Mediaboss Marketing

Has anyone else observed a striking pattern in the New York Times recently? Theyve hosted a series of fond, nostalgic recollections about the good old days of twentieth-century Communismthe optimism, the idealism, the moral authority. Not to mention the gulags, the squalor, and the soul-crushing conformity.

Actually, they dont usually mention those things. These articles are part of a series called Red Century, which is supposedly dedicated to exploring the history and legacy of Communism, 100 years after the Russian Revolution. But that history and legacy turn out to be very selectively explored. The editors of the Times could easily spend a year filling their newspaper with a hair-raising litany of Communisms crimes across the globe, stuff that would keep their readers up at night for weeks. Theres certainly no shortage of material: the terror, the gulags, the Holodomor, the Cultural Revolution, and so on. Yet in this series, the crimes of Communism are mostly just hinted at.

A few articles deal forthrightly with the horrors of the Soviet regime. Others present being a member of the secret police as a morally complex issueit was way to build the future and be a part of something larger than themselvessomething I doubt the Times would be foolish enough to publish if it were about a former member of the Gestapo or the Klan.

Disturbingly, most entries are in this vein of talking about the idealism and human warmth and just plain caring of the people who denied the gulags and the mass starvation in Ukraine. Sure, they may have abetted the torture and murder of millions, but their devotion to creating a more just world was infectious, the party was possessed of a moral authority that lent shape and substanceto an urgent sense of social injustice, and all of it was infused by an inherent optimism for the future, implied by socialism and progressivism.

The overall thrust of the series is summed up in a call to try Communism again, but maybe this time try not to have any gulags. No, really.

This time, people get to vote. Well, debate and deliberate and then voteand have faith that people can organize together to chart new destinations for humanity.

We may reject the version of Lenin and the Bolsheviks as crazed demons and choose to see them as well-intentioned people trying to build a better world out of a crisis, but we must work out how to avoid their failures.

Meanwhile, we can actually tune in live and see what happens when someone tries to act on this idea of reviving the Communist ideal. A few years ago, leftist pundits were praising Venezuela as a socialist miracle. Then the socialist regime hit the Thatcher Line: it ran out of other peoples money (in this case, oil company money) and the illusion came crashing down. The result: desperate poverty, shortages, squalor, children dying in hospitals from lack of medicine and equipment, refugees fleeing in makeshift boats.

In other words: your basic rundown for a radical socialist regime. Its not the first time this has happened. Its not even the tenth time.

And the socialist revolutionaries respond the way they always have: they try to save the revolution by exterminating political freedom. In the past few weeks, while folks at The New York Times were airily speculating about reviving Communism, but in a good way, Venezuelas socialist revolutionaries staged a flagrantly rigged vote to overturn representative government, and now they have brought back the midnight knock on the door, with the arbitrary arrest and imprisonment of opposition leaders.

At home, the Left is calling for resistance against the authoritarianism of Donald Trumpwhile their most prominent mouthpieces are actively whitewashing a movement that stands for totalitarianism, and the actual young idealists in places like Venezuela are getting gunned down in the streets by the regime. Some of this has even been reported in The New York Times. Maybe somebody ought to inform the opinion editors.

What is it about a thoroughly discredited doctrine like Communism that just wont die? My overall sense from the Red Century series is that enough years have passed since the fall of the Iron Curtain that Western intellectuals now feel they can get away with downplaying Communisms crimes and failures and return to rapturous descriptions of its abstract ideals, without the need any longer to take a serious look at what those ideals really meant in practice.

The theory of Communismthe elevation of the collective over the individual and of government dictates above free, private decision-makingis the fundamental cause of all of its evils. But its also a moral theory with old roots, on that has established itself in many peoples minds as synonymous with morality itself. Of course everyone should put the collective public good over private interestswhat could possibly go wrong? Well, we found out what could go wrong, over and over again. We have plenty of reasons to think that individual rights and private interests are actually essential to a free and prosperous societynot to mention that they might help keep us out of the gulag.

But if you cant bring yourself to question whether the theory of socialism is synonymous with the very idea of morality and progress, you wont be able to relinquish the socialist dream, even after it has been exposed as a nightmare.

