarchy. Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez are sheepdogging ten years after the moniker describing their actions was created. Their goal is to save the sinking ship that is the Democratic Party, which has now lost legitimacy with the voters it needs to win the white house again. Polls show a record-low approval rating for the party, with a mere 27% of those polled having a positive view of the democrats and a measly 7% having a very positive opinion. After the debacle of the coup against Biden, which resulted in Kamala Harris being a $1 billion loser, public disapproval was inevitable.
The U.S. oligarchy is a bipartisan two-headed monster, and no one should know that more than Bernie Sanders. The democratic head of the beast did everything in its power in 2016 and 2020 to deny him the nomination, although Sanders is not the leftist that many believe him to be. No matter. Even a little bit of liberal reformism is too much for the democrats’ deep-pocketed donors. Every democratic presidential winner is totally in sync with their demands. No one gets the job without being vetted first. Joe Biden was the party’s winner in 2020 because he promised them, “Nothing will fundamentally change.”
Democracy didn’t suddenly disappear because a republican is in office instead of a democrat or because Elon Musk is constantly at Donald Trump’s side. The people of this country live under authoritarian billionaire rule devoted to accelerating a race to the bottom for most people in this country. That couldn’t have happened without the complete connivance of the Democratic Party.
The point of Sanders and AOC’s extravagant exercise is to herd democrats in while they are still reeling from Trump’s elimination of the United States Department of Education and firing thousands of federal workers across every agency. Democrats are both anxious and angry at Trump while simultaneously nervously pleading for their party to do something. The angst is understandable because capitulation is the order of the day for the liberal order.
Columbia University acceded to Trump’s demands that they had already been in the process of implementing. They have pushed out faculty who condemned Israel’s war crimes and suspended and expelled students even before Trump withheld $400 million in funds the government was contracted to pay them. The law firm Paul Weiss likewise crumbled under pressure and didn’t try to fight what were likely illegal sanctions leveled against it by a dubious executive order.
The mostly democratic liberal class is going along to get along, and no one should think that Bernie or AOC or the rest of the democrats are any different. Their goal is to energize people who instead should be expressing disgust with the democrats and leaving their failed party behind. The meaningless tour is an underhanded effort to fool them into returning to the fold. In addition, Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez is mentioned as a possible 2028 presidential candidate and the Fighting Oligarchy Tour should be seen as a campaign trial run for her. Instead of waiting in long lines to hear warmed over nonsense from fake leftists, democrats should be building independent political power outside of the electoral system.
One of the issues that goes unaddressed by Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez is the continued U.S./Israeli genocide in Gaza. On this and other issues, Ocasio-Cortez gives cover to the party. She famously claimed that Kamala Harris was “working tirelessly” on a ceasefire in Gaza while the Biden administration never wavered from arming the apartheid state. The insistence on continuing with genocide was just one reason that Kamala Harris lost voters in the 2024 election.
As for Sanders, no one should forget that he is a zionist who lived on an Israeli kibbutz as a young man. He hopes that zionism can be more liberal, and so he doesn’t criticize the Israeli state. He personalizes by constantly invoking Benjamin Netanyahu’s name , deflecting from the central issue of the U.S./Israeli alliance and its mutually agreed upon support for ethnic cleansing. “Netanyahu has not allowed any aid into Gaza in 22 days. He broke the ceasefire, resuming a bombing campaign that has killed more than 50,000 people. Now, he is threatening a long-term occupation of Gaza.
NO MORE MILITARY AID TO NETANYAHU’S WAR MACHINE.“
Israel’s genocide cannot be personified by one man, but if you’re a reformer cosplaying as a leftist, criticism of an individual is all that will be countenanced. While his fake leftist tour draws thousands of people, Sanders gives Trump cover, praising him for “cracking down on fentanyl, making sure our borders are stronger.”
The Democratic Party may be able to limp along and win the midterm elections in 2026 or the presidency in 2028. Its fortunes ebb and flow with events and their ability to find candidates from a place called Hope or who are audaciously hopeful and claim they want to change. But the mask is off for millions of people who were once their reliable voters.
Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez may be able to give their party cover; that is the role they play. They are allowed to come out from time to time and even offer a little criticism here and there while knowing full well that, should they govern again, there will be excuses and a beat down of anyone who really is on the left. Bernie and AOC are hoping that they can fool all of the people all of the time.
https://blackagendareport.com/bernie-an ... -democrats
Chasing Chuck Tumor's testicular cancer—or building Resistance to Stage 4 Capitalism?
Raymond Nat Turner, BAR poet-in-residence 26 Mar 2025
Chuck Schumer speaks at a press conference vaguely addressing the economic impact of billionaires on working families.
Billionaire bought and bossed talk shop. Alcohol, Geritol and
Protocol reign shares traded on the floor. Well-off windbags—
Huff and puff—only to stuff
Our needs; pleas; SOSs; in cylindrical files destined for dumpsters …
Wise old owl flaps tethered wings. And peers over red readers
For Kabuki Theater: Testicular Cancer versus Zombie Lies …
Weasel words kiss king’s ring. Avert government shutdown. And
Sell our social safety net to slimy kleptocrats/wannabe strongmen!
What’s making the first fifty days of fascism—blitzkrieg/warp speed—
So unsettling? Tumor’s testicular cancer is but a tiny part of an answer—
Same as $campaign contributions metastasizing for tag-team $elections.
Capitalism’s the root cause—the real, chronic, and acute cause …
Bipartisan billionaires burned our boat. Blew up our bridge.
Forced our train from the station … Caused our cancers. And,
Like toothpaste, resisting returning to the tube; Genie refusing
To jump back in bottle … we will not turn around and go back.
Bipartisan billionaires fear red hot lava of resistance! Fear
Fiery flow rising from below! Fear steamy street heat of
Millions—mad as hell—unable to put up with prancing, chainsaw-
Wrecking ball, scorched earth attacks on our lives … a minute more!
Our prognosis is poor ’til we STOP tying-off arms. STOP
Holding noses—damaging brains! STOP demobilizing
Movements. STOP de-activating activists. STOP joy-riding on the
Donkey with crack pipe dreams of DP remolded militant workers party.
We’re rehabbing. Re-training fat, flabby, atrophied dream muscles.
Retraining muscle memories of shoe leather lessons learned in Arab
Spring! George Floyd Summer! Strike-tober! Occupy and all other
Harvest-rich seasons of mass mobilization, of mass organization!
We’re compassionately releasing life-imprisoned dreams! Dreams
Locked behind concertina wire eyelids. Dreams cowering beneath
Gun towers of tradition, oppression and propaganda. Class-struggling with our
Resistance medicines—our simple prescriptions, “Organize! Organize! Organize!”
© 2025. Raymond Nat Turner, The Town Crier. All Rights Reserved.
Raymond Nat Turner is a NYC poet; BAR's Poet-in-Residence; and founder/co-leader of the jazz-poetry ensemble UpSurge!NYC. You can Vote for his work at GoFundMe and PayPal .
https://blackagendareport.com/chasing-c ... capitalism
Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist 26 Mar 2025
Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are trying to re-engage disaffected voters who are rightly disengaged from the Democratic Party. Big rallies can’t hide the fact that the Fighting Oligarchy Tour leads misguided people right back to oligarchy.
“Bernie Sanders is this election's Democratic sheepdog. The sheepdog is a card the Democratic party plays every presidential primary season when there's no White House Democrat running for re-election.”
Bruce Dixon
The late Bruce Dixon, Black Agenda Report co-founder and Managing Editor, is credited with coining the term “sheepdog” to describe Vermont senator Bernie Sanders when he challenged Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in 2016. Dixon was correct and prescient. Sanders lost the nomination to Clinton and as promised, endorsed her anyway. She went on to lose to Donald Trump that year and Sanders’ loyalty was for naught. He was blamed for Hillary Clinton’s defeat and was demonized by her and others as being responsible for Trump’s victory.
Ten years later, Sanders is still playing the sheepdog role, not as a presidential candidate but now as a reliable party elder and loyal company man with the help of congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is popularly known as AOC. They are holding rallies across the country, the Fighting Oligarchy Tour , and drawing large crowds of liberal white people in their thousands.
Alas, there is nothing about attending a rally with a crowd of other people that will in any way defeat the U.S. oligarchy. Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez are sheepdogging ten years after the moniker describing their actions was created. Their goal is to save the sinking ship that is the Democratic Party, which has now lost legitimacy with the voters it needs to win the white house again. Polls show a record-low approval rating for the party, with a mere 27% of those polled having a positive view of the democrats and a measly 7% having a very positive opinion. After the debacle of the coup against Biden, which resulted in Kamala Harris being a $1 billion loser, public disapproval was inevitable.
The U.S. oligarchy is a bipartisan two-headed monster, and no one should know that more than Bernie Sanders. The democratic head of the beast did everything in its power in 2016 and 2020 to deny him the nomination, although Sanders is not the leftist that many believe him to be. No matter. Even a little bit of liberal reformism is too much for the democrats’ deep-pocketed donors. Every democratic presidential winner is totally in sync with their demands. No one gets the job without being vetted first. Joe Biden was the party’s winner in 2020 because he promised them, “Nothing will fundamentally change.”
Democracy didn’t suddenly disappear because a republican is in office instead of a democrat or because Elon Musk is constantly at Donald Trump’s side. The people of this country live under authoritarian billionaire rule devoted to accelerating a race to the bottom for most people in this country. That couldn’t have happened without the complete connivance of the Democratic Party.
The point of Sanders and AOC’s extravagant exercise is to herd democrats in while they are still reeling from Trump’s elimination of the United States Department of Education and firing thousands of federal workers across every agency. Democrats are both anxious and angry at Trump while simultaneously nervously pleading for their party to do something. The angst is understandable because capitulation is the order of the day for the liberal order.
Columbia University acceded to Trump’s demands that they had already been in the process of implementing. They have pushed out faculty who condemned Israel’s war crimes and suspended and expelled students even before Trump withheld $400 million in funds the government was contracted to pay them. The law firm Paul Weiss likewise crumbled under pressure and didn’t try to fight what were likely illegal sanctions leveled against it by a dubious executive order.
The mostly democratic liberal class is going along to get along, and no one should think that Bernie or AOC or the rest of the democrats are any different. Their goal is to energize people who instead should be expressing disgust with the democrats and leaving their failed party behind. The meaningless tour is an underhanded effort to fool them into returning to the fold. In addition, Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez is mentioned as a possible 2028 presidential candidate and the Fighting Oligarchy Tour should be seen as a campaign trial run for her. Instead of waiting in long lines to hear warmed over nonsense from fake leftists, democrats should be building independent political power outside of the electoral system.
One of the issues that goes unaddressed by Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez is the continued U.S./Israeli genocide in Gaza. On this and other issues, Ocasio-Cortez gives cover to the party. She famously claimed that Kamala Harris was “working tirelessly” on a ceasefire in Gaza while the Biden administration never wavered from arming the apartheid state. The insistence on continuing with genocide was just one reason that Kamala Harris lost voters in the 2024 election.
As for Sanders, no one should forget that he is a zionist who lived on an Israeli kibbutz as a young man. He hopes that zionism can be more liberal, and so he doesn’t criticize the Israeli state. He personalizes by constantly invoking Benjamin Netanyahu’s name , deflecting from the central issue of the U.S./Israeli alliance and its mutually agreed upon support for ethnic cleansing. “Netanyahu has not allowed any aid into Gaza in 22 days. He broke the ceasefire, resuming a bombing campaign that has killed more than 50,000 people. Now, he is threatening a long-term occupation of Gaza.
NO MORE MILITARY AID TO NETANYAHU’S WAR MACHINE.“
Israel’s genocide cannot be personified by one man, but if you’re a reformer cosplaying as a leftist, criticism of an individual is all that will be countenanced. While his fake leftist tour draws thousands of people, Sanders gives Trump cover, praising him for “cracking down on fentanyl, making sure our borders are stronger.”
The Democratic Party may be able to limp along and win the midterm elections in 2026 or the presidency in 2028. Its fortunes ebb and flow with events and their ability to find candidates from a place called Hope or who are audaciously hopeful and claim they want to change. But the mask is off for millions of people who were once their reliable voters.
Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez may be able to give their party cover; that is the role they play. They are allowed to come out from time to time and even offer a little criticism here and there while knowing full well that, should they govern again, there will be excuses and a beat down of anyone who really is on the left. Bernie and AOC are hoping that they can fool all of the people all of the time.
https://blackagendareport.com/bernie-an ... -democrats
Chasing Chuck Tumor's testicular cancer—or building Resistance to Stage 4 Capitalism?
Raymond Nat Turner, BAR poet-in-residence 26 Mar 2025
Chuck Schumer speaks at a press conference vaguely addressing the economic impact of billionaires on working families.
Billionaire bought and bossed talk shop. Alcohol, Geritol and
Protocol reign shares traded on the floor. Well-off windbags—
Huff and puff—only to stuff
Our needs; pleas; SOSs; in cylindrical files destined for dumpsters …
Wise old owl flaps tethered wings. And peers over red readers
For Kabuki Theater: Testicular Cancer versus Zombie Lies …
Weasel words kiss king’s ring. Avert government shutdown. And
Sell our social safety net to slimy kleptocrats/wannabe strongmen!
What’s making the first fifty days of fascism—blitzkrieg/warp speed—
So unsettling? Tumor’s testicular cancer is but a tiny part of an answer—
Same as $campaign contributions metastasizing for tag-team $elections.
Capitalism’s the root cause—the real, chronic, and acute cause …
Bipartisan billionaires burned our boat. Blew up our bridge.
Forced our train from the station … Caused our cancers. And,
Like toothpaste, resisting returning to the tube; Genie refusing
To jump back in bottle … we will not turn around and go back.
Bipartisan billionaires fear red hot lava of resistance! Fear
Fiery flow rising from below! Fear steamy street heat of
Millions—mad as hell—unable to put up with prancing, chainsaw-
Wrecking ball, scorched earth attacks on our lives … a minute more!
Our prognosis is poor ’til we STOP tying-off arms. STOP
Holding noses—damaging brains! STOP demobilizing
Movements. STOP de-activating activists. STOP joy-riding on the
Donkey with crack pipe dreams of DP remolded militant workers party.
We’re rehabbing. Re-training fat, flabby, atrophied dream muscles.
Retraining muscle memories of shoe leather lessons learned in Arab
Spring! George Floyd Summer! Strike-tober! Occupy and all other
Harvest-rich seasons of mass mobilization, of mass organization!
We’re compassionately releasing life-imprisoned dreams! Dreams
Locked behind concertina wire eyelids. Dreams cowering beneath
Gun towers of tradition, oppression and propaganda. Class-struggling with our
Resistance medicines—our simple prescriptions, “Organize! Organize! Organize!”
© 2025. Raymond Nat Turner, The Town Crier. All Rights Reserved.
Raymond Nat Turner is a NYC poet; BAR's Poet-in-Residence; and founder/co-leader of the jazz-poetry ensemble UpSurge!NYC. You can Vote for his work at GoFundMe and PayPal .
https://blackagendareport.com/chasing-c ... capitalism
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Sympathy for the Devils...
Liberals Believe In Nothing And Remember Even Less
A Democrat president can be as tyrannical and murderous as he wants and liberals will just brunch away in cheerful obliviousness, content with their knowledge that their team is holding the trophy.
Caitlin Johnstone
March 31, 2025
The other day I shared a short post about a video that was going around showing a father in Gaza tearfully cradling the head of his son who was decapitated in an Israeli airstrike, and some guy responded with the comment “Good thing you helped get TRUMP ELECTED!!”
And I must admit I was actually, truly shocked. I mean, what exactly did this fellow think was happening under Biden that whole time?
I saw a post on Twitter where a leftist responded to a liberal who was acting like ICE just suddenly transformed into a modern gestapo under Trump, saying, “Liberals believe in nothing and remember even less.”
And it’s just so true. They don’t believe in anything. They don’t stand for anything. It’s just a team sport for these people. Politics for the mainstream liberal is not about advancing values or building a better world, it’s about their team winning solely for the sake of winning. And because they have no real values or causes beyond winning for its own sake, what their team does when it’s in office doesn’t matter to them.
