Dominic Armstrong 🌹

In Gaza, 1 kilo of flour costs $30. Babies wear plastic bags for diapers. No formula. No income. After 20 months under genocidal siege, food is scarce, unaffordable & people are starving to death. Here’s a list of verified fundraisers, pls help if you can: gazadirect.com

As Israeli leaders decry alleged war crimes about Iran’s retaliatory strikes, they are still starving two million people in Gaza. One million children. Every day, they bait the starving masses and kill them en masse. Don’t forget about Gaza

Meet the seven brilliant student-scholars disappeared off the streets of the US by the Trump Administration for criticizing Israel’s atrocities in Gaza. Four are being held in brutal for-profit ICE detention centers in Louisiana. None are charged with a crime. Free them now. ⤵️

Congrats to @DGukesh on becoming World Chess Champion at age 18!!

Current Affairs is raising money to expand our work. Growing independent media is vital right now. We can only do it w/ your support. If you like what we do please RT & encourage others to help. These funds pay writers, researchers, artists for great work currentaffairs.org/donate

The only way to build an effectual counterpower to the oligarchy is with a robust and militant labor movement. Any political solution must emerge from within that labor movement.

All the takes are correct and yet they also miss the point. Yes, it was insane for the Democrats to think they could win by running a soulless candidate, without a shred of progressive policy vision, pursuing endorsements from neocon war-hawks everybody hates, while arming and funding a genocide, and belittling and crushing those who have enough morality to protest it.  It is enraging that the Democrats are so smug and blind to this. But these are all just symptoms.  The deeper reality is that liberalism has failed, liberalism is dead, and people urgently need to wake up to this fact and respond accordingly. It is a defunct ideology that cannot offer any meaningful solutions to our social and ecological crises and it must be abandoned. Democrats have proven over and over again that they cannot accept even *basic* steps like public healthcare, affordable housing, and a public job guarantee - things that would dramatically improve the material, social and political conditions of the working classes. And they cannot accept a public finance strategy that would steer production away from fossil fuels and toward green transition to give us a shot at a liveable future. Why? Because these things run against the objectives of capital accumulation. And for liberals capital is sacrosanct. They will do whatever it takes to ensure elite accumulation, it is their only consistent commitment.  At home, they suppress and demonize progressive and socialist tendencies. Abroad, they engage in endless wars and violence to suppress input prices in the global South and prevent any possibility of sovereign economic development. The Democrats have done all this purposefully and knowingly, for my whole life, not as some kind of "mistake" but in full consciousness that it is in the interests of capital. And because liberalism cannot address our crises, and because it crushes socialist alternatives, it inevitably paves the way for right-wing populism.  They know this pattern, and yet they risk it every time - this election being only the most recent example. They did it in 2016, when they actively crushed the Sanders campaign and sent Trump to the White House. They do it because ultimately they (and I mean the liberal ruling class here) don't really mind if fascists take power, so long as the latter too ensure the conditions for capital accumulation. They 100% prefer this to the possibility of a socialist alternative. So, progressives have to face reality. The dream of "converting" the Democratic party is dead. This is now a fact and it must be accepted. The only option is to build a mass-based movement that can reclaim the working classes and mobilize a political vehicle that can integrate disparate progressive struggles into a unified and formidable political force and achieve substantive transformation. This will take real work, actual organizing, but it must be done and that process must begin now.

My analysis of the election: a massive failure by Democratic leadership to understand the electorate, completely inexcusable given that the exact same thing happened in 2016 and we leftists warned them before both that calamity and this one: currentaffairs.org/news/once-agai…

Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party, along with the establishment wing of the Republican Party, which allied itself with Harris, live in their own non-reality-based belief system. Harris, who was anointed by party elites and never received a single primary vote, proudly trumpeted her endorsement by Dick Cheney, a politician who left office with a 13 percent approval rating. The smug, self-righteous “moral” crusade against Trump stokes the national reality television show that has replaced journalism and politics. It reduces a social, economic and political crisis to the personality of Trump. It refuses to confront and name the corporate forces responsible for our failed democracy. It allows Democratic politicians to blithely ignore their base -  77 percent of Democrats and 62 percent of independents support an arms embargo against Israel. The open collusion with corporate oppression and refusal to heed the desires and needs of the electorate neuters the press and Trump  critics. These corporate puppets stand for nothing, other than their own advancement. The lies they tell to working men and women, especially with programs such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), do far more damage than any of the lies uttered by Trump.