This deep vein of denial has troubling consequences. One signstill on a very small scaleis the reconstitution of Young Communist Clubs, something I havent seen much of since I was in college in 1989, the year reality pulled the rug out from under all of the earnest young socialists. This can only be happening again because todays young people have been allowed to grow up ignorant of the nature of Communism, both in the past and in the present. And this is aided and abetted by publications at the top of the culture, like The New York Times, as they draw a gauzy curtain of nostalgia across the history of twentieth-century Communism.

One of those Red Century encomiums to Communist idealism sums up its case by recalling Rosa Luxemburgs revolutionary ultimatum: socialism or barbarism.' But the lesson of historyheck, the lesson of our own timeis that socialism is barbarism.

Dont let The New York Times send this truth down the memory hole.

Follow Robert on Twitter.

Read this article:
Why Is The New York Times Trying to Rehabilitate Communism? - The Federalist

The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) has 25,000 members. Its growth over the past year has been massive tripling in size and no doubt a product of the increasing rejection of a bipartisan neoliberal consensus that has visited severe economic insecurity on the vast majority, particularly among young workers.

No socialist organization has been this large in decades. The possibilities for transforming American politics are exhilarating.

In considering how to make such a transformation happen, we might be tempted to usher those ranks of new socialists into existing vehicles for social change: community organizations, trade unions, or electoral campaigns organizations more likely to win immediate victories for the workers that are at the center of our vision. Why not put our energy and hone our skills where they seem to be needed the most? Workers needs are incredibly urgent; shouldnt we drop everything and join in these existing struggles right now?

While its crucial to be deeply involved in such struggles as socialists, we also have something unique to offer the working class, harnessing a logic that supports but is different from the one that organizers for those existing vehicles operate under. Heres a sketch of a practical approach rooted in that vision that can win support for democratic social change in the short run and a majority for socialist transformation in the long run.

For socialists, theory and practice must be joined at the hip. Socialists work for reforms that weaken the power of capital and enhance the power of working people, with the aim of winning further demands what Andr Gorz called non-reformist reforms. We want to move towards a complete break with the capitalist system. Socialists, unlike single-issue activists, know that democratic victories must be followed by more democratic victories, or they will be rolled back.

Single-payer health care is a classic example of a non-reformist reform, one that would pry our health system free from capitals iron grip and empower the working class by nationalizing the private health insurance industry. But socialists conceive of this struggle differently than single-issue advocates of Medicare for All.

Socialists understand that single payer alone cannot deal with the cost spiral driven by for-profit hospital and pharmaceutical companies. If we do achieve a national (or state-level) single-payer system, the fight wouldnt be over; socialists would then fight for nationalization of the pharmaceutical industry. A truly socialized health care system (as in Britain and Sweden) would nationalize hospitals and clinics staffed by well-paid, unionized health care workers.

Socialists can and should be at the forefront of fights like this today. To do so, we must gain the skills needed to define who holds power in a given sector and how to organize those who have a stake in taking it away from them. But we cant simply be the best activists in mass struggles. Single-issue groups too often attack a few particularly bad corporate actors without also arguing that a given crisis cannot be solved without curtailing capitalist power.

Socialists not only have to be the most competent organizers in struggle, but they have to offer an analysis that reveals the systemic roots of a particular crisis and offer reforms that challenge the logic of capitalism.

As socialists, our analysis of capitalism leads us to not just a moral and ethical critique of the system, but to seeing workers as the central agents of winning change.

This isnt a random fetishizing of workers its based on their structural position in the economy. Workers have the ability to disrupt production and exchange, and they have an interest in banding together and articulating collective demands. This makes them the key agents of change under capitalism.

This view can be caricatured as ignoring struggles for racial justice, immigrant rights, reproductive freedom, and more. But nothing could be further from the truth. The working class is majority women and disproportionately brown and black and immigrant; fighting for the working class means fighting on precisely these issues, as well as for the rights of children, the elderly, and all those who cannot participate in the paid labor market.

