What you want to say – 26th October 2016 | The Cedar Lounge Revolution

What you want to say – 26th October 2016 October 26, 2016

Posted by WorldbyStorm in Uncategorized.
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As always, following on Dr. X’s suggestion, it’s all yours, “announcements, general discussion, whatever you choose”, feel free.

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1. Phil F - October 26, 2016: When the Communist International was formed, one of the conditions of membership was that parties in the imperialist world materially support struggles by oppressed peoples against the imperialists – in particular you were expected to support struggles against your own imperialist ruling class.

The condition of anti-imperialism

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2. Phil F - October 26, 2016: Oh well, another plug: an interesting interview I did a little while ago with the London organiser of the Fire Brigades Union, Paul Embery. Paul was also the trade union co-ordinator of the Left Leave campaign: https://rdln.wordpress.com/2016/07/15/interview-british-firefighter-organiser-paul-embery-on-firefighters-issues-the-state-of-the-british-working-class-and-the-brexit-vote/

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3. eamonncork - October 26, 2016: There’s a small but perhaps significant recovery in the Trump vote. So we may yet be spared the horrors of a Clinton presidency. Was going to put this in the Signs of Hope thread but couldn’t find it.

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sonofstan - October 26, 2016: “There is hope but not for us”

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4. eamonncork - October 26, 2016: Hopefully WikiLeaks can come up with a few things to get Donald over the line. Then we can have someone here explaining why in many ways this was a triumph for the Left, distrust of elites, something else, rhubarb rhubarb. Like Lexit. We could call it Lump. Blacks, hispanics and women might think a vote for Clinton is a progressive one but they’re all wrong. The Lumps know the truth.

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Ed - October 26, 2016: You forgot to say that Trump and Wikileaks are both treacherous agents of Putin, that’s the talking point of the last month. Gotta keep those takes hot.

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5. eamonncork - October 26, 2016: Say it loud, I’m a Lump and I’m proud.

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Joe - October 26, 2016: eamonncork now eamonntroll?

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Michael Carley - October 26, 2016: Isn’t Eamonntroll a Tove Jansson character?

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eamonncork - October 26, 2016: LikeLike

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ejh - October 26, 2016: LikeLike

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6. Joe - October 26, 2016: Great article by Gerard Howlin on the far left in today’s Examiner. “Like Trump, what the far Left here stand for is a dictatorship of the articulate.”

When I say ‘great’, I mean great in the way that a Trump win would be great.

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eamonncork - October 26, 2016: Someone post that article up for the crack. Just read it, it’s a magnificent example of taking an awful lot of time to make no sense at all. According to GH, there has been (sinisterly) an end to the sectarian squabblings between the SWP and SP. That’s a man who’s not paying too much attention.
Trump fan though I am, I don’t think he could ever be accused of being articulate.

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John Cunningham - October 26, 2016: The New York Times is at it as well: ‘What do Trump and Marx have in common?’ http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/26/opinion/what-do-trump-and-marx-have-in-common.html?smid=fb-share&_r=0&mtrref=www.facebook.com&gwh=FE1F1F41870F8FB28D53A125C81B282A&gwt=pay&assetType=opinion

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eamonncork - October 26, 2016: I think Howlin’s piece is the first time ‘articulate’ has been used a term of abuse since George Colley went on about ‘well heeled articulate women’ forty years ago.

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7. fergal - October 26, 2016: It’s great to have eamonncork back- I just hope Markp maintains his low profile- has he gone off to fight with Al Qaeda in the Yemen in defence of liberty of expression, secularism, anti- racism and satire?

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8. ejh - October 26, 2016: Talking of people making a fool of themselves in major newspapers, the Camilla Long “povvo safari” fiasco re: I, Daniel Blake has been providing plenty of entertainment as well as a sharp insight into what, and how, the other half-a-per cent really think.

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eamonncork - October 26, 2016: Sometimes you get the impression that England is currently being run by people for whom the achievements of the Attlee government are a historical catastrophe which can now finally be rolled back.
The unabashed disparaging use of the phrase ‘povvo safari’ by someone who is descended from one of England’s the many dukes or earls which abound over there is something I don’t think you’d have seen even ten years ago. It’s very 1933, this disdain for the lower orders. It’s like they just can’t be bothered hiding it anymore. They know they’re better, why not say it?
To top it all she then decides to abuse Loach by invoking Mike Leigh. I suspect Mike Leigh will hardly be impressed by this.

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WorldbyStorm - October 26, 2016: My mother did teacher training in the early 60 in England. One ic her lecturers was openly contemptuous of the Butler Act which part opened up free education in the late 40s.

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eamonncork - October 26, 2016: I have a weakness for upper class English novels, Powell, Waugh etc. (it’s OK, so does Tariq Ali). And I’m always surprised by just how fervently the upper class despised the post-war realignment, it was almost their version of the nakba. When George Osborne was doing his thing, I was always reminded of the fact that ancestors of his featured prominently in the Nancy Mitford novels. A read of the diaries of the upper class grandees of the time reveals a class hatred every bit as fierce as that of the most left-wing miner. I think that’s not recognised enough. ‘Povvo safari’ and a lot of the ‘chav’ stuff comes from this lineage I think.

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Ed - October 26, 2016: Didn’t Waugh himself say during the Attlee government that ‘the kingdom seemed to be under enemy occupation’.

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sonofstan - October 26, 2016: Powell is essential to understanding the enemy. And a brilliant writer.

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Dr. X - October 28, 2016: The Butler Act was passed in 1944. . . by the wartime coalition. . . and Butler was a Tory!

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WorldbyStorm - October 28, 2016: Very true.

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ejh - October 26, 2016: Camilla Long’s big break

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Starkadder - October 26, 2016: I am DEEPLY embarrassed to admit that I had a crush on Upper-Class Warrior Camilla Long at one point.

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WorldbyStorm - October 26, 2016: It could be worse. Though I’m pressed to think how! 🙂

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eamonncork - October 26, 2016: She’s quite the card, this is, seriously, the first sentence of a piece from a few weeks back, ‘I don’t think I have felt a purer stab of hatred than the moment my eyes fell on the Black Lives Matter protesters when they turned up in court last week.’ Hatred. And also a crap and clumsy opening line.
The piece is headlined, ‘Nine silly fake hippies lost in the left’s swamp of lies,’ which sounds like either a Day Today headline or lyrics from a song by Traffic.
I don’t think it would have worked out Starkadder.

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Starkadder - October 26, 2016: I shall reserve my affections for Lizzy Caplan in future, who abstains from writing articles “Punching down” at weaker people.

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Joe - October 26, 2016: You sure you haven’t got your Camillas mixed up Starkie? It wasn’t Camilla Parker Bowles by any chance was it? Nah I’d say, probably not.

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eamonncork - October 26, 2016: Has anyone seen it by the way?
I think Loach has dipped a bit recently (and why wouldn’t he, he’s been grafting away for half a century) but this sounds worth watching. Actually I watch them all though I do think he hit a peak between Hidden Agenda in 1990 and Land and Freedom in 1995, as good a run as any director ever had. Jim Allen was perhaps his greatest collaborator.

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Alibaba - October 26, 2016: I’ve seen the film. It’s so grounded in the social realities of the subject matter. Every time Loach dips his toe into film, I reckon it’s worth the watch. Although you’re right about ‘Land and Freedom’, it was nothing short of superb. I do remember that in my old primary school days, the students were invited to watch ‘Kes’ and it blew me away and probably gave me a critical left-minded yearning.

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CMK - October 26, 2016: ‘Land and Freedom’ was bourgeois trash and an outrageous attack on Comrade Stalin and the GPU in their heroic efforts to contain Franco’s Trotskyite gofers in the POUM and save the Spanish republic!

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eamonncork - October 26, 2016: As Captain Mainwaring used to say, ‘I was wondering when someone would notice that.’
My apologies for yesterday CMK.

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Pasionario - October 27, 2016: One fellow who noticed it at the time was was Mick “strong communist voice in Dail Eireann” O’Riordan. As he told the readers of The Irish Times (24 October 1995):

“THERE is one question in the film which must mystify many viewers. “Why did the Popular Front Government crush the Barcelona Revolution of May 3rd-7th 1937?” The answer is another question: “What sort of a Revolution was it?” It took place a week after horrific bombing of Guernica, by which Franca’s ally, the Nazi Condor Air Force, further escalated the war against the Republic. On May 11th, 1937, General Von Faupel, Nazi Ambassador to Franco, sent a despatch to Hitler saying that Franco had told him that he had 13 agents in Barcelona.

Originally, he said, he didn’t intend to take advantage of this possibility in Catalonia until military operations had been established there. But, since the Reds had recently attacked Teruel, to aid the government of the Basque Country (my emphasis), he thought that the time was ripe for the outbreak of disorder in Barcelona.

Franco’s Fifth Column agents found it easy to infiltrate the ultra Left “Revolutionaries.” All they had to do, was to adopt anti Socialist, anti Communist, anti Republican and anti Popular Front attitudes and positions. That came naturally to Franco’s agents.”

And to think some people accuse The IT of being a bourgeois newspaper!

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Brian Hanley - October 26, 2016: I think he has never bettered ‘Kes’ a film that still gets to me. I think Loach’s best films have been the ones that were small ‘p’ political rather than too polemical. I’m hoping ‘I, Daniel Blake’ is one of those.

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Pasionario - October 27, 2016: At the risk of sounding like a 1960s French film critic, the problem with Loach is that most of the recent films, while admirable in many ways, stick to a conventional melodramatic style of story-telling. There’s always some poor salt-of-the-earth sucker who gets ground down by the system. The goodies are very good and the baddies are very bad indeed. It’s predictable, one-dimensional and often pretty maudlin (even if the politics is sound).

Radical filmmaking can and should be a bit more than that without getting stuck up its own fundament. If you want a good example of what that can look like, check out last year’s The Measure of Man about a security guard in a supermarket featuring the wonderful Vincent Lindon. There’s certainly shades of Loach there, but without the sentimentality.

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eamonncork - October 27, 2016: I would agree with you on that. I think a lot of it has to do with Paul Laverty who’s been the scriptwriter for the last couple of decades. Nothing drastically wrong with him but there’s something slick and mechanical about his work sometimes, you could almost present the screenplays to classes as models of how to set up a situation, add a bit of tension and then resolve it. They’re very schematic.
There can be something of a ticking the box issue of the month quality to it at times. Whereas the best Loach collaborators, Jim Allen, Rob Dawber and Bill Jesse, were guys who rather than being professional screenwriters had something urgent to impart from their own experience. Literally in the case of the last two because IIRC they were dead by the time Riff Raff and The Navigators came out.
I’d think The Navigators, written by Dawber, was the last great Loach and that My Name Is Joe, his first, is Laverty’s best, because he did seem to have something personal he wanted to get across there.
I was in a minority on Wind That Shakes The Barley, thought again it was too slick and simplified, that Maurice Goldring reading of the War of Independence which would be great if it were true but requires an awful lot of weight to be borne by a few lines from Liam Mellowes.
Loach movies in the eighties seemed to have more of the messiness and unpredictability of real life. Raining Stones with its benevolent priest and refusal to accuse the parents looking for the communion dress of false consciousness is an example of this.
Maybe the best example of another way of doing these things is Bill Douglas’s Comrades which I think might be the greatest of all British left-wing films. His trilogy and the Terence Davies one take a more poetic and oblique view of life and I think they’re masterpieces. I have a soft spot too for the Peter Watkins and Ken McMullin movies of the time. The knock against them was that the radical nature of their form meant they were self-indulgent because they wouldn’t carry through to the mass audience. But at this stage of the game remove the mass audience aren’t watching much that’s not mainstream anyway.I suppose Kes is the most poetic of the Loach movies and all the better for it.
The Measure of A Man is very good, so is Two Days One Night by the Dardenne Brothers who I suppose are the kings of socially engaged film-making these days. They’re great and undoubtedly influenced by Loach though perhaps more by Robert Bresson who wasn’t particularly political, his immense compassion from his characters came from a quasi religious view of the world within which we are all doomed and the only consolation is an odd bit of God’s grace. A genius all the same.
Though, with all the reservations, even a cruising Loach is worth watching. The very fact that he still annoys the Camilla Longs of this world is much in his favour.