A Democrat president can be as tyrannical and murderous as he wants and liberals will just brunch away in cheerful obliviousness, content with their knowledge that their team is holding the trophy.
You see this in the way our friend believes that I “helped get Trump elected” by criticizing the people who were perpetrating an active genocide. He just automatically took it as a given that it was my responsibility to stay silent on Gaza because the person in charge was a Democrat and his veep was running for president. The fact that it was a genocide which needed to be ferociously opposed never entered into the equation for him. All he cared about was winning.
All of the most shocking and gruesome things I have ever seen online were recorded in Gaza during the Biden administration. Nobody who’d paid the slightest bit of attention to Israel’s US-backed atrocities in 2023 and 2024 would believe this was anything new that just started under Trump. But because Gaza is just seen as a political plaything by these freaks, they only care about it now that Trump is in office — and only insofar as it can be used to take points away from the Republicans.
And that’s exactly why they lost. The Democrats calculated that the Harris campaign could simply ignore Gaza without putting any daylight between Kamala’s policies and Genocide Joe’s and still win the election, and they were wrong. Polls show that among people who voted for Biden in 2020 but not for Harris in 2024, Gaza was by far their biggest reason for not doing so. The Democrats believed in nothing and stood for nothing, and nothing is what they got.
Mainstream “centrism” is just as toxic, murderous and tyrannical as Trumpism. These people will watch entire populations being mowed down by the hundreds of thousands via the policies of the people they voted for, and as long as it doesn’t interrupt brunch they’ll keep sipping their mimosas and laughing and tweeting and feeling smugly correct, and then go to bed and sleep like babies in an ocean of human blood.
https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2025/03 ... even-less/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Sympathy for the Devils...
You don’t get to be doomers *now*
Performative liberals co-opt despair, offer nothing, and still miss the point.
Antonio Melonio
Apr 5
Image made with AI because who even cares anymore.
So everyone is a pessimist now. Social media right now is filled to the brim with fucking cringe posts crying about this and that—here on Substack, but particularly on Reddit. It’s insufferable. There is no escaping all the surface-level bitching. Doomerism insofar has been reserved to the disillusioned Left treading the infamous idealist-to-nihilist pipeline—now liberals, again, have co-opted our things. Fucking assholes. This was my thing.
The reasons are clear: Trump won, Trump is doing things, tariffs, uncertainty, the fall of institutional oversight, their useless Democratic party is doing nothing (as always), yadda yadda yadda. Being a doomer is now en vogue. It’s the Zeitgeist. Why is it the Zeitgeist? Because liberals say so. Always late to the party, always, ALWAYS for the wrong fucking reasons. Never a systemic analysis to be found among them, never an ounce of self-reflection (both Biden and Harris are almost as psychopathic and narcissistic as Trump; pure and utter sociopaths all of them; war criminals all of them).
And they aren’t doomers now because they’ve read Marx or Graeber or realized anything. They’re not staring into the abyss because they have finally grasped that capitalism is the meat grinder that made Trump inevitable; that capitalism is, was, always will be the fascism enabler. No. They’re only here because they… lost. Again. That’s it. That’s the whole story. This fucking my team vs. your team bullshit like politics were a damn football game, while NEVER for a damn minute realizing that culture wars and all this performative shit is just a distraction from the very real class war.
Performative despair. Mourning the loss of a system that was already rotten—just now it’s rotting in ways they can’t ignore anymore. The state is crumbling? Sure. But where the fuck were you when it was crumbling for the rest? When it was tearing apart working-class families, building carceral (I just learned this word and had to use it) empires, militarizing the police, devastating the world, or turning healthcare into a subscription service for the rich? You were nowhere, you did nothing. You were laughing. You were calling the Left “idealistic” or “extreme” while sipping your Starbucks and clutching your New York Times op-eds like prayer beads. (This is all very US-centric but it applies just the same to us here in Europe). And now you blame everyday people for not electing your flavor of late-stage-capitalist asshole (I’m not talking here about MAGA lunatics; the election results spoke a clear language); you blame them for hating the status quo which you chose to preserve forever. That was your only politics. Nothing changes, billionaires get richer, the world slowly dies. Well, because YOU offered no alternative, offered no vision, people chose a particularly unhinged psychopath who doesn’t even hide it and does whatever he wants. He offered change, in whatever way. People know very well what he is, and still they chose him. Conservatives adapted. They’re not conservatives anymore, they are accelerationists. And the people were, are so disillusioned, so unhappy, so alienated, so angry that they chose someone, anyone, who promised to change the fucking status quo. How fucking hard can you lose? They chose a fascist over your fucking visionless status quo. Thanks for that, assholes. The rest of the world has to deal with it and everything will, in fact, get worse now. But it would have gotten worse anyway. It’s just that we’re on an accelerated timeline of collapse now. Maybe best to get it over with.
Well, now that the facade is cracking in your neighborhoods, now that your brunch is slightly more stressful—now suddenly it’s all “late-stage capitalism” and “the end is near.” But not because of capitalism. No, that would require ideological coherence. It’s the “other side,” the Republicans, the Russians, TikTok, whatever. It’s always someone, something else. And you are right, to a degree, but it’s you, too. Particularly you.
They still don’t get it. Trump isn’t a glitch. He’s a feature. He’s the logical end-point of a system that commodifies everything, that monetizes human suffering, that flattens nuance and sells it back as identity politics on a tote bag. Trump is capitalism unfiltered, with the mask ripped off. He’s their monster, their Frankenstein, stitched together from decades of bipartisan rot. You can’t bomb half the world, offload all your jobs, inflate tuition and rent to cosmic levels, and then act surprised when the people turn to a clown promising a show. People love shows and they are so fucking bored of everything now. It’s ironic that Leftists, while absolutely hating it, understand why someone would elect Trump while a liberal in their so-very-narrow worldview resorts to calling them stupid, hating them, alienating them further, writing posts like “People who elected Trump, do you regret it now? Do you see what you did?” or “Everyone who elected him should be deported.” Fucking tragedy, fucking comedy, all of it.
Instead of reckoning with all this, they doomscroll and sigh and vote blue no matter who and wonder why nothing ever gets better. It's not meant to. The system is working exactly as intended.
Liberals are the ultimate fair-weather critics. They embrace pessimism when it's convenient, when it makes them look "smart" or "aware" or vaguely but not really radical—but it’s just aesthetic. Just like everything else with them. Their doomerism is hollow. They don’t want to burn it all down. They just want the world they know. The one where they were comfortable and where they could conveniently tune out all the suffering around the world. Palestine happened under Democratic rule. So many other things did. How can you never realize that there can be no “good side”?
I’m tired of it. I’m tired of them co-opting the language of despair without earning it. Without living it. Because to be a real doomer is not just to feel hopeless—it’s to understand why. Understand the systemic reasons, all that lies underneath the surface, goddammit. It’s to be crushed by the weight of history and see clearly that it was never going to end any other way.
But even in that hopelessness, there’s clarity. And clarity is a threat. So they steal the despair, sanitize it, and sell it back to each other as tweets and reaction videos and Substacks with “urgent” headlines. They feel so very smart, so very vindicated now. Democrats created Trump and now they can use them as their only politics. A common enemy to unite against. Still, they do not offer anything.
We knew this was coming. They just noticed it now. And they'll still be surprised when the next Trump comes, and the one after that, and the one after that. Because they still think you can vote your way out of a fire when the house is already ashes and dust.
Voting is a farce. This entire thing is a farce. But don’t worry, it will get worse now. The only hope I see is artificial intelligence consuming it all and becoming the ultimate ruler. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. Humans are too fucking stupid for this.
Antonio
https://beneaththepavement.substack.com ... dium=email
Performative liberals co-opt despair, offer nothing, and still miss the point.
Antonio Melonio
Apr 5
Image made with AI because who even cares anymore.
So everyone is a pessimist now. Social media right now is filled to the brim with fucking cringe posts crying about this and that—here on Substack, but particularly on Reddit. It’s insufferable. There is no escaping all the surface-level bitching. Doomerism insofar has been reserved to the disillusioned Left treading the infamous idealist-to-nihilist pipeline—now liberals, again, have co-opted our things. Fucking assholes. This was my thing.
The reasons are clear: Trump won, Trump is doing things, tariffs, uncertainty, the fall of institutional oversight, their useless Democratic party is doing nothing (as always), yadda yadda yadda. Being a doomer is now en vogue. It’s the Zeitgeist. Why is it the Zeitgeist? Because liberals say so. Always late to the party, always, ALWAYS for the wrong fucking reasons. Never a systemic analysis to be found among them, never an ounce of self-reflection (both Biden and Harris are almost as psychopathic and narcissistic as Trump; pure and utter sociopaths all of them; war criminals all of them).
And they aren’t doomers now because they’ve read Marx or Graeber or realized anything. They’re not staring into the abyss because they have finally grasped that capitalism is the meat grinder that made Trump inevitable; that capitalism is, was, always will be the fascism enabler. No. They’re only here because they… lost. Again. That’s it. That’s the whole story. This fucking my team vs. your team bullshit like politics were a damn football game, while NEVER for a damn minute realizing that culture wars and all this performative shit is just a distraction from the very real class war.
Performative despair. Mourning the loss of a system that was already rotten—just now it’s rotting in ways they can’t ignore anymore. The state is crumbling? Sure. But where the fuck were you when it was crumbling for the rest? When it was tearing apart working-class families, building carceral (I just learned this word and had to use it) empires, militarizing the police, devastating the world, or turning healthcare into a subscription service for the rich? You were nowhere, you did nothing. You were laughing. You were calling the Left “idealistic” or “extreme” while sipping your Starbucks and clutching your New York Times op-eds like prayer beads. (This is all very US-centric but it applies just the same to us here in Europe). And now you blame everyday people for not electing your flavor of late-stage-capitalist asshole (I’m not talking here about MAGA lunatics; the election results spoke a clear language); you blame them for hating the status quo which you chose to preserve forever. That was your only politics. Nothing changes, billionaires get richer, the world slowly dies. Well, because YOU offered no alternative, offered no vision, people chose a particularly unhinged psychopath who doesn’t even hide it and does whatever he wants. He offered change, in whatever way. People know very well what he is, and still they chose him. Conservatives adapted. They’re not conservatives anymore, they are accelerationists. And the people were, are so disillusioned, so unhappy, so alienated, so angry that they chose someone, anyone, who promised to change the fucking status quo. How fucking hard can you lose? They chose a fascist over your fucking visionless status quo. Thanks for that, assholes. The rest of the world has to deal with it and everything will, in fact, get worse now. But it would have gotten worse anyway. It’s just that we’re on an accelerated timeline of collapse now. Maybe best to get it over with.
Well, now that the facade is cracking in your neighborhoods, now that your brunch is slightly more stressful—now suddenly it’s all “late-stage capitalism” and “the end is near.” But not because of capitalism. No, that would require ideological coherence. It’s the “other side,” the Republicans, the Russians, TikTok, whatever. It’s always someone, something else. And you are right, to a degree, but it’s you, too. Particularly you.
They still don’t get it. Trump isn’t a glitch. He’s a feature. He’s the logical end-point of a system that commodifies everything, that monetizes human suffering, that flattens nuance and sells it back as identity politics on a tote bag. Trump is capitalism unfiltered, with the mask ripped off. He’s their monster, their Frankenstein, stitched together from decades of bipartisan rot. You can’t bomb half the world, offload all your jobs, inflate tuition and rent to cosmic levels, and then act surprised when the people turn to a clown promising a show. People love shows and they are so fucking bored of everything now. It’s ironic that Leftists, while absolutely hating it, understand why someone would elect Trump while a liberal in their so-very-narrow worldview resorts to calling them stupid, hating them, alienating them further, writing posts like “People who elected Trump, do you regret it now? Do you see what you did?” or “Everyone who elected him should be deported.” Fucking tragedy, fucking comedy, all of it.
Instead of reckoning with all this, they doomscroll and sigh and vote blue no matter who and wonder why nothing ever gets better. It's not meant to. The system is working exactly as intended.
Liberals are the ultimate fair-weather critics. They embrace pessimism when it's convenient, when it makes them look "smart" or "aware" or vaguely but not really radical—but it’s just aesthetic. Just like everything else with them. Their doomerism is hollow. They don’t want to burn it all down. They just want the world they know. The one where they were comfortable and where they could conveniently tune out all the suffering around the world. Palestine happened under Democratic rule. So many other things did. How can you never realize that there can be no “good side”?
I’m tired of it. I’m tired of them co-opting the language of despair without earning it. Without living it. Because to be a real doomer is not just to feel hopeless—it’s to understand why. Understand the systemic reasons, all that lies underneath the surface, goddammit. It’s to be crushed by the weight of history and see clearly that it was never going to end any other way.
But even in that hopelessness, there’s clarity. And clarity is a threat. So they steal the despair, sanitize it, and sell it back to each other as tweets and reaction videos and Substacks with “urgent” headlines. They feel so very smart, so very vindicated now. Democrats created Trump and now they can use them as their only politics. A common enemy to unite against. Still, they do not offer anything.
We knew this was coming. They just noticed it now. And they'll still be surprised when the next Trump comes, and the one after that, and the one after that. Because they still think you can vote your way out of a fire when the house is already ashes and dust.
Voting is a farce. This entire thing is a farce. But don’t worry, it will get worse now. The only hope I see is artificial intelligence consuming it all and becoming the ultimate ruler. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. Humans are too fucking stupid for this.
Antonio
https://beneaththepavement.substack.com ... dium=email
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Sympathy for the Devils...
Cory Booker, Confused Liberals, Obama's Reappearance, and the Dangers of a Fake Movement
Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist 09 Apr 2025
Any “movement” that leads protest back to the Democratic Party is, by definition, dangerous. Criticism of Donald Trump cannot be a defining feature of change.
“I think some of these protesters are spontaneous and organic and sincere. Some, I think, are connected to Russia and I say that having looked at this for a long time. I think some financing should be investigated. And I want to ask the FBI to investigate them.”
Nancy Pelosi discussing Palestine solidarity protests in 2024
What kind of protest has Nancy Pelosi as a featured speaker? One that is connected to the Democratic Party and that by definition isn’t protesting anything important, which is why Nancy Pelosi appeared at a Hands Off rally in Scranton, Pennsylvania on April 5. She spoke predictably as a democratic member of congress would, saying that she wanted to protect the safety net , “Hands off our safety net. Hands off our medicaid. Hands off our medicare. Hands off our social security.” But those who have longer memories know that during the Obama administration she declared that social security was “on the table” for budget cut consideration.
The Hands Off organization was suspect from the moment of its inception. Of course one would say hands off of popular programs. But why “Hands Off NATO” and how could “Hands Off Palestine” possibly be missing?
The answer of course is that Hands Off was organized by Indivisible , a group run by Democratic Party insiders. Co-executive directors Leah Greenberg and Ezra Levin are not only a married couple but both have worked for Democratic Party candidates and Greenberg was a staffer in the State Department during the Obama administration. They can best be described as controlled opposition, speaking in support of the low hanging fruit of popular safety net programs which allow for the likes of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to show up at what is allegedly a protest. Pelosi’s main function as Speaker was to raise money from her equally rich friends and dispatch any hint of slightly progressive policy from House members foolish enough to think they might have an impact on their party.
Hands Off rallies attracted thousands of people across the country and gave the impression that some sort of serious opposition was being waged against Donald Trump’s agenda. It certainly was a week for high profile extravaganza. The rallies were preceded by another extravaganza of nothingness carried out by none other than New Jersey Senator Cory Booker.
Booker’s 25 hour long speech from March 31 to April 1 was initially presented as a filibuster that would break segregationist Strom Thurmond’s 24 hour effort to delay passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957. But by definition, a filibuster is carried out in order to oppose legislation. Booker’s speech didn’t oppose anything in particular. Kudos should go to his staff who wrote a 1,000 page document so that their boss could engage in a campaign and fundraising stunt.
