Why are the Republicans at war with reality?

"None of the major problems facing humanity in the 21st century can be solved by the principles that still dominate the developed countries of the west: unlimited economic growth and technical progress, the ideal of individual autonomy, freedom of choice, electoral democracy. As is evident in the case of the environmental crisis, facing these problems will require in practice regulation by institutions, in theory a revision of both the current political rhetoric and even the more reputable intellectual constructions of liberalism. The question is can this be done within the framework of the rationalist, secularist and civilised tradition of the Enlightenment. As for left vs right, it will plainly remain central in an era which is increasing the gap between haves and have-nots. However, today the danger is that this struggle is being subsumed in the irrationalist mobilisations of ethnic or religious or other group identity." Eric Hobsbawm, historian - Prospect Magazine - March, 2007 

"Reality has a well-known liberal bias"
Stephen Colbert

Before we really get started we should clarify our terms, things like "liberal" and "reality", because American English is so freighted with euphemisms and constantly changing circumlocutions that it is easy to get lost in the fog. For example, when I was a boy North Korea would have been described as a "red state"... now Texas is.

Let us begin with "liberal".

In American English "liberal", depending on who is saying it can mean anything from mildly progressive to the "Weather Underground"... However liberal's universal or classic, "proper English" meaning is to be favorable to free trade, "laissez faire", economics, low taxes, "right to work" laws and deregulation... that makes Maggie Thatcher a "liberal".

So since we are speaking murky "murkin", by liberal we mean the left. So Stephen Colbert is basically saying that reality has a notably left wing bias. This takes us to "reality".

The reality I will be talking about can be pretty well summed up in two popular and contemporary books: Thomas Picketty's, "Capital in the Twenty-First Century" about inequality and Naomi Klein's, "This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate", whose title speaks for itself.

To simplify brutally, "reality" as described by Piketty/Klein means that our planet earth is literally well on its way to being uninhabitable thanks to a tiny group (0.01%) of unimaginably wealthy individuals, who have grown wealthier and wealthier, even as the middle class has withered, an oligarchy who expect to live forever, and live forever very well indeed, probably in some gated community in what is now Antarctica.

"Perhaps it is worth remembering that Noah's Ark was not built to hold everyone, but just the lucky few."
Naomi Klein
 

The growing consciousness of this "reality" is causing many individuals who come from many very different social stratae, races, sexual orientations etc. to grow restless and dissatisfied with the present system and find themselves "at last compelled to face with sober senses (their) real conditions of life, and (their) relations with (their) kind".

In short, it is "us" versus "them".

This restless and dissatisfied state is often referred to, especially by those who deplore it, as "populism"

What does that mean?

Here is a favorable, Midwestern version of populism by Chicago's poet laureate, Carl Sandburg.

I AM THE PEOPLE, THE MOB

I AM the people--the mob--the crowd--the mass.
Do you know that all the great work of the world is
done through me?
I am the workingman, the inventor, the maker of the
world's food and clothes.
I am the audience that witnesses history. The Napoleons
come from me and the Lincolns. They die. And
then I send forth more Napoleons and Lincolns.
I am the seed ground. I am a prairie that will stand
for much plowing. Terrible storms pass over me.
I forget. The best of me is sucked out and wasted.
I forget. Everything but Death comes to me and
makes me work and give up what I have. And I
forget.
Sometimes I growl, shake myself and spatter a few red
drops for history to remember. Then--I forget.
When I, the People, learn to remember, when I, the
People, use the lessons of yesterday and no longer
forget who robbed me last year, who played me for
a fool--then there will be no speaker in all the world
say the name: "The People," with any fleck of a
sneer in his voice or any far-off smile of derision.
The mob--the crowd--the mass--will arrive then.

So what I am getting at is that those few unimaginably wealthy, now-unregulated, individuals and corporations who finance American politicians, especially Republican/Tea-Party ones, are afraid (terrified, soiling themselves from fear) that "the mob--the crowd--the mass" might just be about to "arrive" and they are willing to do anything, including making the most powerful country on earth ungovernable, in order to avoid that.

I'm sure that you are all too familiar with how this plays, but these two snippets below give the flavor perfectly and the only surprising thing I find in them is their puzzled, "how can they be so silly?" tone.

