Helsinki Is the Latest Offensive in Trump's War on the Establishment

by Gilbert Doctorow 16 July 2018

Back in April 2017, when the United States sent cruise missiles against the Sheyrat air base in Syria in response to alleged use of chemical weapons by Bashar Assad’s armed forces on his civilian population and also dropped the “mother of all bombs” on ISIS caves in Afghanistan a week later to no apparent purpose, I believed that Donald Trump was being guided by Henry Kissinger, then still in the President’s inner circle, to use the tactic of appearing unhinged as a way of establishing his power presence on the world stage and also to fend off domestic enemies who were plotting his impeachment.

In a word, it seemed that Trump was taking a page out of the Richard Nixon playbook from the Christmas Eve bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong Harbor in 1972.

In the fourteen months since then straight up to Trump’s scandalous behavior at the G7 summit in Canada in June when he refused to sign the collective declaration of participants and through to his back of the hand treatment of allies at the NATO summit in Brussels last week, I have come to appreciate that Trump had nothing to learn from Kissinger. Being unpredictable, being personally aggressive and impolite, being mendacious and contradictory to those he does not respect are clearly his long held business principles.

I salute him for this, because those he does not respect are precisely the liberal Atlantic community establishments in Washington, D.C., in Brussels who, since the USA achieved its unipolar moment with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, have waged war incessantly on piddling countries in Southern Europe, in the Middle East, spreading havoc and destruction, killing innumerable civilians while proclaiming the spread of human rights and democracy as their guiding principle.

In case the gentle reader sees this condemnation as unduly severe, even radical, I direct him or her to the article by Professor of Government at the Harvard Kennedy School Graham Allison: “The Myth of the Liberal Order” in the July-August issue of Foreign Affairs magazine. In 10 pages, Allison says very much the same thing as I have summarized in the preceding paragraph.

The leading personalities in the establishment are conformists for whom strength comes only from unity and a forced consensus that stifles all free thinking. By their political correctness, they crush dissent and make a mockery of freedom of expression.

Donald Trump has instinctively understood they are his ideological enemies and has dropped all pretense at courtesy, which leaves them collectively huffing and puffing, as we saw on the margins of the NATO gathering last week.

Ever since he moved into the White House, mainstream media in the US have resisted the temptation to call Trump a madman, but they continually insinuate that he is volatile, whimsical and generally speaking, in his changeability, frequent policy reversals, and seemingly quixotic for tilting at the windmills of establishment thinking on foreign policy, in particular.

This sort of commentary personalizes and so depreciates the political war that Trump is waging on the establishment. Trump campaigned against NATO in 2016, and despite his nodding as President to its continued existence, it is perfectly clear that he intends to pull the US out of NATO. He has taken up the grievances of the two past US administrations over the unwillingness of our European allies to properly fund the common defense. And he has used this as a bludgeon, doubling the target contributions to 4% of GDP, a target utterly unachievable for lack of political will on the Old Continent.

The confrontation with NATO allies over funding is really about the illogic of NATO’s existence, which is justified only by its creating the conditions for war. Trump in effect has been saying: if you, Europe, are beating the drum over a Russian threat to the Baltics, to European-American control of the Middle East, then pay the bill, don’t expect the US to continue to pay 75% of the tab. And this blunt threat shakes out the reality: that the Russian threat is invented to serve the interests of NATO’s continuity as an institution, nothing more.

Of course, Trump does not say this. Firstly, he does not have a way with words. Secondly, this is unspeakable heresy.

Trump campaigned in 2016 for normalization of relations with Russia. From the time of the forced resignation of his then National Security Adviser Michael Flynn in February 2017. Trump has had to retreat from that campaign pledge, and indeed, he has gone along with every proposal for ratcheting up sanctions on Russia that Congress has pitched to him and with every measure to show contempt for Moscow that the malicious functionaries at the State Department could serve up, such as confiscation of Russian consular properties.

However, when he gained traction against the Mueller investigation earlier this spring, when he fully absorbed the meaning of Vladimir Putin’s claims to full nuclear parity with the United States through roll-out of new and awesome weapons systems in his annual address to the Federal Assembly on 1 March 2018, Trump knew that a meeting to start to repair relations with the Kremlin could be postponed no longer. That was clear from his telephone call to Putin on 20 March to congratulate him on his electoral victory during which he said a meeting would have to be arranged “in the near future.” The summit with North Korean leader Kim in Singapore was not a self-standing event: it was an essential first step towards the meeting with Vladimir Putin taking place in Helsinki today.

In conclusion, in the person of Donald Trump we see remarkable continuity of thought and strategic vision notwithstanding all of the noise and contradictions used to disarm and confuse his opponents.