What did Booker say? He said that Trump is very bad without mentioning the continued genocide in Gaza or that non-citizen students are being snatched off the street and sent to immigration detention. He said that democrats should apologize for losing. Why does he think they should apologize? He said that they didn’t show voters that they care about them. That statement is true but not for any reason that Booker would mention. The democrats didn’t continue the covid era programs that could have helped millions of people and they lost in part because of their choice to adhere to the dictates of their party’s oligarchs and defend neo-liberal austerity. Booker certainly doesn’t own up to what the democrats really got wrong. How could he? Among other things Booker is known for voting with republicans in 2017 to prevent the importation of drugs from Canada. As for his opinions of Trump, no one needed him to speak for hours on end to say what they dislike about his administration.
Yet the bamboozlement worked. Booker was defended more often than not. We were told how he trained and fasted and rehydrated himself before his speechathon. These details were meant to quiet any criticism and sadly, for the most part they did just that. Anyone who questioned the effectiveness of his theatrical performance was deemed a “hater.” White people who rightly pointed out that emperor Booker wore no clothes were labeled “anti Black ” and were informed that their opinions were not wanted.
After the Booker extravaganza of nothingness, Barack Obama reappeared and made what he thinks are meaningful comparisons between himself and Trump.
“Imagine if I had done any of this. Imagine if I pulled Fox News credentials from the White House press corps. … Imagine if I had said to law firms representing parties my administration had initiated, that you will not be allowed into government buildings. We will punish you economically from dissenting from the Affordable Care Act or the Iran deal. We will ferret out students who will protest against my policies. It’s unimaginable that the same parties that are silent now would have tolerated behavior like that from me.”
Obama may not have pulled any press credentials, but he prosecuted nine journalists under the Espionage Act, more than any of his predecessors. As for ferreting out students, he killed a 16 year old U.S. citizen, Abdulrahman Al-Awlaki in a drone strike after assassinating his father the same way. He may not have kept anyone out of a government building, but his administration forced down a plane carrying Evo Morales, then the president of Bolivia, because they thought whistleblower Edward Snowden may have been aboard. It is also interesting that Obama didn’t say, “Imagine if I had a kill list.” He did have one and very few of his supporters blinked an eye, much less protested the carnage he caused.
A fake right wing movement in left wing disguise is the last thing that anyone needs at this juncture. For one thing, Trump has proven that the presidency is a powerful office and that the president can get away with doing most of what he wants. If Obama wanted to ask about imagining, he might ask us to imagine what would have happened if he made recess Supreme Court appointments. We might imagine how Joe Biden could have added to the court and undone the conservative super majority. But they won’t ask us to imagine any of their choices which have been so damaging.
Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are sheepdogging desperate democrats back into the party. Democratic Party operatives in Indivisible are doing the same thing. There have been no mentions of the continued U.S./Israeli genocide in Gaza. Only 15 Senate democrats voted to halt the next installment of weapons to Israel. Cory Booker was not among that number.
There is no value to bringing thousands of people together and then keeping them in a state of confusion. The end result may be that democrats will be victorious in the future, but what will those victories be worth? Will there be undercover efforts to cut social security and very public wars of aggression that kill thousands of people? If history is any guide the answer to those questions will be a resounding yes. It will be better to hold off on protest until there is a better understanding about what and who we should be fighting.
Keeping the duopoly party tag team alive will only lead to more disaster for people in this country and around the world. It is time for true movement politics, a mass left wing movement in order to have any improvement in our lives and in our human rights. The Hands Off rallies should be the last time that well meaning but uninformed people are led right back to failure.
https://blackagendareport.com/cory-book ... e-movement
HANDS OFF NATO? Not Palestine? Who got the memo?
Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor 09 Apr 2025
Chris Smalls addressed the HANDS OFF crowd in Los Angeles. The Palestinian flags and keffiyehs were there throughout the rally.
The Democrats’ HANDS OFF rallies included “HANDS OFF NATO” and excluded “HANDS OFF PALESTINE,” but not all rally goers got the memo.
On Sunday, April 6, the KPFA-Radio Berkeley Sunday Show opened with an hour on Saturday’s nationwide “HANDS OFF!” rallies, which had taken place in cities across the country. The first guest, University of San Francisco professor Rebecca Gordon, opened by saying she’d seen some great signage at the rally she attended, the first being, “Trump Has His Head So Far Up Putin’s Ass That He Can See Sarah Palin.”
This New Cold War nonsense was also manifested on the “HANDS OFF 2025 ” website, where the graphic representing the rally listed NATO near the center, between cancer research and consumer protection, as an institution to be defended. The website also included a PDF for printing a “HANDS OFF NATO” sign.
The site quotes MoveOn Executive Director Rahna Epting saying, "This peaceful movement is powered by everyday people—nurses, teachers, students, parents," but these everyday people don’t wake up hungry for military industrial profit, asking who NATO can bomb, bully, or overthrow next. Their very real worries about losing Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, public lands, civil rights, unions, housing, and more were simply being managed by the Democrats in charge of the message, most notably MoveOn and Indivisible .
In “Why Are HANDS OFF Rallies Supporting NATO? ,” an essay published by Sheer Post and Common Dreams, Code Pink co- founder Medea Benjamin and World Beyond War founder David Swanson wrote, “The inclusion of NATO in the Hands Off list contradicts the basic Hands Off agenda. Right now, at the bidding of President Trump, NATO is openly and aggressively pressuring its member nations to move money from healthcare, retirement funds, and clean energy to weapons and militarism.”
They also wrote, “We would be happy to expand the Hands Off demands to international issues, such as Hands Off Palestine or Yemen or Greenland or Panama or Canada. But we do object to including a destructive institution like NATO, an institution that systematically and grossly violates the commitment to settle disputes peacefully contained in the UN Charter.”
The demand for peace and specifically peace in Palestine were wholly absent from the HANDS OFF website for obvious reasons. War and genocide in Gaza are part of the Democratic Party agenda, with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris most complicit. Turning attention to that would risk turning people away from the party.
Who got the memo?
To be fair to rally goers, I didn’t see any “HANDS OFF NATO” signs in the many photo essays published around the country. Someone told me they saw a few in the City of San Rafael in California’s Marin County, and I did see one sign that read, “THIS IS NOT RUSSIA.”
I didn’t see any Palestinian flags in the photo essays either, but people who attended the Berkeley, Oakland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles rallies said that there were highly visible pro-Palestinian contingents, and in Oakland there was a Palestinian speaker. They didn’t seem to have gotten the MoveOn memo.
Not surprisingly, the list of partner organizations was largely a collection of donor-dependent NGOs. There was a heavy emphasis on climate and the environment despite the huge carbon costs of war and all the damage it does to soil, food, water, and human health.
There were, however, a few surprises, most notably Peace Action and Veterans for Peace . These organizations would seem to have nothing in common with a pro-NATO rally, so why did they sign up? The Veterans for Peace website prominently features the group’s endorsement of both the national HANDS OFF rally and the concurrent march against Gaza Genocide in Washington, DC.
I asked a member of Veterans for Peace how the group had come to endorse a pro-NATO rally, and he said he didn’t know but he was disgusted. He had attended the rally in Berkeley without knowing that HANDS OFF NATO was one of its official demands. Vets for Peace is loosely organized in local chapters, but the national organization had somehow made a decision to endorse.
It seemed that they may have failed to get the memo because their website reads, “These two demonstrations illustrate the huge organizing challenge that anti-war/peace activists face in an environment where people are under attack and feeling uncertainty and fear. While people are appalled by the blatant ethnic cleansing and genocide in Gaza, many are also panicked by what they see happening here at home.”
Code Pink was not among the “partner” organizations; they definitely got the memo, as evidenced by Medea Benjamin and David Swanson’s essay.
Nevertheless, Code Pink-Los Angeles volunteer Marya Shahriary says the Code Pink contingent clustered on a corner chanting at the march’s starting point, Pershing Square, and gradually other individuals and pockets of people joined them as they marched to City Hall.
“Someone invited us to speak at Pershing Square,” she said, “but then someone else, probably a HANDS OFF higher up, disinvited us.”
Melina Abdullah , Cal State-LA Pan-African Studies Professor and BLM-Grassroots organizer, was invited to speak and she spoke eloquently about Palestine, without hesitation, as did Amazon labor organizer Chris Smalls and Bitchuation Room podcast host Francesca Fiorentini. When Abdullah realized that Code Pink had been disinvited at Pershing Square, she invited Marya Shahriary on stage to speak.
At a small protest on the sidelines of the Washington, DC HANDS OFF rally, Code Pink’s Jodie Evans criticized the inclusion of “HANDS OFF NATO” and the exclusion of “HANDS OFF PALESTINE,” and said many people stopped to talk to them.
Medea Benjamin and David Swanson are to be thanked for drawing the activist community’s attention to the HANDS OFF organization’s “HANDS OFF NATO” demand. As more people get the memo, how will they respond? Will they demand its removal for their ongoing participation? And ask for the addition of a “HANDS OFF PALESTINE” demand?
I would hope that Veterans for Peace and Peace Action will otherwise ask to be removed from the list of partner organizations.
If so, we’ll see how HANDS OFF responds.
https://blackagendareport.com/hands-nat ... o-got-memo
From Uncle Tom to Cousin Cory: (Or, The Curious Case of Mr. Booker’s Senate Floor Minstrel Show)
Anthony Karefa Rogers-Wright 09 Apr 2025
Senator Cory Booker’s recent 25-hour Senate speech is hailed by some as an act of resistance. Really, it exposes the moral bankruptcy of neoliberal politics, as his performative progressivism clashes with his unwavering support for militarism and apartheid.
“It is wrong to encourage a man or a people in evil doing; it is wrong to aid and abet a national crime simply because it is unpopular not to do so.”
So wrote the epochal scholar and thinker W.E.B DuBois as part of his elegant polemic of the father of Black accommodationism and an ancestor of the Black Misleadership Class, Booker T. Washington. Whereas Dr. DuBois was diplomatic with his opprobrium of Mr. Wasington, I cannot offer the same semblance of benevolence when it comes to Senator Cory Booker, who represents a pernicious manifestation of bootlicking and an exemplar of the fact that white “supremacy” ideology can be upheld and exercised by anyone regardless of their race, ethnicity, gender, or other identity.
Last week, Senator Booker, a useful negro tool of Big Pharma and Big zionism, took to the floor of the United States Senate and spoke for 25 hours and 4 minutes straight. For far too many, the spectacle and intermittent soliloquy served as proof that the Democrat party has finally found its footing and is tapped into the mood of the people demanding acts of “resistance” against Trump’s regime and draconian policies - especially after the recent capitulation by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and nine other Senate Democrats who voted to allow Trump to proceed with his legislative internecine that continues to take a slash and burn approach to government agencies and functions, rather than force his hand with a government shutdown. However, a closer look at Booker’s boolicking brouhaha reveals the nadir of neoliberal opporcoonism, abject tartuffery, and how desperate and pathetic Democrats and their liberal acolytes are in a moment when its been irrefutably elucidated that they are not a legitimate opposition as much as they are complicit in the toxic panoply of suffering and oppression being shouldered by poor, working class and colonized people in the United States and abroad.
During his speech, Booker the Boot had the nerve to quote Martin Luther King in a feeble attempt to lift up the need for more humanity. In handpicking Dr. King quotes, in the same way that AIPAC hand picked him like a piece of capitulatory cotton, it must not have occurred to Senator Booker that he has become the white moderate that Martin King admonished us of in his legendary Letter from Birmingham Jail . Moreover, Booker is the “respectable negro who would rather be invited to the White House than invited to the cause of justice ” King eviscerated in a speech about the repugnant Vietnam War. Booker’s cognitive dissonance that provided him with the temerity to quote legendary Civil and Human Rights champions like King on the Senate floor while condemning righteous acts like Boycott, Divest, and Sanction and proclaiming his unconditional and inexorable support for the Israeli war machine is no different than white supremacists quoting King as part of their condemnation of so-called Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and Affirmative Action. White “supremacy” indeed gets its power from invisibility, triangulation, and Blackface costumes such as those worn by Cousin Cory Booker.
And to be clear, it wasn’t morality holding Booker upright during his 25-hour minstrel show on the Senate floor as much as it was the strings of his zionist alabaster puppet masters at AIPAC who have furnished him with close to one million dollars in blood money throughout his career. Booker’s moral bankruptcy was on full display when just one day after his Senate floor remix of Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah he voted against a resolution introduced by Senator Bernie Sanders to block nearly $9 billion in military aid and equipment to the zionist ethnostate. This should come as no surprise though - after all, Booker is fond of posing for pictures with war criminals like Netanyahu and Israeli Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant, both the recipients of International Criminal Court arrest warrants for war crimes in Gaza.
What is surprising, though maybe it shouldn’t be, is the effect Booker’s 25-hour blathering marathon of moral mendacity is having on the numerous number of DNC plantation negroes and white liberals who are heralding him as a hero. The effect is more pernicious than one might realize as a chorus of liberal negroes and their white liberal counterparts took to social media after his speech to post selfies with big smiles in a pathetic demonstration of approval as if Booker should be the new face of Miles Davis’ seminal album, “Someday My Prince Will Come.” Far too many of these DNC plantation dwellers even castigated their own people who took umbrage with Booker’s one man Amos and Andy rendition by retorting with sophomoric statements and questions such as, “at least he’s doing something, what
Cory Booker and Yoav Gallant
are you doing for the cause?” To these sad and lost liberals I will actually concur that Booker did indeed do something - he legitimized genocide, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid by remaining silent about the zionist war machine’s crimes against humanity in Palestine, he legitimized Trump rolling out the red carpet to welcome an accused war criminal, Benzion Mileikowsky aka Benjamin Netenyahyu, to the White [people’s] House, and he legitimized the white “supremacy” ideology that continues to effectuate a global campaign of imperialism, neocolonialism, war, and economic and environmental malfeasance.
The Booker effect also continued into last weekend when Democrat-aligned liberal nonprofits held a series of demonstrations across the country declaring “Hands Off.” These perfunctory protests should have been dubbed, “Hands Off Morality,” as the demands said nothing about ending genocide, ethnic cleansing, and illegal occupation in Palestine, nothing about ending a feckless, fossil-fueled war between Ukraine and the Russia, and even provided qualified immunity for the criminal and colonial entity known as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Many of the attendees noted that Booker was on their minds and inspired them to take to part.
In his polemic of Booker T. Washington, Dr DuBois declares, “But so far as Mr. Washington apologizes for injustice, North or South, does not rightly value the privilege and duty of voting, belittles the emasculating effects of caste distinctions, and opposes the higher training and ambition of our brighter minds,—so far as he, the South, or the Nation, does this,—we must unceasingly and firmly oppose them.” This duty is now bestowed upon us as Black and all people of conscience, to expose Booker for all that he is and has always been, a silver tongue with a dark heart, a melanated mask that still fails to obscure the fact that he is a willing agent of white “supremacy,” and an enemy of oppressed people the world over. Failure to do so will allow bootlickers like Booker to continue to be seen as the apotheosis for Black leadership and liberation rather than anathema to them.
No Compromise
No Retreat
https://blackagendareport.com/sites/def ... x400_0.png
Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist 09 Apr 2025
Any “movement” that leads protest back to the Democratic Party is, by definition, dangerous. Criticism of Donald Trump cannot be a defining feature of change.
“I think some of these protesters are spontaneous and organic and sincere. Some, I think, are connected to Russia and I say that having looked at this for a long time. I think some financing should be investigated. And I want to ask the FBI to investigate them.”
Nancy Pelosi discussing Palestine solidarity protests in 2024
What kind of protest has Nancy Pelosi as a featured speaker? One that is connected to the Democratic Party and that by definition isn’t protesting anything important, which is why Nancy Pelosi appeared at a Hands Off rally in Scranton, Pennsylvania on April 5. She spoke predictably as a democratic member of congress would, saying that she wanted to protect the safety net , “Hands off our safety net. Hands off our medicaid. Hands off our medicare. Hands off our social security.” But those who have longer memories know that during the Obama administration she declared that social security was “on the table” for budget cut consideration.
The Hands Off organization was suspect from the moment of its inception. Of course one would say hands off of popular programs. But why “Hands Off NATO” and how could “Hands Off Palestine” possibly be missing?
