I cannot imagine a Left independent of the unions, which would be an indispensable prerequisite of “independence”.

And, if it becomes “strong and…irresistible” how can it’s members also claim to remain independent? I think I’m safe in assuming that Naomi Klein means that it would be the ‘leadership’ of such a movement that would have to be strong and irresistible, so as to keep the cadres in line. “Strength and especially “irresistibility” in a political movement imply rigid, disciplined structural organization, sort of like, oh, I don’t know, the CPSU back in the day. “Independence” would be totally absent.

And how many “militant and radical” Leftists does Naomi Klein think she can find in the U.S. of today who would voluntarily and independently rally behind such radicalism and militancy?

Night-Gaunt—‘call me Roy’ does sound like Beck, I suppose, but unless these guys become too repetitious I think it’s worthwhile to try to figure out what’s eating them.  The thing about the schools is somewhat mixed up, since ‘progressive education’ and ‘progressive’ as in politics are two different things.  One can notice that ‘progressive education’ didn’t seem to have done much serious harm to middle- and upper-class White people, so attributing the poor results of the public school systems of bygone years with Black and Hispanic children to ‘progressive education’ doesn’t seem very logical, especially given the cultural, political and economic context of the victims.

Flummox—the problem with the state is that it is based on coercion and violence.  As a result, it is a focus for various forms of sociopathy, like war and empire abroad and political and economic oppression at home.  These seem to arise inevitably even in entirely liberal regimes like that of the United States.  I think any workable solution must be based on nonviolence and autonomy, that is, the formation and cultivation of noncoercive relations and institutions.  One can’t really free people or improve their lives by holding a gun to their heads.

Progressives destroyed the bottom rung of the ladder of
economic success by corrupting a public school system in which half of the
students never graduate and half of those who do are fundamentally illiterate.
Every major inner city in America from, Chicago, Detroit, Oakland, St. Louis,
every school board and school district, every city council in those inner cities is
100% controlled bt the Democrat Party and progressives and has been for 100
years. Everything that is wrong with the inner cities of America that policy can
affect Democrats and progressives are responsible for. They have their boot
heels on the necks of poor black and Hispanic children all across America and
are crushing them every day.

Look at it this way: The empire needs only about 15-20% of its population at
the very most to administrate and perpetuate itself—through lawyers,
insurance managers, financial managers, college teachers, media managers,
scientists, bureaucrats, managers of all types and many other professions and
semi-professions. Less and less as technological advances increase.

What happens to the rest? They are the production machinery of the empire
and they are the consumers upon the empire depends to turn profits. If every
one of them earned a college degree it would not change their status, but only
drive down wages of the management class, who are essentially caterers to the
corporate financial elites who govern most things simply by controlling the
availability of money at all levels, to to bottom.

Only about 25% of Americans get a college degree. One quarter of Americans
do not finish high school. Interestingly, they are beginning to come together,
though they don’t know it. Right now we are seeing the proletarianization of
college graduates, as increasingly more of them are forced to take service and
labor jobs.

Perhaps cal me Roy doesn’t hold the right answer, but seeing there being no such things as a “good state” is about as opposite of workable solutions as there is.

http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/naomi_klein_building_an_independent_left_20100914/

>The “Shock Doctrine” author tells Laura Flanders, “We have to build that independent left. It has to be so strong and so radical and so militant and so powerful that it becomes irresistible.”

Indeed. Spot-on, in fact.

Now, all we need is for people like Mr. Scheer and Mrs. Huffington to stop trying to “manage progressive rage,” while continuing to endlessly kvetch.

By call me Roy, September 15 at 12:35 am Link to this comment

Oh, I forgot to mention:

Progressives destroyed the bottom rung of the ladder of economic success by corrupting a public school system in which half of the students never graduate and half of those who do are fundamentally illiterate. Every major inner city in America from, Chicago, Detroit, Oakland, St. Louis, every school board and school district, every city council in those inner cities is 100% controlled bt the Democrat Party and progressives and has been for 100 years. Everything that is wrong with the inner cities of America that policy can affect Democrats and progressives are responsible for. They have their boot heels on the necks of poor black and Hispanic children all across America and are crushing them every day.

Is he correct or not? If so then I am wrong. If not what is he then,Anarcissie? What name did I call him then? Am I wrong in calling him that name?

It sounds exactly like a Glenn Beck. I should know I have listened to him closely and know the rant and catechism.