Trump’s Treasonous Traitor Summit or: How Liberals Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the New McCarthyism by CJ Hopkins 16 July 2018

Trump’s Treasonous Traitor Summit or: How Liberals Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the New McCarthyism by CJ Hopkins

So it appears America and democracy have miraculously survived the dreaded Trump-Putin summit … or Trump’s meeting with his Russian handler, as the neoliberal ruling classes and their mouthpieces in the corporate media would dearly like us all to believe. NATO has not been summarily dissolved. Poland has not been invaded by Russia. The offices of The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, and MSNBC have not been stormed by squads of jackbooted Trumpian Gestapo. The Destabilization of the Middle East, the Privatization of Virtually Everything, the Conversion of the Planet into One Big Shopping Mall, and other global capitalist projects are all going forward uninterrupted. Apart from Trump making a narcissistic, word-salad-babbling jackass of himself, which he does on a more or less daily basis, nothing particularly apocalyptic happened.

And so, once again, Western liberals, and others obsessed with Donald Trump, having been teased into a painfully tumescent paroxysm of anticipation of some unimaginably horrible event that would finally lead to Trump’s impeachment (or his removal from office by other means) were left standing around with their hysteria in their hands. It has become a sadistic ritual at this point … like a twisted, pseudo-Tantric exercise where the media get liberals all lathered up over whatever fresh horror Trump has just perpetrated (or some non-story story they have invented out of whole cloth), build the tension for several days, until liberals are moaning and begging for impeachment, or a full-blown CIA-sponsored coup, then pull out abruptly and leave the poor bastards writhing in agony until the next time … which is pretty much exactly what just happened.

In the days and weeks leading up to the summit, the global capitalist ruling class Resistance deployed every weapon in its mighty arsenal to whip the Western masses up into a frenzy of anti-Putin-Nazi fervor. While continuing to flog the wildly popular baby concentration camp story (because the Hitler stimulus never fails to elicit a Pavlovian response from Americans, regardless of how often or how blatantly you use it), the corporate media began hammering hard on the “Trump is a Russian Agent” hysteria. (Normally, the corporate media alternates between the Hitler hysteria and the Russia hysteria so as not to completely short-circuit the already scrambled brains of Western liberals, but given the imminent threat of a peace deal, they needed to go the whole hog this time and paint this summit as a secret, internationally televised assignation between Hitler and … well, Hitler).

In order to render them even more repugnant in the eyes of Western liberals (as if being two Hitlers wasn’t repugnant enough), The New York Timesproduced this short porno graphically depicting Trump and Putin as insatiably horny homosexual lovers. A fusillade of apocalyptic op-eds followed, the most shamelessly paranoid and hysterical of which was Roger Cohen’s experimental dystopia, in which “The Alliance of Authoritarian and Reactionary States” trick the inherently fascist Europeans into launching a Second Holocaust with a “fake news” story about Moroccan migrants abducting poor little “Tatiana” from a beach resort in Fuengirola.

While faithful New York Times-reading liberals were still struggling to regain control of their sphincters and doubling up on their alprazolam prescriptions in a desperate attempt to banish these visions of the coming butch-gay Putin-Nazi Reich, go-to propagandist, Jonathan Chait, who has obviously been watching way too much Homeland, published this paranoid spec-fic novella (complete with a “Carrie is off her meds” flow chart) about how Trump has probably been “a Russian intelligence asset” since 1987. At the same time, MSNBC’s Malcolm Nance took to Twitter to denounce Glenn Greenwald as a treasonous “agent of Trump and Moscow” for physically traveling to a conference in Russia and speaking with several Russian people. Nance, who usually just makes things up, was actually telling the truth this time. Greenwald really did visit Russia, and was selfied in the company of Edward Snowden, on top of which he’s totally gay, and God knows what kind of Commie orgies go on in the Kremlin dungeon!

And the neoliberal “Resistance” was just getting started. As Trump was arriving at Stansted Airport to begin his “destruction of British diplomacy” (and possibly poison the Queen with more of that Novichok oatmeal that has been plaguing the UK), The Guardian‘s Owen Jones was personally preparing cells of the “London Resistance” for “the biggest demonstration in British history,” or “the biggest weekday protest in British history,” or a very large protest in any event. The London Resistance’s secret weapon was the baby Russian Agent Hitler blimp, which forced Trump and his Nazi goons to retreat to one of his Scottish golf resorts, but not before humiliating America, and horrifying The Washington Post, by failing to grovel before the British monarch. Still, the point is, London was saved. The forces of hatred, bigotry, and Russianness were roundly defeated by the forces of love, and goodness, and democracy, and tolerance, and whatever. If only the French had been willing to deploy a baby Hitler blimp in 1940 … or had been able to unite the corporate media, the intelligence agencies, the capitalist ruling classes, and thousands of virtue-signaling liberals to disapprove of the original Hitler!

But that wasn’t all … oh no, far from it. No, the weeks of white-eyed editorials warning us of the dangers of peace, the neo-McCarthyite smear campaigns, the virtue-signaling Stop Trump protests, all that was just an extended edition of Orwell’s famous Two Minutes Hate, designed to generate mass hysteria and paranoia in the run-up to the summit. By Friday, the Intelligence Community was issuing warnings of imminent Russian “attempts to undermine America” with September 11 scale “cyber attacks!” National Intelligence Director Dan Coats personally told the AssociatedPress that the little “Imminent Russia Attack” lights he has on his desk were all “blinking red.” Apparently, Trump and the Putin-Nazis are preparing “a crippling cyber attack” against “critical US infrastructure,” like “a power outage in New England in January,” or even “a cyber attack on banks” that will erase Americans’ entire life savings but somehow spare all the Russian accounts, or at least another devastating round of division-sowing Facebook ads!