The answer of course is that Hands Off was organized by Indivisible , a group run by Democratic Party insiders. Co-executive directors Leah Greenberg and Ezra Levin are not only a married couple but both have worked for Democratic Party candidates and Greenberg was a staffer in the State Department during the Obama administration. They can best be described as controlled opposition, speaking in support of the low hanging fruit of popular safety net programs which allow for the likes of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to show up at what is allegedly a protest. Pelosi’s main function as Speaker was to raise money from her equally rich friends and dispatch any hint of slightly progressive policy from House members foolish enough to think they might have an impact on their party.
Hands Off rallies attracted thousands of people across the country and gave the impression that some sort of serious opposition was being waged against Donald Trump’s agenda. It certainly was a week for high profile extravaganza. The rallies were preceded by another extravaganza of nothingness carried out by none other than New Jersey Senator Cory Booker.
Booker’s 25 hour long speech from March 31 to April 1 was initially presented as a filibuster that would break segregationist Strom Thurmond’s 24 hour effort to delay passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957. But by definition, a filibuster is carried out in order to oppose legislation. Booker’s speech didn’t oppose anything in particular. Kudos should go to his staff who wrote a 1,000 page document so that their boss could engage in a campaign and fundraising stunt.
What did Booker say? He said that Trump is very bad without mentioning the continued genocide in Gaza or that non-citizen students are being snatched off the street and sent to immigration detention. He said that democrats should apologize for losing. Why does he think they should apologize? He said that they didn’t show voters that they care about them. That statement is true but not for any reason that Booker would mention. The democrats didn’t continue the covid era programs that could have helped millions of people and they lost in part because of their choice to adhere to the dictates of their party’s oligarchs and defend neo-liberal austerity. Booker certainly doesn’t own up to what the democrats really got wrong. How could he? Among other things Booker is known for voting with republicans in 2017 to prevent the importation of drugs from Canada. As for his opinions of Trump, no one needed him to speak for hours on end to say what they dislike about his administration.
Yet the bamboozlement worked. Booker was defended more often than not. We were told how he trained and fasted and rehydrated himself before his speechathon. These details were meant to quiet any criticism and sadly, for the most part they did just that. Anyone who questioned the effectiveness of his theatrical performance was deemed a “hater.” White people who rightly pointed out that emperor Booker wore no clothes were labeled “anti Black ” and were informed that their opinions were not wanted.
After the Booker extravaganza of nothingness, Barack Obama reappeared and made what he thinks are meaningful comparisons between himself and Trump.
“Imagine if I had done any of this. Imagine if I pulled Fox News credentials from the White House press corps. … Imagine if I had said to law firms representing parties my administration had initiated, that you will not be allowed into government buildings. We will punish you economically from dissenting from the Affordable Care Act or the Iran deal. We will ferret out students who will protest against my policies. It’s unimaginable that the same parties that are silent now would have tolerated behavior like that from me.”
Obama may not have pulled any press credentials, but he prosecuted nine journalists under the Espionage Act, more than any of his predecessors. As for ferreting out students, he killed a 16 year old U.S. citizen, Abdulrahman Al-Awlaki in a drone strike after assassinating his father the same way. He may not have kept anyone out of a government building, but his administration forced down a plane carrying Evo Morales, then the president of Bolivia, because they thought whistleblower Edward Snowden may have been aboard. It is also interesting that Obama didn’t say, “Imagine if I had a kill list.” He did have one and very few of his supporters blinked an eye, much less protested the carnage he caused.
A fake right wing movement in left wing disguise is the last thing that anyone needs at this juncture. For one thing, Trump has proven that the presidency is a powerful office and that the president can get away with doing most of what he wants. If Obama wanted to ask about imagining, he might ask us to imagine what would have happened if he made recess Supreme Court appointments. We might imagine how Joe Biden could have added to the court and undone the conservative super majority. But they won’t ask us to imagine any of their choices which have been so damaging.
Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are sheepdogging desperate democrats back into the party. Democratic Party operatives in Indivisible are doing the same thing. There have been no mentions of the continued U.S./Israeli genocide in Gaza. Only 15 Senate democrats voted to halt the next installment of weapons to Israel. Cory Booker was not among that number.
There is no value to bringing thousands of people together and then keeping them in a state of confusion. The end result may be that democrats will be victorious in the future, but what will those victories be worth? Will there be undercover efforts to cut social security and very public wars of aggression that kill thousands of people? If history is any guide the answer to those questions will be a resounding yes. It will be better to hold off on protest until there is a better understanding about what and who we should be fighting.
Keeping the duopoly party tag team alive will only lead to more disaster for people in this country and around the world. It is time for true movement politics, a mass left wing movement in order to have any improvement in our lives and in our human rights. The Hands Off rallies should be the last time that well meaning but uninformed people are led right back to failure.
https://blackagendareport.com/cory-book ... e-movement
HANDS OFF NATO? Not Palestine? Who got the memo?
Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor 09 Apr 2025
Chris Smalls addressed the HANDS OFF crowd in Los Angeles. The Palestinian flags and keffiyehs were there throughout the rally.
The Democrats’ HANDS OFF rallies included “HANDS OFF NATO” and excluded “HANDS OFF PALESTINE,” but not all rally goers got the memo.
On Sunday, April 6, the KPFA-Radio Berkeley Sunday Show opened with an hour on Saturday’s nationwide “HANDS OFF!” rallies, which had taken place in cities across the country. The first guest, University of San Francisco professor Rebecca Gordon, opened by saying she’d seen some great signage at the rally she attended, the first being, “Trump Has His Head So Far Up Putin’s Ass That He Can See Sarah Palin.”
This New Cold War nonsense was also manifested on the “HANDS OFF 2025 ” website, where the graphic representing the rally listed NATO near the center, between cancer research and consumer protection, as an institution to be defended. The website also included a PDF for printing a “HANDS OFF NATO” sign.
The site quotes MoveOn Executive Director Rahna Epting saying, "This peaceful movement is powered by everyday people—nurses, teachers, students, parents," but these everyday people don’t wake up hungry for military industrial profit, asking who NATO can bomb, bully, or overthrow next. Their very real worries about losing Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, public lands, civil rights, unions, housing, and more were simply being managed by the Democrats in charge of the message, most notably MoveOn and Indivisible .
In “Why Are HANDS OFF Rallies Supporting NATO? ,” an essay published by Sheer Post and Common Dreams, Code Pink co- founder Medea Benjamin and World Beyond War founder David Swanson wrote, “The inclusion of NATO in the Hands Off list contradicts the basic Hands Off agenda. Right now, at the bidding of President Trump, NATO is openly and aggressively pressuring its member nations to move money from healthcare, retirement funds, and clean energy to weapons and militarism.”
They also wrote, “We would be happy to expand the Hands Off demands to international issues, such as Hands Off Palestine or Yemen or Greenland or Panama or Canada. But we do object to including a destructive institution like NATO, an institution that systematically and grossly violates the commitment to settle disputes peacefully contained in the UN Charter.”
The demand for peace and specifically peace in Palestine were wholly absent from the HANDS OFF website for obvious reasons. War and genocide in Gaza are part of the Democratic Party agenda, with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris most complicit. Turning attention to that would risk turning people away from the party.
Who got the memo?
To be fair to rally goers, I didn’t see any “HANDS OFF NATO” signs in the many photo essays published around the country. Someone told me they saw a few in the City of San Rafael in California’s Marin County, and I did see one sign that read, “THIS IS NOT RUSSIA.”
I didn’t see any Palestinian flags in the photo essays either, but people who attended the Berkeley, Oakland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles rallies said that there were highly visible pro-Palestinian contingents, and in Oakland there was a Palestinian speaker. They didn’t seem to have gotten the MoveOn memo.
Not surprisingly, the list of partner organizations was largely a collection of donor-dependent NGOs. There was a heavy emphasis on climate and the environment despite the huge carbon costs of war and all the damage it does to soil, food, water, and human health.
There were, however, a few surprises, most notably Peace Action and Veterans for Peace . These organizations would seem to have nothing in common with a pro-NATO rally, so why did they sign up? The Veterans for Peace website prominently features the group’s endorsement of both the national HANDS OFF rally and the concurrent march against Gaza Genocide in Washington, DC.
I asked a member of Veterans for Peace how the group had come to endorse a pro-NATO rally, and he said he didn’t know but he was disgusted. He had attended the rally in Berkeley without knowing that HANDS OFF NATO was one of its official demands. Vets for Peace is loosely organized in local chapters, but the national organization had somehow made a decision to endorse.
It seemed that they may have failed to get the memo because their website reads, “These two demonstrations illustrate the huge organizing challenge that anti-war/peace activists face in an environment where people are under attack and feeling uncertainty and fear. While people are appalled by the blatant ethnic cleansing and genocide in Gaza, many are also panicked by what they see happening here at home.”
Code Pink was not among the “partner” organizations; they definitely got the memo, as evidenced by Medea Benjamin and David Swanson’s essay.
Nevertheless, Code Pink-Los Angeles volunteer Marya Shahriary says the Code Pink contingent clustered on a corner chanting at the march’s starting point, Pershing Square, and gradually other individuals and pockets of people joined them as they marched to City Hall.
“Someone invited us to speak at Pershing Square,” she said, “but then someone else, probably a HANDS OFF higher up, disinvited us.”
Melina Abdullah , Cal State-LA Pan-African Studies Professor and BLM-Grassroots organizer, was invited to speak and she spoke eloquently about Palestine, without hesitation, as did Amazon labor organizer Chris Smalls and Bitchuation Room podcast host Francesca Fiorentini. When Abdullah realized that Code Pink had been disinvited at Pershing Square, she invited Marya Shahriary on stage to speak.
At a small protest on the sidelines of the Washington, DC HANDS OFF rally, Code Pink’s Jodie Evans criticized the inclusion of “HANDS OFF NATO” and the exclusion of “HANDS OFF PALESTINE,” and said many people stopped to talk to them.
Medea Benjamin and David Swanson are to be thanked for drawing the activist community’s attention to the HANDS OFF organization’s “HANDS OFF NATO” demand. As more people get the memo, how will they respond? Will they demand its removal for their ongoing participation? And ask for the addition of a “HANDS OFF PALESTINE” demand?
I would hope that Veterans for Peace and Peace Action will otherwise ask to be removed from the list of partner organizations.
If so, we’ll see how HANDS OFF responds.
https://blackagendareport.com/hands-nat ... o-got-memo
From Uncle Tom to Cousin Cory: (Or, The Curious Case of Mr. Booker’s Senate Floor Minstrel Show)
Anthony Karefa Rogers-Wright 09 Apr 2025
Senator Cory Booker’s recent 25-hour Senate speech is hailed by some as an act of resistance. Really, it exposes the moral bankruptcy of neoliberal politics, as his performative progressivism clashes with his unwavering support for militarism and apartheid.
“It is wrong to encourage a man or a people in evil doing; it is wrong to aid and abet a national crime simply because it is unpopular not to do so.”
So wrote the epochal scholar and thinker W.E.B DuBois as part of his elegant polemic of the father of Black accommodationism and an ancestor of the Black Misleadership Class, Booker T. Washington. Whereas Dr. DuBois was diplomatic with his opprobrium of Mr. Wasington, I cannot offer the same semblance of benevolence when it comes to Senator Cory Booker, who represents a pernicious manifestation of bootlicking and an exemplar of the fact that white “supremacy” ideology can be upheld and exercised by anyone regardless of their race, ethnicity, gender, or other identity.
Last week, Senator Booker, a useful negro tool of Big Pharma and Big zionism, took to the floor of the United States Senate and spoke for 25 hours and 4 minutes straight. For far too many, the spectacle and intermittent soliloquy served as proof that the Democrat party has finally found its footing and is tapped into the mood of the people demanding acts of “resistance” against Trump’s regime and draconian policies - especially after the recent capitulation by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and nine other Senate Democrats who voted to allow Trump to proceed with his legislative internecine that continues to take a slash and burn approach to government agencies and functions, rather than force his hand with a government shutdown. However, a closer look at Booker’s boolicking brouhaha reveals the nadir of neoliberal opporcoonism, abject tartuffery, and how desperate and pathetic Democrats and their liberal acolytes are in a moment when its been irrefutably elucidated that they are not a legitimate opposition as much as they are complicit in the toxic panoply of suffering and oppression being shouldered by poor, working class and colonized people in the United States and abroad.
During his speech, Booker the Boot had the nerve to quote Martin Luther King in a feeble attempt to lift up the need for more humanity. In handpicking Dr. King quotes, in the same way that AIPAC hand picked him like a piece of capitulatory cotton, it must not have occurred to Senator Booker that he has become the white moderate that Martin King admonished us of in his legendary Letter from Birmingham Jail . Moreover, Booker is the “respectable negro who would rather be invited to the White House than invited to the cause of justice ” King eviscerated in a speech about the repugnant Vietnam War. Booker’s cognitive dissonance that provided him with the temerity to quote legendary Civil and Human Rights champions like King on the Senate floor while condemning righteous acts like Boycott, Divest, and Sanction and proclaiming his unconditional and inexorable support for the Israeli war machine is no different than white supremacists quoting King as part of their condemnation of so-called Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and Affirmative Action. White “supremacy” indeed gets its power from invisibility, triangulation, and Blackface costumes such as those worn by Cousin Cory Booker.
And to be clear, it wasn’t morality holding Booker upright during his 25-hour minstrel show on the Senate floor as much as it was the strings of his zionist alabaster puppet masters at AIPAC who have furnished him with close to one million dollars in blood money throughout his career. Booker’s moral bankruptcy was on full display when just one day after his Senate floor remix of Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah he voted against a resolution introduced by Senator Bernie Sanders to block nearly $9 billion in military aid and equipment to the zionist ethnostate. This should come as no surprise though - after all, Booker is fond of posing for pictures with war criminals like Netanyahu and Israeli Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant, both the recipients of International Criminal Court arrest warrants for war crimes in Gaza.
What is surprising, though maybe it shouldn’t be, is the effect Booker’s 25-hour blathering marathon of moral mendacity is having on the numerous number of DNC plantation negroes and white liberals who are heralding him as a hero. The effect is more pernicious than one might realize as a chorus of liberal negroes and their white liberal counterparts took to social media after his speech to post selfies with big smiles in a pathetic demonstration of approval as if Booker should be the new face of Miles Davis’ seminal album, “Someday My Prince Will Come.” Far too many of these DNC plantation dwellers even castigated their own people who took umbrage with Booker’s one man Amos and Andy rendition by retorting with sophomoric statements and questions such as, “at least he’s doing something, what
Cory Booker and Yoav Gallant
are you doing for the cause?” To these sad and lost liberals I will actually concur that Booker did indeed do something - he legitimized genocide, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid by remaining silent about the zionist war machine’s crimes against humanity in Palestine, he legitimized Trump rolling out the red carpet to welcome an accused war criminal, Benzion Mileikowsky aka Benjamin Netenyahyu, to the White [people’s] House, and he legitimized the white “supremacy” ideology that continues to effectuate a global campaign of imperialism, neocolonialism, war, and economic and environmental malfeasance.
The Booker effect also continued into last weekend when Democrat-aligned liberal nonprofits held a series of demonstrations across the country declaring “Hands Off.” These perfunctory protests should have been dubbed, “Hands Off Morality,” as the demands said nothing about ending genocide, ethnic cleansing, and illegal occupation in Palestine, nothing about ending a feckless, fossil-fueled war between Ukraine and the Russia, and even provided qualified immunity for the criminal and colonial entity known as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Many of the attendees noted that Booker was on their minds and inspired them to take to part.
In his polemic of Booker T. Washington, Dr DuBois declares, “But so far as Mr. Washington apologizes for injustice, North or South, does not rightly value the privilege and duty of voting, belittles the emasculating effects of caste distinctions, and opposes the higher training and ambition of our brighter minds,—so far as he, the South, or the Nation, does this,—we must unceasingly and firmly oppose them.” This duty is now bestowed upon us as Black and all people of conscience, to expose Booker for all that he is and has always been, a silver tongue with a dark heart, a melanated mask that still fails to obscure the fact that he is a willing agent of white “supremacy,” and an enemy of oppressed people the world over. Failure to do so will allow bootlickers like Booker to continue to be seen as the apotheosis for Black leadership and liberation rather than anathema to them.
No Compromise
No Retreat
https://blackagendareport.com/sites/def ... x400_0.png
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Sympathy for the Devils...