Night-Gaunt, September 15 at 2:37 pm:

‘The problem with the Left/liberals/Progressives is that they don’t have the Daddy Warbucks behind them, guiding them, nurturing them and organizing them. We don’t have the equivalent.

Call Me Roy has given us exactly what Glenn Beck and the other mouth pieces of the Reich wing and their historical revisionism they promote every second of the day.

I don’t recall any Progessives or Liberals being involved in the Secret meetings on Jekyl Island in 1910 to set up the Federal Reserve system for the big banksters, and give us the permanent Income Tax in 1914. ...’

The people who set up the Federal Reserve probably considered themselves to be ‘progressives’, as did Roosevelt and Wilson and their allies and followers.  ‘Progressive’ does not mean much of anything until we know which direction things are supposed to progress in. Mussolini considered himself to be a progressive, and in a way he was right, because the sort of unified corporate state he imagined is becoming the dominant model.  And look around this supposedly leftish web site and you will find plenty of self-described progressives who believe that a big, powerful, efficient, intrusive government is a really good thing as long as it’s run by the good people.

In fact, that’s what’s being promoted when someone says ‘strong… militant… powerful… irresistible’ although Klein probably doesn’t imagine it that way.

Maybe that’s what ‘call me Roy’ is on about.  Calling him bad names does not really answer or disprove his concerns.

You have to decide whether you’re going to persuade people, compromise with them, or just overpower them and tell them what to do.  Given the current state of things politically speaking the last seems like a really long shot for the Left, to put it mildly.

It is my usual habit to scroll quickly past those posters to whom the purpose of
the paragraph break remains a mystery. This is not snobbery, I have simply
found that nothing announces “screed” as surely as a solid block of unbroken
sentences. Exhibit “A” in this case is the meandering, slandering, guilt-by-
association, fact-adjascent, reason-free, and ultimately enlightening comments
of CMR.

Now, WriterOnTheStorm is a curious cat, and libertarianism is a curiosity, so
naturally I’d like to understand a credo that attracts such disparate players as Tea
Party boot-strappers and champions for a free market in human organs.  But
libertarianism has proved as elusive to define as fascism, in part because its
advocates remain stubborn strangers to what Hegel called “weltgeist”, or as us
civilians call it, common knowledge. For example, to make the assertion that
Progressives and Fascists have the same “intellectual roots”  requires a—let’s
be generous and call it unilateral—definition of fascism.

One can encounter a cornucopia of such unripened fruit on libertarian sites such
as the chuckle-inspiring reason.com. There you will find a rich soil of state-is-
to-blamers, where all manner of political fiction is free to take root and seek the
golden light of the one true meritocracy.

I may not yet have a definition of libertarianism to satisfy my curiosity, but I have
learned to know it by its fruits.

http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=5615

Norman Solomon speaks on the subject.

I wld suggest we abandon the dichotomizing people’s thinking into leftist and rightist.
Such pairing off elicits in people’s mind two extremities; one being utterly wrong—the other utterly right; which leads to bipolar disorder.

What is posible to achieve in between the two phenomena, especially initially [one has to have a start s’mwnem-s’mhow-s’mwhere]appears more realistic thinkings!

And presently the plutocratic [?righist] extremity; its awesome barbarity and utter control of its meats for wars and servitude [doing the dirty-perilous work for masters of peple] which controls utterly CIA, FBI, city police, media, schooling, food, oil, army, congress, and WH, cannot be changed but by power.

In some euro lands there are in those blabbing houses at least a few barkers barking up against the right tree.

In US there is no single barker in US babbling babel; not even kucinich; he barks but up the wrong tree.
If one cld get in just one or two honest barkers in congress, that wld be a start.
So nader shld run for a congress and not for ‘all’ f it; the WH.
In WH he’d be dead meat in a few days.
Ok, maybe in senate as well! tnx

The problem with the Left/liberals/Progressives is that they don’t have the Daddy Warbucks behind them, guiding them, nurturing them and organizing them. We don’t have the equivalent.

Call Me Roy has given us exactly what Glenn Beck and the other mouth pieces of the Reich wing and their historical revisionism they promote every second of the day.

I don’t recall any Progessives or Liberals being involved in the Secret meetings on Jekyl Island in 1910 to set up the Federal Reserve system for the big banksters, and give us the permanent Income Tax in 1914.