It’s a scary thought, but here it is: If some red states were to openly defy the authority of President Obama in the exercise of his constitutional duties, would today’s Republican Congress side with him? Or would they honor the insurrection?(...) The word “insurrection” does come to mind. Yet the resistance out West to federal authority has been received in virtual silence on Capitol Hill. It’s almost as if the GOP Congress wanted an uprising against the president. This country has drifted far beyond the rough-and-tumble give-and-take that historically occurs between the parties. It’s one thing to oppose the president’s policies. It’s quite another to refuse to acknowledge presidential authority. Colbert King - Washington Post

It is a peculiar, but unmistakable, phenomenon: As Barack Obama’s presidency heads into its twilight, the rage of the Republican establishment toward him is growing louder, angrier and more destructive.(...) even by the dismal standards of political discourse today, the tone of the current attacks is disturbing. So is their evident intent — to undermine not just Mr. Obama’s policies, but his very legitimacy as president. It is a line of attack that echoes Republicans’ earlier questioning of Mr. Obama’s American citizenship. Those attacks were blatantly racist in their message — reminding people that Mr. Obama was black, suggesting he was African, and planting the equally false idea that he was secretly Muslim. The current offensive is slightly more subtle, but it is impossible to dismiss the notion that race plays a role in it. Editorial - New York Times

If Piketty/Klein are right, and I believe they are, the only logical solution that might save our planet's habitability and social peace would be very stiff and omnipresent regulations on the use of energy and very high taxes on top incomes to cushion the effects of a massive reconversion of the economy... You notice I use the word "logical"

To think "logically", people must think calmly and clearly, rationally, so obviously to keep that from happening emotions must be created to keep rational thinking out of the picture. Fear, racism, anger, selfishness, hatred and war all drive out cool, collected thinking, so obviously fear, racism, anger, selfishness, hatred and war have to be promoted at all cost... cost is no problem when the future of the 0.01 percent's fortunes and power are at stake.

For those few who still read history there is nothing new here. After the defeat of WWI, with the  German population impoverished and the recent Russian revolution fresh in their minds the great industrialists of Germany were very "concerned" about the rise of Marxism in their country and took measures to put a stop to it.

By 1919 Krupp was already giving financial aid to one of the reactionary political groups which sowed the seed of the present Nazi ideology. Hugo Stinnes was an early contributor to the Nazi Party (National Socialistische Deutsche Arbeiter Partei). By 1924 other prominent industrialists and financiers, among them Fritz Thyssen, Albert Voegler, Adolph [sic] Kirdorf, and Kurt von Schroder, were secretly giving substantial sums to the Nazis. In 1931 members of the coalowners' association which Kirdorf headed pledged themselves to pay 50 pfennigs for each ton of' coal sold, the money to go to the organization which Hitler was building. The U.S. Kilgore Committee - "Who Financed Adolf Hitler?"

This all finally led to 4,200,000 Germans being killed in WWII (we are leaving out the 6,000,000 Jews and the 20,000,000 Russians), and of course Germany was a smoking ruin, filled with widows and orphans, but these industrialists like the Krupps and the Thyssens  made money leading up to the war, during the war (using slave labor), and after the war and the Krupps and the Thyssens, for example, are still some of richest families in Germany today. Like Naomi says, the staterooms on Noah's Ark are limited.

Every nation has its own idiosyncrasies, for example Germans wear lederhosen and Americans wear cowboy hats, so I don't imagine we'll be seeing torchlit parades of roman saluting, brown shirts, goosestepping down the broad avenues of Washington, or African-Americans being loaded onto boxcars either, for that matter.

American fascism will, like everything else American, have its own inimitable style, but I would argue that the beginning and perhaps more than the beginning, is unfolding right before our very eyes. DS

Naomi Klein trumps the doomsters

"(Neo-conservatism is) not some new invention but capitalism stripped of its Keynesian appendages, capitalism in its monopoly phase, a system that has let itself go -- that no longer has to work to keep its customers, that can be as antisocial, antidemocratic and boorish as it wants." Naomi Klein, "The Shock Doctrine"

David Seaton's News Links
I'm a great fan of James Kunstler's, "Clusterfuck Nation" blog. The prophet Jeremiah has nothing on Jimmy Kunstler's "Lamentations".