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eamonncork - October 27, 2016: My Name is Joe isn’t Laverty’s first film with Loach, it’s his second.

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Pasionario - October 27, 2016: If you compare the improvised debate scene in Land and Freedom with its counterpart in The Wind that Shakes the Barley, then the weaknesses of Loach’s later work become clear.

The dispute over collectivisation in Land and Freedom is exactly how you can imagine such arguments playing out in Spain at the time. And both the Anarchists/POUM and the Communists had a point and Loach lets them make it.

In The Wind that Shakes the Barley, as Eamonn puts it, he hangs a lot of weight on the story of Mellowes and a handful of others who were not representative of most anti-Treatyites. The history has become subservient to Loach’s contemporary political agenda (Iraq) and the results are unbalanced.

Comrades, by contrast, is a bona fide masterpiece.

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Alibaba - October 28, 2016: Tonight I watched the BBC1 ‘Question Time’ for the first time ever. Much to my delight, Ken Loach was on the panel and this 80 year old man appeared to me as a man who still has fire in his belly.

Loach knows how to keep his finger on the pulse of those who are put down or in the modern vernacular ‘vulnerable’. And this despite all the hindrances put his way during the 1970s and 1980s because of his left leanings. ‘Kes’ did something to me because I went from fourth class, doing the dreaded long division, to see a film that opened my eyes to class issues. Does Loach sometimes err in the direction of sentimentality? Yes, he does. An occupational hazard perhaps. One-dimensional characters? I never thought so.

‘Land and Freedom’ impressed me because it made me understand what it was really like to live through a civil war. Loach didn’t run shy of taking political sides and rightly so. It didn’t drag me by the scruff of the neck in an over-exacting way. It wasn’t up for preaching; it was there for our consideration and in a cinematically brilliant way.

‘I, Daniel Blake’ might be the last film Loach will make. He contacted the trade unions and consulted with workers that are behind the social welfare office treatment that shapes the film. And how it shows. Believe me, it will do something to you too.

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Brian Hanley - October 28, 2016: I agree with Pasionaro about the politics of ‘The Wind That Shakes the Barley’ but I think the film is a very valuable corrective to Neil Jordan’s ‘Michael Collins’ which is by far the most influential movie about Irish history. But people take what they like from these films.

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9. CL - October 26, 2016: ‘White Working Class Politics in an Age of Immigration and Inequality’
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-new-minority-9780190632557?cc=us&lang=en&

“Barack Obama won both the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections with more than 50 percent of the vote, despite double-digit defeats among white voters without college degrees….
Trump’s revolutionary nomination returned working-class white voters to broader consciousness….
Trump represents a powerful protest vote — a middle finger to political elites in both major parties that have ignored, dismissed or condemned working-class white people and failed to deliver meaningful change for decades…
With his decline in the polls, Trump may have only deepened the marginality of these supporters.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-election-workers-commentary-idUSKCN12Q07F

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Joe - October 26, 2016: It is a problem though isn’t it? I’m not bowing to media manipulations that are implying that the white working class are all Brexiteers and Trumpeteers. Or that they are all BNP and KKK boneheads. But there is a minority in the white working class that is alienated from socialist politics and policies – and that minority has grown in recent years.
Somebody mentioned the ‘very left-wing miner’ in the postwar period. Problem is that his grandson might be a very right-wing unemployed white man in an ex-mining town now.
The left has to win him and his likes back to the progressive internationalism of his grandad. Or more correctly to its twenty first century equivalent, whatever that may be.

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10. Michael Carley - October 26, 2016: To see how the other half live, have a look at the expenses claims of my boss, including two quid for a packet of biscuits.

http://www.bathchronicle.co.uk/university-of-bath-vice-chancellor-glynis-breakwell-8k-housekeeping-bill/story-29841893-detail/story.html

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sonofstan - October 27, 2016: It’s still more that mildly astounding to me how much university VCs get paid here; at least your place is ‘successful’ but, as we lose staff that aren’t replaced and as IT problems multiply due to lack of investment, our VC takes home a sum not far short of what your one gets.

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Michael Carley - October 27, 2016: It’s in the Mail now. Comments are a joy.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3878714/University-vice-chancellor-earns-400-000-year-claims-20-000-expenses-including-2-BISCUITS-despite-living-entirely-rent-free.html

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sonofstan - October 27, 2016: Once upon a time it was the students that upset the Daily Mail……. Of course, stories like this make the mail public imagine that academics are rolling in it too.

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Michael Carley - October 28, 2016: One good thing the Irish government did a few years ago was tell the heads of universities where to stick their demand for a pay rise.

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11. roddy - October 26, 2016: As someone who can go as far back as JFK, Trump is the only US presidential candidate that I could really imagine pushing the button and that really scares me.Many of the others were out and out counts but even Regan and Bush would have shied away at the last minute from nuclear obliteration. Trump is a madman who in my opinion is capable of anything.

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gendjinn - October 26, 2016: Reagan was a concern. That close call where they were about to give the president the “handful of minutes” to make a launch phonecall seems to indicate that all parties involved believed that had the call gone through to Reagan he would have authorised a full release. So the anecdotes go.

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Pasionario - October 27, 2016: Hell JFK was a concern! He came pretty close during the Missile Crisis. It was Khrushchev who saved the day there.

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Dr. X - October 28, 2016: I’ve not heard this one about the handful of minutes before. Is it connected to the Able Archer affair, or something else?

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gendjinn - October 28, 2016: No, this was a different instance where NORAD was getting false alarms there was a launch from USSR. Essentially someone in the chain decided that the info coming in was wrong and fortunately decided to check something instead of calling the president. Did you see Deutschland 83?

A Russian sub commander during the Cuban missile crisis gave the order to launch and I believe it was the 1st officer that refused to turn his key that stopped it.

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WorldbyStorm - October 28, 2016: We have been fortunate in the sanity of individuals in chains of command but its not something yo can depend on every time is it?

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12. Liberius - October 27, 2016: Could Kaliningrad – a 220sq km exclave on the Baltic sandwiched between Poland and Lithuania – be supplied directly from the Russian Federation, without passing through EU/Nato territory? Not easily: there are only the ferries and airlanes from St Petersburg.

The perils of googling things and then failing to recognise that some regions share their names with a city inside of that region. For the record, 223 sq. kilometres is the size of Kaliningrad the city, Kaliningrad the Oblast is a much more spacious 15,100 sq. kilometres. The author is a ‘literary fellow’ no less…

https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/kaliningrad-could-be-next-flashpoint-between-russia-and-the-west-1.2845352

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eamonncork - October 27, 2016: Next week a NATO general writes on the state of poetry in the six counties of Ulster.

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RosencrantzisDead - October 27, 2016: The Russian part of the Port of Tartus, by the by, comprises two jetties. Together they can dock the grand total of four vessels. Even US intelligence analysts doubt that this is over the Port of Tartus.

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gendjinn - October 28, 2016: Four warm water jetties are still four warm water jetties. Not like Russia’s got many of those free, and those are bottled up by Turkey.

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RosencrantzisDead - October 28, 2016: I am inclined to believe that the ‘port of Tartus’ is a variation on the ‘Russia wants a warm water port’. Many people thought the Soviets invaded Afghanistan to try and get an Indian Ocean port; this was nonsense then and no serious historian believes that theory now. I tend to think that Syria is a ‘prestige’ war for Russia rather than one motivated by simple strategic concerns. They want to demonstrate that they can counter NATO/US involvement in the Middle East and that they are still a big player internationally.

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gendjinn - October 28, 2016: Well it is, isn’t it? And lacking a warm water port is a serious strategic shortcoming for a superpower. Granted it got (ab)used for propaganda purposes but that does mean it entirely lacks truth.

I would say that Russia had many reasons to go in, prestige, weapons/unit testing/training, morale and does appear to have been quite successful in achieving their aims and obtaining benefits. Then getting out.

In the past few weeks I’ve come across some info about Syria. The competing pipelines from Iran & Saudi Arabia, Assad vetoes the SA one. The other is the Visas for Al Qaeda author talking about a brigade of Arab Afghan veteran jihadists used to destablise Syria/Libya. I’d say the latter was verging on CT but with the CIA-Contra-Crack CT now known to be true, anything is possible.

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RosencrantzisDead - October 28, 2016: It isn’t really as serious a shortcoming as it was when Peter the Great was King. Russia has nuclear-powered Ice-breakers that solve that problem in their freezing ports. They even have ports above the arctic circle that never freeze over (and are unlikely to given the direction our CO2 output is going).

But I agree with you that it is more correct to characterise this as Russia responding to perceived US aggression in the Middle East as well as a way to gain prestige. Russia sees support for dissidents and the use of economic sanctions as being the early stages of a war (rather than something designed to preserve peace). Similarly, there is a belief that international law is used as a superficial pretext for direct engagement by NATO/US forces (WMDs, human rights abuses, the need to ‘spread democracy’). In response, they have developed a military strategy to counter this (the Gerasimov doctrine).

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13. Logan - October 27, 2016: An interesting article on how post-Watergate Democrats lost their way on the economy (written by Matt Stoller) has been getting a lot of attention in the US:

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/10/how-democrats-killed-their-populist-soul/504710/

Its a bit of a long read but good. Some of the conclusions are a bit simplistic though – in particular it doesn’t really say enough about the international situation the US economy found itself in for the 30 years after 1975, compared to the 30 years before.

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gendjinn - October 27, 2016: Thomas Frank in May talking about his book on this topic in 26 minutes.

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14. eamonncork - October 28, 2016: Good news for Lumps. Our man’s vote continues to recover, North Carolina and Ohio back in his column and Florida back in play. OK, he might not be perfect but you don’t see Wikileaks uncovering any skeletons in his closet, do you? Time to start working on those explanations of how this is A Progressive Moment. Like Brexit.

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eamonncork - October 28, 2016: Get on at 9/2 while you still can. We can use the proceeds to buy champagne for the election night party.

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eamonncork - October 28, 2016: I’d go the ‘in many ways an oddly cheering revival of an old white working class populism’ route myself. Remember that good old white working class populism, from the days when the white vote was the only one that mattered (indeed in many states the only one that got counted.)

Is feidir leis.

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eamonncork - October 28, 2016: He’s our backdoor man. The women don’t know but the little boys understand.

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RosencrantzisDead - October 28, 2016: I dunno, Eamonncork, Spiked Online seem to be having reservations about him…

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eamonncork - October 28, 2016: I’ve been concerned for some time that the legacy of the Revolutionary Communist Party is being betrayed.

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eamonncork - October 28, 2016: I didn’t hand over my hard earned money to the Living Marxism seller outside Stockwell tube station in 1989 for this.

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15. makedoanmend - October 28, 2016: It’s funny how vile is an anagram of evil.

The core choice for most voters in elections across so-called democracies has simply become: “vote for the lesser evil” – proving TINA.

One wonders how a country of 300 million+ people can’t find 2 somewhat sensible adults to contest for the leader of the empire. Instead we have two vile candidates – a metamorphised Ken and Barbie (or is it mask slippage) – a chilling satire on democracy crowning the head cheerleader (Trump) and the Quarterback (Clinton).

As for the red button, one needs to review Clinton’s record in Libya and Haiti, and one needs to review her friends such as Nuland and Kagan – plenty of itchy red button fingers and blood stained hands.

The future’s not brite.

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eamonncork - October 28, 2016: I’m pleased to see that you devoted more space to Clinton’s misdeeds than to Trump’s. Welcome to the movement.
TINA actually stands for Trump Is Not Awful (compared to Clinton).
I feel that one of the problems of left wing politics is an unimaginative linear attitude towards election results. That whole boring thing of earmarking the left wing candidate and then treating their victory or defeat as a victory or defeat for left-wing politics is just too tiresome and depressing.
My post facto theory of electoral politics argues that what we should do is wait for the result and then claim the victory for left wing politics. This gives us a much more optimistic picture of the world, Lexit being a great example. Instead of winning elections, we should be concentrating on claiming the winning side as our own. In those circumstances every electoral victory is our victory. In the immortal words of David Cassidy, we can be heroes just for one day. But isn’t it better than no day at all?