Yes the war on alcohol was done by women who were being oppressed by drunk men. So they concentrated on ending it the wrong way. A blot on our Bill of Rights. Now-a-days they just use the commerce clause to keep the Drug War active since 1914 to oppress us today in 2010. It let a great deal of that authoritarian “camel” under out tent of Liberty. A gateway drug for fascism to come in over the years.

There were plenty of Conservatives who liked eugenics then and now, considered it a good “scientific” excuse to play into their racism and classism that they already believed was ordained by their god as well—the negative kind (to destroy what they considered “negative” characteristics. Positive is to just nurture what they considered to be “positive” and ignore the “negative.”) It was still wrong but then it started in 19th century UK, then incubated in the USA and found its foul fruition in Germany. Euthenics is much better. It means good place or environment.

I don’t know if it is even possible to build such a group in time. The crypto-fascists (the uber-rich) have been working behind the scenes and in front since 1980 to take over both official parties and put us into this crappy position. I would like it not to be true.

But is there an ‘average Joe’ out there?

Naomi Klein, love you, and your work.

Please continue in your search for truth and beauty.

a truly effective, progressive left will never happen without a free independent press. sites like this one are generally just preaching to the choir. most americans get their news from the mainstream- and anyone with a half a brain knows the way that is all slanted. there is simply no way for the average joe to be exposed to the truth.

Anarcissie, while I agree that there is no “coherent Left in the US” at this moment in time, that doesn’t diminish the need for a stronger, more cohesive left that can make a greater difference, or the possibility of this happening in the future.

Also, I’m not sure what you mean by “the methods of the Right”, but certainly you must agree that something needs to be done to change the current course of the US?

Actually, I was unable to make out what Klein was advocating.  There is no coherent Left in the US.  There is no entity to become “so strong and so radical and so militant and so powerful that it becomes irresistible.”  Just as well, too; if there’s anything that turns bad fast it’s leftists who adopt the methods of the Right.

Call me Roy: I’d prefer to call you nuts.

This garbled rant of yours, borrowing from such diverse fruitcakes as Jonah Goldberg and The John Birch Society, is worthy of a real wood-and-nails soap box in Boston Common.

Sorry, I forgot to bring any change with me to drop into your cup. But good luck!

The New Republic has not been a lefist periodical

since the mid-seventies.

The Nation magazine has been nothing but a Democrat
apologist periodical since Katrina took over as editor
in the ninties.

The same can be said of In These Times, and The Progressive .............

Naomi,

  Ain’t gonna happen !!!!!!!!!  Read your own book!!!!!

The political process is gone forever in America..

The good side,  the ecology has collapsed also, so

in short order, this mess is going to be straigtened out

by neccessity of survival.

call me Roy—you’re making the same mistake the proggies do.  You think there is a good state.

Mixing half truth with truth has always been a great

ploy of the conservatives and has served them well.

Oh, I forgot to mention:

Progressives destroyed the bottom rung of the ladder of economic success by corrupting a public school system in which half of the students never graduate and half of those wo do are fundamentally illiterate. Every major inner city in America from, Chicago, Detroit, Oakland, St. Louis, every school board and school district, every city council in those inner cities is 100% controlled bt the Democrat Party and progressives and has been for 100 years. Everything that is wrong with the inner cities of America that policy can affect Democrats and progressives are responsible for. They have their boot heels on the necks of poor black and hispanic children all across America and are crushing them every day.
The Democratic Party and Progressivism is the most powerful force obstructing opportunity for America’s poor and minority. It oppresses them with their creation of the modern welfare state. Progressives engineered a welfare system that destroyed the inner city black family and created a vast “under-class” so mired in the culture of dependency and povert that they may never escape.
Progressives are the most racist bunch of monsters in history. Margret Sanger is the champion of the progressives. She was such a nasty racist with her evil eugenics programs. Hitler modeled his eugenics programs on the American Progressive Eugenics Movement of the early 20th century. Her whole purpose for abortion was to rid society of what she called the less desirable minorities. Her legacy lives on in the racist fact that children of color are the victims of 2/3 of all the abortions committed since Roe v Wade. Black women, who make up only 12% of the population have had over 40% of the abortions ever committed. They are nearly 4 times more likely than their caucasion counterparts to get abortion, just as progressive darling Margret Sanger planned.
For decades now, the ‘progressives’ (liberals or ‘The Left’) in our country have been propelled by two powerful influences: Saul Alinsky and Cloward and Piven. (Of course, Marx and Engels figure in, too, but why state the obvious?) In 1966, Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven authored an article in “The Nation” magazine that has been followed as closely as a blueprint by organizations such as ACORN and, dare I say, the Democrat Party (at least the present-day incarnation of the Democrat Party). Incredibly, we are seeing the fruits of that seditious strategy in the news everyday. And I say ‘seditious’ advisedly, because the end result will be the capitulation of our national sovereignty and way of life to those who seek to control us and rule over us.