Socialists must also fight on the ideological front. We must combat the dominant ideology of market individualism with a compelling vision of democracy and freedom, and show how only in a society characterized by democratic decision-making and universal political, civil, and social rights can individuals truly flourish.

If socialist activists cannot articulate an attractive vision of socialist freedom, we will not be able to overcome popular suspicion that socialism would be a drab, pseudo-egalitarian, authoritarian society. Thus we must model in our own socialist organizations the democratic debate, peaceful conflict, and social solidarity that would characterize a socialist world.

A democratic socialist organization that doesnt have a rich and accessible internal educational life will not develop an activist core who can be public tribunes for socialism. Activists dont stay committed to building a socialist organization unless they can articulate to themselves and others why even a reformed capitalism remains a flawed, undemocratic society.

But socialists must also be front and center in struggles to win the short-term victories that empower people and lead them to demand more. Socialists today are a minority building and pushing forward a potential, progressive anti-corporate majority. We have no illusions that the dominant wing of the Democrats are our friends. Of course, most levels of government are now run by Republicans well to the right of them. But taking on neoliberal Democrats must be part of a strategy to defeat the far right.

Take the Democrats, who are showing what woeful supposed leaders of the resistance they are every day. Contrary to the party leaderships single-note insistence, the Russians did not steal the election for Trump; rather, a tepid Democratic candidate who ran on expertise and competence lost because her corporate ties precluded her articulation of a program that would aid the working class a $15 minimum wage, Medicare for All, free public higher education.

Clinton failed to gain enough working-class votes of all races to win the key states in the former industrial heartland; she ended up losing to the most disliked, buffoonish presidential candidate in history. If we remain enthralled to Democratic politics-as-usual, were going to continue being stuck with cretins like Donald Trump.

Of course, progressive and socialist candidates who openly reject the neoliberal mainstream Democratic agenda may choose for pragmatic reasons to use the Democratic Party ballot line in partisan races. But whatever ballot line the movement chooses to use, we must always be working to increase the independent power of labor and the Left.

Sanders provides an example: its hard to imagine him offering a radical opening to using the s word in American politics for his openly independent campaign if he had run on an independent line. Bernie also showed the strength of socialists using coalition politics to build a short-term progressive majority and to win people over to a social-democratic program and, sometimes, to socialism. Sanders gained the support of six major unions; if we had real social movement unionism in this country, he would have carried the banner of the entire organized working-class movement.

Bernies weaker performance than Clinton among voters of color though not among millennials of color derived mostly from his being a less known commodity. But it also demonstrated that socialists need deeper social roots among older women and communities of color. That means developing the organizing strategies that will better implant us in the labor movement and working-class communities, as well as struggles for racial justice and gender and sexual emancipation.

Socialists have the incumbent obligation to broaden out the post-Sanders, anti-corporate trend in US politics into a working-class rainbow coalition. We must also fight our governments imperialist foreign policy and push to massively cut wasteful defense spending. We should be involved in multiracial coalitions, fighting for reforms like equitable public education and affordable housing.

Democratic socialists can be the glue that brings together disparate social movement that share an interest in democratizing corporate power. We can see the class relations that pervade society and how they offer common avenues of struggle. But at 25,000 members, we cant substitute ourselves for the broader currents needed to break the power of both far-right nativist Republicans and pro-corporate neoliberal Democrats.

We have to work together with broader movements that may not be anti-capitalist but remain committed to reforms. These movements have the potential to win material improvements for workers lives. If we stay isolated from them, we will slide into sectarian irrelevance.

Of course, socialists should endeavor to build their own organizational strength and to operate as an independent political force. We cannot mute our criticism against business unionist trends in the labor movement and the middle-class professional leadership of many advocacy groups. But in the here and now, we must also help win those victories that will empower workers to conceive of more radical democratic gains. Our members are disproportionately highly educated, young, male, and white. To win victories, we must pursue a strategy and orientation that makes us more representative of the working class.

In the final analysis, socialists must be both tribunes for socialism and the best organizers. Thats how the Communist Party grew rapidly from 1935-1939. They set themselves up as the left wing of the CIO and of the New Deal coalition, and grew from twenty thousand to one hundred thousand members during that period.

