The unions are dead in this country. Wal Mart closed a store in Canada recently that had successfully unionized.

Have you lost your mind not connecting the loss of American jobs to the quick buck fuck strategy of corporations ripping the rug out from under thousands upon thousands of workers and stripping communities?

Wal Mart to this day holds management meetings telling managers how to threaten employees over unionizing.

If you want the history of the unions in this country and their lack of achievement and the fact wages and benefits have gone while corporate profits up—try reading the paper.

Simple question: who is a better representative of real American values: Joe Hill, or Joe McCarthy?

You talk about the “tragic” history of the union movement, but there is triumph as well. And what are you comparing America’s union history to? Spain? Denmark? Mexico? China?

Yet again, you seem to want to look at America’s history in isolation, outside the global context.

If you’re going to define the union experience in America as a tragedy, you have to explain what your criteria are. What are you comparing it to?

do you have a comprehension disability?

McCarthy was a sick fuck—where do I state otherwise?

I said the commie witch hunt was a smoke screen for union busting.

do you have no idea of the tragic history of the union movement in this country?

and you need to take a deep breath and understand that because someone criticizes something—this is a public forum for invisceration–that doesnt mean they throw the baby out with the bath water.

and “dull binary thinking” is your prob, not mine.

your inability to follow a thread and then turn the intended meaning on its head to satisfy YOUR point of view rather than follow what someone is trying to express….

oh well. tant pis. doesnt matter.

Your bizarre arguments that keep stating because x is true y and z automatically follow is bad algebra, baby. bb.

A lot of people fought like hell to establish unions and won! They were smarter, more committed and more American than their opponents.

Now you come along and offer the view that Joe McCarthy is more of an American than Joe Hill?

What separates you from Ann Coulter?

Sure, you root for the different side, but your view of America is essentially the same as Coulter’s.

She sees Joe McCarthy as the real heart of America, fighting to prevent the seizure of private property by unionists and communists.

You appear to agree with Coulter’s historical frame for McCarthy as the representative American and only disagree on whether seizing private property is a good or bad thing.

McCarthy was nothing near the “heart of America.” He was an alcoholic demogogue out to save his failing political career by any means necessary. The man was feckless — a joke within and without his own party. His political fame and fortune was very short-lived and he his name and legacy are to this day synonymous with ANTI-AMERICAN demagoguery.

Coulter looks at America and says, because America has done many good things, it is defined as a good country and anyone who questions that is therefore anti-American.

Anna looks at America and says, because America has done many bad things, it is defined as a bad country, therefore rational, humanist people will also be anti-American.

Both are the product of dull, binary thinking.

The “the mad German-Scandanavian-European wagon loads” you despise included the ancestors of Albert Schweitzer and Joe Hill and George Carlin and Father Berrigan and Eleanor Roosevelt and Woodie Guthrie and Samuel Gompers and Bella Abzug and on and on and on and on — millions of real heroes known and unknown who fought against fascism and won.

Every place, every people has a dark side and America is no means exceptional in that regard. But if you’re going to define something, you need to focus on what makes it unique, not what makes it the same as everything else. And in America’s case, that’s the legacy of freedom, free thought, free speech and free people.

You are splitting hairs.

Another interesting note: The McCarthy era was not about routing commie pinko anything. It was about smashing the union movement to secure a stranglehold on the economy, profits and markets.

I have lived abroad. I know what the difference it is to live in a country that has universal health care and wages that allow for real paid time off; maternity leave and understand that protecting workers is protecting the economy.

Just the union busting antics over the past 100 years would support my thesis of the dark heart that beats in this country.

That so many people here vote against their own self interests is fact enough.

You are constructing a filigree of rhetoric rather than staying on the ground.

This country is still only an IDEA. I understand that. I understand we have a righteous mother fucker of a constitution that allows for redress of any injustice and that that process is subject to the people and sensibility working it at any given time.

I understand where everyone was coming from when they decided they needed to get “here”.

You starry eyed view of this country’s history of the last 150 years is jaw dropping.

The monumental venality that infected the whole seething enterprise. My God.

From the cesspool that was New York to the mad German-Scandanavian-European wagon loads that littered the way west and the crazy isolate sensibility that informed those who were no more than human detritus deposited across the plains.