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Ed - October 28, 2016: Eamonn, seriously, this trolling would probably be a lot funnier if it hadn’t already been a standard trope for the most appalling drones in the US media for the past several months; there have been multiple articles by Clintonite ultras claiming that all the US leftists who criticize HC want Trump to win on some kind of ‘the worse, the better’ logic; invariably they are completely unable to produce anyone who actually makes this argument, apart from a few random cranks, but that hasn’t stopped them from applying it to pretty much any prominent left-wing commentator who doesn’t believe that the vileness of Trump means that all criticism of Clinton has to be put on ice until she wins (whereupon there will be a new rationalization for putting all criticism of Clinton on ice; basically the right time to criticize right-wing Democrats will never, ever arrive, there will always be some kind of urgent reason to keep quiet about their support for death squads in Honduras or their being in the pocket of Wall Street).

Here are a couple of examples of the evidence-free ‘progressives for Trump’ genre, and a take-down:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/08/15/beware-the-hillary-clinton-loathing-donald-trump-loving-useful-idiots-of-the-left.html

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/06/leftists_for_trump_what_is_to_be_done_about_these_insufferable_nihilists.html

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Ed - October 28, 2016: The third link didn’t seem to come through there, here it is:

http://www.salon.com/2016/08/17/no-they-dont-support-trump-smeared-left-wing-writers-debunk-the-myth/

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eamonncork - October 28, 2016: Lighten up skin. You’ve no idea how boring it gets here in the CIA station in Tblisi.
Or do you?

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eamonncork - October 28, 2016: (1) I can’t take responsibility for Honduran Death Squads. I stopped buying their albums when they changed their name to The Squad.
(2) Behind the trolling, which may well be silly (my apologies, it’s a nice sunny day and I’m in good form) I am trying to make a serious point. Wikileaks for example are obviously trying to aim at the erosion of support for Clinton. I’ve no great interest in their motives for this but if Clinton’s figures were to drop drastically the result would be Trump winning the election. The most obvious consequences of this would be an enormous worsening of the situation of black, hispanic and muslim people and a colossal emboldening of the very worst reactionary elements of American society. In the circumstances the fact that the greens might have won 2.4% of the vote would be of little consolation. I’m not fond of Clinton myself but it would seem to me that Trump would be infinitely worse. I feel the lack of black, hispanic and muslim people on the CLR, and indeed of women, might be inclined to lead to a bit of complacency on this point.
(3) If Gore had beaten Bush in 1998 we might have been spared the entire Iraqi clusterfuck. Had it not been for votes going to Ralph Nader, he would have beaten him. If that nader campaign subsequently provided a boost to progressive politics great enough to cancel out the dire consequences of the Bush victory, I missed it. Though maybe Salon had an article about it. My opinion can always be changed by one of those. Though the headline should surely be ‘deny the accusation’ rather than ‘debunk the myth.’ It’s up to the reader to decide if debunking has taken place.
it’s a bit like the days when the SDLP would run against Sinn Fein in a constituency in the name of ‘giving nationalist voters a choice,’ and the result would be the handing of the seat to a unionist candidate. It’s all very well admiring the pristine nature of your idealism but in democracies electoral arithmetic matters and has to be taken into account.
I’m sorry you don’t find my trolling funny Ed. What can I do? As the old saying goes, death is easy but comedy is hard. Splundig vur thrigg.

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CMK - October 28, 2016: Well, the reason Hilary gets a bit more stick thank Trump from the Left is that we know much more about what she will do with office given her track record.

As for Honduran death squads: someone at the business of one of those clearly fingered Hilary for her role in the Honduran coup.

Doug Henwood’s ‘My Turn’ is a readable and short summary of Hilary’s record to date. A record that completely undermines claims being made for her as some great progressive. At almost every point in her record since 1992 you can see where she faced choices to take a progressive stance or either stick with the status quo or implement a worsening of conditions for ordinary Americans. She, at every single points, chose the latter. No reason to believe she won’t do the same a president.

Put another way, if Trump wins the US deep state will work to contain him; if Hilary wins the US deep state will have an insider in the White House and will work hard to facilitate her.

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CL - October 28, 2016: ‘Trump now leads by a 30 percentage point margin among white voters without college degrees, up from 20 points from this weekend. White women now tilt toward Trump by 48 to 43 percent after leaning 49 to 43 percent in Clinton’s favor before.’
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/10/28/clinton-lead-shrinks-even-as-nearly-6-in-10-expect-her-to-win-post-abc-tracking-poll-finds/

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Ed - October 28, 2016: 1) As far as Wikileaks is concerned, it’s become an article of faith for Clinton loyalists that they are actually trying to deliver a Trump victory. This is based on a whole chain of assertions and assumptions (“Putin wants Trump to win AND Russia was behind the email hack AND Wikileaks is consciously doing Putin’s work AND anyone who uses those emails to criticize Clinton is doing the same AND …”) which would normally be dismissed as tin-foil hat, conspiracist stuff in a different context. I don’t know what their precise agenda is, and I’m not keen to assume too much. I would prefer to have seen these emails come out during the Democratic primary, when they would have boosted Sanders rather than Trump (and I believe Sanders would have had an easier path to victory than Clinton in the presidential election). Was that a deliberate choice by Wikileaks, or did they not have access to the emails at that point? I don’t know.

2) Whatever we might say about Wikileaks, this line of argument isn’t being applied to them in particular, it’s being applied to the entire US left (‘left’ being left of the Democratic right-wing). It’s applied to people who say they are voting for the Green candidate, but also to people who say they will reluctantly vote for Clinton to keep out Trump. Basically anyone who says anything critical whatsoever is yelled at and denounced as a Trump stooge. When people supported Sanders against Clinton in the primary they were screamed at and told that they wanted Trump to win; now that it’s become clear that Clinton was a lousy candidate to pick and Sanders would have done a better job, they’re screaming even louder that the bad lefties want Trump to win out of spite, with zero evidence to back it up. There was a whole spate of articles about ‘Bernie or Bust’ voters who were opting for Trump; the opinion polls showed that fewer Sanders supporters planned to vote Trump ahead of Clinton than Clinton supporters planned to vote McCain ahead of Obama in 2008. There’s a deliberate slippage in all these arguments from ‘you want Trump to win’ to ‘you’re not enthusiastic enough about Clinton winning’ to ‘you’ve said something critical about Clinton, how dare you!’ When Sanders gave his speech endorsing Clinton at the Democratic convention, I heard someone (not a random punter on Twitter, a New Yorker columnist) complain that while the content of the speech was all very good, he just didn’t sound ‘emotionally invested’ in a Clinton victory. It’s not enough to give them your vote or your backing, you have to give them your soul (shades of Corbyn being held responsible for Brexit because he didn’t run around saying that he loved everything about the EU with all his heart).

3) In spite of the email leaks, Clinton should still be walking this election. She’s up against a terrible candidate who has lost the support of much of the Republican establishment; she has everyone from Glen Beck to John Negroponte (another sponsor of Central American death squads) lending her their voice, along with all the usual Democrat supporters. A tape of Trump boasting about sexual assault was leaked at the point of maximum impact in the election cycle. He has virtually no newspapers endorsing him (I’m pretty sure his media backing is lower than any previous candidate, even Goldwater). If there’s still even an outside chance that he might win, the fault lies with Clinton, the Democratic establishment and the kind of campaign they’ve chosen to run. Her most zealous supporters sometimes seem to put more energy into scapegoating the US left for a possible loss than they do into asking why a loss is even conceivable and doing something to put that right.

4) On Nader: Gore still won the popular vote in 2000, and he would have won the electoral-college vote too, if not for blatant vote-rigging by Jeb Bush’s cronies in Florida. When the Supreme Court made a nakedly political decision to halt the Florida recount, Gore went along with it meekly; his supporters—especially his African-American supporters—were ready to mobilize, but he told them to go home and accept the result. Scapegoating Nader for the Bush years in the light of that is a bit much. There were polls at the time showing that the majority of Nader voters were so fed up with the Democrats after 8 years of Clintonism—NAFTA, mass incarceration, ‘the end of welfare as we know it’—that they would have stayed at home if they hadn’t voted for Nader.

5) I’m not at all as sure as you are that the Iraq war never would have happened on Gore’s watch. After it became clear what a disaster it was, there was a rush to pin the blame on a very narrow group of people, Dr Strangelove-types from the neocon fringe. But it had much, much wider support than that; the whole Democratic establishment was on board, including Hillary Clinton and John Kerry (with the New York Times putting its shoulder to the wheel with Judith Butler’s WMD fabrications just as much as Fox News). The geopolitical logic behind invading Iraq was pretty sound at the time; it proved to be a disaster, of course, but it was a bipartisan choice back in 2002–3. This isn’t directly relevant to the Clinton-Trump choice, but it’s worth saying anyway.

6) I want Trump to lose. Every left-winger I know wants Trump to lose. ‘The worse, the better’ has absolutely zero traction anywhere that I know of, from left-wing social democrats to anarchists. It’s just that very few people actively want Clinton to win, either; this is a lesser of two evils argument with more evil than lesser. It’s perfectly reasonable to argue that a Trump presidency will be even worse than a Clinton one, but the Clinton one will still be pretty bad all the same (and a good deal worse than Obama’s by every sign).

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/726092025133670401

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WorldbyStorm - October 28, 2016: I’m on my way out but just on 3 and 5. 3 first. I’d be dubious the other way. First I don’t think Clinton is quite as awful a candidate as people make out. She’s very mundane and humdrum (and in contrast to Obama she’s lacks any huge charisma) but she’s actually much more similar to previous winning candidates in that. In an effectively two party state it’s no surprise to me that Trump is keeping relatively high, though not if we take RCP poll of polls particularly brilliantly. People are socialised into voting one of two ways. That’s the choice. And the gap between the parties is probably at an all time high – in the sense of antagonism between their supporters/voters/worldviews. Republicans are going to vote Republican or they’ll tend to walk. It’s worth keeping in mind that the band of support losing candidates get. Dukakis was pretty awful and got 45.6%. Mondale 40%. Dole 40%. It is possible that Trump will come in under 40%. Worth looking at the winners too. She’s comfortably in the range of same. We’ll see.

5. I don’t think that’s absolutely self-evident at all. Those who were arguing and pushing for war in Iraq were very close to the Republican establishment and much further away from the Democratic one. Having Cheney as vice president was even more crucial along with others in the administration. I’m certain that there’d have been post 9/11 some sort of conflict with Afghanistan, but Iraq? And did Iraq make any real sense? I think the fact it was such a hard sell and had no real support internationally underscores that.

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gendjinn - October 28, 2016: Ed – nailed it, all of it. Well done!
WbS – Clinton & Trump are the most unfavourable candidates to run post-WW2. Clinton is a worse candidate than Romney, McCain, Kerry, Gore, Dole, GHWB, Dukakis and Mondale. With the highest unfavourables of any candidate running since WW2 except for Trump.

Republicans were a minority in the Senate and 29 Democratic senators voted for the AUMF. The Dem party is a wholly owned subsidiary of the MIIC now. Why else do you think almost half the electorate doesn’t even bother to register to vote?

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ejh - October 28, 2016: I feel the lack of black, hispanic and muslim people on the CLR, and indeed of women, might be inclined to lead to a bit of complacency on this point.

This is probably true, but it might be worth observing that there isn’t apparently all that much enthusiasm for Clinton among younger women, or working-class women, as you’d maybe expect given the historical nature of the likely result. When I say “enthusiasm” I don’t mean voting-intention figures compared to Trump, I mean any of the passion that Obama’s candidacy brought about eight years ago. Maybe it’s an unfair comparison in some ways it’s not something I’d want to discuss by swapping slogans, and maybe it’s not really my discussion to have, but the difference has struck me nonetheless.

It can never be said enough times that Bush did not beat Gore.

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ejh - October 28, 2016: Why else do you think almost half the electorate doesn’t even bother to register to vote?

Touch less than thirty per cent

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WorldbyStorm - October 28, 2016: gendjinn – worse and unfavourable aren’t synonymous (otherwise we’d be all arguing for J. Corbyn to be pushed out of the LP leadership – I’m not suggesting Clinton is Corbyn but the underlying point I think is valid). I’m pretty sure Clinton isn’t worse as a candidate that Bob Dole. Or George Bush jnr. Or indeed Ronald Reagan.