Then, just in time for the corporate media to milk it throughout the weekend, special counsel Robert Mueller, III released a 29-page indictment accusing a bunch of Russian spies of, well, basically, being Russian spies. The indictment alleges that these Russian spies destroyed the campaign of Hillary Clinton, who everyone knows is supposed to be President, by “hacking” the Democratic Party’s servers and stealing and disseminating emails revealing both Clinton and the Democratic Party to be the soulless neoliberal hypocrites most people already knew they were. The indictment of these Russian intelligence officers (and no Americans, nor any other parties who can ever actually be brought to trial, requiring special counsel Mueller to offer evidence to support his allegations) was followed up by a chorus of voices demanding that the summit be cancelled and that Trump slink home in complete disgrace to confess his crimes to a vindicated nation, and then presumably fire his entire administration, resign, and appoint Hillary Clinton President.

Sometime early Sunday morning, after hours of careful deliberation over cheeseburgers and sodas on Air Force One with the Gorilla Channel streaming on his smartphone for ambiance, Trump decided to go ahead with the summit. This left the Resistance no other choice than to turn up the dial on the manufactured hysteria by repeating the words “treason,” “treasonous,” and “traitor” as many times as humanly possible on every news site, television channel, and social media platform in existence, and just generally running around like lunatics shrieking about an “IMMINENT RUSSIAN ATTACK!”

On the morning of the summit, Charles M. Blow, maestro of alliteration and subtlety, in The New York Times (which, we must remember, holds itself to the highest journalistic standards and in no way resembles a rabble-rousing tabloid), published this impassioned piece entitled “Trump, Treasonous Traitor,” accusing the President of “betraying the nation,” and basically demanding that he be tried for treason. “America is under attack,” Blow announces, “and its president absolutely refuses to defend it.” If Mother Jones‘ David Corn has his way, Senator Rand Paul, who Corn denounces as “a traitor,” would also be taken outside and shot for the crime of noting that the Attack on America® Russia allegedly perpetrated is fairly standard clandestine behavior, engaged in by most developed nations, including the United States of America, whose history of election interference, coup-fomenting, assassinations, and other, more hamfisted forms of regime change is common knowledge, or at least it was, until the ruling classes and the corporate media turned the majority of Western liberals into paranoid McCarthyite fanatics denouncing anyone who questions the honesty of the US Intelligence Community as a “traitor,” and seeing Russians and Nazis coming out of the woodwork.

In the wake of Trump’s Treasonous Traitor Summit, which Garry Kasparov has called “the darkest hour in the history of the American presidency” (darker than Truman dropping the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki!), the neoliberal establishment and the corporate media appear to have gone full Joe McCarthy. Virtually every establishment mouthpiece, former spook, official state clown, from Thomas Friedman to Stephen Colbert, have been braying about “treason” and “traitorousness,” and suggesting that Donald Trump be removed from office by, you know, whatever means necessary. At least David Frum, senior editor at The Atlantichad the balls to openly call for a CIA-orchestrated military coup, because we can’t afford to wait for the legal process to take its course this time, as we are “facing a national security emergency!”

God knows where we go from here. It’s hard to believe the ruling classes can keep teasing liberals, and other Trump-obsessives, over and over and over like this, without eventually impeaching or shooting the guy … but then again, maybe they can. Perhaps they intend to continue conducting this experiment all the way up to 2020, just to see how paranoid and mindlessly conformist they make the majority of the Western public. In any event, if they decide not to impeach him, and then try him for treason, or just kill him, or whatever, the Democrats at least have a new campaign slogan that they can use in 2018 and beyond … “NEXT TIME VOTE FOR WHO WE TELL YOU TO, YOU RUSSIA-LOVING NAZI SCUM!” It kind of has a ring to it, doesn’t it?

https://web.archive.org/web/20180718214952/https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/07/18/trumps-treasonous-traitor-summit-or-how-liberals-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the-new-mccarthyism/

Burlington Vermont Nurses Staged a Two Day Strike - 16 July 2018

by Tristin Adie

ON FRIDAY NIGHT,13 July 2018, I marched with hundreds of nurses, their families and supportive community members from our picket line outside the University of Vermont (UVM) Medical Center to downtown Burlington. After two days of being on strike against the second-largest employer in the state, we filled the streets of its largest city, wearing our red T-shirts and carrying signs declaring the importance of safe staffing and fair wages.

I’ve been a socialist and an activist for my whole adult life. I’ve marched in more protests than I can count (200? 300? who knows?). In the 15 years I lived in New York City, I marched with tens of thousands of union members through various campaigns. I was a member of the Communications Workers of America union, and participated in a victorious two-week strike against Verizon.