Outstanding article from @DaveADenison on Texas politics and political history. This part from @triofrancos is particularly good: “…Thea Riofrancos made the key distinction: ‘Right-wing populism prefers the masses atomized, individualized, and alienated from their political power, with their collective agency projected onto a leader and their ire misdirected away from the ruling class. Left-wing populism results from and reinforces bonds of solidarity among a historic bloc of the oppressed allied against a shared enemy.’”

My thoughts on Biden dropping out: Joe Biden was discarded by the same billionaire class he assiduously served throughout his political career. Barely able to stumble his way through the words on a Teleprompter and not always cognizant of what is happening around him, his billionaire supporters pulled the plug. He was their creature – he has been in federal office for 47 years - from start to finish. He was used as a foil to defeat Bernie Sanders in the 2020 primaries and was anointed as the candidate in 2024 in a Soviet-style primary campaign. The billionaire class will now anoint someone else. Democratic Party voters are stage props in this political farce. Donald Trump, unlike Kamala Harris or any other apparatchik the billionaire class selects as a presidential candidate, has a genuine and committed base, however fascistic. In Hitler and the Germans, the political philosopher Eric Vogelin dismisses the idea that Hitler — gifted in oratory and political opportunism but poorly educated and vulgar — mesmerized and seduced the German people. The Germans, he writes, supported Hitler and the “grotesque, marginal figures” surrounding him because he embodied the pathologies of a diseased society, one beset by economic collapse and hopelessness. Voegelin defines stupidity as a “loss of reality.” The loss of reality means a “stupid” person cannot “rightly orient his action in the world, in which he lives.” The demagogue, who is always an idiote, is not a freak or social mutation. The demagogue expresses the society’s zeitgeist. Biden and the Democratic Party are responsible for this zeitgeist. They orchestrated the deindustrialization of the United States, ensuring that 30 million workers lost their jobs in mass layoffs. As I write in America, The Farewell Tour, this assault on the working class created a crisis that forced the ruling elites to devise a new political paradigm. Trumpeted by a compliant media, this paradigm shifted its focus from the common good to race, crime and law and order. Biden was at the epicenter of this paradigm shift. Those undergoing profound economic and political change were told that their suffering stemmed not from rampant militarism and corporate greed but from a threat to national integrity. The old consensus that buttressed New Deal programs and the welfare state was attacked as enabling criminal Black youth, “welfare queens” and other alleged social parasites. This opened the door to a faux populism, begun by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, which supposedly championed family values, traditional morality, individual autonomy, law and order, the Christian faith and the return to a mythical past, at least for white Americans. The Democratic Party, especially under Bill Clinton and Biden, became largely indistinguishable from the establishment Republican Party to which it is now allied. The Democratic Party refuses to accept its responsibility for the capture of democratic institutions by a rapacious oligarchy, the grotesque social inequality, the cruelty of predatory corporations and an unchecked militarism. The Democrats will anoint another amoral politician, probably Harris, to use as a mask for outsized corporate greed, the folly of endless war, the facilitation of genocide and the assault on our most basic civil liberties. The Democrats, tools of Wall Street, gave us Trump, and the 74 million people who voted for him in 2020. They look set to give us Trump again. God help us.

1/ I’m an Israeli historian. My community is still too silent about the horrible war in Gaza. Over 8 months I’ve closely followed the war, reading >1000 articles and viewing >1000 videos/images of the war from all sides. My summary conclusions & full report are in the 🧵:

The Harvard Law Review refused to run this piece about genocide in Gaza. The piece was nearing publication when the journal decided against publishing it. You can read the article here: bit.ly/47ENL1W

From San Antonio for Justice in Palestine: Read our response to the @ExpressNews Editorial Board’s incoherent opinion piece. We hope for a local paper of record that treats Palestinian life as a subject worthy of respect depth and care. Please repost. (1/10)

Dock Workers in Genova, Italy, mobilized this weekend alongside anti-war protesters to stop the shipments of NATO weapons into the wars in Ukraine and Yemen

Thrilled to stand with nurses today who are organizing a union that will fight for protective equipment, dignified wages, sick leave, and adequate staffing to provide optimal care for patients @NationalNurses Welcome to Austin!

“The study also estimates a universal healthcare system would have saved the US $459 billion in healthcare costs in 2020…Medicare for All would be both an economic stimulus & life-saving transformation of our health care system. It will cost people far less than the status quo.”

🤦🏻‍♂️

Check out this short thread showing the corporate greed and price gouging behind inflation.