Probably the most prolific and apocalyptic of the "doomsters", Kunstler is always entertaining and thought provoking and though seen by many as extremist, in my opinion his diagnosis falls far short of being pessimistic enough.

Maybe it's because I've just been reading what is probably the most important political agitprop text of the XXI century, Naomi Klein's Polaroid of evil, "The Shock Doctrine", but I wonder how someone as justifiably alarmed and dramatically pessimistic about America's statu quo as James Kunstler is, can, at the same time, be such a starry-eyed optimist about human nature and the way, and for whose benefit, the world is run.

Kunstler sees our present wasteful system collapsing and being replaced by a healthy return to the soil, where the far flung suburbs are abandoned in favor of small cities populated by craftsmen surrounded by small, labor intensive farms that will supply them with food. Rather like the Middle Ages, but with Internet.

Here is a typical sample of his work:

American perestroika really boils down to this: we have to rescale the activities of daily life to a level consistent with the mandates of the future, especially the ones having to do with available energy and capital. We have to dismantle things that have no future and rebuild things that will allow daily life to function. We have to say goodbye to big box shopping and rebuild Main Street. More people will be needed to work in farming and fewer in tourism, public relations, gambling, and party planning. We have to make some basic useful products in this country again. We have to systematically decommission suburbia and reactivate our small towns and small cities. We have to prepare for the contraction of our large cities. We have to let the sun set on Happy Motoring and rebuild our trains, transit systems, harbors, and inland waterways. We have to reorganize schooling at a much more modest level. We have to close down most of the overseas military bases we're operating and conclude our wars in Asia. Mostly, we have to recover a national sense of common purpose and common decency. September 14, 2009

Everything he says above makes sense to me as I'm sure it does to many people. The problem is that the public affairs of America have become a pantomime run for the benefit of special interest groups and what is worse a great percentage of the population are perfectly aware of this but impotent to change it.

To cut to the chase, Milton Friedman and his "Chicago Boys", Ronald Reagan, Alan Greenspan, Dick Cheney and George Bush, at the head (or the tail) of a legion of think tanks and lobbies have hollowed out America's institutional infrastructure, while filling their pockets and the pockets of those who sail in them and have impoverished millions of people all over the world in the process.

This is how the Nobel Prize winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz reviewing Naomi Klein's, "The Shock Doctrine" in the New York Times puts it:

Market fundamentalists never really appreciated the institutions required to make an economy function well, let alone the broader social fabric that civilizations require to prosper and flourish.

How does this democratic dysfunction work in America's daily life? In this case Arianna Huffington channels the "dark side" better than Stiglitz:

Listening to President Obama's heartfelt, well-intentioned, but ultimately naïve speech on financial reform today, my mind kept flashing on a story I heard the last time Washington, in the wake of the Enron scandal, promised to reform Wall Street. The story came from a friend who took a family trip on a cruise ship. Her 10-year-old son kept pestering the crew, begging for a chance to drive the massive ocean liner. The captain finally invited the family up to the bridge, whereupon the boy grabbed hold of the wheel and began vigorously turning it. My friend panicked -- until the captain leaned over and told her not to worry, that the ship was on autopilot, and that her son's maneuvers would have no effect. And that's the way it is with our leaders. They stand on the bridge making theatrical gestures they claim will steer us in a new direction while, down in the control room, the autopilot, programmed by politicians in the pocket of special interests, continues to guide the ship of state along its predetermined course.

These groups have no concern for the general welfare and as long as their itches get scratched, they could care less if the rest of the population lives in rags... countries like this abound in the world. Why should Kuntsler think that the USA would be any different?

Often formerly prosperous countries have slid of the graphs when their money ceased to have value. Imagine the dollar collapsing. Here is what it might look like:

The dollar dropped to the lowest level in a year versus the euro as Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke’s declaration that the recession is likely over led investors to sell the U.S. currency and buy riskier assets. Bloomberg

Move over Japan. Investors spent a decade borrowing in zero-interest-rate yen and putting the funds in higher-yielding assets overseas. It’s the U.S.’s turn to flood the world with cheap funding and the risks of this going wrong are huge.(...) imagine what might happen if the world’s reserve currency became its most shorted. Carry trades are, after all, bets that the funding currency will weaken further or stay down for an extended period of time. It’s also a wager that a central bank is trapped into keeping borrowing costs low indefinitely.(...) The dollar-carry trade says nothing good about confidence in the U.S. economy. It’s also a reminder that the side effects of this crisis may be setting us up for a bigger one. William Pesek - Bloomberg

The possibility of the dollar collapsing is the leitmotif of much of today's international economic commentary. This would cause great hardship world wide, but I imagine that the Chinese and the EU are already preparing themselves for that eventuality. It is a chilling possibility that only a war or a plague might be enough to move the dollar back up in value as a momentary "refuge".