But the last two days, and last night’s protest in particular, were unlike anything I’ve ever experienced, and it happened here in little old Burlington, Vermont: population 42,000. I’m still trying to figure out why.

MAYBE IT was the sheer breadth of participation in the strike. Despite sincere and deep concerns about leaving our patients in the care of scab nurses, entire units joined each other on the picket lines. The hospital itself admitted that only 93 of the 1,800 LPNs, RNs and APRNs in our union crossed the picket line.

UVM nurses on the march at the end of their two-day strike

I knew that the majority of nurses at UVMMC were angry about our working conditions. It was another thing to see that anger translated into a willingness to fight.

We organized 10 picket lines around town. Night-shift nurses maintained an overnight presence at the main hospital picket line. People made fantastically creative signs, taught themselves to lead chants and had special red T-shirts made to reflect the issues on their units. Some spirited souls even wore red tutus and ball gowns to the march.

Maybe, too, it was the community support. Hundreds of drivers passed us on the picket lines, laying on their horns, giving us the thumbs-up, pumping their fists in the air and flashing us electrified grins.

One UPS driver got out of his truck in order to run up and down our lines, high-fiving every single nurse he passed. Like other UPS drivers, he refused to cross our picket lines throughout the strike.

People brought nourishing, lovingly prepared food to our picket lines: roasted zucchini in herb sauce; homemade pesto; artisanal whole-grain bread; popsicles and ice water. Ben and Jerry’s drove a truck up, and served out ice cream by the cupful.

Teachers, university professors, grocery workers, EMTs, home care workers and so many family members of nurses walked the lines with us. A patient wearing his hospital gown — IV pole in tow — joined us in his wheelchair on the picket line. I’m crying as I write this.

Bus drivers shouted out solidarity to us over their PA systems as they drove by. A musician from Massachusetts played labor songs for hours, with lyrics refashioned to suit nursing issues.

Nurses from New York state and Massachusetts drove for hours to join us, even bringing along an inflatable, cigar-chomping “fat cat” that they positioned at a hospital entrance.

Local politicians joined us to give greetings. Sen. Bernie Sanders called in from D.C. to address us. Ordinary working-class heroes from across the country got their co-workers or socialist pals together to take pictures demonstrating solidarity with us. My favorite came from a comrade in India who took a picture together with her ill father, their fists raised in solidarity.

Maybe it was the timing. In Trump’s America, unions are supposed to be breathing their last gasps. After years of decline in the private sector, workers in the public sector are now facing the threat of extinction after the Janus v. AFSCME Council 31 Supreme Court decision.

But we’ve shown that workers can actually fight back against a twisted system, where corporate executives are rewarded with six-figure bonuses while we work longer hours, at a faster pace and for stagnant wages.

BUT IT’S more than all these factors. It’s something else: defiance, determination and confidence among people who are sick of being ground down.

Last night, someone played Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down” over a megaphone while we were marching. I thought to myself that we ought to try chanting that, so I started it up: “We won’t back down, we won’t back down...”

Suddenly, the fists of everyone around me went up, and that gorgeous Vermont air was filled with a loud, unified message that we will not back down in the face of greed and indifference from our hospital administrators.

My fellow nurses and community members have been transformed by this struggle.

I think that’s what feels different. We went from feeling defensive to feeling confident. From worrying that the community would call us greedy or insensitive to knowing that the community has our backs. From thinking a union was something external — a service group, perhaps — to knowing that we are the union. Our strength comes from our numbers and our solidarity.

It’s not over, and lots of questions remain about what happens next. We may need to strike again, perhaps for more than two days. There is certainly support for this among our co-workers. While we were picketing together, dozens of nurses told bargaining committee members that they want us to announce when the next strike will occur.

But it was clear by the end of last night’s march that we’re in this to win it: for our patients, our coworkers, our community and for working people everywhere. And we won’t back down.

'The Little Savage' by Frederick Marryat - Considered

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfWSg9_hD3E&t=5s



https://xenagoguevicene.com/2018/07/14/the-little-savage-by-frederick-marryat-reading-the-first-chapter-aloud/

14 July 2018

I fell down a rabbit hole in a literary sense. I was looking at various videos on Youtube that criticized popular movies for being ‘politically correct’ and using an all female caste just to have an all female caste. One example that attracted lots of Youtube video makers anger was ‘Ghostbusters’ with a number of women as the lead characters. I saw someone had a video noting the all female caste of a re-make of ‘Lord of the Flies.’ The book of note has had two movies already – one black and white, the other more recently in color. So…why make it again? To sell tickets hopefully should be the first consideration. I guess. Or to make a point. One could be made. Women would handle the situation of being on an isolated desert isle differently than the boys in the book.