The Socialist Party, on the other hand, condemned the New Deal as a restoration of capitalism. In saying so they were partly right: the New Deal was in part about saving capitalism from itself. But such a stance was also profoundly wrong in that it distanced the Socialist Party from popular struggles from below, including those for workers rights and racial equality that forced capital to make important concessions. This rejection was rooted in a concern that those struggles were reformist; it led the SP to fall from twenty thousand members in 1935 to three thousand in 1939.

Of course, there are also negative lessons to be learned from the Communist growth during the Popular Front period. They hid their socialist identity in an attempt to appeal to the broadest swath of Americans possible. When forced to reveal it, they referred to an authoritarian Soviet Union as their model. And by following Moscows line on the Hitler-Stalin Pact and then the no-strike pledge during World War II, the party abandoned the most militant sectors of the working class. Thus, the Communists put themselves in a position that prevented them from ever winning hegemony within the US working-class movement from liberal forces.

Still, the Popular Front was the last time socialism had any mass presence in the United States in part because, in its own way, the Communists rooted their struggles for democracy within US political culture while trying to build a truly multiracial working-class movement.

The road to DSA becoming a real working-class organization runs through us becoming the openly socialist wing of a mass movement opposed to a bipartisan neoliberal consensus. If we only become better organizers, with more practical skills in door-knocking and phone-banking and one-on-one conversations, we will likely see the defection of many of our most skilled organizers who will take those skills and get jobs doing mass work in reformist organizations.

Such a defection bedeviled DSA in the 1980s, leading to a donut phenomenon thousands of members embedded in mass movements, but few building the center of DSA as an organization. We must avoid this. Simultaneously, if we dont relate politically to social forces bigger than our own, DSA could devolve into merely a large socialist sect or subculture.

The choice to adopt a strategy that would move us towards becoming a mass socialist organization with working-class roots is ours. This is the most promising moment for the socialist left in decades. If we take advantage of it, we can make our own history.

See the rest here:
What Should Socialists Do? - Jacobin - Jacobin magazine

The Democratic Socialists of Americahave a big question to answer a 24,000-person strong question. According to a recent announcement, thats how many members the group claims to have, thanks in part to the interest in socialism prompted by the insurgent presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders and as a reaction to theelection of a far-right president in Donald Trump. But, as800 delegates descend on Chicago forthe DSA conventionthis week, the group must figure out how itsmasses of card-carrying socialists will engage in electoral politics.

Local chapters have debated how much energy to put into running for office versus engaging in issue advocacy, and whether to align with Democrats or work on building a new political party.

EnterJabari Brisport a DSA-endorsed, Green Party candidate for New Yorks 35th City Council District whooffers one potential path forward for the group.

A flyer for a New York City council candidate forum hangs outside the Epiphany Lutheran School in Brooklyn, NY on July 26, 2017.

Photo: Bryan Thomas for The Intercept

Brisport is a 29-year-old African American artist and activist who was born and raised in the 35th District, which includes portions of Crown Heights, Prospect Heights, and other neighborhoods in Brooklyn. In a wide-ranging interview with The Intercept, he described his motivation for running, and his thoughts on the larger political zeitgeist.

Grassroots politics runs deep in his family as does radicalism. Brisports mother is a former Black Panther. Hespent years organizing around local causes, and was an enthusiastic backer of Sanderss presidential campaign. Unlike Sanders, however, Brisport chose to end his cooperation with Democratic Party after the election.

Last year, I was really just fed up with the party, he said. After Bernie lost the nomination, I decided to moved on out to the Greens who, honestly, ideologically Im closer to and are a better fit with me. I was also tired of arguing with other Democrats over things I think are basic, like whether money influences politics.

The New York City Councils first-past-the-post elections, where whoever gets the most votes wins outright, running as a third-party candidate is tough.But because Brooklyn is so heavily dominated by Democrats,Brisport is essentially trying to introduce atwo-party competition. In doing that, hes walking a path similar to Kshama Sawant, the Socialist Alternative councilwoman in Seattle who defeated a Democratic opponent on a platform designed around democratizing wealth and power in the city.

