Fifty years ago, no self-respecting person on the left would have dreamed of aligning themselves with the FBI or CIA

Things have changed in fifty years.

The FBI and the CIA have been rehabilitated. Comey and Brennan are heroes of the resistance. And, unlike fifty years ago, anything you read in the New York Times is Guaranteed Gospel Truth! Back in the day, your first reaction to mainstream media claims was always skepticism. 

Now, NYT/WaPo/CNN/PBS are the go-to platforms for truth-seeking lefties.

That's not all that's changed. Fifty years ago, the Black Resistance to 350 years of oppression gave rise to inspirational leaders like Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, and MLK. Today, Black Resistance to 400 years of oppression is centralized in the corporate-sponsored BLM astro-turf movement.

Fifty years ago, most people still viewed the Democrats as the party of unionized labour. Now it's the party of union-busting hedge-fund billionaires.

Fifty years ago, Republicans were the war party and Democrats were at least more likely to talk peace, if not actually cease and desist from dropping our Paveway instruments of democracy on recalcitrant third world peasants. Today the Democrats are as keen on perpetual war as the old war party ever was.

Sadly, what we have witnessed over the last fifty years, is the wholesale betrayal of the interests of everyday working people, of all ethnicities and creeds, by both parties.

Sooner or later, blowback is coming...

Donald Trump hurt my feelings...

I was pleased to see a little bit of a Social Dem caucus forming around Bernie after the mid-terms. If the Democratic Party is to gain any traction going forward, it'll only happen once the old guard shuffles into the sunset. Until then, there's no particular reason for anyone of a progressive bent to vote Dem.

Six months in, I'm underwhelmed. Instead of keeping the focus on their progressive ideas, they've been reduced to mud-wrestling Trump in the quagmire of identity politics. Sorry, but being offended by Trump's race-baiting hyperbole isn't going to be much of a vote getter in 2020. They're quickly making themselves irrelevant.

In this they have the full connivance of America's mainstream media, the proprietors of which are more than happy to sideline anyone espousing real health care reform and serious taxes on unearned wealth. And indeed, they much prefer endless coverage of outrages, real and imagined, to reasoned discussion of critical issues.

If the Social Dem Caucus is to make good on it's potential, they need to get over their hurt feelings and shift the focus back to electoral politics and actual issues. Trump's tweets need not be an issue, if you don't make them one.


Otherwise, they're just helping ensure a Trump victory in 2020.

Happy Easter!

Sorry Mom, I didn't make it to church this year. Didn't make it to synagogue for Passover either, if that's any consolation. My God-fearing agnosticism is multi-confessional.

I did however find time to go out to the garage and tinker with the Ninja. She's purring like a kitten and waiting for her spring ride, just as soon as the weather clears up a little.

The big news this Easter weekend was the Tax March. That's the latest spasm of the anti-Trump movement, die-hard Hillary fans who have yet to concede last November's election.

Come on folks - even Fareed Zakaria acknowledges that those 59 Tomahawks have rendered Donny J Presidential!

Yup, he's got blood on his hands. That's what America looks for in a leader.

What caught my eye in the news coverage of the Tax March was the logos of Dem Party astro-turf outfits all over the place.



If you think that tax march was some kind of grass roots thing that just happened, think again. Go to taxmarch.org and check out their partners page. Holy cow, that page could keep a Soros-is-the-antiChrist conspiracy theorist busy for months!

What baffles me is that all these groups are invariably described as "leftist," yet they've all been co-opted by the Democratic Party. I'm a long-term observer of US politics, and I'd have to say I didn't notice much of a leftward tilt under eight years of Obama... nor under eight years of Clinton, for that matter.

Mind you, I'm a long-time small "c" commie and what I understand by the word "leftist" may mean something else. I suppose you could be relatively leftist as long as you only compare yourself to those to the right of you on the political spectrum, but has there been anything to the right of the Democratic Party in the last twenty years? At a minimum the label should imply the prioritisation of the interests of working people over the interests of capital.

Maybe this watering down of labels and their meanings is all part of the long term bamboozlement of the working class in America. Kind of like how "red states" means Republican states. In the rest of the world the colour red is unambiguously associated with the political left. Only in America has that been successfully turned upside down.

With the Ninja shaking off the winter hibernation the only vehicle in the fleet still giving trouble is the little Ford 4x4. A friend was telling me the other day that could be stale gasoline. After all, it's been parked in a snow-drift all winter.