As I was reading the comments about the movie idea I read someone refer to a book that ‘Lord of the Flies’ was a kind of answer to – The Coral Island: A Tale of the Pacific Ocean (1858) is a novel written by Scottish author R. M. Ballantyne. The work became a standard for youth education in England and perhaps America in the 19th century. I looked the work up and found links to the text on Project Gutenberg and an audio reading on Librivox. I started to listen to the work but was lulled into disinterest by the obvious moral tone of this adventure-sermon. Britain is praised, Christianity is validated, and drunken louts of low class sailors are punished.

But the work lead me to another title in the Wikipedia article about the sailing adventure. I saw the title ‘Mr Midshipman Easy’ by Frederick Marryat. I seemed to remember an Illustrated Classic comic book cover with that title. A man in a broad striped shirt swinging on a block and tackle next to the side of a 19th century wooden sailing boat. One of the covers of those comic books that made me long to know what the story was all about. So, I listened and read the text of ‘Mr Midshipman Easy.’ I was delighted with the first opening lines of the work at the wit and word play. This man, Frederick Marryat, could tell a story.



Having time on my hands since Angie is at day camp I pushed through ‘Mr Midshipman Easy’ in two or three days with a combination of audio while looking at text, listening to audio while lying down, or simply reading the text with no audio. Sometimes witty, sometimes a plain adventure, and sometimes a bit of a counter-attack against a blind belief in the ‘Rights of Man.’



Project Gutenberg text of 'The Little Savage' by Frederick Marryat - http://www.gutenberg.org/files/21551/21551-h/21551-h.htm

I moved on next to ‘The Little Savage’ by Frederick Marryat. But, when I looked at the Wikipedia page there was a link to Project Gutenberg text, but no link to a Librivox audio. There was no audio available. I tried looking on Audible.com, but they make it hard to see what they have. I thought I had found an orphaned audio classic; I could make a voice recording and pin my fortune to a famous star.

Yesterday, when Angie was at camp, I made a video recording of me reading the first chapter. I set up my tripod and put the camera on auto and made a video recording. I wasn’t aimed at my face, because my face would not be on the finished video. I took the video on a memory stick/ thumb drive and put it on the parlor computer where I could get a video of a candle burning as the visual to put my audio to. I used the Windows Live Movie Maker to edit out the coughs and word stumbles. Then I put the video in Adobe Premier Elements to put the video and audio together. I put the finished movie back on the memory stick and put it on Youtube for anyone to see. I went to my bedroom laptop and put a number of ads on Reddit to direct people to see my video.

So far about four people have seen the video. Not much demand for a 1848 children’s adventure book. Although I put the link on r/VoiceOver and the counter said 76 people had clicked on the link. Perhaps they could watch the video on Reddit without leaving to go to Youtube and adding to the count there.

At least I made the effort to create something that did not exist that morning. On the way home from camp I was talking to Angie about the video I had made and she said she wanted to see it. That’s enough of an audience for me….or, at least an important beginning. I want to get a better microphone; the one I am using is an 8$ model from Walmart, or the microphone on the camera that is picking up everything.

As I read along deeper into the story the tone seems to be very preachy and full of Christian homilies. The story was not finished when Frederick Marryat died and his son took his notes and completed the work for publication. The work does not contain any of the wit I saw in ‘Mr Midshipman Easy.’ The last half seems to be all ‘Trust in God’ from a missionary woman who arrives.

I was wondering if I should even continue to read the entire work. I could just leave the first chapter on Youtube to get one interested and then the curious can follow the link to Project Gutenberg. I also thought of re-writing the work myself. The sections were God and Christ are explained could be a lot more entertaining, and true to what a real savage on an island might thing of 19th Century British Christianity.

HBO’s 'Succession': Why are these dreadful people allowed to decide what we see and hear? By Joanne Laurier 13 July 2018

HBO’s Succession: Why are these dreadful people allowed to decide what we see and hear? By Joanne Laurier 13 July 2018

Jeremy Strong in Succession

Created by Jesse Armstrong

The HBO television series, Succession, is a sharply drawn, scathing portrait of a family that owns and operates a global media conglomerate. The 10-episode first season—six have aired so far—premiered in June and has been renewed for a second season.

Succession is the creation of British writer Jesse Armstrong, whose credits include Black Mirror (one episode), Veep, The Thick of It and In the Loop. Armstrong, actor/comedian Will Ferrell and Adam McKay (director of The Big Short ) serve as executive producers, along with Frank Rich (former New York Times columnist and Veep producer), among others.

At the center of Succession, set largely in New York City, is Logan Roy (Brian Cox), a tyrannical, 80-year-old patriarch and the head of Waystar Royco, a media behemoth that operates in some 50 countries.

Married to his third wife and wily champion, Marcia (Palestinian actress Hiam Abbass), Logan suffers a massive brain hemorrhage early on in the series. Taking him for dead, or, at least, brain-dead, his children begin vying for control of the empire.

The most likely successor is Kendall (Jeremy Strong), Logan’s eldest son from his second marriage. Next in line is Roman (Kieran Culkin), an irresponsible, self-centered jokester, as degenerate as he is quick-witted. Connor (Alan Ruck), Logan’s eldest son, and only child from his first marriage, is a “New Ager” now living in New Mexico, while Siobhan “Shiv” (Sarah Snook), Logan’s daughter and youngest child, is pursuing a career in Democratic Party politics.