The incumbent in the 35th District is a former art museum executive named Laurie Cumbo,who moved into the district to run for office in 2013. Brisports main ideological difference with Cumbo is their divergent approaches to developing Brooklyn.

Hers is what Ive seen called the Guggenheim Theory of development, which is that if you bring lots of really glitzy art spaces to an area, really great concert halls, really great art museums, so on and so forth, thatll bring economic improvement to the area, he noted. Which is like a half-truth. Because it brings more wealth and improvement to the area but also pushes out the poor people.

What Brisport is describing is the process of gentrification, which has swept his part of Brooklyn in recent years, drawing the ire ofAfrican American and West Indian communitiesin the district. Brisport claims to offera more democratic form of growth guided by the local community.

Give more community control, he suggested, pointing to the redevelopment of the Bedford-Union Armory in Crown Heights. Brisport opposes plans to turn the 138,000-square-foot armory into a bonanza for private developers. Instead, he is supporting residents who want to turn the site into a community land trust. Under such a model, land development would be approved by a nonprofit controlled by the local community.

People from the community organize into a non-profit, and then you can turn over the land to them, instead of wealthy developer, he explained. They can choose who they contract out to. Maybe theyll contract out to a non-profit. Ultimately, theyll have final say in the negotiations.

That same spirit of greater localized democracy runs through the entirety of Brisports platform: From expanding participatory budgeting, to requiring police officers to live in the city, to taxing the rich to ensure a more equitable distribution of wealth and power.

One of the challenges ofBrisports run for office and for DSA, in general is defining democratic socialism in a way that Americans will embrace it as a mainstream ideology.

You tell somebody socialism without hearing somebody describe it, they automatically think government owns everything, takes away your property, he complained. Its not necessarily thinking about it as government. Its about We The People. Its about having power and agency over how things are guided.

He cited the financial crisis as an example of how a group of elites were able to negatively impact the lives of millions of people without facing democratic accountability.

In 2008, when the banks crashed the economy, we cant vote out the CEOs of those banks, we have no say over those bankers, he noted. However, if an elected official messes up the economy, you can vote them out. You have a say.

A crowd gathers for a New York City council candidate forum inside the Epiphany Lutheran School in Brooklyn, NY on July 26, 2017.

Photo: Bryan Thomas for The Intercept

One of the obstacles Sanderss presidential campaign faced in his race against Hillary Clinton was the strong loyalty shown by older African American voters to the establishment of the Democratic Party. The only cohort of the black electorate Sanders won was the youngest. The establishment party candidates also made strong showingsamong these voters of other ethnic backgrounds in races againstpopulists. In his re-election bid, Chicagos Mayor Rahm Emanuel, for instance, counted on strong black support to beat back challenger Chuy Garcia in his Democratic primary. Sanders-backed Tom Perriello suffered from a deficit among black voters in the Virginia Democratic gubernatorial primary.

For Brisports part, these shortfalls came largely thanksto a coordinated campaign by the partys establishment and the deep Southern tiesheld by Clinton and her husband, the former Arkansas governor President Bill Clinton.

The Democratic Party weaponized identity politics a little bit against Bernie Sanders, he said of last years presidential primary. As soon as he started losing the South, they made this whole thing of him not connecting with black voters. Which is insane. Because like, if Coke was really doing well in the South over Pepsi, nobody would be like, Well, I guess Pepsi is having trouble connecting with black voters!'

However, he also said Sanders should have adjusted his approach to appeal to a wider set of voters. Bernie also is a little big guilty, he conceded. At some point, he failed to move things outside of an economic lens. I think he was asked this one question at a debate that was like whats your biggest blind spot as a white person. He said, when youre white you dont know what its like to be poor. I dont know how he got to that conclusion.

I love Bernie. I would vote for him ten times. But Im not sure what he was going for with that statement, Brisport continued. I think his bigger blinder was seeing so much from an economic lens when you do need a mixture of an economic approach and an approach towards marginalized group. When I said weaponized identity politics earlier, I dont mean to say Im anti-identity politics. I understand their role. Its a double-edged sword. Its something to be addressed not something to be used as character assassination.