There’s no question that there are real problems with the Democrats. I’d be the first to say it. I doubt I’d vote for them except against a candidate like Trump if I were in the US or dependent upon the individual Dem candidate. But there are also very real differences. If you’re pro-choice, or pro-some measure of gun control, or relatively pro-union, or pro-some measure of state intervention or against cutting the state, etc, a Clinton presidency while offering no massive change doesn’t offer the dangers and risks of all out assault on those areas that most Republican candidates would.

ejh, I think that’s a valid criticism re enthusiasm, but then I think back and try to think of any election like Obamas first and I can’t really. perhaps on the right hand side of the house the Reagan first one? And I also think that after Obama and the fact that that enthusiasm was proven to be misplaced a lot of people weren’t going to be caught again. I think too that there is a quieter level of support.

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gendjinn - October 28, 2016: @ejh VAP is 242m; Reg is 140m & turnout varies from 80m to 130m. So it’s not 50% but it’s unique in the “western democracies” and pretty terrible.

The point remains, there is a plurality in the US open to something neither Democrat nor Republican.

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gendjinn - October 28, 2016: @WbS usually not, in this case they coincide. That is the story sold to you by the Democrats but what have been the trend lines in all of those areas over the last 25 years. What difference has Obama made to any of the trends?

Both of the parties are wholly owned subsidiaries of Wall Street. Clinton and Obama both tried to privatize Social Security during the terms – saved by Monica and the Tea Party respectively. HRC will also make her effort to privatize. The identity politics are just wedge issues cynically used by both sides to win elections. The staggering lack of registration and participation speaks to the people seeing it and turning off.

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WorldbyStorm - October 28, 2016: Got to disagree there gendjinn, it’s not simply identity politics in relation to those issues I mention. They have a substance. Nor is my sense that the Democrats either a fully owned subsidiary of MNCs or indistinguishable from the Republicans. But we’ll simply have to differ on that. The best we can hope for I think is that matters continue as is, rather than deteriorate further. One thing I am convinced of is that a Trump presidency will definitely see the latter. With the Democrats it’s a possibility but one has to hope that all those forces that we can loosely term progressive will use the space of a Clinton presidency to push back against the worst aspects of Dems and point up the contradictions. It seems to me that that latter project would be considerably easier with a Clinton presidency than a Trump one..

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eamonncork - October 29, 2016: Of course it’s easy to be dismissive about ‘identity politics’ if you’re a straight white male, like almost all of us on here.
Glenn Greenwald? Give me a break. When someone questioned the timing of this news about the E-Mails last night, he tweeted his outrage at the ‘smearing’ of the FBI, as if said organisation is some entirely unproblematic entity altogether.
I would think it behoves us all to be honest about what result we actually deep down want to see in this election. At least I’m doing that. And that whole ‘they’re voting for her but not with any enthusiasm’ stuff is bizarre. Should those votes perhaps be counted as half votes then?
CMK’s ‘deep state’ thing would seem to indicate he thinks Trump is preferable to Clinton. Fair enough.
He’s hardly alone on this site in thinking that. It’s odd to feel that hoping Trump loses makes you a right winger.

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eamonncork - October 29, 2016: I also think the fact that, as was the case during the Brexit, the ‘white working class’ seems to have emerged as an entity whose needs everyone is bothered about is very interesting. No-one spoke like this even five years ago. Back then the working class was the working class.

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Michael Carley - October 29, 2016: @EamonnCork On a phone so this has to be short but the “white working class” has been talked about for a long time, e.g.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_(BBC_series)

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eamonncork - October 29, 2016: Also good to see CMK admit that Clinton does get more stick than Trump from the left, obvious though this is. But the ‘because we know what she’ll do because of his record,’ argument is also odd. What do you think Trump will do? Do you think there’s any great mystery about who will be happiest if he wins and what the result of that will be?
Or is it a case of bad and all as resurgent white nationalism might be, at least it’s better than the triumph of the Washington elite? Which, as is the case with the ‘it’s good to see the establishment get a bloody nose’ stuff is similar to a lot of the stuff driving the Trump campaign. There’s perhaps merely just a difference of opinion about who the ‘elite’ are.
The next thing you’ll be telling me there’s no such thing as global warming. That’s something which would be made much worse than a Trump presidency but no doubt that’s ‘identity politics’ too.
Anyway that’ll do for now. I appear to be arguing with people who speak an entirely different language, a pointless pursuit at any time. There seemed to be a time when the loudest voices on the CLR weren’t essentially pro Assad, pro Putin and pro Trump. Though it may be that I wasn’t paying attention and was simply mistaking the site for something more mainstream than it actually is. Which makes it my problem rather than yours.

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eamonncork - October 29, 2016: It has, by the likes of Michael Collins (not the one from Cork). But not in the sense which I feel it’s talked about now, as in some way the ‘real working class.’ This has to be short because essentially I might as well be talking to myself.

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ejh - October 29, 2016: I would think it behoves us all to be honest about what result we actually deep down want to see in this election. At least I’m doing that. And that whole ‘they’re voting for her but not with any enthusiasm’ stuff is bizarre

Do you know, I never thought I’d say this, but fuck off, Eamonn. If you want to have an epiphany, you have one, but as one inevitable characteristic of that process is being a jerk at the expense of people you used to agree with, I’m really not up for being the target of that.

I’ve spent years keeping out of the way of that sort of person because it’s really unpleasant being their punchbag and they never, ever stop. Nor do they ever stop raving (pro Assad, pro Putin and pro Trump indeed) once they’ve got into what is clearly a really satisfyting habit, and nor is it possible to have any kind of conversation with them once they’ve decided that the only alternative to their own loud and aggressiveforeign policy positions is that people are objecively on the other side.

It’s called projection and i know from long experience that there’s noting I can do about it, but it you want to project, don’t fucking project on me.

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WorldbyStorm - October 29, 2016: I think a moment of calm is called for isn’t it? There’s a lot if assumptions all over the place in this discussion and on all sides – for example one the other way us that somehow people who in extremis ie Trump might see Clinton as the lesser of two evils by quite some distance and/or are blissfully unaware she’s a centre right candidate as if thus hasn’t been true if dem politics all our lives and as if only this was stated again and again somehow views will change. I Aldo think EC is being slightly provocative given the general sentiment expressed on the issue here in comments and frankly I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. Finally is it not possible to depersonalise it, I don’t think ECs points about views in Clinton were directed to you ejh personally but were more general but even if they were would it not be possible to ask him directly if that were the case before reaching this point?

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ejh - October 29, 2016: I reached this point a long time ago. This is not my first time in front of this particular in-flight movie and I think I prefer the option with the parachute.

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WorldbyStorm - October 29, 2016: There’s far too much room in the context of comments for people to say things inadvertently or be misinterpreted – I’m often too terse and may come across as such and its both unintentional but also problematic. I do think it well worth asking people if they’re engaging directly with one. Does EC mean you? I find that hard to believe but that’s for him to answer. And if he means others, well, as you note all this works in a number of ways because it is generally better to keep discussions on such matters abstract rather than personalised. Because I think we could spend far too much time trying to second guess and to no actual purpose.

And there’s another point that I think is important. To my mind there is no right and wrong in terms of attitudes to the US election – people can adopt widely divergent approaches in all sincerity (bar voting for Trump – but vote for Clinton, the GP, probably not the libertarian though… abstain, all valid). There may be better or worse and that’s a different matter and well worth discussing.

Again to me this is a core question in a time when the left is in such poor shape. How do leftists engage with societies where their line is either entirely marginal or is swamped by centre leftists or centrists who talk leftish but aren’t funciotnally so, and particularly with the rise of further right populist forces that threaten to wrest power. Each instance will be different but it’s not unreasonable to discuss it and to appreciate that there will be different views and approaches.

So I’ll conclude by saying that that is an discussion well worth having and beyond that we all know the score – it would be a pity if people who I know are both genuine and sincere and thoughtful fall out.

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Ed - November 1, 2016: WBS, I think Clinton will still win the election, although I wouldn’t predict the margin of victory. But I think Sanders would have been a much stronger candidate, from a purely pragmatic point of view; much less baggage than Clinton, and he would have been able to expose Trump’s phony ‘anti-establishment’ pose much more effectively than Clinton, too. Basically the Democrats chose to run a classic Washington insider as their candidate at a time of insurgent politics, in the US and elsewhere, and it’s made this race closer than it should have been. It’s partly a question of timing; Clinton would have been a better candidate back in 2008, when the Democrats had been out of office for two terms (probably not as good as Obama but better than she is in 2016). And Clinton has certainly had advantages that most candidates don’t have; you only need to look at the latest list of senior Republicans who’ve abandoned Trump:

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/10/where-republicans-stand-on-donald-trump-a-cheat-sheet/481449/

On Iraq: I didn’t say it was self-evident, none of us can be sure how things would have gone with a different president in the White House; I’m just not at all convinced by the opposite argument, that it’s a sure-fire thing Iraq would never have happened if the Democrats had been in place. Historically Democratic presidents have been no more reluctant to go to war than Republicans, and the Democrats certainly did nothing to oppose the war drive back in 2003. There are still good reasons for thinking a Gore victory in 2000 would have been preferable; I just don’t think Iraq is the strongest peg to hang that argument on.

As for the rest: I think ejh said what needs to be said about the trouble with epiphanies. Since from the context I seem to be one of those identified as ‘pro-Assad, pro-Putin, pro-Trump’, I could take offence, but I doubt anyone takes that stuff seriously. People who make a habit of going on like that will indeed find that they are talking to themselves, and have themselves to thank for that. I hope Eamonn comes back down from this particular ledge, because otherwise there’s not much you can do short of going Full Nick Cohen, and everyone knows you should never go Full Nick Cohen.

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WorldbyStorm - November 1, 2016: First up I would never suggest that you were pro-Putin or Assad Trump etc, I well remember our joint discussions against some who had that line earlier this year. And somehow I can’t see CL or gendjinn as that either – despite our differing analyses.

I broadly agree in regard to thinking Sanders would have had some immediate strengths. But… I do wonder how a self-proclaimed socialist would fare beyond the Democratic Party. Indeed I wonder if there might not have been trouble for him from within the Democratic Party. Perhaps he’d win against Trump, Trump being so grim, but perhaps not. I kind of wish he had done better (you made the point the other day that the latest email stuff would have been much better used back during the primary). Totally agree Clinton would have been a stronger candidate in 2008.

Sorry, I inadvertently misquoted you there re Iraq. And yes, not a sure fire thing. That said on balance of probability perhaps somewhat less than more likely. Lieberman (!) would have been VP but would have been a lot more isolated in a Gore White House I think than Cheney was with Rumsfeld etc. The counter argument is that after 9/11 (it happened on the Democrats watch rhetoric etc) perhaps the push to the most extreme military option, which was Iraq, would have been unstoppable. Or perhaps Gore would have been able to fend it off. I’lll readily accept it’s a more finely balanced counterfactual than some.

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Ed - November 1, 2016: Didn’t mean you of course about the Assad/Putin/Trump stuff – and I hope Eamonn calms down and realizes how daft it all is. I can understand why ejh felt the need to let off steam in response to that kind of talk but best to leave it at that I think.

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Ed - November 1, 2016: Not a bad piece here (from one of the few New Statesman writers worth reading) arguing that Trump’s chances are worse than they might look:

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/elections/2016/10/relax-donald-trumps-chances-are-worse-they-look

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ivorthorne - November 1, 2016: Clinton is bad. Trump is worse.

Do I feel some small sense of satisfaction from seeing Clinton struggle? Sure, but it’s pretty tiny. Somebody like Sanders – centre left – was oft criticised as unelectable (an American Corbin) and Clinton was supposed to be more electable. Clinton’s record suggested otherwise. She’s consistently lost large leads, but in the minds of many liberal commentators “electable” means centre to centre right. One of Trumps most attractive qualities to many Americans is his talk of the evils of big business, free trade and Wall Street. He has struck a cord. If Sanders was running, he could have attracted some of that vote – as well as the anti-Trump vote that’s propping up Hillary in the polls. At a minimum, he’d be in the same position as Hillary is now.

I do find the somewhat ambivalent attitude of some on the left to Putin and Assad concerning. They are genuinely worse than the likes of May in that what May may do and cover up, they’ll boast about or at a minimum be more blatant in their denial of reality. Using smart bombs that end of killing civilian populations is horrific, using dumb bombs is considerably worse.