Arriving on the family-corporate scene is cousin Greg (Nicholas Braun), an apparent dolt and grandson of Logan’s estranged brother Ewan (James Cromwell), currently residing in Canada. Though viewed by his cousins as a “rescue pup” or charity case, Greg catches the ambition bug as he works under the direction of Tom (Matthew Macfadyen), Shiv’s boyfriend and a senior executive at the firm. Frank (Peter Friedman) is the company’s Machiavellian Chief Operating Officer.

Jeremy Strong, Hiam Abbass and Brian Cox in Succession

As the conspiring surges and the feuding rages among the siblings, Kendall acquires—at an exorbitant price—a digital media firm run by Lawrence (Rob Yang), who gloats: “You just invited me into the chicken coop. And without Daddy around to protect you, I’m gonna eat you all, one by f-----g one.”

In Episode 2 (Sh*t Show at the F**k Factor), Logan lies in a hospital bed. Connor, who considers himself a “UN White Helmet”-type in the succession struggle, muses bizarrely that his father “once talked to me about cryogenics … All the other billionaires are strolling around in new bodies, but not Dad, because we were too embarrassed to actually discuss it.”

In an effort to stabilize Waystar’s plummeting stock price, Kendall schemes to take the reins and “control the narrative,” while the others are in favor of a more nonaligned CEO. General counsel Gerri (J. Smith-Cameron), not inclined herself to take a “job that makes your brain explode,” stuns Kendall with the information that Logan has strapped Waystar with over three billion dollars in debt.

Kendall tries unsuccessfully to negotiate with one of the banks in question, whom he accuses of extortion and “buzz-saw castration.” Faced with “total corporate collapse,” he rallies the employees to brainstorm his “Strategy of a Thousand Lifeboats,” imploring them to activate their “armada of eyeballs.” Meanwhile, Shiv enlists the help of an old flame to investigate Marcia, who Kendall and Roman view as a “power-hungry maniac.” Kendall makes a deal with a private equity huckster, Stewy (Arian Moayed), described as chiseling his profits “like a vampire locust.”

Upon hearing that Logan, now semi-recovered, is planning to address Waystar’s charity ball, dubbed the “Sad Sack Wasp Trap,” Kendall, who was originally slated to speak, is concerned—and jealous: “What if he falls asleep in his soup? What if he starts shouting racist comments? ... When he opens his mouth, anything could come out. Drool, anti-Semitism, a f-----g string of silk handkerchiefs tied together.” But Logan comes on strong, telling the audience, that includes Stewy—“the little schmuck who owns such a big chunk of me”—that he is not retiring.

Succession

Increasingly desperate, Kendall sets about organizing a vote of no-confidence in his father. Meanwhile, Logan and his brother Ewan face off at a Thanksgiving dinner, during which the former accuses the latter of being a “carnival barker for all the wars we really didn’t need,” such as Vietnam: “Viet Cong come up your drainpipe in Ottawa, did they?” To which Ewan replies, “This whole family is a nest of vipers.” Proving the point, Tom sends Greg to the office to shred documents related to Waystar’s criminal behavior. The resentful Greg keeps some for future leverage.

In Episode 6, entitled “Which Side Are You On?” (the famed 1931 coal miners’ union ballad plays during the closing credits), Kendall pleads his case with the Waystar Royco board members: “[Logan] is currently unfit to run this company … He took on levels of debt that threatened the very existence of our firm, he is lining up dead-weight acquisitions in a sector that he has a historic regard for, but which is a non-growth area.

“We face existential battles in scale, and he is facing precisely the wrong direction. He is making decisions for a future that he no longer understands, and we don’t have time for missteps … Our entire ice cap will melt. He is gambling our last dollars at the track on a horse that’s ready for the glue factory, and I am calling for a vote of no confidence in him as CEO and chairman.”

Kendall’s effort is unsuccessful, in part because Logan intimidates Roman (a central figure in the plot!) into voting against the no-confidence motion. Logan instantly fires all those, including Kendall, who lined up in opposition to him, The episode ends with the mogul smugly speaking on the phone to the US president—who previously cancelled a meeting with Logan because of a terror scare—about fast-tracking his proposed acquisitions: “Well, you really had a terrorist problem. I’ve just taken down a terrorist myself. My son. So, can you help me with this FCC [Federal Communications Commission] red tape bullshit?”

The series is relatively unsparing in its criticism of the rich. Some moments are stronger than others and there are a number worthy of special mention. For example, in Episode 3, Kendall is advised that there are a “million options” to save the company, including “swaps, acquisitions, cooperative interactions. You know, smart stuff only a young man like you can conceive of.” But the firm’s attorney Gerri prefers the old-fashioned option: “If you want stuff that works for the price: layoffs.” In other words, the reckless and shortsighted running up of billions of dollars in debt will translate into a global slaughter of jobs.