Brisports criticism matches that of Khalid Kamau, a DSA-backed socialist candidate who won a city council seat in South Fulton, Georgia, in the spring.

I love Bernie, but I think where his campaign failed I dont think this is a personal failure of Bernie, but perhaps of the people that were around him and advising that campaign is that there wasnt enough attention paid to people of color, Kamau told Truthout in March. I am not sure that people of color who were in that campaign were listened to the way they should have been.

New York City council candidate Jabari Brisport (second from left) meets with constituents following a candidate forum inside the Epiphany Lutheran School in Brooklyn, NY on July 26, 2017.

Photo: Bryan Thomas for The Intercept

Going forward, Brisport believes the best way for democratic socialists to build a truly multi-racial movement is to show up and support communities of every background.

DSA is multi-tendency. Its electoral but also fighting lots of different battles: housing, immigrant justice, climate, labor rights, strike solidarity, education he explained. What theyve been really great at doing is going into these conflicts where the community is fighting. And not only allying themselves with the local community, but amplifying them and also taking a backseat. Not like coming up and saying, Were DSA were running this. But also saying how can we amplify what you do?

New York Citys 2,000-member strong DSA chapter has put its money where it mouth is in diversifying the movement. So far, both of the candidates it supports for city council races comes from non-white backgrounds. In addition to Brisport, DSA voted to endorse Reverend Khader El-Yateem in his Democratic primary in Brooklyns diverse Bay Ridge neighborhood. El-Yateem is a Palestinian Christian and a supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaign (BDS) a bold stance in a city known for its stridently pro-Israel politics.

El-Yateem is Trumps worst nightmare. He supports immigrants, is Arab-American and explicitly refuses to take money from developers, NYC-DSA Co-Chairwoman Rahel Biru said in a statement.

Brisport has seen the difficulties in organizing people of different ethnic backgrounds into one movement first hand in his own backyard. He pointed to disputes between Caribbean Americans and Jewish Americans in Brooklyn over housing as an example.

Theres a general sense in the community that the Jews are buying up the land and controlling everything, he said of complaints hes seen in the Caribbean community. Which is upsetting. He added, Its almost like what I saw Trump do. He saw peoples real concerns about an economy that was failing them and shifting it over to Muslims and Mexicans.

Brisports goal is to end the racial infighting and unite his diverse district behind democratic socialism.

What I tell people is gentrification isnt caused by white people, its caused by capitalism, he said. If you de-commodify the land and you take the profit motive away then we can actually fight against this.

Top photo: Jabari Brisport, a 29-year-old actor-turned-activist-turned-member of the Democratic Socialists of America, poses for a portrait in Brooklyn, NY on July 26, 2017.

Continue reading here:
Jabari Brisport Is Running For City Council to Bring Democratic Socialism to Brooklyn - The Intercept

It is enormously frustrating that conservatives cant capture the moral high ground from the phony virtue-signaling factory that is the modern Democratic Party. Conservative policies not only work better but also are morally superior.

Democrats depend on cliches and false narratives to obstruct true reform which includes shaming many Republicans from believing enough in their own agenda to pursue it with conviction. This is nowhere more apparent than in the endless debate over the fate of Obamacare and the future of American health care.

It is unconscionable that Republicans are unable to muster a simple majority to end the Obamacare monstrosity a freakish beast that does everything it promised not to do and does little it promised to do, a gargantuan scam that is destroying our health care, eroding our liberty and punishing our economy. Its a camel with its entire body already inside the tent of the American idea hellbent on completing Obamas plan to fundamentally demolish it.

Democrats are incapable of offering new ideas because they are ideologically and politically enslaved. Their worldview weds them to the historically discredited notion that great results flow from allegedly good intentions. And their lust for power impels them to exploit identity politics and perpetuate victimhood for the constituencies whose overwhelming support is essential to their political lifeblood.

For example, they cant support decentralization and competition in education, no matter how much that could improve the lives of minorities trapped in inferior schools, or support across-the-board tax cuts even though cuts for higher-income earners help stimulate economic growth, which redounds to the benefit of middle- and lower-income earners because they cannot abandon their class warfare strategy.