If the dollar so fell in value that it ceased to be the world's reserve currency, then the USA would need to export massively to gain hard currency. The USA hardly manufactures anything anymore, so what to sell?

We often forget that the United States is the world's greatest exporter of agricultural commodities: wheat, rice, corn, soybeans and yes, if we needed the cash badly enough, oil. This is one of the great differences between America and the developing world's other former empires: America itself can be pillaged.

I remember that the late Peter Drucker was worried, way back during the "Japan is number one" panic, that the USA would simply end up supplying grain to the Japanese.

If the dollar goes blooey the Chinese will be happy to buy our commodities, on the cheap, just as they are happy to buy oil from Sudan or soybeans from Argentina.

I think the most likely model for America's future, on much more massive scale of course, would be that of Argentina and Uruguay -- Brazil seems to be more sensibly run -- once they were wealthy countries with highly educated middle classes and strong social nets, which now find themselves prostrated by Chicago Boys induced debt and corruption, at the mercy of the world's commodity markets.

So what I envisage is not the disappearance of America's great cities, as Jim Kuntsler does, but their conversion into the South American mixture of a tiny group of wealthy owners of the natural resources, their foreign currency safely stashed offshore, who live in well guarded communities, protected by bodyguards, who fly in private helicopters over the squalor of immense, sprawling, sordid, miserable trailer park like slums, where desperate people live by their wits, selling drugs, or their bodies, where gamines scavenge in garbage heaps, where in order to feed the rest, parents sell their prettier children into prostitution, so the rich of the world can come to America for sex tourism, like they do in Cambodia or Thailand.

I can imagine, because I have seen it happen in other places, that this could lead to the rise of fascist populism, antisemitism, military coups, martial law and much desperate violence.

It really doesn't take much imagination, just studying what happens when resource-rich countries that once had a prosperous middle class take this path.

So, having read Naomi Klein, I'm afraid I don't see Jim Kunstler's Arcadia coming, not with the political and economic leaders that control America today and in any foreseeable future. DS

Naomi Klein advocates boycotting Israel - Guardian

After viewing the video clip from the BBC read this snippet from Naomi Klein's article in the Guardian.

It's time. Long past time. The best strategy to end the increasingly bloody occupation is for Israel to become the target of the kind of global movement that put an end to apartheid in South Africa. In July 2005 a huge coalition of Palestinian groups laid out plans to do just that. They called on "people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era". The campaign Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions was born.

Every day that Israel pounds Gaza brings more converts to the BDS cause - even among Israeli Jews. In the midst of the assault roughly 500 Israelis, dozens of them well-known artists and scholars, sent a letter to foreign ambassadors in Israel. It calls for "the adoption of immediate restrictive measures and sanctions" and draws a clear parallel with the anti-apartheid struggle. "The boycott on South Africa was effective, but Israel is handled with kid gloves ... This international backing must stop."

Yet even in the face of these clear calls, many of us still can't go there. The reasons are complex, emotional and understandable. But they simply aren't good enough. Economic sanctions are the most effective tool in the non-violent arsenal: surrendering them verges on active complicity.(...) The world has tried what used to be called "constructive engagement". It has failed utterly. Since 2006 Israel has been steadily escalating its criminality: expanding settlements, launching an outrageous war against Lebanon, and imposing collective punishment on Gaza through the brutal blockade. Despite this escalation, Israel has not faced punitive measures - quite the opposite. The weapons and $3bn in annual aid the US sends Israel are only the beginning. Throughout this key period, Israel has enjoyed a dramatic improvement in its diplomatic, cultural and trade relations with a variety of other allies. For instance, in 2007 Israel became the first country outside Latin America to sign a free-trade deal with the Mercosur bloc. In the first nine months of 2008, Israeli exports to Canada went up 45%. A new deal with the EU is set to double Israel's exports of processed food. And in December European ministers "upgraded" the EU-Israel association agreement, a reward long sought by Jerusalem.