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yourcousin - November 2, 2016: Stay snarky eamonn, stay snarky (but while saying it you have to think of The Outsiders).

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makedoanmend - October 28, 2016: LOL – re: TINA – no, he’s no awful – He’s @x&%’ing horrible.

If I had to vote for anyone in the US High School Popularity Contest called the presidential elections, it would be:

Cthulhu – pure evil – the real deal – so vile it can afford to tell the truth – refreshing

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16. Tomboktu - October 28, 2016: [Not my writing – copied from the PILA website]

PILA Bulletin: 27 October 2016

Labour Court – First award granted under the Protected Disclosures Act for penalisation of a whistle-blower

The Labour Court recently granted the first award under the Protected Disclosures Act 2014 (the Act) in respect of penalisation. It determined the employee, a care assistant in a nursing home was unjustly penalised when she was placed on paid suspension for five months for having made a ‘protected disclosure’ concerning an alleged abuse of patients. An award of €17,500 was granted. Compensation up to a maximum of five years remuneration can be awarded to an employee who is penalised for making a protected disclosure.

The Act protects whistle-blowers from penalisation (included threatened penalisation) for making a ‘protected disclosure’. A ‘protected disclosure’ is a disclosure of ‘relevant information’ in accordance with the Act. Such information must, in the ‘reasonable belief of the worker’, tend to show a ‘relevant wrongdoing’ and must have come to the attention of the worker in ‘connection with the worker’s employment’. ‘Relevant wrongdoings’ are defined in an exhaustive list, an example of which is the endangering of an individual’s health and safety.

By way of background in March 2014 Ms Monaghan raised a concern with the nursing home’s Matron about a supervisor and the treatment of patients. Ms Monaghan also organised a meeting of the care assistants to discuss her concerns and raised these directly with HIQA also. An unannounced HIQA investigation took place in May 2014 and Ms Monaghan’s employer also carried out its own investigation. On the basis of that investigation there were indications that Ms Monaghan’s concerns were motivated by malice and she was suspended with pay from June to November 2014.

It was argued by the employer that Ms Monaghan’s concerns were more appropriately defined as grievances, rather than falling within the definition of penalisation within the meaning of the Act. However, the Court held that while a ‘grievance is a matter specific to a worker’, a protected disclosure is ‘where a worker had information about a relevant wrongdoing’. It held that Ms Monaghan’s concerns, which related to ‘alleged health and safety risks to residents’, fell within the definition of a ‘protected disclosure.

Source: http://www.pila.ie/resources/bulletin/2016/10/27/labour-court-first-award-granted-under-the-protected-disclosures-act-for-penalisation-of-a-whistleblower

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17. eamonncork - October 28, 2016: Another reason to hope for Trump victory is that his stated reluctance to support American allies in Europe will enable Russia to retake the Baltic States, the Ukraine and the like, thus creating a new Soviet Union to act as a necessary counterbalance to American power (as an Irishman one thing that pisses me off is these small shitty places pretending to be proper countries just to annoy their powerful neighbour). Despite what the MSM, and its Rothschild paymasters would have you believe, Russia is still an example of Actually Existing Socialism which deserves our uncritical support. If Trump is good enough for Putin, he’s good enough for me.

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eamonncork - October 28, 2016: I’ll get me astrakhan coat.

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18. CL - October 28, 2016: -Teneo says the firm addresses a “range of financial, reputational and transformational challenges and opportunities by combining the disciplines of strategic communications, investor relations, investment banking, financial analytics, executive recruiting, digital analytics, corporate governance, government affairs, business intelligence, management consulting and corporate restructuring on an integrated basis.”-
http://www.judicialwatch.org/bulletins/teneo-the-clinton-machine/

One wonders what is being hidden behind such gobbledygook.
Perhaps the class struggle:
“Teneo also helped shape McDonald’s campaign against raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour,”

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19. CL - October 28, 2016: “When Harry Truman left the White House in 1953, historian David McCullough records, “he had no income or support of any kind from the federal government other than his Army pension of $112.56 a month….
Nevertheless, Truman refused to cash in on his celebrity and influence as a former president.
“I could never lend myself to any transaction, however respectable,” Truman later wrote, “that would commercialize on the prestige and dignity of the office of the presidency.”

“Band also offers the following commentary on the “$50 million in for-profit activity” he was able to secure for Bill Clinton (as of November 2011) as well as the “$66 million in future contracts, should he choose to continue with those engagements.”
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-10-26/doug-band-memo-offers-vivid-details-foundation-corporate-donors-and-bills-profit-act?page=2

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CL - October 28, 2016: “Is he the ultimate suck up/kick down operator or does he genuinely belong in the highest corridors of power? …
there was deep internal opposition, a legitimate fear that the AIF would become another “A” list for Kelly,to plunder, a target-rich environment for Teneo.” Niall O’Dowd on Declan Kelly.

O’Dowd “previously had a business and friendship relationship with Declan Kelly for several years,”
http://www.irishcentral.com/opinion/niallodowd/profile-declan-kelly-ceo-of-teneo-in-the-eye-of-the-clinton-funding-storm

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20. eamonncork - October 28, 2016: Hope you got on Trump at 9/2, since the news about this E-Mail thing you can’t get him at anything shorter than 11/4. I predict that within a week he’ll be favourite. Then he’ll win the election. Make of that what you will but get used to the idea.

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eamonncork - October 28, 2016: And this time I’m not trolling. I think this will turn the race his way.

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eamonncork - October 28, 2016: I for one welcome . . .

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ejh - October 28, 2016: Would you like a fiver at 3/1?

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eamonncork - October 28, 2016: Go on then ejh. I’d never be more pleased to lose a bet. I have him at 9/2 and 11/4 as well and hope I lose those too.
Anthony Weiner, you’d have to say, is some man for one man. The phrase ‘one man wrecking crew’ springs to mind.

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eamonncork - October 28, 2016: I may be wrong about this but I place inordinate faith in the movement of betting money and it generally doesn’t let me down.

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ejh - October 28, 2016: I already lost a fiver on Brexit and see no reason not to quadruple my losses.

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Joe - November 1, 2016: Clarity is required here, brothers. Are yis talking euros or pounds? Or dollars?

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21. CL - October 29, 2016: -Dow paid Teneo $2.8 million in 2011, soaring to $19.4 million in 2012, according to internal Dow documents reported by the Washington Post. An investigator hired by the company later wrote, “It appears Dow is paying Teneo for connections with Clinton.”-
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/10/28/clin-o28.html

“the Clintons do not draw any lines between their “charitable” work, their political activity, their government jobs or (and most important) their personal enrichment.”
http://www.wsj.com/articles/grifters-in-chief-1477610771

Clinton is still the odds-on favourite with PaddyPower at 2/7,-it was 1/6 a few days ago. Trump, the Great White Dope, is at 3/1

Is the FBI October surprise a game-changer? Doubtful.Although Weiner sent the Dow down this afternoon.
And time is running out for any more October surprises with only 3 days left in the month. But emails are forever,-unless you own your own server and anything incriminating can be ‘bleached’ out. So the next 10 or 11 days could be fairly tense before this bizarre circus reaches a climax.

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22. CL - October 29, 2016: ‘the university signed Bubba to a sweet deal as an “honorary chancellor,” paying him $17.6 million over five years…
David Bloomfield, an education professor at Brooklyn College and the CUNY grad center, said such for-profit schools often leave students buried in debt…
At Laureate’s Walden University in Minneapolis, just 44 percent of grads are making payments on their loans compared with 67 percent nationwide. The school is under investigation by Minnesota education officials.

The graduation rate at Laureate’s New School of Architecture and Design in San Diego is a paltry 33 percent, and the average student graduates with $43,417 in government loans.”
http://nypost.com/2016/10/28/clinton-donor-got-state-department-invite-and-bill-got-17m/

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yourcousin - October 29, 2016: I’m pretty sure we get it. That power is a self referencing, self perpetuating nepotistic endeavor and that most presidents do very well for themselves after they leave office.

It’s also worth pointing out that Truman was the oddball on this issue. I mean he was literally the poorest president in my nation’s history. So in that sense Bill Clinton is no different than any other office holder. To make it look otherwise is trying to skew the issue.

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CL - October 29, 2016: I think you’re right; corruption is widespread and legal. But some are more corrupt than others. There’s surely a difference between Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.

“the mixing of speech fees, the Clinton Foundation, and actions by the State Department, which she ran, are all intertwined and it’s corrupt.”
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-10-23/watergates-bob-woodward-clinton-foundation-corrupt-its-scandal

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yourcousin - October 29, 2016: Jimmy Carter is the odd duck of all the living ex presidents. His faith and dedication his charity work mark him out from the others. As far as politicians go he is one of my favorites.

But again my question comes back to, “to what end”?

What are we supposed to take from all of these quotes and links that we didn’t already know before? I mean I get it’s always good to be able to dig into the weeds on an issue, but unless you find something that changes things or confirms something in dispute then…

I mean no one here is being a Hillary booster. At most some of us have stated that she is well within the political mainstream (even her scandals are mainstream). And that she is not on par with Donald Trump. And being very generous on a Saturday morning I might argue that some of vilification and misogyny from the right after all these years has seeped into the rhetoric from the left. That’s it.

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WorldbyStorm - October 29, 2016: Well exactly, YC. We’re all pretty well up to speed on the Dems. No one here is a member or supporter of them as a party (there’s been a few who i’d think were good though – Paul Wellstone seemed like a genuinely good dude). I could never imagine joining them. gendjinn made a very important point further up the thread, if there was an alternative all of us would go for it – that is if there was a leftwing alternative (speaking of third parties when I was in NY for a period of time in 89 I knew people in the New Alliance Party and went along to fundraisers – now that was another kettle of fish entirely, a very weird kettle of fish. I also hung out a couple of times at the CP’s bookshop on iirc 23rd street) But at Presidential elections again the issues I note above come into play. And those third party candidates who do well tend to be right rather than left. We know Clinton is part of a machine and is a machine politician herself. So there’s no illusions about her at all. She’s at best like a centre right FGer. But then the point is not so much that if I was there I’d vote for her as against Trump. Trump is the more immediate problem – at least as I read it.

What gets me is in a way that people expect anything much of Clinton than a steady as it goes typical pol (there is a point that I would make that a woman president of the US would be important, not because she’s a Dem but because that has a positive effect further afield – and in a way that’s the only plus side on the balance sheet if we’re talking about her as her, that and being pro-choice, not overtly anti-union, etc – and I think YC has a point that misogyny is an issue where she is over reified in a negative way. But fundamentally she’s rather banal tbh neither the epitome of evil or the greatest thing since sliced bread).

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CL - October 29, 2016: Yes, the Clintons have mainstreamed corruption, just as Trump has mainstreamed bigotry.
Not all that’s being revealed by Wikileaks was known before; much of it is a surprise. Certainly that Band memo is an eye-opener to many.
But you do have a point; since the Clintons have mainstreamed corruption what’s new? Perhaps that the Clinton greed is so egregious that it can never be over-stressed.

“On the one hand, we have a petulant, vocabulary-challenged man-boar of a billionaire, who hasn’t paid his taxes, has regularly left those supporting him holding the bag, and seems like a ludicrous composite of every bad trait in every bad date any woman has ever had. On the other hand, we’re offered a walking photo-op for and well-paid speechmaker to Wall-Street CEOs, a one-woman money-raising machine from the 1% of the 1%, who, despite a folksiness that couldn’t look more rehearsed, has methodically outplayed her opponent.”
http://www.unz.com/article/waking-up-in-hillary-clintons-america/

Hillary is lucky in that the Republicans have chosen the Great White Dope to be her opponent.
Just because Trump is an ogre should not delude us as to what to expect from a Clinton presidency. The various revelations and surprises have given us enough warning.

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yourcousin - October 29, 2016: “from the 1%”

Since when does a fabric wholesaler count as the 1%?

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CL - October 29, 2016: Hillary is peddling power and influence not draperies.

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yourcousin - October 29, 2016: Her father did though. He ran a successful small business. So bourgeoisie her roots may be she is hardly a Rockefeller or daughter of some other oligarch.