Now back to todays more pressing issue health care reform. Their policies have wrought untold disaster across the board, yet they will acknowledge no responsibility for these failures, much less join, in any way, those seeking solutions.

Democrats tell us they would be happy to work with Republicans to repair the glitches in Obamacare. The problem is that we are not dealing with mere glitches. The entire legislative debacle is a galloping cancer on our system.

Further exposing the Democrats fraud, almost all of the Republicans so-called repeal and replace proposals have not actually contemplated repeal at all; theyve just proposed revisions. Yet Democrats, in lockstep, will not even come to the table to discuss them. In other words, except for their failed efforts to fully repeal the bill, all Republican proposals have been efforts not to completely end Obamacare (sad to say) but to partially repair it.

Democrats dont want the system improved. They know its a barely disguised wealth redistribution scheme that if left alone will necessarily eventuate in a single-payer system a euphemism for socialized medicine.

So for now, lets forget Democrats, who have no intention of working with Republicans on this.

What about the couple of handfuls of pseudo-Republicans who dont have the decency to end this nightmare the ones who campaigned on the promise to repeal this law but wont now pull the trigger?

I dont want to hear that their consciences are involved or that they are from liberal states. How about their intellectual honesty and dignity?

Why do they enable Democratic propaganda that millions would be hurt by repealing a law that forces those millions to buy insurance against their will? Why arent they held accountable for giving life-support to a law that is already harming people and would result in socializing one-sixth of our economy?

Dont you just love hearing the self-serving protestations of these squishes, pretending to care so much about people while they are single-handedly (as Democratic intransigence is an irremediable reality) decimating world historys greatest health care system?

There is nothing compassionate about what Democrats and their sanctimonious foxhole-sharing Republican frauds are doing here.

Its time for freedom-loving, people-loving Americans to turn the tables on these charlatans and recapture the moral high ground through aggressive and intelligent messaging. Well never save this republic if we cant make the case that government largesse is fundamentally destructive and incompetent and that the invisible hand of the market yields results across the board that are more beneficial for more people than those of any other system known to man.

Socialism kills, impoverishes and enslaves and only masquerades as compassion while facilitating the compassion merchants consolidation of power. Freedom brings prosperity and, if you insist on using compassion as the be-all-end-all yardstick, is abundantly compassionate.

^

Follow David Limbaugh on Twitter @davidlimbaugh and his website at http://www.davidlimbaugh.com.

See the article here:
DAVID LIMBAUGH: Socialism kills, impoverishes, enslaves - Examiner Enterprise

Picture: Tumblr screengrab / Alisher Sharip on Unsplash

An old tumblrpost is doing the rounds on the internetagain,but the arguments surrounding itremainjust as heated.

The post itself is fairly ancient in internet terms, having originally been first sharedon a personal blog in 2012.

It featuresa young American girlgirl enjoying a 'Japanese tea party' at home, complete with kimono, Origami and Asian-style cuisine.

The post is a 'how-to', written byHeidi, a Utah homemaker and mother to four children - who decided to throw thethemed tea party for her daughter.

The pictures and accompanying explainerdidn't remain on the 'how-to'blog long though, and waspicked up by a tumblr user, whoexpressedconcern surroundingcultural appropriation.

User ginzers shared the post and picturewith the comment:

Teach children that this is not ok

What followed was a pretty heated back and forth from other users, some agreeing with the sentiment that it's not 'OK' to appropriate otherpeople's culture, and others seeing it as simply akid's tea party.

Then, a tumblr user identifying themselves as Japanese stepped in to share their thoughts on the matter.

The response was quickly cheered and supported by other Tumblr users, and in the years that have followed this particular posthas percolated around reddit and various other forums in one form or another. Hence why it resurfaces from time-to-time.

Interestingly, one thing that doesn't crop up nearly as often is a follow up post from the original tumblr poster ginzers

Afterreceivingquite a bit of flak for their initial anger at the tea party, they went on to share some furtherthoughts on tumblr

More:This student's message about white privilege is the most important thing you'll read today

Read the rest here:
Someone called this girl's Japanese tea party racist and then a ... - The indy100