It is in this context that Israeli leaders started their latest war: confident they would face no meaningful costs. It is remarkable that over seven days of wartime trading, the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange's flagship index actually went up 10.7%. When carrots don't work, sticks are needed.

This is an idea whose time has certainly come. DS

Get set

The panic in global financial markets has sparked an unprecedented rush into safe US Treasury securities, driving yields on short-term government notes down to almost zero.(...) The low yields reflect a surge in demand for these instruments, seen as the safest in the world during times of turmoil.(...) Analysts say the fear factor has pushed up demand for Treasuries, since investors are virtually certain the US government will not default.(...) Bob Eisenbeis, analyst at Cumberland Advisors, said the unprecedented low yields are a sign of "dysfunction" in markets. Eisenbeis said US municipal bonds are paying upwards of 6.0 percent tax-free and corporate bonds even more, but that fears of default and a lack of knowledge about underlying bond quality have led investors to shun these alternatives. One reason for the surge in demand for Treasuries, said Eisenbeis, is the Federal Reserve's decision to flood financial markets with liquidity including through other central banks. Many central banks and commercial banks are reluctant to use this cash for traditional lending, and are buying Treasuries to ride out the storm, Eisenbeis added. A big question for the market is whether the Treasury market has become a bubble that will burst. Although the low rates allow Washington to borrow money cheaply, Eisenbeis said such a scenario could be perilous for the economy and the dollar.(...) "There are lots of reasons to believe this Treasury rally is unsustainable, and that a day of reckoning is fast approaching," he said. "When you have this huge flood of liquidity into the marketplace, that can't last forever," he said. A bursting of this bubble could mean a rush out of Treasuries, forcing the government to pay higher rates on an unprecedented amount of debt. (...) Mike Larson, an analyst at Weiss Research, says the long-term bond market could be "the biggest bubble of all," worse than the dot-com and real estate bubbles.(...)"Treasury bonds almost never move this far, this fast. And interest rates, which move in the opposite direction of bond prices, almost never fall this far, this fast," Larson said. (emphasis mine) AFP

David Seaton's News Links
One of the most interesting things about the decline of the American empire is that not only are the broad outlines familiar to most of the world's educated inhabitants, but even many of the details are too: details that in any other culture would be private "family" stories. That way we can use the English language and the American situation as a universal parable or mythology when broadly discussing the human condition.

Some readers of mine ask me for Spanish stories and, when I can, I am happy to oblige. The problem with doing this in an English language blog is having to provide masses of context about situations that most readers are not too familiar with.

However today there is a Spanish story that most Americans can appreciate.

As some of you may already know Spain's real estate bubble is one of the few that can rival America's and it is also deflating spectacularly.

Here is an item from an English language review of the Spanish press about Spain's second largest real estate developer, Martinsa-Fadesa:

El País notes today that the Martinsa real estate company overvalued the worth of its land by up to 19,000%. The paper claims that the company ended 2007 with profits because of these accounting irregularities, and gives as an example some land in Las Palmas worth a million € in their accounts, but valued at 179 million. A plot in A Coruña sold for 1.5 million appeared in the accounts with a value of 84 million.

That, in a nutshell is what this universal crisis in all about: cooked books, hidden debt, assets whose true value is unknown and perhaps unknowable. This has been going on at every level until value itself has become impossible to determine and wealth is frantically looking for someplace safe to hide.

We are now living through a gigantic spasm, perhaps another birth pang, perhaps the final death throes, of what Naomi Klein calls "Disaster Capitalism": the legacy of Milton Friedman.

What was once the proud ship of Marget Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, the SS Milton Friedman, for decades a powerful intellectual movement, is now sinking in a tragic farce of unregulated larceny. Viewed from outer space it must be a barrel of laughs.