And that is part of my problem. People are ascribing things to her that are simply not true. Basically I believe she deserves to be damned on her own merits, not ones other people are dreaming up for her.

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CL - October 29, 2016: Hillary Clinton is also descended from Welsh coal miners, but that does not make her a socialist.

She and Bill are worth tens of millions derived from ‘monetizing’ the power and prestige of the presidency through serving the interests of the wealthy and privileged.

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WorldbyStorm - October 29, 2016: But no one has said she’s a socialist. So I’m unsure what your argument is. As for corruption. Mainstreaming it more than Bush? And even if that’s correct and it’s a bit questionable, what again is the point? We get that Hillary is no saint – tbh she’s business as usual. But to some of us Trump is much worse again.

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yourcousin - October 29, 2016: I get that they’re capitalists. We’re in agreement. We don’t like capitalists, we’re still in agreement. Ipso facto we don’t like Bill and Hillary, sort of in agreement.

Where we differ is that I don’t hate them enough to ascribe things that are not true to them. There is more vehemence directed not just at Hillary but also painting her with the exact same brush as Bill. Which is the exact same rhetorical exercise Trump used in bringing up Bill’s infidelities.

Again she can be damned on her own merits without having crap made up about her. Which is what you are doing and which why I pointed out your factual error.

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CL - October 29, 2016: ‘But no one has said she’s a socialist. So I’m unsure what your argument is’-WBS

Well no one said she was a fabric wholesaler either but YC thought it relevant. My point being that its as relevant and as irrelevant,-and as illigical- to state that her ancestors were coal miners as it is to say that her father sold draperies.

As for ‘business as usual’, that the Clintons are just run of the mill politicians just like all the others. Not quite.

And Bill and Hillary have been partners in power for 40 years or more.

“The memo, made public Wednesday by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, lays out the aggressive strategy behind lining up the consulting contracts and paid speaking engagements for Bill Clinton that added tens of millions of dollars to the family’s fortune, including during the years that Hillary Clinton led the State Department.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/inside-bill-clinton-inc-hacked-memo-reveals-intersection-of-charity-and-personal-income/2016/10/26/3bf84bba-9b92-11e6-b3c9-f662adaa0048_story.html

This is just ‘business as usual’, everyone does it? No

YC. Please point out what you call my ‘factual error’, and what it is that i have ‘made up’ about the Clintons.

(A lot of this stuff no one could make up)

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yourcousin - October 29, 2016: I would have thought it was all there in black and white. You said that she was from the 1% to which I pointed out that a small business owner who could not even get elected as an alderman is hardly the 1%.

I would also point that while I would like to think that the marriage was a true partnership Hillary took a back seat for many years while Bill pursued his career. There is also his highly publicized multiple affairs. Somehow, and just call me crazy here I see their marriage as still unequal.

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WorldbyStorm - October 29, 2016: But YC’s point was that she could hardly be called as coming from the 1% in terms of her family.

Some interesting stats here which seem to suggest that it is only in the last three years that her income jumped through book deals and speaking fees. Bill Clinton’s by contrast made huge money since leaving the presidency through books and speaking and some consulting. But then he was President and a hugely popular and (in)famous one at that. But it’s fairly obvious what the money has been for. Forbes (link is below notes this)

“What makes the Clintons different than most business tycoons, many of whom are featured on the Forbes World’s Billionaires list, is that they have made their fortune in straight cash, not equity gains. The people featured on our billionaires list are worth far more than the Clintons, but the vast majority of their wealth is wrapped up in their ownership of various companies. Many of the billionaires on our list take in less cash each year than the Clintons. Bill and Hillary’s liquidity gives them a war chest to employ during political campaigns. In 2008, Hillary loaned her campaign $13.2 million. She has never disclosed paying herself back.

It is unclear exactly what the Clintons have done with the rest of the money they have made. Layering years of disclosure documents on top of annual tax returns, Forbes estimates that the Clintons are worth a combined $45 million. They spent $95 million on taxes, their two houses cost a combined $5 million, and they gave $22 million to charity from 2001-14, according to historical tax returns and property records. But as Forbes outlined in a separate story last month, that leaves $50 million missing.”

Now why I am discussing the financial affairs of ‘centre’ right politicians I’ve no great fondness for and would in any circumstances not have much time of day for is a bit beyond me, but you did bring this up. Clearly they’re hugely ambitious and utterly focused on the Presidency. But it seems to me that ‘corruption’ charges in the contest of this are probably wide of the mark. They make sufficient monies that ‘corruption’ isn’t necessary – the money itself eases the processes they engage in within the system. Do I find that laudable or worthy of support? Of course not – I’m not a Clinton supporter. But it is the US system and complaining about it or that people use it seems to me to miss the point in this discussion. To say this is somehow the worst ever again misses the point. They’re playing this system. It’s not pretty but it is how the system is played (I guess I could argue that they’re getting the monies as far as can be seen from the usual suspects – underscoring the adage a fool and their money is easily parted). But again this misses the point. If it were Mitt Romney as against Trump I’d probably vote Romney. Because it comes down to much worse and not at all great.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/danalexander/2015/10/13/how-the-clintons-made-more-than-230-million-after-leaving-the-white-house/#67e126fe791e

http://moneynation.com/how-much-does-hillary-clinton-make-in-a-year/

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CL - October 29, 2016: Let me just point out again that Hillary’s father is not Hillary.
And Hillary Clinton who is worth tens of millions is of, by, and for the 1 per cent, and will promote the interests of the powerful and wealthy when she becomes president.

Hillary and Bill are partners in power for more than 40 years.

Good piece on Band here;

‘And yet it’s hard to shake the sense that it’s not all about saving the world. There’s an undertow of transactionalism in the glittering annual dinners, the fixation on celebrity, and a certain contingent of donors whose charitable contributions and business interests occupy an uncomfortable proximity….
it placed him at the center of a matrix of the ultra-wealthy and the ultra-powerful, the kinds of people Clinton has always taken a special pleasure in surrounding himself with….
CGI operates like an economy in which celebrity is the main currency….
What is striking is the extent to which Teneo’s business model depends on his relationship with Clinton. Band’s former White House colleague says Teneo is essentially a p.r. firm that is able to charge above-market rates because it persuades executives that Band and the ties it brings are an essential service…
Band’s pitch to clients was that he was “able to fly around [with Clinton] and decide who flies around with him. … The whole thing is resting on his access.”
https://newrepublic.com/article/114790/how-doug-band-drove-wedge-through-clinton-dynasty

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yourcousin - October 29, 2016: Again though she is not from the 1%. Mathematically that is a statement of fact. And I cannot believe that it is left to me of all people to point out two things, Hillary is not Bill, and their partnership is not quite equal. I would love it if it were, but it’s not.

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CL - October 29, 2016: YC, see below at 27

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CL - October 29, 2016: WBS-charitable giving;

In the years from 2007 to 2014, the Clintons gave about $15 million to charity. That’s about 11% of their total income or 14% of the total Bill and Hillary Clinton net worth sum. 98% of that money was donated to the Clinton Family Foundation.
http://moneynation.com/hillary-clinton-net-worth/

On the Clinton corruption see Bob Woodward;
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-10-23/watergates-bob-woodward-clinton-foundation-corrupt-its-scandal

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23. eamonncork - October 29, 2016: LikeLike

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24. Liberius - October 29, 2016: Fianna Fáil 26 (-1)
Fine Gael 25 (no change)
Sinn Féin 13 (-2)
Independents 10 (no change)
AAA-PBP 9 (+3)
Independent Alliance 6 (+2)
Labour 5 (-2)
Social Democrats 3 (-1)
Green Party 3 (+1)

New RED C/SBP poll. Interesting that AAA-PBP score, a reflection on the public’s view on the recent Jobstown conviction perhaps?

https://www.businesspost.ie/politics/red-c-poll-aaa-pbp-surges-record-high-368725

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Tomboktu - October 29, 2016: “a reflection on the public’s view on the recent Jobstown conviction perhaps?”

Or their work on the 8th amendment?

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Liberius - October 29, 2016: Should have, and added a caveat that it could all just be sample error, though I suppose that’s the peril of rattling out a comment quickly.

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25. Paddy Healy - October 29, 2016: This is more significant than a reflection of Recent events for the left and the Labour movement generally
Even taking into account the marin of error of 3%, The 9% for AAA-PBP as against the 5% for the Labour Party is historic.
If you add other anti -coalition-in principle TDs such as Seamus Healy , Joan Collins, Tommy Broughan to AAA-PBP, it is clear that the Labour Party Led by Brendan “FEMPI ANTI-TRADE UNION LAW HOWLIN” is in serious trouble
The shameful anti-Connolly heritage represented by Willie OBrien, Cathal o’Shannon has been overcome.
Jack O Connor should be worried. UNITE Has ALREAdy Dissafilliated from Labour. SIPTU is the only institution keeping the class traitors of the Labour Party in business!!!!

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26. Paddy Healy - October 29, 2016: Sorry. I thought I was putting this post on the more recent discussion about the new poll. It is now on the post on that topic

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yourcousin - October 29, 2016: I brought it up because you said she was from the 1%. Those are YOUR words and they are important because you’re arguing a narrative that is not true.

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CL - October 29, 2016: Hillary Clinton is of, by, and for the 1 per cent. What her Daddy did for a living is irrelevant. The Clinton family corruption cannot be decomposed into what’s attributable to Hilary and what’s attributable to Bill. They have been partners in power for more than 40 years

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yourcousin - October 29, 2016: Look I get that America has by and large moved a “post truth” political environ, not much I can do about that. But here I would like to think that the truth still matters. That’s why I called bullshit and instead of acknowledging her non 1% roots and correcting your argument you’ve engaged in rhetorical acrobatics in a manner that would make any politician proud.

You’re also arguing that Hillary is guilty of Bill’s sins. Something else I disagree with. Not to mention your unwillingness to acknowledge any sort gender disparity inside the marriage. I mean if they were partners why did Hillary have to wait until Bill was essentially finished with his “career” until she started her own? That doesn’t seem very equal to me.

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CL - October 29, 2016: I have no intimate knowledge of the internal dynamics of the Clinton marriage. But what is public knowledge is that Hillary and Bill Clinton have been partners in power for more than 40 years.

I absolutely do acknowledge that Hillary’s father sold draperies. But that has no relevance as to whether Hillary is or is not a member of the 1 per cent, or any other percent. Her Daddy’s occupation, and her coal miner ancestry have no logical connection to the discussion.

The Clinton family’s wealth, political power, and philanthropy are a seamless web of corruption.
If there is a journalist in the U.S who would know about corruption its Bob Woodward:

“It’s one thing for the right-wing press to accuse the Clinton foundation of cronyism, corruption, and scandal (especially if the facts, and internal admissions by affiliated employees, confirm as much) – it tends to be generally ignored by the broader, if left-leaning, media. But when the Watergate scandal’s Bob Woodward, associate editor at the liberal Washington Post, says very much the same, Hillary Clinton’s campaign has no choice but to notice….

‘the mixing of speech fees, the Clinton Foundation, and actions by the State Department, which she ran, are all intertwined and it’s corrupt.’
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-10-23/watergates-bob-woodward-clinton-foundation-corrupt-its-scandal

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WorldbyStorm - October 30, 2016: Btw just on one point, id be a lot more cautious re Woodward who at the least was a water carrier for Bush 2 during the run up to the Iraq war and wrote some remarkably favourable books on that a Presidency. And I’d also have to take issue with the 1% idea which seems to me to be rather unuseful concept which drives well beyond serious class based analyses but perhaps that’s a different matter.

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yourcousin - October 30, 2016: So what you’re saying is that you’re confused about who is president right now, Barack or Michelle? I mean they’re partners in power right? I mean why does Hillary even want a third termed if this is the case. Your catch phrase though alliterative is off base and fails to appreciate the realities of gender in America.

I’m impressed by your constant denigration of Hillary’s family by constantly saying “her daddy”. You say her father’s occupation is not relevant but the fact that what started this argument was your saying otherwise. Because you argued that she came from the 1%.

Your link arguing that the media is leftist made me roll my eyes. As it says in the intro here, “those of us who roll our eyes when we hear that the Irish media has a left-wing bias, but wish it were true”. I would highlight the acquittal of Bundy and company versus the constant attacks on the Standing Rock protestors and the almost complete silence reversal of media coverage on those situations. Think upon Amy Goodman as your leftist media paradigm here in America.