50501 rallies vs. Trump but not Democrats or imperialism
April 11, 2025 John Parker
Los Angeles — 50501 is a relatively new organization, having emerged only a few months ago, yet it claims to have already organized 50 protests across all 50 states. Its mission, as stated on its website, is to confront what it sees as the Trump administration’s ongoing attacks on constitutional rights and the expansion of executive power at the expense of legislative democracy.
In Los Angeles County, the group has gained traction, drawing significant crowds. On April 5, thousands joined a march from Pershing Square to City Hall, signaling a growing base of support.
Looking ahead, 50501 is planning further actions that include appearances by prominent Democratic politicians, with particular focus on figures like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who are expected to arrive in Los Angeles in mid-April.
However, the enthusiastic participation of the Democratic Party in these events raises important questions. While it’s true that Trump-era policies incited widespread anger, the Democratic Party itself has long-standing contradictions that complicate its role in any genuine anti-war or anti-imperialist movement. Historically, both Democratic and Republican administrations have supported the expansion of NATO and U.S. military interventions abroad. Under President Obama, for example, the United States carried out mass deportations — more than any other administration — and participated in NATO-led operations that devastated countries like Libya.
These contradictions were apparent on April 5 in Los Angeles. The Harriet Tubman Center for Social Justice had endorsed the protest and planned to send a speaker, this writer. However, the center’s representative was removed from the speakers list after refusing to support continued U.S. military aid to Ukraine and voicing opposition to NATO.
And the exclusion came as a surprise. But then a flyer was circulated with the event’s materials that included “Hands Off NATO” as one of the rallying demands. Had the Harriet Tubman Center been aware of this, it might not have endorsed the event at all. Given that the disinvited speaker was Black and representing an organization named after a person embodying the fight against slavery, the irony was difficult to ignore. NATO, after all, played a key role in the 2011 destruction of Libya — once Africa’s most prosperous nation — leading to mass poverty and even the return of open-air slave markets.
When questioned, organizers claimed they could not platform a speaker who wasn’t in solidarity with Ukrainian refugees. Yet this narrow definition of solidarity excluded the Russian-speaking population of the Donbass region, many of whom opposed the 2014 U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine.
In 2022, as a Senate candidate and writer for Struggle-La Lucha, I traveled to Ukraine and Russia between May 1 and May 12 on a fact-finding mission organized by what is now known as the Struggle for Socialism Party and the Harriet Tubman Center. We sought to uncover stories suppressed by Western media — stories that challenged the prevailing NATO narrative of the war in Ukraine.
In the Lugansk People’s Republic, I was guided by Alexey Albu, a leader of the socialist organization Borotba (Struggle) and a survivor of the May 2014 massacre in Odessa. During the Maidan coup, which installed a far-right regime aligned with Western imperialist interests, violence erupted across the country. In Odessa, neo-Nazi mobs firebombed the House of Trade Unions, killing nearly 50 anti-fascists — some burned alive, others beaten or shot while fleeing the flames. Alexey narrowly escaped and later fled to Crimea for safety.
In March 2024, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Ukraine was responsible in this massacre, yet Western media barely covered the verdict. The court’s findings confirmed the Ukrainian government’s complicity, through inaction, in enabling these atrocities.
While in Lugansk, I visited the Rubizhne shelter and the villages of Sokilnyky and Krymske, where recent fighting had driven out extremist militias like the Right Sector and Azov Battalion. Swastikas scrawled across walls, shell fragments, and testimonies from civilians painted a grim picture of life under these ultra-nationalist forces.
The people of Donbass responded to the 2014 coup by declaring independence, forming the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics. In referenda, 89% of Donetsk and 96% of Lugansk residents voted for self-rule. Rather than honoring this, the Ukrainian government, backed by the U.S., labeled them terrorists and launched brutal military operations.
By early 2022, 150,000 Ukrainian troops were massed on the Donbass border. The death toll since 2014 had already reached 14,000. In desperation, the breakaway republics called for Russian assistance to protect their people.
If we want to understand what could have happened without that intervention, we need only look at Gaza. With U.S. support, Israel’s military continues to devastate the region, killing 100 children per day. That same U.S. military-industrial complex fuels Ukraine’s war machine.
Consider Andriy Biletsky, the founder of the Azov Battalion and current commander of Ukraine’s 3rd Army Corps. In 2010, Biletsky infamously stated that Ukraine’s mission was to lead the “white race” in a crusade against “Semite-led Untermenschen.” Untermenschen is an unscientific term used by Nazi Germany, implying an ethnic designation. They are supposedly inferior people who fall into a category of basically anyone not “accepted” by the German Nazis.
White supremacy morphs to serve the interests of U.S. imperialism. NATO and U.S. wars are never about democracy or freedom. They are about maintaining global dominance, fascism, poverty, and the subjugation of our international working class – starting with the Global South, Black and Brown, Palestinian, and anyone getting in the way of U.S. imperialism and its IMF and World Bank.
We must be wary of progressives who sidestep these issues, especially those who avoid discussing Palestine, minimize police brutality, or demonize countries like Iran, Cuba, China, Venezuela, Nicaragua, the DPRK, and Russia. Of course, no state is without contradictions — but we must focus on the largest contradiction of all: the unchecked violence of U.S. imperialism.
As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “The greatest purveyor of violence in the world today is my own government.” To vilify nations resisting U.S. hegemony while ignoring our own country’s war crimes is not just hypocritical — it’s dangerous and the greatest contradiction. That cannot be tolerated.
https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2025/ ... perialism/
'The enemy of our enemy is not our friend'.
No to sheepdogging, no to those treacherous bastards.
The real fight cannot begin until the Democratic Party is rejected overwhelmingly by the working class.
April 11, 2025 John Parker
Los Angeles — 50501 is a relatively new organization, having emerged only a few months ago, yet it claims to have already organized 50 protests across all 50 states. Its mission, as stated on its website, is to confront what it sees as the Trump administration’s ongoing attacks on constitutional rights and the expansion of executive power at the expense of legislative democracy.
In Los Angeles County, the group has gained traction, drawing significant crowds. On April 5, thousands joined a march from Pershing Square to City Hall, signaling a growing base of support.
Looking ahead, 50501 is planning further actions that include appearances by prominent Democratic politicians, with particular focus on figures like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who are expected to arrive in Los Angeles in mid-April.
However, the enthusiastic participation of the Democratic Party in these events raises important questions. While it’s true that Trump-era policies incited widespread anger, the Democratic Party itself has long-standing contradictions that complicate its role in any genuine anti-war or anti-imperialist movement. Historically, both Democratic and Republican administrations have supported the expansion of NATO and U.S. military interventions abroad. Under President Obama, for example, the United States carried out mass deportations — more than any other administration — and participated in NATO-led operations that devastated countries like Libya.
These contradictions were apparent on April 5 in Los Angeles. The Harriet Tubman Center for Social Justice had endorsed the protest and planned to send a speaker, this writer. However, the center’s representative was removed from the speakers list after refusing to support continued U.S. military aid to Ukraine and voicing opposition to NATO.
And the exclusion came as a surprise. But then a flyer was circulated with the event’s materials that included “Hands Off NATO” as one of the rallying demands. Had the Harriet Tubman Center been aware of this, it might not have endorsed the event at all. Given that the disinvited speaker was Black and representing an organization named after a person embodying the fight against slavery, the irony was difficult to ignore. NATO, after all, played a key role in the 2011 destruction of Libya — once Africa’s most prosperous nation — leading to mass poverty and even the return of open-air slave markets.
When questioned, organizers claimed they could not platform a speaker who wasn’t in solidarity with Ukrainian refugees. Yet this narrow definition of solidarity excluded the Russian-speaking population of the Donbass region, many of whom opposed the 2014 U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine.
In 2022, as a Senate candidate and writer for Struggle-La Lucha, I traveled to Ukraine and Russia between May 1 and May 12 on a fact-finding mission organized by what is now known as the Struggle for Socialism Party and the Harriet Tubman Center. We sought to uncover stories suppressed by Western media — stories that challenged the prevailing NATO narrative of the war in Ukraine.
In the Lugansk People’s Republic, I was guided by Alexey Albu, a leader of the socialist organization Borotba (Struggle) and a survivor of the May 2014 massacre in Odessa. During the Maidan coup, which installed a far-right regime aligned with Western imperialist interests, violence erupted across the country. In Odessa, neo-Nazi mobs firebombed the House of Trade Unions, killing nearly 50 anti-fascists — some burned alive, others beaten or shot while fleeing the flames. Alexey narrowly escaped and later fled to Crimea for safety.
In March 2024, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Ukraine was responsible in this massacre, yet Western media barely covered the verdict. The court’s findings confirmed the Ukrainian government’s complicity, through inaction, in enabling these atrocities.
While in Lugansk, I visited the Rubizhne shelter and the villages of Sokilnyky and Krymske, where recent fighting had driven out extremist militias like the Right Sector and Azov Battalion. Swastikas scrawled across walls, shell fragments, and testimonies from civilians painted a grim picture of life under these ultra-nationalist forces.
The people of Donbass responded to the 2014 coup by declaring independence, forming the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics. In referenda, 89% of Donetsk and 96% of Lugansk residents voted for self-rule. Rather than honoring this, the Ukrainian government, backed by the U.S., labeled them terrorists and launched brutal military operations.
By early 2022, 150,000 Ukrainian troops were massed on the Donbass border. The death toll since 2014 had already reached 14,000. In desperation, the breakaway republics called for Russian assistance to protect their people.
If we want to understand what could have happened without that intervention, we need only look at Gaza. With U.S. support, Israel’s military continues to devastate the region, killing 100 children per day. That same U.S. military-industrial complex fuels Ukraine’s war machine.
Consider Andriy Biletsky, the founder of the Azov Battalion and current commander of Ukraine’s 3rd Army Corps. In 2010, Biletsky infamously stated that Ukraine’s mission was to lead the “white race” in a crusade against “Semite-led Untermenschen.” Untermenschen is an unscientific term used by Nazi Germany, implying an ethnic designation. They are supposedly inferior people who fall into a category of basically anyone not “accepted” by the German Nazis.
White supremacy morphs to serve the interests of U.S. imperialism. NATO and U.S. wars are never about democracy or freedom. They are about maintaining global dominance, fascism, poverty, and the subjugation of our international working class – starting with the Global South, Black and Brown, Palestinian, and anyone getting in the way of U.S. imperialism and its IMF and World Bank.
We must be wary of progressives who sidestep these issues, especially those who avoid discussing Palestine, minimize police brutality, or demonize countries like Iran, Cuba, China, Venezuela, Nicaragua, the DPRK, and Russia. Of course, no state is without contradictions — but we must focus on the largest contradiction of all: the unchecked violence of U.S. imperialism.
As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “The greatest purveyor of violence in the world today is my own government.” To vilify nations resisting U.S. hegemony while ignoring our own country’s war crimes is not just hypocritical — it’s dangerous and the greatest contradiction. That cannot be tolerated.
https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2025/ ... perialism/
'The enemy of our enemy is not our friend'.
No to sheepdogging, no to those treacherous bastards.
The real fight cannot begin until the Democratic Party is rejected overwhelmingly by the working class.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Sympathy for the Devils...
What’s Preventing a United Front Against the Trump Regime?
Posted on April 29, 2025 by Conor Gallagher
Conor here: Appreciate that Solomon reserves much of his criticism for most Democrats who aren’t all that opposed to much of what Trump is doing, but I fail to understand the faith in Bernie and AOC:
Drop Site
@DropSiteNews
REPORT: Biden Officials Admit They Never Pressured Israel for Ceasefire, as Israeli Leaders Boast of Playing Washington
“God did the State of Israel a favor that Biden was the president during this period… We fought [in Gaza] for over a year and the administration never came to
By Norman Solomon, co-founder of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His books include War Made Easy, Made Love, Got War, and most recently War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine (The New Press). Originally published at TomDispatch.
America desperately needs a united front to restrain the wrecking ball of the Trump regime. While outraged opposition has been visible and vocal, it remains a far cry from developing a capacity to protect what’s left of democracy in the United States.
With the administration in its fourth month, the magnitude of the damage underway is virtually impossible for any individual to fully grasp. But none of us need a complete picture to understand that the federal government is now in the clutches of massively cruel and antidemocratic forces that have no intention of letting go.
Donald Trump’s second presidential term has already given vast power to the most virulent aspects of the nation’s far-right political culture. Its flagrant goals include serving oligarchy, dismantling civil liberties, and wielding government as a weapon against academic freedom, civil rights, economic security, environmental protection, public health, workers’ rights, and so much more.
The nonstop Trumpist assaults mean that ongoing noncooperation and active resistance will be essential. This is no time for what Martin Luther King, Jr., called “the paralysis of analysis.” Yet the past hugely matters. Repetition compulsions within the Democratic Party, including among self-described liberals and progressives, unwittingly smoothed the path for Trump’s return to power. Many of the same patterns, with undue deference to party leaders and their narrow perspectives, are now hampering the potential to create real leverage against MAGA madness.
“Fiscal Conservatism and Social Liberalism”
Today, more than three decades after the “New Democrats” triumphed when Bill Clinton won the presidency in 1992, an observation by Washington Post economics reporter Hobart Rowen days after that victory is still worth pondering: “Fiscal conservatism and social liberalism proved to be an effective campaign formula.” While campaigning with a call for moderate public investment, Clinton offered enough assurances to business elites to gain much of their support. Once elected, he quickly filled his economic team with corporate lawyers, business-friendly politicians, lobbyists, and fixers on loan from Wall Street boardrooms.
That Democratic formula proved to be a winning one — for Republicans. Two years after Clinton became president, the GOP gained control of both the House and Senate. Republicans maintained a House majority for the next 12 years and a Senate majority for 10 of them.
A similar pattern set in after the next Democrat moved into the White House. Taking office in January 2009 amid the Great Recession, Barack Obama continued with predecessor George W. Bush’s “practice of bailing out the bankers while ignoring the anguish their toxic mortgage packages caused the rest of us,” as journalist Robert Scheer pointed out. By the time Obama was most of the way through his presidency, journalist David Dayen wrote, he had enabled “the dispossession of at least 5.2 million U.S. homeowner families, the explosion of inequality, and the largest ruination of middle-class wealth in nearly a century.”
Two years into Obama’s presidency, his party lost the House and didn’t regain it for eight years. When he won reelection in 2012, Republicans captured the Senate and kept control of it throughout his second term.
During Obama’s eight years as president, the Democrats also lost upward of 900 seats in state legislatures. Along the way, they lost control of 30 legislative chambers, while the Republican share of seats went from 44% to 56%. So GOP state legislators were well-positioned to gerrymander electoral districts to their liking after the 2020 census, making it possible for Republicans to just barely (but powerfully) gain and then retain their stranglehold on the House of Representatives after the 2022 and 2024 elections.
Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Kamala Harris in 2024 ran for president while sticking to updated versions of “fiscal conservatism, social liberalism,” festooning their campaigns with the usual trappings of ultra-mild populist rhetoric. Much of the media establishment approved, as they checked the standard Democratic boxes. But opting to avoid genuine progressive populism on the campaign trail meant enabling Trump to pose as a better choice for the economic interests of the working class.
Mutual Abandonment
The party’s orientation prevents its presidential nominees from making a credible pitch to be champions of working people. “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them,” Senator Bernie Sanders tweeted immediately after the 2024 election. “While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change.”
But there’s little evidence that the party leadership wants significant change, beyond putting themselves back in power. Midway through April, the homepage of the Democratic Party seemed like a snapshot of an institution still disconnected from the angst and anger of the electorate. A pop-up that instantly obscured all else on the screen featured a drawing of a snarling Donald Trump next to the headline: “We’re SUING Trump over two illegal executive orders.” Underneath, the featured message proclaimed: “We’re rolling up our sleeves and organizing for a brighter, more equal future. Together, we will elect Democrats up and down the ballot.” A schedule of town halls in dozens of regions was nice enough, but a true sense of urgency, let alone emergency, was notably lacking.
