davel

The script was by JohntheDuncan.

What unites them is this: a settled commitment to American global supremacy. That is something far more important to Dick Cheney, the human embodiment of the existing global power structure, than a few points on the tax rate or a little more diversity in government hiring. Kamala Harris, in her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, promised that “I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.” This is enough for Dick Cheney. In this sense, she is a traditional Democrat.

Even among Democrats, the baseline assumption that America must have enough guns to exert our will on the entire world is not questioned. Kamala Harris may push for paid family leave, but she is not going to dismantle the United States intelligence agencies. Kamala Harris may raise taxes on capital gains, but she is not going to meaningfully slash military funding. Kamala Harris may protect abortion, but she is not going to stop sending weapons to Israel, or remove America’s drone bases in Africa, or Give Schools All The Money They Need and Make The Air Force Hold a Bake Sale to Buy a Bomber. The harshest things that America does, its most uncompromising violence, its rawest assertion of pure power over weaker people, is always done overseas, far away from where we can watch it. For generations, there has been a mutual agreement from both major parties to do what must be done to protect America’s ability to militarily dominate the world—the gun that protects our concurrent ability to be richer than everyone else, the velvet fist that allows us to extract trillions of dollars in value from the Global South and use it to raise our own national standard of living. This commitment to maintaining the global order, people like Dick Cheney understand, is more important than all the other, smaller issues that voters get worked up about.

Mostly, Democrats deal with this reality by not talking about it. […] We, as Democratic voters, pretty much just ignore this stuff. We may come out against specific wars that are particularly bad ideas, but we, as a party, have almost zero will to confront the military industrial complex and its global tentacles and the way that it maintains, at gunpoint, the complex system of global economic power that allows us to live nice lives.

It’s not that Donald Trump has any ideological opposition to this commitment, which the Republicans have always embraced with relish. It’s just that he’s insane and an unpredictable egomaniac and therefore cannot be counted on to fulfill his role on this matter. […] They may prefer a Republican, but they need, above all, someone predictable. Someone who will not try to undermine the entire system. In this race, that person is Kamala Harris. And so Dick Cheney and the men like him will support Kamala Harris.

An Al Mayadeen investigation of July 19th laid bare the US Navy’s crushing defeat by Yemen’s AnsarAllah, in Washington’s initially-vaunted Operation Prosperity Guardian. Western media has finally acknowledged the Empire’s comprehensive trouncing by God’s Partisans, in an epic David vs Goliath triumph. Elsewhere, reporting on the much-hyped USS Eisenhower aircraft carrier strike group’s return to base after months of relentless bombardment by the Resistance amply underlines how aircraft carriers - the core component of US hegemony for decades - are quite literally dead in the water.

Economically to the right of Genocide Joe.

Long-term capital gains, or assets held for more than one year, are currently taxed at a maximum rate of 20%.

So not nothing, but not much, assuming the change can be pushed through at all. Nothing will fundamentally change. These taxes wouldn’t even affect well-paid workers; they only kick in at $1M.

This stuff was posted on two sites:

• Ryan Grim & Jeremy Scahill’s new Drop Site
• Matt Taibbi’s Racket News

I haven’t gone through all the content yet, but over the last ~6 years I’ve come to take Jeffrey Sachs at his word, moreso than Naomi Klein. He’s been consistently what he appears at face value.

• Ryan Grim: Jeffrey Sachs: A Front Row Seat to the Cold War That Never Ended
• Matt Taibbi: What I Got Wrong About “Shock Therapy”
• Ryan Grim & Emily Jashinsky interview Matt Taibbi & Jeffery Sachs: A True Shock? Economist Jeffrey Sachs Reveals Secret at Heart of U.S.-Russian Relations (YouTube video)

It appears that Senator Elizabeth Warren was spot on in her assessment of the lack of a backbone for Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell when it comes to raising capital requirements on the powerful megabanks on Wall Street.

Powell doesn’t lack backbone. The private banking cartel largely runs the Fed, and he’s their elected capo. The Fed is a racket.

I’m no expert on the Foreign Agents Registration Act, but the revisions to it seem to have removed “political propaganda” from it, such that it is focused on “lobbying,” so on first blush the executive branch seems to be on shaky legal ground. BlueAnoners will eat this up, though.

inb4 mbfc

There will always be some ineradicable incentive for unions to do things that benefit their own members even if they do some vague harm to society at large. Corporations will always try to exploit this incentive for their own benefit. It is easy to say in an abstract sense “Unions shouldn’t give in to that,” but in the real world, it is not easy at all. Should the United Mine Workers demand that coal mines shut down, because of the environment? Should the Machinists union tell Boeing to shut its factories where its members manufacture weapons that are used to blow up poor people on the other side of the world? Etc. Antitrust issues can sometimes be seen as just another big picture dilemma that does nothing to help working people put food on the table right now.

In lieu of solving this timeless tension in today’s little blog post, let’s think about the more modest goal of how antitrust and organized labor can work together more effectively. First, we all have to realize that we’re all part of one holistic policy goal. We think that allowing corporations to proceed unchecked down the road to ultimate power is a bad idea. It is bad for workers, who will be crushed, and it is bad for governments, who will be co-opted, and it is bad for all citizens, who will suffer as corporate power sweeps away regulations and rearranges all of society to benefit shareholders at the expense of everything else, like AI gone awry. Organized labor should make it a point to use its own political capital—a very real weapon, if Kamala Harris wins the White House—to support antitrust efforts and protect its enforcers. And the antitrust world should correspondingly recognize the fact that simply limiting corporate power by fighting monopolies will never be enough; unless there are unions inside of the companies to constantly exercise power on behalf of the workers, there is no actual institution that will be carrying on the fight to prevent companies from just proceeding right back down the same harmful monopolistic path over and over again. We’re peas in a pod here. Don’t want huge companies and their idiot billionaire bosses to run the world? Break them up, and unionize them. It’s the best program we have.