Why will Progressives fail again? (Continued)

The reason is that America’s original Progressives were also its original, big-government liberals. Most people point to the New Deal era as the source of big government and the welfare state that we have today. While this is perfectly accurate, it is important to understand that the principles of the New Deal did not originate in the New Deal; rather, they came from the Progressives, who had dominated American politics and intellectual cultural a generation prior to the New Deal. We have no less an authority on this connection than Franklin Roosevelt himself. When FDR campaigned in 1932, he pointed to the Progressives – and in particular to Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson – as the source of his ideas about government. In terms of the personalities who made up the Progressive movement, some are familiar to us and others are less so. The movement was comprised of well known politicians like Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt; but it was also comprised of intellectuals and writers who are less well known but who have been very influential in America. There were folks like John Dewey, who was America’s public philosopher for much of the early 20th century. Even less well known was Herbert Croly, but Croly was highly influential, since he founded and was the first editor of The New Republic – which became the main organ of Progressive opinion in the United States, and is still one of the most important journals on the Left today. I should add here that Woodrow Wilson actually fell into both of these categories – he was both a well known politician and president, but also was, for decades prior to his entry into politics, a prominent intellectual (a college professor and president of Princeton) who wrote many books and influential articles.
The party’s platform should have appealed strongly to blacks, intellectuals, and labor union members, but the support given them by the Communist Party was used against them by both major parties. The progressives maintained their right to accept support from any group. This was high-principled but politically fatal. Wallace received only 2.4 percent of the popular vote and carried no state. In 1950, the party opposed America’s decision to fight in Korea. Wallace split with the party’s leadership on the issue and resigned from the party. The Progressive Party disappeared after the 1952 election. Only time will tell if another progressive party will be formed that works.

Why will Progressives fail again?

American liberals are descendants of the early 20th-century Progressives, who in turn shared intellectual roots with fascists. Both fascists and liberals seek to use the state to solve the problems of modern society. Many fascists, including Mussolini (but not Hitler) started as socialists—though almost none started as liberals, who stood for representative government and mild reformism. Moreover, fascism’s combination of nationalism, statism, discipline and a promise to “transcend” class conflict was initially popular in many countries. Though fascism was always less popular in democracies such as the United States, some American intellectuals did flirt with its ideas. Fascist party programs contained active social welfare policies to be implemented through a corporatist state, so there were indeed overlaps with Progressives and with New Dealers. But so, too, were there overlaps with the world’s Social Democrats and Christian Democrats, as well as with the British Conservative Party from Harold Macmillan in the 1930s to Prime Minister Ted Heath in the 1970s, and even with the Eisenhower and Nixon administrations. Many on the left today call themselves “progressive,” and they do so not just because it’s a nicer way of saying “liberal,” but also because they very much intend to revive the political principles of America’s original Progressives, from the Progressive Era of the 1880s through World War I. In response to repeated bank runs in the early 1900s, progressives created the Federal Reserve System. This flew right in the face of Thomas Jefferson, who argued that the “Bank of the United States is one of the most deadly hostility existing, against the principles and form of our Constitution. “It didn’t take long to prove Jefferson right, as the worst financial disaster in U.S. history happened largely because of the Fed’s continual contraction of the money supply before and during the Great Depression. Progressives redistributed the wealth by implementing a “progressive” income tax sold to America as something that would lower tariffs and be a tax on the wealthy. Woodrow Wilson led passage of the Revenue Act in 1913. The rates only lasted four years, then all Americans had their taxes jacked up and they haven’t come down since. The bottom tax bracket hasn’t paid single digit percentages in taxes in over 60 years. They introduced the first nanny state efforts in 1919 with Prohibition. They convinced the nation to ban a drink. Then, the final straw: The president of peace, just a few months after narrowly winning re-election, entered America into World War I. It was billed as the war to end all wars — because progressives thought they had the solution to world conflict — and brought us the League of Nations. Another failure. (Continued)

****************

It would seem ‘independent left’ is just an offset to the ‘tea party’
which means for the left, they get to dabble in anything where in
the tea party, they’re just a bunch of lunatics most likely wanting
to get elected so they can start the fast track to becoming an
elite by ‘accepting’ those bribe dollars from the lobbyists.