Overall, the party seems stuck in the mud of the past, still largely mired in the Joe Biden era and wary of opening the door too wide for the more progressive grassroots base that provides millions of small donations and volunteers to get out the vote (as long as they’re genuinely inspired to do so). President Biden’s unspeakably tragic refusal to forego running for reelection until far too late was enabled by top-to-bottom party dynamics and a follow-the-leader conformity that are still all too real.
On no issue has the party leadership been more tone-deaf — with more disastrous electoral and policy results — than the war in Gaza. The refusal of all but a few members of Congress to push President Biden to stop massively arming the Israeli military for its slaughter there caused a steep erosion of support from the usual Democratic voters, as polling at the time and afterward indicated. The party’s moral collapse on Gaza helped to crater Kamala Harris’s vote totals among alienated voters reluctant to cast their ballots for what they saw as a war party, a perception especially acute among young people and notable among African Americans.
The Fact of Oligarchy
Pandering to potential big donors is apt to seem like just another day in elected office. A story about California Governor Gavin Newsom, often touted as a major Democratic contender for president in 2028, is in the category of “you can’t make this stuff up.” As reported by Politico this spring, he “is making sure California’s business elite can call him, maybe. Roughly 100 leaders of state-headquartered companies have received a curious package in recent months: a prepaid, inexpensive cell phone… programmed with Newsom’s digits and accompanied by notes from the governor himself. ‘If you ever need anything, I’m a phone call away,’ read one note to a prominent tech firm CEO, printed on an official letterhead, along with a hand-scrawled addendum urging the executive to reach out… It was Newsom’s idea, a representative said, and has already yielded some ‘valuable interactions.’”
If, however, you’re waiting for Newsom to send prepaid cell phones to activists working for social justice, telling them, “If you ever need anything, I’m a phone call away,” count on waiting forever.
The dominance of super-wealthy party patrons that Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have been railing against at “Fighting Oligarchy” rallies has been coalescing for a long time. “In the American republic,” wrote Walter Karp for Harper’s magazine shortly before his death in 1989, “the fact of oligarchy is the most dreaded knowledge of all, and our news keeps that knowledge from us.” Now, in the age of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg, the iron heel of mega-capital is at work swiftly crushing democratic structures, while top Democrats race to stay within shouting distance of the oligarchs.
A paradoxical challenge for the left is that it must take part in building a united front that includes anti-Trump corporatists and militarists, even while fighting against corporatism and militarism. What’s needed is not capitulation or ultra-leftism, but instead a dialectical approach that recognizes the twin imperatives of defeating an increasingly fascistic Republican Party while working to gain enough power to implement truly progressive agendas.
For those agendas, electoral campaigns and their candidates should be subsets of social movements, not the other way around. Still, here’s one crystal-clear lesson of history: it’s crucial who sits in the Oval Office and controls Congress. Now more than ever.
Fascism Would Stop Us All
A horrible reality of this moment: a fascist takeover of the government is within reach — and, if completed, any possibility of fulfilling a progressive agenda would go out the Overton window. The words of the young Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton, murdered in 1969 by the Chicago police (colluding with the FBI), ring profoundly true today: “Nothing is more important than stopping fascism, because fascism will stop us all.”
But much of the 2025 Democratic Party leadership seems willing to once again pursue the tried-and-failed strategy of banking on Trump to undo himself. Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, the party leaders in the House and Senate, have distinctly tilted in that direction, as if heeding strategist James Carville’s declaration that Democrats should not try to impede Trump’s rampage against the structures of democracy.
“With no clear leader to voice our opposition and no control in any branch of government, it’s time for Democrats to embark on the most daring political maneuver in the history of our party: roll over and play dead,” Carville wrote in late February. “Allow the Republicans to crumble beneath their own weight and make the American people miss us.” (Evidently impressed with his political acumen, the editors of the New York Times published the op-ed piece with that advice only four months after printing an op-ed he wrote in late October under this headline: “Three Reasons I’m Certain Kamala Harris Will Win.”)
As for the Democratic National Committee, it probably had nowhere to go but up in the wake of the chairmanship of Jaime Harrison, who for four years dutifully did President Biden’s bidding. Now, with no Democratic president, the new DNC chair, Ken Martin, has significant power to guide the direction of the party.
In early April, I informed Martin that my colleagues and I at RootsAction were planning a petition drive for the full DNC to hold an emergency meeting. “The value of such a meeting seems clear for many reasons,” I wrote, “including the polled low regard for the Democratic Party and the need to substantively dispel the wide perception that the party is failing to adequately respond to the current extraordinary perils.” Martin replied with a cordial text affirming that the schedule for the 448-member DNC to convene remains the same as usual — twice a year — with the next meeting set for August.
The petition, launched in mid-April (co-sponsored by RootsAction and Progressive Democrats of America), urged the DNC to “convene an emergency meeting of all its members — fully open to the public — as soon as possible… Business as usual must give way to truly bold action that mobilizes against the autocracy that Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and their cronies are further entrenching every day. The predatory, extreme, and dictatorial actions of the Trump administration call for an all-out commensurate response, which so far has been terribly lacking from the Democratic Party.”
No matter what, at this truly pivotal time, we must never give up.
As Stanley Kunitz wrote during the height of the Vietnam War:
In a murderous time
the heart breaks and breaks
and lives by breaking.
It is necessary to go
through dark and deeper dark
and not to turn.
While reasons for pessimism escalate, I often think of how on target my RootsAction colleague India Walton was in a meeting when she said, “The only hope is in the struggle.”
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/04 ... egime.html
From the Comments:
amfortas the hippie
April 29, 2025 at 6:30 am
beating the dust that used to be the bones of the horse that got loose.
demparty is way, way past moribund.its a corpse.
ground up grassroots is the only way.
and i fear the engineered mindf&ck and division are too far along.
dragons are required, at this point….and thats gonna take a clarity that can only come through widespread hardship.
____________
Dr. John Carpenter
April 29, 2025 at 8:17 am
Amen. Change isn’t going to come from the dems and looking for it there is a waste and part of the problem.
Reply ↓
ChrisFromGA
April 29, 2025 at 8:56 am
Don’t forget that the GOP, while nominally in a better position, is effectively a ruined party as well.
Like one of those eels that sinks its fangs into the host and sucks out the guts, Trump has done a take-down of the elephants, leaving only sniveling sycophants like the “swamp stooge” Mike Johnson in his wake.
We’re gonna need bigger, badder dragons. With lots of fire to destroy everything.
_________________________
Christopher Smith
April 29, 2025 at 8:01 am
The Democrats are the very thing preventing a united front.
Case in point, Chuck Schumer brags about writing a sternly worded letter with tough questions over the Trump administration going after Harvard. Harvard itself is complaining that it is standing up for pluralism and academic freedom, and yet FIRE shows it is the absolute worst for free speech. Funny how Harvard suppresses academic freedom and demands conformity (not pluralism) from its faculty and students, and then whines about Trump. Give me a break. To the contrary, to the extent that Trump is demanding that Harvard drop mandatory DEI based in Kendi/DiAngelo dogma I am in favor of his actions.
Why exactly should I “unite” with the resistance when they have nothing on offer except protecting their own rice bowls from being smashed? As for Bernie and AOC, how come they only come out to complain about the oligarchs when the Dems are out of power, but knuckle under when the Dems are in power? “Resistance” my backside.
__________________________
Nikkikat
April 29, 2025 at 10:08 am
Christopher, you nailed it! Bernie and AOC are not the answer and never were. They are part of the problem. Frankly, the attacks on Harvard are in no way meaningful to the average person. This is the place people like Obama care about, not me.
____________________________
JonnyJames
April 29, 2025 at 10:16 am
I agree. The Ds and Rs are there to misinform, distract and divide the public, while their bribe-masters asset-strip and pillage the place.
As Jimmy Carter said: “the US is an oligarchy with unlimited political bribery”. This was of course, hardly covered in the mass media.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/p ... ery-63262/
I agree, the Ds and Rs have a monopoly on electoral politics. Solomon, Hartmann, Sanders and AOC et al. are the ‘sheepdogs” for the DNC. They talk a good game, then bait and switch everyone during the so-called elections. We are told to “hold our nose” and vote for the D brand of genocide and institutional corruption. The “lesser evil” and all that BS. But evil is evil.
The same for the Rs. They want to believe that the Orange Idiot is a savior, but he’s Judas.
“The Rs stab you in the chest, then the Ds stab you in the back”
There is no meaningful choice, no functioning democracy, and the rule of law does not apply to the oligarchy or their henchmen. The US is an oligarchy, it should be glaringly obvious by now, but many turn a blind eye and pretend we can just “vote” one more time and
This article from 2015 explains how the game works.
https://www.blackagendareport.com/berni ... -democrats
_____________
So what are we waiting for?
Posted on April 29, 2025 by Conor Gallagher
Conor here: Appreciate that Solomon reserves much of his criticism for most Democrats who aren’t all that opposed to much of what Trump is doing, but I fail to understand the faith in Bernie and AOC:
Drop Site
@DropSiteNews
REPORT: Biden Officials Admit They Never Pressured Israel for Ceasefire, as Israeli Leaders Boast of Playing Washington
“God did the State of Israel a favor that Biden was the president during this period… We fought [in Gaza] for over a year and the administration never came to
By Norman Solomon, co-founder of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His books include War Made Easy, Made Love, Got War, and most recently War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine (The New Press). Originally published at TomDispatch.
America desperately needs a united front to restrain the wrecking ball of the Trump regime. While outraged opposition has been visible and vocal, it remains a far cry from developing a capacity to protect what’s left of democracy in the United States.
With the administration in its fourth month, the magnitude of the damage underway is virtually impossible for any individual to fully grasp. But none of us need a complete picture to understand that the federal government is now in the clutches of massively cruel and antidemocratic forces that have no intention of letting go.
Donald Trump’s second presidential term has already given vast power to the most virulent aspects of the nation’s far-right political culture. Its flagrant goals include serving oligarchy, dismantling civil liberties, and wielding government as a weapon against academic freedom, civil rights, economic security, environmental protection, public health, workers’ rights, and so much more.
The nonstop Trumpist assaults mean that ongoing noncooperation and active resistance will be essential. This is no time for what Martin Luther King, Jr., called “the paralysis of analysis.” Yet the past hugely matters. Repetition compulsions within the Democratic Party, including among self-described liberals and progressives, unwittingly smoothed the path for Trump’s return to power. Many of the same patterns, with undue deference to party leaders and their narrow perspectives, are now hampering the potential to create real leverage against MAGA madness.
“Fiscal Conservatism and Social Liberalism”
Today, more than three decades after the “New Democrats” triumphed when Bill Clinton won the presidency in 1992, an observation by Washington Post economics reporter Hobart Rowen days after that victory is still worth pondering: “Fiscal conservatism and social liberalism proved to be an effective campaign formula.” While campaigning with a call for moderate public investment, Clinton offered enough assurances to business elites to gain much of their support. Once elected, he quickly filled his economic team with corporate lawyers, business-friendly politicians, lobbyists, and fixers on loan from Wall Street boardrooms.
That Democratic formula proved to be a winning one — for Republicans. Two years after Clinton became president, the GOP gained control of both the House and Senate. Republicans maintained a House majority for the next 12 years and a Senate majority for 10 of them.
A similar pattern set in after the next Democrat moved into the White House. Taking office in January 2009 amid the Great Recession, Barack Obama continued with predecessor George W. Bush’s “practice of bailing out the bankers while ignoring the anguish their toxic mortgage packages caused the rest of us,” as journalist Robert Scheer pointed out. By the time Obama was most of the way through his presidency, journalist David Dayen wrote, he had enabled “the dispossession of at least 5.2 million U.S. homeowner families, the explosion of inequality, and the largest ruination of middle-class wealth in nearly a century.”
Two years into Obama’s presidency, his party lost the House and didn’t regain it for eight years. When he won reelection in 2012, Republicans captured the Senate and kept control of it throughout his second term.
During Obama’s eight years as president, the Democrats also lost upward of 900 seats in state legislatures. Along the way, they lost control of 30 legislative chambers, while the Republican share of seats went from 44% to 56%. So GOP state legislators were well-positioned to gerrymander electoral districts to their liking after the 2020 census, making it possible for Republicans to just barely (but powerfully) gain and then retain their stranglehold on the House of Representatives after the 2022 and 2024 elections.
Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Kamala Harris in 2024 ran for president while sticking to updated versions of “fiscal conservatism, social liberalism,” festooning their campaigns with the usual trappings of ultra-mild populist rhetoric. Much of the media establishment approved, as they checked the standard Democratic boxes. But opting to avoid genuine progressive populism on the campaign trail meant enabling Trump to pose as a better choice for the economic interests of the working class.
Mutual Abandonment
The party’s orientation prevents its presidential nominees from making a credible pitch to be champions of working people. “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them,” Senator Bernie Sanders tweeted immediately after the 2024 election. “While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change.”
But there’s little evidence that the party leadership wants significant change, beyond putting themselves back in power. Midway through April, the homepage of the Democratic Party seemed like a snapshot of an institution still disconnected from the angst and anger of the electorate. A pop-up that instantly obscured all else on the screen featured a drawing of a snarling Donald Trump next to the headline: “We’re SUING Trump over two illegal executive orders.” Underneath, the featured message proclaimed: “We’re rolling up our sleeves and organizing for a brighter, more equal future. Together, we will elect Democrats up and down the ballot.” A schedule of town halls in dozens of regions was nice enough, but a true sense of urgency, let alone emergency, was notably lacking.
Overall, the party seems stuck in the mud of the past, still largely mired in the Joe Biden era and wary of opening the door too wide for the more progressive grassroots base that provides millions of small donations and volunteers to get out the vote (as long as they’re genuinely inspired to do so). President Biden’s unspeakably tragic refusal to forego running for reelection until far too late was enabled by top-to-bottom party dynamics and a follow-the-leader conformity that are still all too real.
On no issue has the party leadership been more tone-deaf — with more disastrous electoral and policy results — than the war in Gaza. The refusal of all but a few members of Congress to push President Biden to stop massively arming the Israeli military for its slaughter there caused a steep erosion of support from the usual Democratic voters, as polling at the time and afterward indicated. The party’s moral collapse on Gaza helped to crater Kamala Harris’s vote totals among alienated voters reluctant to cast their ballots for what they saw as a war party, a perception especially acute among young people and notable among African Americans.
The Fact of Oligarchy
Pandering to potential big donors is apt to seem like just another day in elected office. A story about California Governor Gavin Newsom, often touted as a major Democratic contender for president in 2028, is in the category of “you can’t make this stuff up.” As reported by Politico this spring, he “is making sure California’s business elite can call him, maybe. Roughly 100 leaders of state-headquartered companies have received a curious package in recent months: a prepaid, inexpensive cell phone… programmed with Newsom’s digits and accompanied by notes from the governor himself. ‘If you ever need anything, I’m a phone call away,’ read one note to a prominent tech firm CEO, printed on an official letterhead, along with a hand-scrawled addendum urging the executive to reach out… It was Newsom’s idea, a representative said, and has already yielded some ‘valuable interactions.’”
If, however, you’re waiting for Newsom to send prepaid cell phones to activists working for social justice, telling them, “If you ever need anything, I’m a phone call away,” count on waiting forever.
The dominance of super-wealthy party patrons that Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have been railing against at “Fighting Oligarchy” rallies has been coalescing for a long time. “In the American republic,” wrote Walter Karp for Harper’s magazine shortly before his death in 1989, “the fact of oligarchy is the most dreaded knowledge of all, and our news keeps that knowledge from us.” Now, in the age of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg, the iron heel of mega-capital is at work swiftly crushing democratic structures, while top Democrats race to stay within shouting distance of the oligarchs.
A paradoxical challenge for the left is that it must take part in building a united front that includes anti-Trump corporatists and militarists, even while fighting against corporatism and militarism. What’s needed is not capitulation or ultra-leftism, but instead a dialectical approach that recognizes the twin imperatives of defeating an increasingly fascistic Republican Party while working to gain enough power to implement truly progressive agendas.
For those agendas, electoral campaigns and their candidates should be subsets of social movements, not the other way around. Still, here’s one crystal-clear lesson of history: it’s crucial who sits in the Oval Office and controls Congress. Now more than ever.