Even reading your link it’s just a guy saying Bob Woodward said the Clinton situation is corrupt. It’s name dropping from a TV panel on Fox News.

I get that many leftists here would love it if Hillary were the devil she were made out to be as it would justify favoring folks like Duterte abroad who tell the government and the Pope where to go, but this whole situation reminds me of a scene from, “A Man For All Seasons”

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27. CL - October 29, 2016: WBS-‘But YC’s point was that she could hardly be called as coming from the 1% in terms of her family.’
But nobody mentioned her father’s occupation, except YC, in terms of her being in the 1 per cent.
Ronald Reagan’s father was a shoe salesman. Does that mean that Reagan did not use his political power in the interests of the wealthy?

That Hillary’s father sold draperies is irrelevant, as irrelevant that other of her ancestors were coal miners.

“Dow’s $2.8 million relationship with Teneo in 2011 jumped to nearly $20 million in 2012, which the company’s own internal fraud auditor drew attention to, warning that “it appears Dow is paying Teneo for connections with Clinton.”
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/441529/wikileaks-clinton-foundation-emails-aides-reveal-corruption

-journalist Bob Woodward told a Fox News Sunday panel that the Clinton Foundation is “corrupt” and that Hillary Clinton has not answered for it.

‘the mixing of speech fees, the Clinton Foundation, and actions by the State Department, which she ran, are all intertwined and it’s corrupt.’

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-10-23/watergates-bob-woodward-clinton-foundation-corrupt-its-scandal

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WorldbyStorm - October 30, 2016: CL you really do seem to persist in confusing me with someone who cares about Clinton but I don’t, frankly, and I’m all too aware of the fact there’s an ocean between me and the US and how self indulgent all this stuff can be, indeed I’m minded to mention Neil Postmans theory that following news is how the upper working and middle classes feel a sense of control over events they have zero influence over. And sure I get the irony of me saying that given this site. But I really don’t see how I can say this clearer. I get all the problems re Clinton, but I feel – and I’ve stated this is a personal view and others will differ in all sincerity – Trump is a bigger problem. Now you can agree or disagree but would it just be possible for you to respect the fact I get it and yet we differ on it? Because I do not understand why you think link after link is going to push me from my viewpoint, and I’m puzzled why you keep posting them or indeed what your purpose in doing so is.

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gendjinn - October 30, 2016: But there is a game changer to the Lesser of Two Evils argument.

Both the Dems & Reps are owned by Wall Street. Once you see that you realise the LoTE argument is kabuki meant to keep you in line.That the only winning move is not to play, or 3rd party.

Look at the VAP/Reg/Turnout in the US compared to a sample of EU countries. The numbers speak for themselves.

I know you disagree with me, so go look at any of this years Thom Hartman & Thomas Frank interviews on youtube.

Here’s a safe prediction – Clinton’s cabinet will be stacked with Goldman Sachs and Wall Street officers.

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WorldbyStorm - October 30, 2016: Frankly that’s no argument at all gendjinn because it’s purely rhetorical. There is no third candidate or abstention position that can overcome the reality that there are only two actual candidates in this race who can win. You either vote for the Democrat or you vote for the Republican. Vote one way and there will be one range of outcomes, vote another and there will be another. There is no third candidate capable of winning however much we might wish there to be, no abstention that will lead to a third or fourth outcome.
And trying to boil it down to Wall Street is such a simplification, such a reductionism, that collapses actual policy and programmatic differences and ignore too the nature of the candidates and their respective bases simply to paint Clinton and Trump as equivalent that it’s hard to know what to with it. Abortion, union legislation, labour law, tax and a range of other issues distinguish one from the other.
How one deals with the choice, whether one votes one way or another or not at all is up to the individual and can be made in good conscience in many ways but that’s quite a different thing to saying Trump equals Clinton when by any reasonable measure that is fundamentally incorrect.

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gendjinn - October 30, 2016: I see you didn’t bother looking at any of the Thomas Frank evidence I repeatedly laid before you.

You are wrong. I just live here, what would I know?

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WorldbyStorm - October 30, 2016: You seem to make a lot of assumptions about me. I’m not unfamiliar with Frank, he writes every month for the Guardian. I wouldn’t consider what he writes as evidence in quite that sense, but that’s still beside the point – his argument that the Dems are as responsible for the system isn’t without power, but it’s not the entirety of the truth. Nor is he wrong about Clinton portraying herself as a moderate and not having any real radicalism. But those of us who take the view I do know this, that’s what I keep trying to get across. We know this, we factor it in and we still think Trump as President is worse.

Of course you live there, but that doesn’t mean you get a free pass in every discussion on this any more than the opposite is true for this state and I get a free pass on discussions about it here. I’ve noted before you and I hold different views on this matter and we will have to agree to differ. I’ve actually agreed with you that a third option, a real third option would be the best. But it would have to be one that could beat first Trump, then Clinton. But that doesn’t exist now and Trump in the White House isn’t going to generate it (quite apart from the dismal collateral damage he’ll inflict in areas as diverse as state size, etc, ). But the line that Trump = Clinton is so self-evidently incorrect that I think it’s worth stating that it is incorrect. So it’s not that you’re wrong to critique Clinton, not that you’re wrong to abstain or vote for an alternative. But saying she is equal to Trump seems to me on the evidence to be deeply incorrect.

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yourcousin - October 30, 2016: Don’t know why I’m going down this rabbit hole this morning, but here we go.

I would point out that by your own admission to be a Republican is to be a racist. So although all major parties here in the US are capitalist, even the Green Party or Bernie they would not be virulently racist as you yourself have argued.

Everyone here recognizes and opposes capitalism and no one here says, “yea Hillary” (pointing that out for the umpteenth time).

I would point out that the Greens never leveraged Nader’s success into anything on the local level. You also conflate Hillary’s personal ratings with Trump’s policies. A big difference.

Something that troubles me greatly and has since ’08 is the rise of the irrational right. Funny you should mention Frank Thomas and bring Kansas into the equation because not a month ago there was plot to bomb an apartment complex in Garden City, Kansas. My dad was born on a farm between Garden and Scott City. My family lives in both. It’s where I will go to do my pheasant opener in a few weeks. This is the new normal. That kind of activity coupled with the rebirth of the sage brush rebellion out here is not going away.

But don’t worry, I just live here, what would I know?

But if you like to flush out your bet on Hillary’s cabinet I would be more than happy to make a donation to an anti capitalist movement of your choice.

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gendjinn - October 30, 2016: @WbS,

fair enough. I was coming back because I kinda flew off the handle at the “That’s not an argument..” bit. Online, in these types of engagements it is hard not to actually make or seem to make assumptions about the other. Typing it all out strangles the conversation. And no, living somewhere doesn’t give one a free pass but it does give one more insight and information. Spent a lot of time in DC during the first Clinton administration – that was an eyeopener. The existence of open secrets that no one in the media reported outside of DC was quite shocking.

I wasn’t making an argument rather pointing to Frank’s Listen Liberalism which boils the last 25 years down for me. I watched it happen. Every single critique of Clinton’s legislation/policies being made now, was made at the time in The Nation, Mother Jones, Atlantic, etc. I was a subscriber to them all for almost a decade (had to give up early in the Bush admin, too upsetting).

I am categorically NOT saying that Trump == Clinton. The problem is that LoTE keeps everyone in line and voting for US Corporate Capitalism (call it 1%, Wall Street or the Davos Malthusians….). Look at wages, productivity gains, wealth inequality trends in the US from 1980 – flat and all wealth eventually ends up in the hands of the top 1% and 0.1%.

My point is that both the Democrats and the Republicans ultimately serve the very same corporate masters and both are taking the country in the very same direction. That direction is climate change, and extinction – and as scientist reading the literature that has been blindingly obvious since 1991. Before 350ppm and even more so after 400ppm. In that context LoTE no longer applies and the system itself has to be broken.

We can all see the problems with Trump and he definitely trips the fascist triggers. His victory would inspire racism/nativism as Brexit has done in the UK. Clinton however is also problematic – her no-fly zone in Syria risks a shooting war with Russia, something she either does not acknowledge or does not care about. I suspect the latter given the TTP/TTIP encirclement of Russia/China in cold war 2.0. More importantly Clinton will continue the current form of US Corporate Capitalism which poses an existential threat to the planet.

I don’t think it is arguable that the Dems aren’t owned by Wall Street (look at Obama’s cabinet) and. voting records. Once there you can’t play along with the LoTE, it is the losing move. Especially when the wikileaks now prove what we suspected that the DNC stole the primary for Clinton, therefore there is no possibility of reform within the system.

This would be a better discussion over pints in a pub, not an indented comments thread. But ye hack with what you have.

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gendjinn - October 30, 2016: @yc,

Well there was a bit more to it than “Republican == racist”. Are you saying that someone who stands up today and says “I am a Republican and I am voting for Trump.” and nothing else is not a racist? I would think there is a robust argument to be made that any individual making such an unqualified statement is endorsing racism, which is a racist act, making the actor a racist.

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yourcousin - October 30, 2016: I believe my response at the time was that it was far more complicated and nuanced than that. I think you’ve articulated a lot of sense in your response to WBS so I’m happy to leave it there if you would like, but my point is that you can’t have it both ways in the sense of Dems=Rep.=international capitalism while simultaneously railing that everyone who votes for Trump is an unabashed racist.

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WorldbyStorm - October 30, 2016: I would love to talk this out over a pint sometime and if you’re back any time we must do so – and I hope to be in the US in the next couple of years so there too would be good. I agree this isn’t in a way the context because it is so constrained and overly open to sounding a lot harsher than it as. I certainly don’t mean ‘that’s no argument’ in a personalised way or with any heat to it.

I guess I’d only say that weighing it up it seems to me that even if she’s in hock to Wall St. that is less concerning to me (particularly globally) than Trump. Again, I can’t make and wouldn’t make any suggestion that you or anyone else has to agree or to follow that. And like YC, I’m not arguing anything at all about HC’s virtue. Indeed this all gets a bit problematic because to outline where there are policy differences between C and T is to sound like an apologist for one over the other for example if I say, well she’ll raise some taxes on the more wealthy, or she’ll not introduce anti-labor and anti union legislation, or most likely provide continuity with Obamacare or most certainly support the right to choose that sounds like I’m in her corner. But that’s not it. If I’m in a corner at all – from this distance though the election does have an impact, I think Trump will have zero concern for the agreements and structures on this island for example whereas she’ll be bound by BC’s legacy to at least uphold them to some degree, indeed if I was a unionist I’d be sweating at that prospect – then I’m in the corner against Trump and from where I am Clinton is a weapon to use against him and against stuff like the threats to the GFA/BA etc, the only one at hand with any relevance.

Again, you’re absolutely right about the need for an alternative, but that has to be built up. It can’t just emerge from the reality of response to an actual President Trump. And it can’t just emerge at national/federal level. It needs sustained effort across the next five, ten, twenty year until it is possible to get a candidate who is from a movement that has the sort of critical mass an popular polling support to get into election debates, stand toe to toe against Democrats and Republicans and so on.

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Gewerkschaftler - October 30, 2016: I personally value what the ear to the ground reports of YC and Gendjinn. That said an outsider’s view can lend necessary distance. Says he diplomatically.

Eamonn (Cork & Troll) has put the wind up me a bit re the US election. I guess the question that would decide it for me might be “which of the two are most likely to start World War III”. I’m guessing Trump out of a fit wounded pathological egoism shades it, although herself seems to be quite insouciant about the dangers in Syria.

As I’ve said before, I’m glad I don’t have a vote in this one, and since the Brexit vote I’d be very hesitant to call anything.

Gary Younge’s reports from Muncie I liked.

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28. Gewerkschaftler - October 30, 2016: She (Birgitta Jónsdóttir) did rather less well than some of us had hoped in Iceland.

Is there some kind of other election on?

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WorldbyStorm - October 30, 2016: No, let’s talk about Iceland!

I was a bit gutted about that result. The Pirates have good inclinations.

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Gewerkschaftler - October 30, 2016: What I like about the Pirate Party there is their, for want of better words, is their hacker ethic with regards to politics. You find something similar in Podemos and the more recently founded Razem party in Poland.