Possibly, but the Mustang 50 was parked one snow-drift over and took only a half hour on the battery charger to come alive. The Ninja wasn't fired up once all last year, so the gas in the tank is two years old and I've got it running.

Can't be stale gas.

I think that almost universal ignorance of what is "left" is what allowed Donny J to waltz away with Hillary's election. That MAGA schtick worked wonders for a class of marginalized Americans who wanted so desperately to believe that the ersatz billionaire was going to set things right for them. Little did they realize...

But here's the good news. Trump tapped into massive voter disaffection with the political establishment. So did Bernie. Both men eventually sold their supporters down the river. Those people are still there, and there's no reason to think most of them, both the Sander's supporters and people who voted for Trump, are going to be anything other than pissed off when the 2020 White House contest gets serious.

With the right candidate, maybe then Americans will get the change they can believe in.

I picked up that Ninja for cheap just a few weeks before my 60th birthday. I was in denial. That old chestnut about how inside every sixty year old there's a sixteen year old wondering what the fuck happened is truer than true.

So I bought a motorcycle. Next sunny day I'll take her for a blast around the block, which happens to be a ten mile loop with a lot of long straightaways. Spring ain't truly sprung till you get that first rush of 90mph wind through what's left of your hair...

Happy Easter!

What's left?

Back in the day, it was a pretty straight-forward thing distinguishing right from left on the political spectrum. The right was where you found your reactionaries and warmongers. The left was the "progressive" side of the spectrum. The left was pro-labour, pro-women's rights, pro-choice, anti-racist, anti-war, and if not out and out anti-capitalist, at least acknowledged that the titans of industry and the big banks needed to be kept on a short regulatory leash.

Those were the days when the top union boss at the UE, which represented the workers at the General Electric plant where I cut my welding teeth, was an out-and-out self-confessed commie. Not a "liberal," not a "social democrat," not even a "socialist," but a full-bore communist. Yup, that was CS Jackson. And, may I add, he was a mightily effective union leader to boot.

Today, distinguishing left from right is a much more nebulous undertaking. As I tour the blogosphere, I encounter a gusher of references to "rabid leftists," "left-wing extremists," and "die-hard socialists." At first blush one is inclined to be impressed at the robust health of the left in American politics today!

Then you realize that all these references are to the Democratic party and its acolytes...

Bummer, man!

Sad to say, the Democratic party today is at least as reactionary and warmongering as their Republican counterparts, if not more so. And at least as pro-capitalist. Hillary Clinton, the "left" candidate, just spent 1.2 billion dollars, provided mainly by the big banks and the war profiteers, in the most expensive election campaign in US history, only to be defeated by a reality TV personality who spent a small fraction of that and got virtually nothing from the big banks and the warmongers.

What the fuck goes on here?

Back in the day, we could rely on the media to explain things, and if we didn't like the explanations provided by so-called mainstream media, there existed a thriving alternative media happy to fill in the blanks. Today the mainstream media is totally in the pocket of the "deep state" and the alternative media hysterically informs us that Obama has a communist agenda.

CS Jackson must be spinning in his grave...

But at least what's left of the UE had the good sense to endorse the Sanders campaign.

Alas, we know how that ended.

What's left?

Not much... but there is hope! Bernie's short-lived run as a socialist proved that there's a hunger in America for real change. Bernie's unfortunate capitulation to the corrupt Dem party machine put an end to that.

But the hunger remains.

Why I love Michael Moore

Moore had me hooked with his first doc, Roger and Me.

I loved that on-screen persona, the fat slob schlumpfing about Michigan looking for the president of General Motors. Wanting to hold him to account for shipping all those Michigan jobs to Mexico. It was a beautiful thing!

Over the holidays me and the Farm Manager found time to finally view his latest doc, Where to Invade Next.

We weren't disappointed. Moore's latest film neatly contrasts living standards in America with what regular folks typically experience in a variety of European counties. The contrast is an eye-opener. On the one side you've got eight weeks of paid vacation, free health care, free post-secondary education, subsidized day-care, and yadayadayada...

On the other side you've got... well, look around you.

University grads working at Mickey D's trying to pay down their $50,000 student loans.

Health care expenses as the prime cause of personal bankruptcy.

Veterans sleeping on the sidewalk.

Families living in their cars.

Welcome to America!

Over the course of his career, Mr. Moore has done yeoman's work skewering the shibboleths of "American exceptionalism." I suspect a lot of the millennials "feeling the Bern" were feeling it largely thanks to Moore's oeuvre.