Fascism Would Stop Us All
A horrible reality of this moment: a fascist takeover of the government is within reach — and, if completed, any possibility of fulfilling a progressive agenda would go out the Overton window. The words of the young Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton, murdered in 1969 by the Chicago police (colluding with the FBI), ring profoundly true today: “Nothing is more important than stopping fascism, because fascism will stop us all.”
But much of the 2025 Democratic Party leadership seems willing to once again pursue the tried-and-failed strategy of banking on Trump to undo himself. Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, the party leaders in the House and Senate, have distinctly tilted in that direction, as if heeding strategist James Carville’s declaration that Democrats should not try to impede Trump’s rampage against the structures of democracy.
“With no clear leader to voice our opposition and no control in any branch of government, it’s time for Democrats to embark on the most daring political maneuver in the history of our party: roll over and play dead,” Carville wrote in late February. “Allow the Republicans to crumble beneath their own weight and make the American people miss us.” (Evidently impressed with his political acumen, the editors of the New York Times published the op-ed piece with that advice only four months after printing an op-ed he wrote in late October under this headline: “Three Reasons I’m Certain Kamala Harris Will Win.”)
As for the Democratic National Committee, it probably had nowhere to go but up in the wake of the chairmanship of Jaime Harrison, who for four years dutifully did President Biden’s bidding. Now, with no Democratic president, the new DNC chair, Ken Martin, has significant power to guide the direction of the party.
In early April, I informed Martin that my colleagues and I at RootsAction were planning a petition drive for the full DNC to hold an emergency meeting. “The value of such a meeting seems clear for many reasons,” I wrote, “including the polled low regard for the Democratic Party and the need to substantively dispel the wide perception that the party is failing to adequately respond to the current extraordinary perils.” Martin replied with a cordial text affirming that the schedule for the 448-member DNC to convene remains the same as usual — twice a year — with the next meeting set for August.
The petition, launched in mid-April (co-sponsored by RootsAction and Progressive Democrats of America), urged the DNC to “convene an emergency meeting of all its members — fully open to the public — as soon as possible… Business as usual must give way to truly bold action that mobilizes against the autocracy that Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and their cronies are further entrenching every day. The predatory, extreme, and dictatorial actions of the Trump administration call for an all-out commensurate response, which so far has been terribly lacking from the Democratic Party.”
No matter what, at this truly pivotal time, we must never give up.
As Stanley Kunitz wrote during the height of the Vietnam War:
In a murderous time
the heart breaks and breaks
and lives by breaking.
It is necessary to go
through dark and deeper dark
and not to turn.
While reasons for pessimism escalate, I often think of how on target my RootsAction colleague India Walton was in a meeting when she said, “The only hope is in the struggle.”
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/04 ... egime.html
From the Comments:
amfortas the hippie
April 29, 2025 at 6:30 am
beating the dust that used to be the bones of the horse that got loose.
demparty is way, way past moribund.its a corpse.
ground up grassroots is the only way.
and i fear the engineered mindf&ck and division are too far along.
dragons are required, at this point….and thats gonna take a clarity that can only come through widespread hardship.
____________
Dr. John Carpenter
April 29, 2025 at 8:17 am
Amen. Change isn’t going to come from the dems and looking for it there is a waste and part of the problem.
Reply ↓
ChrisFromGA
April 29, 2025 at 8:56 am
Don’t forget that the GOP, while nominally in a better position, is effectively a ruined party as well.
Like one of those eels that sinks its fangs into the host and sucks out the guts, Trump has done a take-down of the elephants, leaving only sniveling sycophants like the “swamp stooge” Mike Johnson in his wake.
We’re gonna need bigger, badder dragons. With lots of fire to destroy everything.
_________________________
Christopher Smith
April 29, 2025 at 8:01 am
The Democrats are the very thing preventing a united front.
Case in point, Chuck Schumer brags about writing a sternly worded letter with tough questions over the Trump administration going after Harvard. Harvard itself is complaining that it is standing up for pluralism and academic freedom, and yet FIRE shows it is the absolute worst for free speech. Funny how Harvard suppresses academic freedom and demands conformity (not pluralism) from its faculty and students, and then whines about Trump. Give me a break. To the contrary, to the extent that Trump is demanding that Harvard drop mandatory DEI based in Kendi/DiAngelo dogma I am in favor of his actions.
Why exactly should I “unite” with the resistance when they have nothing on offer except protecting their own rice bowls from being smashed? As for Bernie and AOC, how come they only come out to complain about the oligarchs when the Dems are out of power, but knuckle under when the Dems are in power? “Resistance” my backside.
__________________________
Nikkikat
April 29, 2025 at 10:08 am
Christopher, you nailed it! Bernie and AOC are not the answer and never were. They are part of the problem. Frankly, the attacks on Harvard are in no way meaningful to the average person. This is the place people like Obama care about, not me.
____________________________
JonnyJames
April 29, 2025 at 10:16 am
I agree. The Ds and Rs are there to misinform, distract and divide the public, while their bribe-masters asset-strip and pillage the place.
As Jimmy Carter said: “the US is an oligarchy with unlimited political bribery”. This was of course, hardly covered in the mass media.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/p ... ery-63262/
I agree, the Ds and Rs have a monopoly on electoral politics. Solomon, Hartmann, Sanders and AOC et al. are the ‘sheepdogs” for the DNC. They talk a good game, then bait and switch everyone during the so-called elections. We are told to “hold our nose” and vote for the D brand of genocide and institutional corruption. The “lesser evil” and all that BS. But evil is evil.
The same for the Rs. They want to believe that the Orange Idiot is a savior, but he’s Judas.
“The Rs stab you in the chest, then the Ds stab you in the back”
There is no meaningful choice, no functioning democracy, and the rule of law does not apply to the oligarchy or their henchmen. The US is an oligarchy, it should be glaringly obvious by now, but many turn a blind eye and pretend we can just “vote” one more time and
This article from 2015 explains how the game works.
https://www.blackagendareport.com/berni ... -democrats
_____________
So what are we waiting for?
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Sympathy for the Devils...
Biden Never Pushed For A Ceasefire In Gaza
They lied that whole entire time. They committed genocide and lied about it, and then they said you were crazy and irresponsible if you didn’t support them.
Caitlin Johnstone
April 29, 2025
❖
Former Israeli ambassador to the United States Mike Herzog acknowledged on Israeli media on Sunday that the Biden administration never at any time pressured Israel for a ceasefire in Gaza.
“God did the State of Israel a favor that Biden was the president during this period, because it could have been much worse,” Herzog said. “We fought [in Gaza] for over a year and the administration never came to us and said, ‘ceasefire now.’ It never did.”
So everyone who said the Biden administration was working for a ceasefire lied. They lied that whole entire time. They committed genocide and lied about it, and then they said you were crazy and irresponsible if you didn’t support them.
People’s rage should shake heaven and earth.
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The US has committed another huge massacre of civilians in Yemen, this time bombing a detention center full of African migrants in Saada. Some 68 people have reportedly been killed, making this Trump’s worst massacre in Yemen since his terrorist attack on a Hodeida fuel port killed 80 people earlier this month.
Trump’s massacres of civilians in Saada and Hodeida are much more evil than anything he has done in the United States domestically, but they’ve received almost no attention from the media or from Democrats because in the eyes of the empire Yemenis don’t count as human beings and killing them is normal.
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The word “antisemite” has become so meaningless that whenever someone uses it you have to ask them “What kind? The Hitler-was-right kind or the stop-bombing-hospitals kind?”
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It’s absolutely bat shit insane that it’s increasingly illegal to voice any praise for groups like Hamas and Hezbollah in the UK and Australia just because the government deems them “terrorists”. What happens when the government is wrong and one of those groups is righ
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They’re seriously going to ethnically cleanse Gaza after a monstrous extermination campaign and then look us all dead in the eyes and tell us we need to hate China.
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It’s wild how the US and Israel just came right out and said “Yeah we’re working on permanently ethnically cleansing all Palestinians from the Gaza Strip,” and then the entire western political/media class went right back to pretending to believe this is about fighting Hamas.
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Calling the Gaza genocide a “war” is like seeing a man beating a toddler to death and calling it a “fight”.
So much evil hides behind calling this thing a war. If you accept that it’s a war then you have to take seriously arguments like “It’s a war, civilians die in war,” or “Hamas shouldn’t have started a war they can’t win.” If it’s a war then it has two sides who share comparable levels of responsibility for any bad things that happen during that time. If it’s a war then it’s taken as a given that Israel’s primary target is Hamas, and not the civilian population of Gaza in its entirety.
But it’s not a war, it’s a naked ethnic cleansing operation being carried out by a highly sophisticated military with the backing of the most powerful empire that has ever existed. It’s a globe-spanning power structure openly purging a Palestinian territory of Palestinian life using a full siege and the systematic destruction of all healthcare and civilian infrastructure, being resisted by a few thousand guys with homemade rockets and dwindling supplies. That’s not a “war”. It’s not even a “conflict”. It’s a slaughter. It’s a holocaust.
If the Gaza holocaust is a “war”, then shooting fish in a barrel is “hunting”. Beating up a quadriplegic is a “street brawl”. A SWAT team shooting an unarmed civilian is a “gun fight”. No conflicts are perfectly equal, but past a certain level of one-sidedness the language of conflict becomes absurd. The daily massacres we are seeing in Gaza are far beyond that point.
They are raining military explosives on top of a giant concentration camp packed full of children while deliberately starving the entire civilian population to death. They have complete control over the enclave, and they are using that control to eradicate the presence of Palestinians in Gaza. That is not war. That is genocide.
https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2025/04 ... e-in-gaza/
******
Liberalism Has Drowned In The Blood Of Gaza's Children
Nate Bear
Apr 27, 2025
Israel split a child in half at the waist last week.
A little girl, to be precise. Next to the two pieces of her, on the roof of a building, was an adult, likely her parent, also dead. In front of them sitting amidst the rubble, was a crying, blood-soaked little boy. Likely the little girl’s brother.
Did you see the headlines, the condemnation? No, you did not. If you aren’t following this evil on social media, you’ll have missed it.
I’ve chosen not to include the pictures. You can find them here and here. It’s up to you whether you click on the links, but I think they’re important to see. I think we need to bear witness and call attention to the complicity of the legacy media who are aiding the whitewash of this historical evil. To never say we didn’t know. To call out the fake tokenistic moral bullshit of “never again.”
If the crying little boy survives who can imagine the trauma to follow? The lifelong pain? The bone-deep terror? I am in contact with Palestinians in Gaza. More than once I’ve been told how they wish for death because they know if they survive they’ll never be able to close their eyes in restful peace again. This little Palestinian boy is, of course, just one among many thousands who, if he survives, will carry a trauma so profound, so unfathomably deep, he will never truly recover.
You may not have heard about this little boy or his little sister who was split in half, but you did hear about Russia. I know you did. We all did. Unlike Israel’s violence, Russia’s violence made the headlines. Why? Because it maintains the illusion of moral superiority we in the west so love to indulge in. Support for Ukraine makes western media and political elites feel good, like they’re on the right side of history. Telling us about Israel would shine an uncomfortable light on true ‘western values.’ Most of us are nothing if not determined to live in cognitive dissonance. The media knows this, buttresses it. The Guardian headlined Russia’s bombs for days yet coverage of Gaza and Israel’s evil dropped completely off the homepage. This, we’re told, is the west’s leading progressive media.
You may not have heard about the blood-soaked toddler or his little sister who was split in half by our bombs, but you probably heard about the Irish hip hop band who said a swear word in condemnation of all the child killing.
Honestly, I think we can call it a wrap on liberalism.
So a genocide continues for the world to see if it chooses, and most don’t. A genocide that has now moved into the starvation phase. No food or other aid has been allowed into the killing fields of Gaza for nearly two months. A caged population deprived of the necessary means for life head now towards total annihilation, an annihilation fully enabled and supported by our governments, by our tax money, by the clear-eyed choices of our leaders who decide how that money is spent. While we struggle to survive in this necro-capitalist system, while we skirt precarity, dodge viruses and wonder what the weather holds this summer on a boiling planet, our governments shovel billions and billions of dollars, pounds and euros to a crazed government carrying out a fascistic project of extermination.
On the subject of a boiling planet—and while the human cost of Israel’s project should never be overshadowed—Israeli genocide has inflicted a massive ecological cost. From the hundreds of razed olive groves to the destroyed tree-lined parks of Gaza to the huge quantities of carbon emitted in the course of exterminating a population, the world has not just been morally altered by Israel’s bloodlust, it has been biophysically changed too.
Does it have to be this way? In an objective sense, no. We live in a world swilling in unmeasurable amounts of wealth, a world where the dream of a good life for all is eminently realisable with the technology and resources of this century, yet our governments choose death. They choose killing. They choose genocide. They choose extermination. With infinite wealth and resources at hand, our governments choose the end of the world.
The conclusion is undeniable: it’s a wrap on liberalism. It has to die.
There are utopian futures, or there are no futures at all.
The first few months of Trump might have some convinced we shouldn’t be so rigid. The purity of his evil might have convinced some people there are in fact lesser evils. I’m once again asking you not to believe this. I’m once again asking you to stand firm in your radicalisation. I’m once again pointing to the ladder of fascist escalation. Trump is merely taking liberalism up the ladder. As I have written about many times before, none of what we’re seeing started with Trump. He didn’t open the ICE camps, he didn’t militarise the police, he didn’t start the deportations, he didn’t designate China the official enemy. He didn’t even start building the wall for christ’s sake! The infrastructure was all in place. This has been a 50-plus year project. Ever since the neoliberal revolution of the 1980s this moment has been brewing. And in case anyone forgets, America’s lesser evil at the last election was already doing genocide.
But okay, fine. For arguments sake, let’s pretend lesser evils are a path forward. And to do this, let’s take a look at the UK where Keir Starmer, the Labour prime minister, is a yardstick. Promising a more humane approach to governance after a decade of Tory disaster, Britain’s Labour government began immediately accelerating the country’s collapse into poverty and cruelty. From day one his government refused to criticise Israel and continued logistical and financial support for the Gaza genocide. Within weeks his government began arresting journalists for reporting on Israel’s crimes. Now they are sacrificing the disabled for capitalism, scapegoating immigrants for the country’s failures and doubling down on austerity. Because centrists stand for nothing, they will always, in historically reactionary times, be dragged along by the tides of ethno-nationalism. The UK under Labour is a textbook example. For this reason Keir Starmer is the most dangerous politician in the west. And the party’s loss at the next election will be historic. Worse will follow under Nigel Farage and the far-right Reform party. But, as with Trump, that is no reason to fall back on a corrupt, rotting, amoral centre.
Liberalism is a show that has gone on too long. Its cast of characters are staid, its show-writers are bloated and out of ideas. The final season is ending gorily, drowned in the blood of tens of thousands of Palestinian children.
No more lesser evils.
We must have utopian futures or we will have no futures at all.
If children being split in half by western bombs hasn’t convinced you of this, nothing will.
(cover photo by Mohammed Ibrahim, a photojournalist from the Gaza Strip)
https://www.donotpanic.news/p/liberalis ... -the-blood
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Sympathy for the Devils...
Graylan Hagler: Capitulation Masquerading as Political Thought
Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist 30 Apr 2025
Congressman Hakeem Jeffries and Senator Cory Booker cosplaying as political opposition. Image - @thegaywhostrayd
Liberals continue to condemn anyone who didn’t support Kamala Harris and the latest iteration of neo-liberal treachery. Black people are told to stand down when there is a fight worth waging.
“We can emotionally understand the Arab/Muslim/Pro-Palestine base not voting for Harris.” - Rev. Graylan Hagler
One can only say that making such a dispensation is very generous of Rev. Graylan Hagler. It isn’t clear what he means by “emotionally understand” but the subtext is troubling. Is he insisting that a group whose people are victims of a genocide ought to support the perpetrators of the war crimes? If that is his stance it is not understandable, emotionally or in any other way. The statement encapsulates what is highly problematic about Hagler’s recent essay The Betrayal of the Black Community . Hagler’s 2,500 word screed is a muddled apologia to the Democratic Party after their ignominious defeat at the hands of Donald Trump, despite raising $1 billion in the effort to elect Kamala Harris.