It’s the very antithesis of TINA in spirit, and at the same time of the sticking to the well-worn paths laid out by dead white men with beards.

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WorldbyStorm - October 31, 2016: Likewise.

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29. CL - October 30, 2016: “As Europe’s history makes painfully clear, a return to aggressive nationalism could be dangerous, not just for the continent but also for the world. Yet a Europe of newly assertive nation-states would be preferable to the disjointed, ineffectual, and unpopular EU of today….

The EU aspired to transcend nation-states, but its fatal flaw has been its consistent failure to recognize the persistence of national differences and the importance of addressing threats on its frontiers….

The bet against sovereignty has failed. But sovereignty’s resurgence has conjured up many dark memories of the nationalism that twice brought the continent to the brink of annihilation. Many observers now worry that European politics are coming to resemble those of the 1930s, when populist leaders spewed hate to whip up support. Such fears are not wholly unfounded.

The Return of Europe’s Nation-States: The Upside to the EU’s Crisis

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30. CL - October 30, 2016: “the cult of the pure national tribe is back with a vengeance. It stalks the globe, from eastern Europe, to the Alternative for Germany party, to the crypto-fascist “alt right”. It produces eruptions of ugliness like the proposed instruction to British firms to report lists of foreign workers (now retracted). The world now divides into those who wish to live only with people who look, sound and (if they do) pray like them, and those who live, in fact celebrate, heterogeneity, the marketplace of the modern city.”-Simon Schama
https://www.ft.com/content/3b323e04-9b8b-11e6-8f9b-70e3cabccfae

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makedoanmend - October 31, 2016: hmmm…

I’m always wary of simple dichotomies.

The quote smacks too much of the good-bad, right and wrong, cowboys and injuns, entrepeneurs and scrowngers. etc. choices we are presented with from both the so-called right and left. It smacks of TINA.

The rise of the right’ist anti-establishment is much more varied and taken as a whole much more nuanced – structural labour surpluses; widening inequality within states; corporate dominance of private live; injection of market dogma into all aspects of social interaction and so on.

And I think also the implications of Schama’s quote might imply a fallacy.

The “purists” seem to be inherently portrayed a uni-dimensional (as if an Irish culture, for example, was simply boring, uninspirational and a fossilised dead end). Whereas the “heterogeneous” (as in evolutionary terminology) imply a multiplicity, progress and a brite new, varied life for its adherents. One must judge these things individually imo, not be handed a script which forces one to choose which team you would like to support.

Just my thoughts on a very complex subject. They are not meant as a direct criticism of the article, its author nor of the esteemed commentator, whose input into this site I find very informative.

And I do not have the time (studying and a professional procrastinator) to get too deeply into the subject just the now.

Do appreciate the article and quote – great fodder for the mind and very topical to this historical juncture when CETA was just endorsed.

CETA: Did the nation-state just die and did the Global Corporate-nonstate just birth?

Did things just get very, very bad for ‘Les Deplorables’?

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EWI - October 31, 2016: Do appreciate the article and quote – great fodder for the mind and very topical to this historical juncture when CETA was just endorsed.

CETA: Did the nation-state just die and did the Global Corporate-nonstate just birth?

Yes. And the behaviour of government-stooge RTÉ is whitewashing the objections to this horror-show have been something to behold. Pro-EU propaganda all the way through, I hope that some of the NGOs lodge complaints to the Broadcasting Authority.

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EWI - October 31, 2016: http://arstechnica.co.uk/tech-policy/2016/10/ceta-eu-canada-deal-signed-analysis/

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31. oconnorlysaght - October 31, 2016: Were I an American citizen (and not disenfranchised, that is), I would be voting Green, this time around. I take wbs’ point about big Hilary being a lesser evil for the White House than Trump, but I am old enough to remember how, in the sixties, Johnson ran against Goldwater, defeated him and then operated most of G’s programme. On the other hand, for those who think Trump is the lesser evil for being opposed by Wall Street, I would remark that on past form finance capital is able, after the initial shock, to coexist and even subvert populist causes. (And Trump is frank about wanting to cut taxes on the rich,) Again, T’s antiestablishment role must be questioned as he is clearly hand in glove with the FBI.

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fergal - October 31, 2016: LBJ’s Vietnam policy- yeah- but was Goldwater also advocating Medicaid, Medicare, Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act and Headstart?

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CL - October 31, 2016: “The actress who played “Daisy” in a 1964 campaign ad talks about the 2016 race in a television ad released by Democrat Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign Oct. 31″
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/new-clinton-ad-revisits-famous-daisy-ad-as-democrats-try-to-move-past-damaging-fbi-news/2016/10/31/294a9be0-9f6f-11e6-a44d-cc2898cfab06_story.html

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oconnorlysaght - October 31, 2016: Just so, Fergal. However, most of the measures you mention were passed before the Presidential election carried on the tide of emotion following the Kennedy assassination.. LBJ’s ‘Great Society’ platform aimed at using federal resources to build upon them. Such resources tended to end in the bottomless pit termed the Vietnam War.
And thanks for the kind words, Paddy. As you will gather, I am in better health and hope you are well, too.

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WorldbyStorm - November 1, 2016: Very glad to hear you are feeling well. Just to restress, I’m fully behind leftists taking whatever route they feel is best. I can only speak for myself and I would be very wrong to pretend that there’s one way and only one way.

Whatever the result in early November the real struggle remains the ability to build a genuine left of the Democratic Party alternative. The history of the NDP north of the Canadian border offers both hope and a cautionary tale. But that’s the only way forward IMHO. Otherwise we’re all fundamentally stuck in a position of meant to be corralling support behind the US equivalent of the liberal wing of FG. And bar in extremis that’s no place at all for us to be I think.

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Paddy Healy - October 31, 2016: Rayner, glad to see you are well again. I had heard you were not the best.
I listened to right wing academic economists who supports Trump recently on BBC Hard Talk.. He is particularly supportive of Trumps proposal to reduce corporation profits tax to 15%. He pointed out that this proposal was shared by the entire Republican Party not just Trump. He was prepared to overlook Trumps opposition to immigration. Such restrictions would undermine the supply of cheap labour. He seemed to imply that this was just demagogic politics for electoral purposes!
But when I consider Hilary and the Donald I am reminded of the old joke about directions given by an irish man to a tourist: “if I were you ,I wouldn’t start from here at all”
It is terrifying that the US Labour and trade union movement is so abject and powerless as the various imperialists conduct their proxy military conflicts and prepare for economic wars. As a post wold war 2 birth, I have a feeling my luck is running out!

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Paddy Healy - October 31, 2016: Italian premier Renzi has said that “red tape” will not prevent the quick rebuilding of the earthquake stricken area. Could he be reerring to restrictions on borrowing under the Fiscal Treaty? Now that the Anglo-French Alliance are getting their money from the PIGS through Fiscal Treaty/Bailout it is now moving on to imposing Fiscal Treaty/ Bail-in which is now in its interest. EU is insisting that Italy impose the hit on shareholders in Italian banks which are effectively bust. Renzi, unlike Noonan/ Kenny/ Burton/ Ross, has told Merkel-Hollande where to go. The bail-in would destroy the pensions of tens of millions of Italians.
Enda has asked for permission from the EU to borrow money to house the Irish people and is taking “no” for an answer. But Renzi represents a large country which retains some degree of self respect and sovereignty.
It would be quite a political/economic earthquake if Italy defected to the British side in the growing inter-imperialist conflict within Europe!!!!

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Gewerkschaftler - November 1, 2016: Paddy – the bold Renzi has yet to push through through a significantly anti-democratic referendum which weaken the power of Parliament in favour of the executive in December.

Most socialists and left trades unions are against these proposals. Former ‘social democrats’ – parties and unions – are for it.

Reform of the structures of representation an government is needed in Italy but not of this kind. The no voters are narrowly ahead in the polls, for what that’s worth.

I don’t think the Italians are going to ally themselves with the little British any time soon. Nor should we welcome it. The “return to the national” proposed by some of the left has so far borne only damage for the working classes of Europe.

The Italian Banks are still in slow collapse, but are just the worst case of general collapse of banking in Europe. Watch and intervene in that space of capitalism definitely – it’s were capital is at its weakest.

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32. EWI - October 31, 2016: UBER ruled an employer:

http://arstechnica.co.uk/tech-policy/2016/10/uber-employment-ruling-op-ed/

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33. sonofstan - November 1, 2016: Only IEL and EC will share my excitement, but I’m at the Airport and the Dundalk team were behind me going through security on their way to St. Petersberg.

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Michael Carley - November 1, 2016: Disappointed there’s no Lennon in the squad, though there is a Finn.

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irishelectionliterature - November 1, 2016: Did you wish them luck ?

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sonofstan - November 1, 2016: I did. Brief chat with Brian Gartland before my bag got hauled off for a swab test.

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irishelectionliterature - November 1, 2016: Excellent, hope they can get a decent result out there. Will be interesting to see if they can hold on to their players and I suspect qualification out of the group would help a few of them sign for another year…. rather than rot in Brightons reserves.

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Joe - November 1, 2016: I won’t say I’m excited but mildly interested certainly. Thanks for sharing.
They hauled off your bag for a swab test. Looking for drugs cos you’re a musician/academic or looking for banned literature cos you’re a leftie?

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Gewerkschaftler - November 1, 2016: They just want to sow a tracker in it, Joe. We need to know where these subversives are!

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Gewerkschaftler - November 1, 2016: Only joking – your mobile does that!

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sonofstan - November 1, 2016: I fly a lot and get swabbed about 1 in 10 times. I’ve given up taking offence. I suspect it’s a machine doing the ‘thinking’
Re the banned literature; a friend of mine was once travelling through holyhead back in the day and underwent a thorough bag search. When he asked what they were looking for, he got the immortal answer: ‘anything that might subvert the Crown, sir’

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Joe - November 1, 2016: Going the other way the answer would have been ‘durty books’.

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ar scáth a chéile - November 2, 2016: St Petersberg – have they gone and changed the name again?
It will always be Leningrad to me. Anyway, best of luck to the lilywhites

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sonofstan - November 2, 2016: 🙂 No ‘edit’ button. Very Stalinist this place.

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34. sonofstan - November 1, 2016: https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/editorial/political-physics

In some ways a sad sign of the times. Radical Philosophy, which managed not to be just an academic journal and did, for a long time lead the charge for engaged and outward looking political Philosophy in the UK is to cease its print publication and it is not yet clear what form it’s next instantiation will take.

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Gewerkschaftler - November 1, 2016: That’s a shame. I read that once in a while.

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35. Joe - November 1, 2016: What’t this? IMPACT acting like a trade union?
http://impacttradeunion.newsweaver.com/newsletter/1ji6gxh7kj26rrq8ifqg1x?email=true&a=1&p=51025751&t=24272675

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36. CL - November 2, 2016: “Tightening polls just a week before the US presidential election sent tremors through financial markets on Tuesday, as investors rethought their long-held bets on a Hillary Clinton victory.”
https://www.ft.com/content/8a6e52be-a054-11e6-86d5-4e36b35c3550

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37. irishelectionliterature - November 2, 2016: I see Andy Boyle and Daryl Horgan have been included in the provisional Irish Squad for the match against Austria.

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Joe - November 2, 2016: Bit thin on strikers. Forwards: Jonathan Walters (Stoke City), Adam Rooney (Aberdeen), Kevin Doyle (Colorado Rapids), David McGoldrick (Ipswich Town).

Time for Robbie’s comeback?

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irishelectionliterature - November 2, 2016: Could be!! Yer Man Hogan at Brentford would want to make his mind up soon and declare for us!

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Joe - November 2, 2016: What about Paddy Madden of Scunthorpe or Richie Towell of Brighton reserves? We need a hero…

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sonofstan - November 2, 2016: There are people at Bohs who would go along to boo Paddy Madden if he played for Ireland. Couple of missed chances in Terryland in 2010 cost us the three in a row, they reckon.

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Joe - November 2, 2016: They are allowed to boo him for that. But not to boo him if he ever plays for Rangers…

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38. sonofstan - November 2, 2016: There’s a Thomas Joseph Delaney captaining the Copenhagen team facing Leicester tonight. FAI missed a trick there, since he’s already played for Denmark.

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