So here's what I don't like about Michael Moore.

Right after he made his last doc he came down four-square for Hillary. Yup, Michael Moore, renegade documentary film-maker, morphed into a strident Dem party supporter.

This was after the Democrats had held the White House for eight years and had done utterly fuck-all to improve the lot of those folks Moore claims to represent; the working class.

The homeless vets.

The families living out of their cars...

Ya, there's Obamacare, I suppose, but what is that other than a giant subsidy to for-profit health-care providers?

And of course there's the record of the Nobel Peace Prize winner's foreign policy. Let me know if you can think of an example where Obama's foreign policy fostered anything resembling peace. Instead, America is involved in more foreign intrigues than ever, and never in the interest of "peace."

This is the party that America's number one anti-establishment film-maker wants you to support?

Fuck you, Michael Moore!

Propornot?

Made a point of getting into town bright and early, in hope of avoiding last Saturday's debacle.

It worked! I got my weekend newspaper for ten bucks minus a handful of change... and there was nothing in it!

Well, that's not quite true. Mark MacKinnon had pretty much the entirety of the "Focus" section to himself for a major, and I mean major, effort about the origins of the Syrian "civil war." Most of his salient points about the actual origins were spelled out well over four years ago in this story, but he did have some original insights into what's become of the protagonists since then.

I was cheered to see a little less Trump this week. That's almost unfortunate after Trump moots a guy nick-named "Mad Dog" for SecDef.

I'm gonna have to re-see "Idiocracy" again before I make up my mind on that one... introducing your new Secretary of Defence, Mad Dog Mattis!

Get the fuck outta here!

But my actual propornot moment came when I read a story by Paul Waldie, who is apparently the Globe's "European correspondent." That's in addition to MacKinnon traipsing around Europe for months updating a story from 2012.

No wonder I'm paying over five bucks for my newspaper!

Anyway, Waldie gets pretty much a whole page in the first section to pontificate on what's wrong with France. Seems the French are mightily pissed with those gosh-darned socialists who have ruled the roost since 2012. They are yearning for the freedom and prosperity that only a right-wing government can bring.

I know this because nowhere in the story is there any hint whatsoever that there exists a substantial polity to the left of the so-called Socialists of Hollande.

Hollande and his party are "left" in the same sense that Hillary's Democratic Party is "left." As in, not really.

In the last French election the Left Front and a couple of fringe left parties garnered about 15% of the popular vote. By now, anybody who expected "left" policies from the centre-rightist "socialist" Hollande will be thoroughly disillusioned.

Will those voters swing right or swing to the real left? I'm guessing most of them will go to the left.

Even if only half of the ten million voters who marked their ballots for Hollande on the last go-round retreat to the real left, the real left becomes a real threat in the upcoming election.

Not a hint of that in Mr. Waldie's story.

Why? I'm guessing it's because the billionaires who own popular media world-wide would rather not broadcast the fact that there is such a thing as a "real" left.

And Waldie correctly surmises that it's better to tell half the story and keep a full paycheque, than to tell the whole story and have no paycheque.

Where is this Trump thing going, and why?

I think American society has reached a tipping point. There are too many people who realize that the status quo is not working in their interest. In a "democracy," that signals change.

And we're not talking about change between a Wall Street friendly GOP vs. a Wall Street friendly Democratic Party. We're talking about real substantive change. As in fuck Wall Street, lets take America back from the banksters.

It is noteworthy that this anti-status-quo groundswell is happening in spite of the best efforts of the corporate media. In a nutshell, too many folks have concluded that the corporate or mainstream media are nothing more than the propaganda arm for the Wall Street crowd.

There are certainly manifold ironies around the fact that it's a Manhattan billionaire who has become the standard bearer for this groundswell of anti-establishment sentiment. But, there are reasons why it couldn't be anyone else.

The Citizens United case essentially slammed the coffin lid on the last vestiges of democracy in America. That left the American public vulnerable to the machinations of whichever political machine could mount the most persuasive advertising campaign.

Or, in Trump's case, to the machinations of a media personality who was able to massage his celebrity status and name recognition into a broad-based populist campaign.

The reasons that Trump's alleged misogyny, racism, hooliganism, and overall boorishness don't hurt his campaign is that these traits prove that he is not part of the political establishment, and the people are screaming enough already at that establishment. That's why they're going to Trump rallies.

That's why they're going to vote Trump in November.

What happens after that is anybody's guess.