When we look at economic news though, it is important to put them immediately into a human perspective. Here is some interesting context:

As jobless numbers reach levels not seen in 25 years, another crisis is unfolding for millions of people who lost their health insurance along with their jobs, joining the ranks of the uninsured. (...) Starla D. Darling, 27, was pregnant when she learned that her insurance coverage was about to end. She rushed to the hospital, took a medication to induce labor and then had an emergency Caesarean section, in the hope that her Blue Cross and Blue Shield plan would pay for the delivery. Wendy R. Carter, 41, who recently lost her job and her health benefits, is struggling to pay $12,942 in bills for a partial hysterectomy at a local hospital. Her daughter, Betsy A. Carter, 19, has pain in her lower right jaw, where a wisdom tooth is growing in. But she has not seen a dentist because she has no health insurance.(...) About 10.3 million Americans were unemployed in November, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The number of unemployed has increased by 2.8 million, or 36 percent, since January of this year, and by 4.3 million, or 71 percent, since January 2001. Most people are covered through the workplace, so when they lose their jobs, they lose their health benefits. On average, for each jobless worker who has lost insurance, at least one child or spouse covered under the same policy has also lost protection, public health experts said.(...) Nearly 4.4 million people are receiving unemployment insurance benefits, an increase of 60 percent in the past year. But more than half of unemployed workers are not receiving help because they do not qualify or have exhausted their benefits. About 1.7 million families receive cash under the main federal-state welfare program, little changed from a year earlier. Welfare serves about 4 of 10 eligible families and fewer than one in four poor children. New York Times

___________

An increasing number of people who retired in recent years, confident they had set aside enough to live on comfortably, are finding themselves strapped. The stock market plunge and the housing downturn have affected many Americans, of course. But retirees have been particularly pinched because their homes and investments are the primary assets they depend on for income. As a result, many of the country's elderly are finding themselves in Nelson's situation, low on money and looking for work. "Suddenly the rug has been pulled out from under them," says Alicia H. Munnell, director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College. Business Week

_______________

Workers who got three days' notice their factory was shutting its doors voted to occupy the building and said Saturday they won't go home without assurances they'll get severance and vacation pay they say they are owed. (...)In the second day of a sit-in on the factory floor that began Friday, about 200 union workers occupied the building in shifts while union leaders outside criticized a Wall Street bailout they say is leaving laborers behind.(...) Organizers of the action said the company can't pay employees because its creditor, Charlotte, N.C.-based Bank of America, won't let them.(...) Bank of America received $25 billion from the government's financial bailout package. "Across cultures, religions, union and nonunion, we all say this bailout was a shame," said Richard Berg, president of Teamsters Local 743. "If this bailout should go to anything, it should go to the workers of this country." Outside the plant, protesters wore stickers and carried signs that said, "You got bailed out, we got sold out." CBS2-Chicago

So, in the snippet from AFP that opens this post we see that US treasury bonds may constitute a bubble greater than the real estate or the Internet bubbles. We may surmise that a collapse of their value would have consequences far greater than those bubbles bursting have. Among those consequences might be hyperinflation and the subsequent pauperization of all Americans except the very, very rich.

The hardships portrayed in the snippets from the Times and from Business Week would multiply exponentially and the frequency of the actions that CBS2 Chicago writes about would multiply with them in lockstep. What are now isolated incidents could become an ungovernable cauldron in a very short time if the great mass of Americans were instantly pauperized as happened recently in Argentina.

Larissa MacFarquhar has written a "must read" profile of Naomi Klein in the current New Yorker. The following snippet may give an idea where the USA is headed right now:

The only time (Naomi Klein) has ever felt a whiff of utopia was in Buenos Aires, in 2002, when the political system had virtually disintegrated—during the time that she and Lewis were filming “The Take.” “That moment in Argentina was an incredible time because a vacuum opened up,” she says. “They had thrown out four Presidents in two weeks, and they had no idea what to do. Every institution was in crisis. The politicians were hiding in their homes. When they came out, housewives attacked them with brooms. And, walking around Buenos Aires at night, there were meetings on every other street corner. Every plaza where there was a streetlight, people were meeting under it and talking about what to do about the external debt, I swear to God. Groups of one hundred or five hundred people. And organizing buying groceries together because they could get cheaper prices, setting up barters because the currency was worthless. It was the most inspiring thing I’ve ever seen.”

If the 20th century has any lessons to teach us, it is that sort of scenario we see laid out clearly before us leads to massive social unrest and upheaval: if not properly managed it can be the classic yeast culture that every apprentice fascist dreams of.

Probably the left's greatest task in the coming months and years is steering this convulsion toward peace and solidarity and away from the temptations of war and mob violence. DS