In Episode 6, Tom takes Greg to a disgustingly expensive “pop-up”—i.e., a temporary restaurant (during a festival or some such event). He wants to educate the neophyte: Greg: “How come the wine list doesn’t have any prices?” Tom: “Because they’re obscene. Look, here’s the thing about being rich, OK? It’s f-----g great. OK? It’s like being a superhero, only better. You get to do what you want, the authorities can’t really touch you, you get to wear a costume, but it’s designed by Armani, and it doesn’t make you look like a prick.” The pair proceed to drink vodkas at “2,000 bucks a pop.”

Brian Cox in Succession

Tom receives a call informing him the no-confidence vote is going ahead. He deliriously tells Greg: “It’s happening. The troops are taking Saddam’s palace, man. This time tomorrow, you and me … I could be like the third most important guy in the company. I mean, it’s the storming of the Bastille. Let us eat cake.” It’s an effective sequence, summing up the backstabbing and unvarnished ostentation. In an interview, actor Jeremy Strong bluntly notes that the “language of our family is just the language of business.”

Succession is well done, and strongly focused within its own parameters. It delights in gleefully and nastily taking on this crowd, and reaffirms that television is capable of producing biting social satire and critique. It is an angry series with a sharp vision and direction, working with an obvious purposefulness.

The series is especially valuable because—whether the creators recognize it fully or not—it poses a burning question: how is this miniscule group of self-involved and essentially talentless nobodies able to determine what an American and global population of billions gets to see and hear?

Succession contributes to undermining what’s left of people’s confidence in the news and entertainment world, which is no small matter at this time of frenetic efforts to censor the Internet and prop up “authoritative” news sources.

Above all, the show paints these billionaires and their hangers-on as cutthroats and parasites, who offer absolutely nothing to (in fact, subtract a great deal from) society or the public discourse. Their vast uselessness, their social “unnecessariness,” stands in contrast even to the Robber Barons of the past (Ford, Carnegie, Rockefeller, etc.) who at least were engaged, brutally, in building and producing something. Succession points to the truth of the Bertolt Brecht adage that perhaps people like the Roys have to be the way they are, but they don’t have to be .

And, although it may be a secondary matter, the creators also point to the fact that the reckless, careless and anarchic pursuit of wealth and power is self-destructive, that it does not make a single one of them happy. Tension, anger, discontent, frustration are their lot.

The actors give it their all: the veteran Cox as the ruthless Logan is excellent, as is Strong as Kendall, a man who fools himself into believing his dirty maneuvers are altruistically motivated. Culkin stands out as a fast talker without principles or backbone, as does Macfadyen as Tom, an opportunist social climber who is not embarrassed to buy Logan a watch that “every time you look at it tells you exactly how rich you are.”

An interviewer from Forbes asked Armstrong if Succession was an evolved version of his 2010 script about Rupert Murdoch, to which he answered: “[ Succession ] offers the liberation of not being tied to a real family and a real man. But are there echoes of Murdoch? I think anyone who knows about him and his family will feel the echoes there. They’ll feel echoes of Trump, of Redstone [owner of Viacom], of the Sinclair family [another conservative broadcast empire], of the Roberts family from Comcast, the Mercer family from Breitbart. There’s a lot of resonance and Murdoch is certainly one of those”—in short, a rogues’ gallery of media and corporate titans!

One might quibble that the “real-life” Murdochs, Redstones and Sinclairs are not nearly as clever and energetic as their portraits here. Armstrong and other comedy writers like Armando Ianucci tend at times to get a little carried away with their own creations. This can even inadvertently lend a little too much luster to their characters whose originals, in this case, are simply mediocre and vicious.

In any event, the interest in and popularity of Succession is further proof that, despite the lingering claims of the official “Americans love free enterprise” narrative, great numbers of people, including a good many artists, view the layer at the very top as greedy, cruel and half-mad.

A Cresent Moon at Sunrise on the 10th of July 2018

I saw a twinkle at the bottom of the faint outline of the letter 'C' as I looked to the east while skating on the street under the street lights at 4:30 in the morning today. I looked again as I skated out to the main street and looked down the hill towards the square church tower and the reddening eastern sky against the lightening blue and black above. With my naked eye I looked and tried to use my hands to block out some of the many street lights around me. I am in the City of Boston, and the streets glow at night, I could read a book. Well, large type. "What is that light?" I asked myself. "Curiouser, and curiouser..."



As I skated up and down the street I looked toward the moon and again and again thought I saw a little point of a star right at the tip. I went inside to have some more of my green tea and sat down at my kitchen computer to find an answer. I do have a program on another computer that I use that has a 'Night Sky' program, but I don't want to put the disk in. I found one entry on a search with Startpage with the word "The crescent Moon will squeak past the bright star Aldebaran early tomorrow." on a site called "StarDate" https://stardate.org/nightsky. But when I click on the link I didn't see anything about the Moon and Aldebaran. There was an article for 10 July - but I searched the entire page and could not find the year. I suppose they only post for the current month - but where is the the scientific accuracy and attention to detail? Four numerals on the page to answer an important question.