His verbiage is a sad example of confused thinking. It not only leads to political defeat but ultimately to the betrayal of Black people. The Black liberals’ lament about traitorous allies is nonsense meant to let the party off the hook for their dismal result and their perpetual habit of treating Black voters as desperate people who will turn out in droves regardless of whether their needs and demands are ever addressed. Hagler’s commentary does not contain any critique of the Democratic Party and is therefore bereft of any meaningful analysis.
Such misdirected anger results in misleaders like Congressman Hakeem Jeffries, House Minority Leader, and Senator Cory Booker, he of the 25-hours of fakery, sitting on the capitol steps in matching Black outfits, posing as if on the album covers of old. Jeffries wrote , “Just sat down on the Capitol Steps with my good friend @SenBooker to have a real conversation about the dangerous situation we confront in America. And what we can all do to stop it.”
Jeffries and Booker are our betrayers, doing only what their party’s oligarchs will allow, and making careers that depend upon ignoring the people’s needs. That’s why they received $1.635 million and $871,563 from AIPAC respectively. It is because of them and their ilk that too many Black voters have decided to “sit this out,” behaving as if they have no need for politics because electoralism keeps failing them.
If Hagler wanted to argue that Black people are always better off in material ways if the democrats win, he should have at least taken that party and its leadership to task. But apparently he could find no explanation for their defeat other than racism and misogyny. Someone of Hagler’s stature and intellect ought to give some explanation for the loss of six million votes for the democratic presidential candidate from 2020 to 2024 rather than dismissing these non-voters as women hating racists who had no other reason to eschew the Kamala Harris bandwagon.
Hagler is so eager to see Harris’ defeat as a failure of “allies” that he forgets the most basic facts about the U.S. electorate. “... it was a surprise to know that 53% of white women voted for Trump.” How is anyone surprised? The last democratic presidential candidate to win a majority of the white vote was Lyndon Johnson in 1964. Since that time a majority of white women and men have voted for republicans. The fact that the duopoly operates as “Black” and “white” parties is hardly new and denial of that indisputable fact is unworthy of anyone claiming to be serious.
One would think that the process that led to Harris’ anointing as democratic candidate over the sitting president, Joe Biden, should at least get a mention in post-election analysis. Biden was an unpopular president with anemic approval ratings. Hagler might ask why the incumbent president didn’t elicit more excitement. He might have mentioned the failure of Build Back Better and other initiatives that were promised to Democratic Party voters eager for changes to be made on their behalf. Instead they watched as he made entreaties to republican supporters of right winger Nikki Haley .
Biden was also in declining health. The party hoped that if they continued the charade of labeling his obviously failing faculties as a stutter that he could be dragged over the finish line. But his June 2024 debate with Trump was disastrous and finally the party’s wealthy donors ordered Biden to stand down. He endorsed Kamala Harris while Barack Obama and others wanted an open convention that would give the appearance that she was not a top down establishment choice. Now books are being published about this combination of oligarchic influence and political incompetence. But Hagler makes no mention of how his party and their leadership shot themselves in their collective feet and let their voters down.
Hagler’s arguments amount to little more than capitulation to the trope which posits that U.S. voters are without a voice or choice, that “lesser evilism” is the most they can hope for. “The lesser of the worst argument has always been the Black reality and we have understood historically that the system is malicious in character, racially unjust, and unfair.” There is no disagreement with Hagler’s characterization of how Black people have historically been treated. But his conclusion that there is no option other than going along with a corrupt party controlled by people who will only countenance neoliberalism and imperialism, is in fact a call for more Black suffering.
Where has putting democrats in office gotten us? Bill Clinton made the right wing dream of ending the right to public assistance a reality and threw millions of people into poverty. Hagler expresses concern for immigrant rights but it was Clinton’s Illegal 1996 Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) which allowed even documented immigrants to be deported for minor infractions of the law. Donald Trump may end up with more deportations but as of now Barack Obama is still the deporter in chief, with more removals than Trump in his first term.
Barack Obama was a dream come true for Wall Street and the bankers who needed a charismatic figure who could get away with doing their bidding. His Justice Department allowed the criminals whose corruption precipitated the 2008 financial crisis to go free without any fear of prosecution . The bank bailouts were estimated to cost more than $1 trillion . While the rich got richer with the help of the first Black president, Black homeowners were not only not bailed out, but the numbers who were “underwater” on their mortgages increased 20-fold between 2007 and 2013 .
Obama did not use his office to help Black Americans and he also botched the Harris campaign’s efforts to win over Black men . “We have not yet seen the same kinds of energy and turnout in all quarters of our neighborhoods and communities as we saw when I was running. Now, I also want to say that that seems to be more pronounced with the brothers. You’re coming up with all kinds of reasons and excuses. I’ve got a problem with that. Part of it makes me think that, well, you just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president, and you’re coming up with other alternatives and reasons for that.”
Obama’s hectoring tone was forgiven when he ran for president but no one wants to hear his amateurish efforts at pop psychology and dismissals of Black men any longer. His insults are no longer acceptable and, if Hagler wanted to explain why Trump won over Harris, he might have mentioned Obama’s comments which went over like the proverbial lead balloon.
It also must be said that any explanation for the Harris defeat must speak to the deficiencies in the candidate herself. Despite having been a United States Senator and a presidential candidate herself, she often comes across as embarrassingly inarticulate, speaking in nonsensical “word salads” that are inexplicable for any politician. She was chosen at the last moment by a president who was no longer wanted. But after her candidacy was announced her website gave no information, aside from how to donate, for 50 days and then appeared as a bad copy and paste of Biden’s site. Harris’s embarrassing showing must also be laid at her feet.
It is wrong headed to speak only about Trump and his supporters while neglecting to mention how the Democratic Party fails its voters. Trump and Israel are carrying out a terrible genocide in Gaza but Joe Biden, rightly called Genocide Joe, prepared the pathway, giving Israel carte blanche to do its worst and play for time for Trump’s victory.
Thousands of voters refused to give their support to the genocide party and they shouldn’t be criticized for taking a firm moral stance. No one should be scolded because they didn’t vote for Kamala Harris. Kamala Harris betrayed Black voters and so did all of the democrats who occupied the white house in recent decades.
Any blame for Trump’s victory must be directed at the party whose oligarchs raised $1 billion in a losing effort. This moment calls for principled debate and for introspection and also for condemnation of policies that leave voters cold and unwilling to hold their noses and vote for what they don’t want.
This surrender also sends a terrible message to the masses of Black people. Now there are calls to “sit out” protests because it is said that Black people should just give up, that our activism is pointless. But electoral politics should not be confused with real activism. Supporting Kamala Harris would only cement the Black misleadership class and their bosses in the oligarchy in place. Had she won there would still be 1 million Black people locked up in jails and prisons, police killings would continue their upward trajectory, and hard earned public dollars would be spent on death and destruction. The genocide in Gaza would still be happening.
Hopefully Hagler will comment on how the Democratic Party has been muted in its criticism of Trump. They are the betrayers, going along with mass firings of federal workers, continued genocide, and a deportation regime that began with Bill Clinton and that has been supported by democrats for 30 years. Their lack of opposition reveals the cynical game. While voters beg them to take action, the most they can muster are 25-hour rants and phony rallies from fake “leftists” in the controlled opposition that claim to fight oligarchy.
This moment calls for people like Rev. Graylan Hagler to call for organizing the kind of mass movement that has brought change throughout U.S. history. Trump is not the only threat to our lives. The duopoly that runs this country must be stopped. The democratic wing of that infamous group must also be stopped and exposed as the enemies of the people that they are. Let us condemn them, the cynics and criminals who are most responsible for the Trump presidency.
https://blackagendareport.com/graylan-h ... al-thought
Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist 30 Apr 2025
Congressman Hakeem Jeffries and Senator Cory Booker cosplaying as political opposition. Image - @thegaywhostrayd
Liberals continue to condemn anyone who didn’t support Kamala Harris and the latest iteration of neo-liberal treachery. Black people are told to stand down when there is a fight worth waging.
“We can emotionally understand the Arab/Muslim/Pro-Palestine base not voting for Harris.” - Rev. Graylan Hagler
One can only say that making such a dispensation is very generous of Rev. Graylan Hagler. It isn’t clear what he means by “emotionally understand” but the subtext is troubling. Is he insisting that a group whose people are victims of a genocide ought to support the perpetrators of the war crimes? If that is his stance it is not understandable, emotionally or in any other way. The statement encapsulates what is highly problematic about Hagler’s recent essay The Betrayal of the Black Community . Hagler’s 2,500 word screed is a muddled apologia to the Democratic Party after their ignominious defeat at the hands of Donald Trump, despite raising $1 billion in the effort to elect Kamala Harris.
His verbiage is a sad example of confused thinking. It not only leads to political defeat but ultimately to the betrayal of Black people. The Black liberals’ lament about traitorous allies is nonsense meant to let the party off the hook for their dismal result and their perpetual habit of treating Black voters as desperate people who will turn out in droves regardless of whether their needs and demands are ever addressed. Hagler’s commentary does not contain any critique of the Democratic Party and is therefore bereft of any meaningful analysis.
Such misdirected anger results in misleaders like Congressman Hakeem Jeffries, House Minority Leader, and Senator Cory Booker, he of the 25-hours of fakery, sitting on the capitol steps in matching Black outfits, posing as if on the album covers of old. Jeffries wrote , “Just sat down on the Capitol Steps with my good friend @SenBooker to have a real conversation about the dangerous situation we confront in America. And what we can all do to stop it.”
Jeffries and Booker are our betrayers, doing only what their party’s oligarchs will allow, and making careers that depend upon ignoring the people’s needs. That’s why they received $1.635 million and $871,563 from AIPAC respectively. It is because of them and their ilk that too many Black voters have decided to “sit this out,” behaving as if they have no need for politics because electoralism keeps failing them.
If Hagler wanted to argue that Black people are always better off in material ways if the democrats win, he should have at least taken that party and its leadership to task. But apparently he could find no explanation for their defeat other than racism and misogyny. Someone of Hagler’s stature and intellect ought to give some explanation for the loss of six million votes for the democratic presidential candidate from 2020 to 2024 rather than dismissing these non-voters as women hating racists who had no other reason to eschew the Kamala Harris bandwagon.
Hagler is so eager to see Harris’ defeat as a failure of “allies” that he forgets the most basic facts about the U.S. electorate. “... it was a surprise to know that 53% of white women voted for Trump.” How is anyone surprised? The last democratic presidential candidate to win a majority of the white vote was Lyndon Johnson in 1964. Since that time a majority of white women and men have voted for republicans. The fact that the duopoly operates as “Black” and “white” parties is hardly new and denial of that indisputable fact is unworthy of anyone claiming to be serious.
One would think that the process that led to Harris’ anointing as democratic candidate over the sitting president, Joe Biden, should at least get a mention in post-election analysis. Biden was an unpopular president with anemic approval ratings. Hagler might ask why the incumbent president didn’t elicit more excitement. He might have mentioned the failure of Build Back Better and other initiatives that were promised to Democratic Party voters eager for changes to be made on their behalf. Instead they watched as he made entreaties to republican supporters of right winger Nikki Haley .
Biden was also in declining health. The party hoped that if they continued the charade of labeling his obviously failing faculties as a stutter that he could be dragged over the finish line. But his June 2024 debate with Trump was disastrous and finally the party’s wealthy donors ordered Biden to stand down. He endorsed Kamala Harris while Barack Obama and others wanted an open convention that would give the appearance that she was not a top down establishment choice. Now books are being published about this combination of oligarchic influence and political incompetence. But Hagler makes no mention of how his party and their leadership shot themselves in their collective feet and let their voters down.
Hagler’s arguments amount to little more than capitulation to the trope which posits that U.S. voters are without a voice or choice, that “lesser evilism” is the most they can hope for. “The lesser of the worst argument has always been the Black reality and we have understood historically that the system is malicious in character, racially unjust, and unfair.” There is no disagreement with Hagler’s characterization of how Black people have historically been treated. But his conclusion that there is no option other than going along with a corrupt party controlled by people who will only countenance neoliberalism and imperialism, is in fact a call for more Black suffering.
Where has putting democrats in office gotten us? Bill Clinton made the right wing dream of ending the right to public assistance a reality and threw millions of people into poverty. Hagler expresses concern for immigrant rights but it was Clinton’s Illegal 1996 Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) which allowed even documented immigrants to be deported for minor infractions of the law. Donald Trump may end up with more deportations but as of now Barack Obama is still the deporter in chief, with more removals than Trump in his first term.
Barack Obama was a dream come true for Wall Street and the bankers who needed a charismatic figure who could get away with doing their bidding. His Justice Department allowed the criminals whose corruption precipitated the 2008 financial crisis to go free without any fear of prosecution . The bank bailouts were estimated to cost more than $1 trillion . While the rich got richer with the help of the first Black president, Black homeowners were not only not bailed out, but the numbers who were “underwater” on their mortgages increased 20-fold between 2007 and 2013 .
Obama did not use his office to help Black Americans and he also botched the Harris campaign’s efforts to win over Black men . “We have not yet seen the same kinds of energy and turnout in all quarters of our neighborhoods and communities as we saw when I was running. Now, I also want to say that that seems to be more pronounced with the brothers. You’re coming up with all kinds of reasons and excuses. I’ve got a problem with that. Part of it makes me think that, well, you just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president, and you’re coming up with other alternatives and reasons for that.”
Obama’s hectoring tone was forgiven when he ran for president but no one wants to hear his amateurish efforts at pop psychology and dismissals of Black men any longer. His insults are no longer acceptable and, if Hagler wanted to explain why Trump won over Harris, he might have mentioned Obama’s comments which went over like the proverbial lead balloon.
It also must be said that any explanation for the Harris defeat must speak to the deficiencies in the candidate herself. Despite having been a United States Senator and a presidential candidate herself, she often comes across as embarrassingly inarticulate, speaking in nonsensical “word salads” that are inexplicable for any politician. She was chosen at the last moment by a president who was no longer wanted. But after her candidacy was announced her website gave no information, aside from how to donate, for 50 days and then appeared as a bad copy and paste of Biden’s site. Harris’s embarrassing showing must also be laid at her feet.
It is wrong headed to speak only about Trump and his supporters while neglecting to mention how the Democratic Party fails its voters. Trump and Israel are carrying out a terrible genocide in Gaza but Joe Biden, rightly called Genocide Joe, prepared the pathway, giving Israel carte blanche to do its worst and play for time for Trump’s victory.
Thousands of voters refused to give their support to the genocide party and they shouldn’t be criticized for taking a firm moral stance. No one should be scolded because they didn’t vote for Kamala Harris. Kamala Harris betrayed Black voters and so did all of the democrats who occupied the white house in recent decades.
Any blame for Trump’s victory must be directed at the party whose oligarchs raised $1 billion in a losing effort. This moment calls for principled debate and for introspection and also for condemnation of policies that leave voters cold and unwilling to hold their noses and vote for what they don’t want.
This surrender also sends a terrible message to the masses of Black people. Now there are calls to “sit out” protests because it is said that Black people should just give up, that our activism is pointless. But electoral politics should not be confused with real activism. Supporting Kamala Harris would only cement the Black misleadership class and their bosses in the oligarchy in place. Had she won there would still be 1 million Black people locked up in jails and prisons, police killings would continue their upward trajectory, and hard earned public dollars would be spent on death and destruction. The genocide in Gaza would still be happening.
Hopefully Hagler will comment on how the Democratic Party has been muted in its criticism of Trump. They are the betrayers, going along with mass firings of federal workers, continued genocide, and a deportation regime that began with Bill Clinton and that has been supported by democrats for 30 years. Their lack of opposition reveals the cynical game. While voters beg them to take action, the most they can muster are 25-hour rants and phony rallies from fake “leftists” in the controlled opposition that claim to fight oligarchy.
This moment calls for people like Rev. Graylan Hagler to call for organizing the kind of mass movement that has brought change throughout U.S. history. Trump is not the only threat to our lives. The duopoly that runs this country must be stopped. The democratic wing of that infamous group must also be stopped and exposed as the enemies of the people that they are. Let us condemn them, the cynics and criminals who are most responsible for the Trump presidency.
https://blackagendareport.com/graylan-h ... al-thought
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."