Eee gads, man. Its in the details. The dust bowl years dislocated so many who were already only marginally literate—little real education offered the majority of Americans for years dispersed across the plains and the West. Generations of almost culture-less people shaped only by the forces of bare knuckle survival.

Yeah…that lends itself to a real civilized populace.

Thats what we are up against.

I

You point out that both The Nation and Life magazine criticized anti-Semitism. Why aren’t they they heart of America?

How did you arrive at the decision that the opponents of The Nation and Life are more definitive of America?

Firstly, The Nation’s and Life’s critiques were consistent with the fundamental ideal of llegal equality among religions/ethnic groups, a key American ideal.

Secondly, they prevailed. There is no formal anti-semitism anywhere in any American university today. The true heart of America can’t count the destruction of legalized anti-semitism as yet another achievement.

However: Events have conspired to create a tipping point. Between the Deus Ex Machina (for Obama) of the economic crisis which then caused McCain to blow his circuits and the miscalculation of unleashing Palin on the stump—its the old law of enantiodromia. Self preservation kicked in for a great deal of what would have been Republican voters.

go to http://www.thenation.com

click on:

Voting the Fate of the Nation

Chalmers Johnson : Presidential Election 2008

This can be a transformative election. Will economic meltdown, race or regional loyalty be the trump card?

Are you aware of how many institutions and organizations and companies would not hire Jews?

Your whole use of the word thrive is forgetting an entire universe of context. I suppose your argument is that since African Americans have forged a unique culture that is loved all over the world and is probably one of America’s ONLY admired exports that would lead you to say African American’s have THRIVED?

Columbia University and NYU Charged with Antisemitism (The Nation, 1921)

A short paragraph from 1921 in which the editors of The Nation level a charge at the admission departments for both New York University and Columbia University as having both taken steps that would reduce the number of Jewish students enrolled each year. The editors believed that the admission tests had been rewritten in such a way as to produce predictably lower scores among Jewish candidates:

“…Columbia authorities have not denied that in the two years following application of the new tests the percentage of Jews admitted fell from 40 to 22.”

Harvard University Charged with Antisemitism (Life Magazine, 1922)

Although Abbott Lawrence Lowell (1856 – 1943) enjoyed a long tenure as the president of Harvard University (1909 – 1933), his reign there was not entirely free from controversy. Among the few unpleasantries associated with his term was one in which he stated that Jewish enrollment to the university should be confined to an admissions quota that should not exceed the 15-percent mark. This brief article addresses the topic (and seemed to side with President Lowell) bringing up an exchange of letters that passed between Lowell and a Jewish alumnus, who is simply identified as “Graduate Benesch”.

You’d think your guy was about to lose. Take a Valium.

Not exactly.

New York is home to more Jews than any other city in the world and they didn’t come over on the Mayflower.

Jews have thrived in America like nowhere else, including Israel.

American humor is, primarily, Jewish humor.

American Jews, primarily, built the entertainment industry and while Afro-Americans, primarily, created jazz, soul and rhthym and blues, American Jews, primarily, produced it.

Where else have Jews thrived to the extent they have in America?

The essential difference between her view and mine is that she bases her analysis on the identity conservatives’ conceptual frame of America as exceptional. In their view, and Anna’s, America is best understood by its own standards of perfection. This is how she comes to believe that because American history shows fascistic impulses prevailing far more often than any humanist should desire, it is fundamentally fascist.

I reject the identity conservatives’ view that America is an exceptional nation that cannot be compared with others. American history is best understood as an integral part of world history and best compared against and put into the context of the histories of other places.

Gospel music, jazz and rock&roll didn’t originate in Britain or Arabia or Portugal, all of which enslaved Africans. They grew up in America and still thrive here.

Racism and fascistic impulses are an important part of American history and there is never a good reason to deny or downplay the facts. But these facts don’t define America. Every nation’s history is shaped by racism and fascistic impulses. Racism and fascistic impulses define us as humans, not as Americans.

What is definitive about America, and therefore its heart, is its commitment to human rights and equality under the law. This is what has, more than anything, made the history of America different from all others.

Our history shows that again and again, these commitments to equality and human rights prevailed. America isn’t unique in this. Other countries as well have every right to point the fruits of their commitments to human rights as evidence of their true spirit, but it is impossible to look at America honestly and not come away with the idea that its heart truly believes in freedom.