There quite simply is no organized Left in this
country. “Liberals cum Progressives” have piled on
the bandwagon continuing to make “Socialist” a
negative term bordering on pejorative.

Facts are all in folks. Capitalism is the enemy of
democracy and bane of every common man. We can only
hope that Vladimir Lenin was correct when he sad “The
Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will
hang them.”

I want a front row seat for that!

Yes I like what Naomi Klein says, however at this point in time, it should be clear that the left is just as much responsible for what has happened to this country as is the right. So, a New left with the same ideology, as the old left, is not a new left at all.

People fled the right en mass, because of the debacle of Bush’s administration. Now what the Democrats have done, has turned them back.

The left, has never understood why workers, vote Republican, even when it’s against their best interest.

Yet it’s the same leftist ideology, that created the failing Presidency of President Obama.

There is no way back, and their might not even be a way foward. No next time, not now, not ever. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/14/opinion/14herbert.html?_r=1&ref=opinion

I love Naomi Klein; I regard her as an international treasure.  What she says is exactly correct—but when I set it alongside the reality of what I see, I am more than skeptical. 

Why?  I came into activism in the Left before I could vote, when the war against the Vietnamese people was still warming up.  There were mass movements and demonstrations abounding:  free speech, civil rights, nuclear disarmament, and so on.  There was dismay but also hope and determination to oppose these evils and change the situation.  There was some success, and this activity continued well into the seventies.

We had some significant upwellings since then, especially as the criminal Iraq war gathered and then occurred.  Since then, however, there seems to be a silent curtain that has fallen over this country.  Instead of organizing, demonstrating, and trying to build an independent mode of action, there is clicking and surfing and texting and the triumph of faux realism that proclaims only the cycle of Democrats-and-Republicans can achieve anything. 

What has happened, over a period of decades, is that this bad-and-worse cop routine has, unsurprisingly, led to both parties’ becoming themselves increasingly degraded…with comprehensive and corresponding results for all of us.  Now, we have no good choices:  we get war-and-Wall Street cutouts like O or Clinton, as alternatives to whatever stooge the GOP provides.  Both parties do everything in their power to limit our choices and our voices.  Foolishly, pretendgressives and war liberals have fallen for this, echoing the idea that it is always *the* moment of crisis, that now is not the time to risk the danger of undertaking something new…

Left to the mentality of the people we seem to have these days, if we transported them back in time, we would have no civil rights today, no women’s vote, no labor unions, and possibly no independent nation.  Their faux realism is the poison that has drained the body politic of hope, of energy, and of the will to fight for democracy. 

We have effectively lost our country, and only individual acts of resistance, rebellion, and dissent remain.  So be it:  let each do what one can, and hope that the totality of these atomized resistances amount to something.  What we can be sure of, however, is that neither the misnamed Democrats nor their evil twin are going to bring us anything but more bloodshed and sorrow.

I am afraid that when the true left rises again in the USA it will be with torches and pitchforks. Many times in US history Liberals have had to come to the rescue of the nations conscience. But this time I fear we have waited too long, for the dark side, while smaller, is far better funded and organized by the evil corporate masters that now control all discourse in the US. Too many americans still believe in that biggest of bullshit american axioms, that if you are just honest and work hard that good things and a reasonably comfortable life will be your reward. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The left’s only hope now is that the conservatives and neo-cons do take both houses, and the white house by 2012. The nation will have gone completely in the shitter by 2016 and then maybe the people will be tired enough, frustrated enough, hungry enough, that they may look into the mirror and finally cry “I am mad as hell, the corporations and the uuber wealthy have taken advantage of me for long enough, I need to burn a gas station, an insurance company, or a bank, to the ground. WE NEED TO START OVER!”

I hope it doesn’t turn to violent revolution, but we are a nation of guns and booze, so bad shit will probably happen before good does. I have always thought that the easiest way to bring down this rickety old house would be for everyone to just stop paying your debts. This, and of course the military siding with the people (the Bolshie’s would have never got past the kremlin wall if the military had backed the rich Romanov’s)

I am afraid that most great nations did not just fall over when killed. It took nearly 2 decades for a bankrupt soviet union to collapse. It took 200 years for the British empire to fall. It took nearly 7 centuries for Rome to finally give up the ghost.

How long do you figure it will take the behemoth america to cave in on itself?