I had skated out to the double yellow line on the empty street and looked to the west to see the flashing red light at the intersection. I skated so the red light was right on the curve of the hill and the yellow street lines were on either side. I looked east and saw the crescent moon and thought of the Islamic image of Venus and the crescent Moon. That's when I thought I saw a little gleam of a light at the bottom. There are lots of lights in the sky around here since there is an airport a couple of miles away. Lots of lights and moving things in the day and night sky. But as I skated on the empty street I did not see the tiny bright light move. I laughed thinking about the 'Alien Bases on the Moon' conspiracy theory.



"There you have it folks, someone is up there doing something!"

As I skated back down my side street I looked through trees and the spaces between houses to see the moon and the twinkling companion. I decided to go inside and get my binoculars and more tea. When I came out the sky was blue and day was here. I looked toward the thin white sliver of the moon and could not see anything off the southern tip. The twinkle was gone.

In Memory of Zoe Chrysali 1968–2018 - Requiescat in Pace et in Amore

https://archive.is/x4SQG

Workers Vanguard No. 1136 29 June 2018

In Memory of Zoe Chrysali

1968–2018

The following is translated from O Bolsevikos [The Bolshevik] (No. 4, April 2018), newspaper of the Trotskyist Group of Greece (TOE).

Zoe Chrysali, one of the founding cadres of the Trotskyist Group of Greece, section of the International Communist League, died at the age of only 50 of brain cancer at her home in Aspropyrgos after years of health problems. We extend our deepest condolences to her sister Georgia and to all her friends.

Zoe was born and grew up in the working-class district of Aspropyrgos. From an early age she suffered from serious health issues, which she fought to the end with her incomparable tenacity despite the extreme adversity she faced. She was a stubborn person, with a special, sharp sense of humor, passionately insistent in expressing her opinions. She loved to tease and challenge her comrades and friends and was always up for a good fight. She adored music and books.

Having a keen sense of what it is to grow up and live as a woman in backward Greek society, Zoe joined the workers movement to fight against women’s oppression and for female sexual liberation. She understood that only through socialist revolution could women achieve their full emancipation.

Zoe came into contact with the ICL in mid 1999 and was won to the international’s position of principled opposition to the imperialist war against Serbia. In March 2000, she took part in discussions, along with other sympathizers, studying the ICL’s program. From then until 2003, when the TOE became a sympathizing section of the ICL at its Fourth International Conference, she played a leading role in the founding of the Greek section on a number of key questions, including the “Russian Question” and capitalist counterrevolution in the Soviet Union and East Europe. In June 2000, she wrote:

“I studied anew Trotsky’s books The Class Nature of the Soviet State, The Revolution Betrayed and the “Declaration of Principles” of the ICL. Thereafter, together with our own discussions, I consider that the positions of the ICL on the question of Afghanistan are consistent with our ideology and I agree with them on the basis of the defense of a bureaucratically degenerated workers state against the threat of the bourgeois counterrevolution.

“In regard to the question of China, what I consider applies is what Trotsky maintained in 1933, when he fought against the conception that the bureaucracy had already destroyed the Soviet workers state: Trotskyists judge that situation as dangerous but not desperate and they consider it an act of cowardice to announce that the revolutionary fight has been lost before the fight and without a fight.”

In 2001, Zoe engaged in the most important fight of her political life, playing a leading role in defense of national minorities in Greece against the then “leader” of the group, who refused to defend oppressed national minorities. This is a vital question for the establishment of a genuine Leninist-Trotskyist party in a Balkan country. The fight that she waged with other comrades on the national question led to a split in the group between the real internationalists and those who had compromised with poisonous Greek nationalism. It was this major struggle that laid the basis for the founding of the TOE. It is no exaggeration to say that without Zoe, there would probably not be a section of the ICL in Greece. In 2002, she went to London and worked with our comrades there, gaining valuable internationalist experience.

In 2005, Zoe withdrew from politics but remained a sympathizer of the TOE for many years. For a while, due to the enormous health problems that she faced, Zoe lost touch with our section and with the international. However, around five years ago she resumed contact with the Greek section. Fully aware that she had only a short time to live, Zoe asked us to arrange a secular funeral for her after she died. In a society in which cremation of the dead is not allowed and in which, for the most part, funeral arrangements—whether secular or religious—are dictated by the family, Zoe wished to make a final statement against religion and the Orthodox church.

It was not easy to carry out this last request, and we had to fight against the religious ceremony that had already been organized. Nevertheless, we succeeded with the valuable help of a sympathizer. In our grief at no longer having Zoe among us, we are comforted a little by the knowledge that we were able to satisfy her last wish. Those who knew her well will laugh and say that even in her death there had to be a little fight. It is more than certain that she deserved it.

We dedicate to our friend and comrade Zoe this issue of our newspaper, which reflects her struggle against the “holy trinity” of Greek capitalism—fatherland, religion and family.

http://www.icl-fi.org/english/wv/1136/zoe_chrysali.html