“The true heart of America welcomes immigrants, be they rich, poor, economic or political refugee, and always has.”

>>yeah thats why America turned back Jewish refugees cause the pure hearts of its citizens were so welcoming and pure; put signs in windows saying “Irish or Catholics need not apply”; and lets not forget the pure true heart of its racism—exemplified in Woody’s true, pure heart post vile racist tat that might be forgivable if done by a school boy, but now a grown “man” (I use the term loosely).

“The true heart of America has created the world’s most open, vibrant, dynamic and varied popular culture, in no small part because there are people from every corner of the earth that have been welcomed here”.

>>That open, vibrant, dynamic popular culture that transfers to the world at large is BLACK AMERICAN CULTURE. And the need for transcendence that forged the music, argot and sensibility was the true heart of American racism

The MYTH of America and the planet’s collective need for a “varied, vibrant, dynamic” culture is what made America the lightning rod for the idea of a “New World”

We are an experiment that isn’t finished and the planet is vested in the outcome. Everyone is part of it.

Misjudging the fascist element here is naive.

Germany was considered the most civilized country in the world…

There will be another civil war after this election.

It will be the revenge of the inarticulate, gibbering goons whose cumulative IQ is less than a plastic stacking deck chair.

They are the relatives of the denizens of Hartlepool who hung a shipwrecked monkey washed ashore during the Napoleanic wars
believing he was a French spy.

And the implication that most of Obama’s base started their political lives in 2000 is nonsense. One of the things that gives Obama an edge is the collective memory of the Clinton years, which were – you and Christopher Hitchens nothwithstanding – hardly “the horror, the horror” for most people. But nothing is static in politics and the fact that Obama utilized “movement politics” to win the nomination and the Presidency is going to have an impact going forward. I can’t predict with any precision, but Obama’s active base will inevitably come into play and effect the way he governs. I’m convinced this is part of his strategy.

Of course he’s going to “disappoint” (I assured myself of that well over a year ago), but the fact that he’s brought so many people – new and old – back into the political process and gives them a stake in his success (or failure) is going to make an Obama era much more interesting and unpredictable than Clinton redux could have been.

I’ve been shocked by your enthusiasm as Obama prevailed, frankly, but now is not the time to sit back, fold your arms and resume a reassuring cynicism. As a serious journalist, this whole unanticipated turn in electoral politics is like a gift (what better candidacy to launch your “Off the Bus” efforts ?) Believe it or not, I have almost as many problems with the majority of Democrats as you do, but won’t it be a pleasure to at least be able to follow the contours of a Presidency without getting distracted either by his dirty laundry or his obvious lack of any depth ? And to measure the impact of millions of people actually giving a shit as a young, smart President- who authentically exudes a measure of idealism – takes office.

You’ve pronounced the Democratic Party as beneath your contempt and incapable of anything resembling a revival of progressive, “small-d” democratic politics. The fact that since 2004 Howard Dean’s insurgent, grass-roots vision of the Party has steam-rolled the Clinton’s more static, top-down version of Democratic politics shows at least elements of your analysis as wrong or reductionist. Thank God that post-2000 generation you refer to, or any of the rest of the Obama “base”, didn’t also simply assumed Democratic electoral politics were utterly hopeless. (Or worse, that they haven’t reveled in the leftish hiptard nihilism regurgitated by Sergio – who apparently thinks watching Bill Maher is some sort of political statement but making phone calls or knocking on doors for Obama leads down a path to sugar-coated fascism. That clown is pure political incoherent and irrelevance – nothing but barely articulate barbs and cliches.)

MANAGUA (Reuters) – Nicaragua’s leftist President Daniel Ortega, a U.S. foe since the Cold War, said God was punishing the United States with the financial crisis for trying to impose its economic principles on poor countries.

“It’s incredible that in the most powerful country in the world, which spends billions of dollars on brutal wars … people do not have enough money to stay in their homes,” former Marxist guerrilla Ortega said in a speech late on Thursday.

“God is punishing the United States,” for imposing flawed economic policies on developing countries around the world, said Ortega, who first governed Nicaragua in the 1980s when his Sandinista government was locked in a war with U.S.-backed Contra rebels.

You would agree if you believed in God.

I suppose that makes the Democrats’ block of funds to the freedom fighting Contras all worth while.