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“Because working-class politics has so much potential to displace Democratic centrism and Republican authoritarianism, a successful Mamdani administration poses a serious threat to establishment leaders in both parties, to say nothing of hysterical billionaires who see even modest tax hikes as the advent of communism. We should expect elites, starting with President Trump, to do everything possible to stop Zohran from implementing his agenda.” There are cracks and there is space that opens up from time to time, but how much Mamdani keeps his promises and delivers, resists pressure and do not concede, and how much class struggle plays out will decide whether such a victory becomes victories. And one should not ignore that only  one million voted for Mamdani and New York and the US today are nit those of 1910. Yet like in UK, now there are more chances of creating a new party and abandon the criminal and imperialist Democratic Party.

Antifa — short for “anti-fascist” — is a decentralised, leaderless movement of far-left individuals who stand against what they see as fascist and rightwing entities.  It is “a label for people who have a certain ideology [who] believe violence is justified to fight against fascistic entities within our society”, including the government or specific organisations, said David Schanzer, director of Duke University’s Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security.  Antifa does not have a membership list or a doctrine, and it does not raise money, hold meetings or have a website, as an established organisation would.  The “consensus” among US terrorism experts was that it was “an ideology” that “has not manifested itself organisationally”, Schanzer said Is antifa a terror threat?  Data shows leftwing extremists have posed a relatively minor security threat to the US over the past three decades, particularly when compared with violence from rightwing groups, although ...

This profligate spending on America’s militarization, coupled with tax cuts for the rich and “preemptive” strikes on Iran, laid bare just how little US conservatism has actually changed in the era of Trump. Samuel Moyn   observed that  Trump had revealed himself to be a “politician of American continuity” rather than a harbinger of change. Like his Republican predecessor, Trump has fused militarism with neoliberal economic policies (deregulation, privatization, tax cuts), which last time around produced a global financial crisis and two failed wars that enriched a select few. In the Bush era, contractors like Halliburton and Blackwater became the brazen faces of disaster capitalism. Today that mantle has been passed to private prison firms like CoreCivic and surveillance tech companies like  Palantir , which has quickly become the new avatar of the burgeoning police state. Two decades after the war on terror, we are in danger of entering what has been  described ...

“Trump spoke next. He arrived twenty minutes late and nobody clapped. He said it was the most silent room he had ever been in. He told them to applaud. No one applauded. Those senior officers sat and listened to the silence. No one applauded. “ No authoritarian right winger insults all their senior generals and admirals together . Pinochet did not do it. Putin doesn’t do it. Modi would not dream of it. Mussolini did not do it. Netanyahu hasn’t done it. Hitler never did it. It’s mad.”

Interpreting Trumpism

Convergence?

An interview with Vivek Chibber

Note that the automatically-generated subtitles contain some spelling inaccuracies.

This is a good perspective that has helped me have a clearer picture. The tariffs are not a response to the decline of American capitalism. The legitimation crisis from which Trumpism emerged was a result of the  strength  of American capital, not its decline. Trump claims that the  result of concessions made by prior administrations in order to bring other states into the US-led system have diminished American economic and political supremacy. A plan that would involve pushing finance off its pedestal and replacing it to some extent with domestic manufacturing. Globalization cannot simply be reversed at the stroke of a pen. Its unravelling would involve much more than simply imposing tariffs*; it would require an array of capital controls as well as a comprehensive industrial policy – measures that would constitute a more serious challenge to the dominant fractions of capital than anything Trump is willing to contemplate. Tariffs on their own are insufficient to r...

From Obama to Trump to Biden and back to Trump, the country has been devastated by US air strikes Related “Made in France” war in Yemen ‘ Houthi Hunting Club. Red Sea 2023-2024’

“The book suffers from American exceptionalism that sees Trump as an aberration of the post-WWII order.”

“The myth of ‘Western values’ died in Gaza. Myths do not die. They are debunked or refuted. They often persist for a long time and are adaped to new contexts; they are part of a belief system. I remember well after Iraq and Afghanistan how people invoked ‘democracy’ and ‘Western values’ in a way not dissimilar from what the Bushes and Blairs and later the Obamas and Bidens articulated them. Recently, a student at the ‘best’ European university in social sciences told me that the myth of sectarianism in the Middle Ast is still being repeated. A white liberal, ‘MeeToo’ English woman what Russia was doing in Ukraine was ‘a Russian thing. It's in their history’. Zelenskyy's recent rise in ‘popularity’ among many is built upon ‘the myth of Western values’ defending Ukraine against an authoritarian Russian regime. Myths are strentghned through amnesia. History is brushed aside and Pavlovian conditioning is enforced.  We should remember how the emergence of ISIS was analysed. How ...

“[W]hy take the time to engage with global and regional history, international political economy, imperialism theory, and war studies just to find oneself in the uncomfortable position of being at odds with the propaganda and power of Western liberal states and state media and their interests?”

“Rather than watching an orchestrated, forgettable set piece featuring smiling foreign dignitaries and heads of state visiting an ever-so-polite president in the Oval Office, it was refreshing to witness a blatant exhibition of the crudeness, rudeness, and brutishness of power politics that usually occurs far, far away from the cameras and, hence, reporters and the public” Related Zelenskyy:  a supporter of Israeli oppression

‘But we liberals are not responsible’.  This is just a brief comment as there are many things to say about the editorial. Notice the use of the word ‘imperialism’. Since when the Guardian uses such a term in its editorials? Imperialism did not apply to the ‘liberal order’ prior to Trump except in some articles in the opinion section. “Vance, Elon Musk and hard-right agitators such as Steve Bannon have a vision of a Europe run not by elected liberal-progressive coalitions but by people like themselves.” Trump and ‘new order’ have come out of a blue sky. We were sleeping. The morning after, there was Trump and an ‘illiberal order.”  No historical background, no sociology . The so-called liberal progressives were innocents in the room. They did not have blood in their hands. Nor did they preside over an imperialist international order. Selectivity. Perpetuating Amnesia. Ignoring structure and systemic analysis. Furthermore, their decades had not to do with the political-economic ...

  “[I]f Cuba does not respect its citizenry’s human rights, it is necessary for the beacon of said rights across the water to starve those citizens into revolt. This is a special kind of tough love for the ordinary Cuban that emanates in particular from Florida and New Jersey fogies still embittered over things lost in the revolution; one deep enough to perdure for two thirds of a century, despite being forever in vain – those ordinary Cubans having bafflingly failed, decade after decade, to overthrow their government, however much hunger and desperation they are subjected to.” Abject gesture

Asked by a reporter how he could blame diversity programmes for the crash when the investigation had only just begun, the president responded : "Because I have common sense." Common sense is nothing more than a deposit of prejudices laid down in the mind before you reach eighteen — Albert Einstein

Myth 1: Trump put pressure on Netanyahu. That has been depicted by many as if it was him who arm-twisted the Israeli genocidal leader to put an end to the war. Myth 2: The depiction of the current truce as a victory for Hamas. by  Gilbert Achcar

From 2019 “It doesn’t take Ariel long to get used to this new world without Palestinians. He and others do feel flashes of regret and fear. A bartender at the nearby Chez George tells Ariel, ‘Maybe the Arabs will crawl out of every corner like zombies and return to exact revenge’. But twenty-four hours after the disappearance, no zombies show up. In fact, ‘They didn’t find a single drop of blood. They were relieved that the army either wasn’t responsible for the disappearance, or it had executed it perfectly’.” The Book of Disappearance Related Dutch-politician calls for ‘transfer’ of Palestinains to Jordan