KPFA has the podcast Ajamu Baraka on American Exceptionalism & The Failure of The Left.

Today on Flashpoints, we feature a discussion with Ajamu Baraka about American Exceptionalism and the failure of the Left to challenge US foreign policy.

The interview with Ajamu Baraka takes up the first 20 minutes of this podcast. Even though I agree with Baraka, I noticed I had a little resistance at first to the implications of what he was saying. That didn’t last long, as I realized that he was right about those implications, and I just had to deal with it.

Naked Capitalism has the article “How to Run a Cheap Foreign Labor Economic Model”.

The editor, Yves Smith, gives the following introduction to the article:

Yves here. In a bit of “cart before the horse,” I’m featuring this post on an approach to labor arbitrage that despite having a certain internal logic, serves to illustrate how far out of whack the debate over unregulated international trade has become.

With that proviso in mind, here is a teaser from the article itself. It follows the description of how to do it “right”.

This can be contrasted with what we’re actually doing, which is importing cheap foreign labor into our formerly high wages services economy.

When you do that what happens is wages get systemically undermined. Profits for those businesses that are exposed to the rising volume of demand and the falling wages enjoy a margin boost. These will include property developers, banks and some retailers (though certainly not all). That’s because the wider economy gets bogged down as wages growth stalls and falls.

This is the type of thing we need to understand if we are ever to get a handle on the falling living standards of most people in this country. We also need to understand the oligarch’s trick of making workers around the world compete for the ever lower wages of the jobs that are available. This competitive spiral downward is what needs to be broken by giving workers more rights around the world. We can do it by legislation in this country and by diplomatic negotiations with other countries to encourage them to do the same.

Upworthy has the article A short comic gives the simplest, most perfect explanation of privilege I’ve ever seen.

Privilege means that some of us have advantages over others for any number of reasons we don’t control — like who we are, where we come from, the color of our skin, or certain things that have happened in our lives.

Here are the first few panels of the cartoon. You have to go to the article to see all of it.

This explains what I came to realize after doing research for an essay in sophomore year in college. Before coming to understand this, I was a fan of Ayn Rand’s. After I came to understand this, I realized that she was just like Richard.

Huffington Post has the article The Confederate General Who Was Erased.

By now, Americans interested in the Confederate monument removal project have had it drilled into them that the monuments were erected decades after the end of the Civil War as testimonies to white supremacy in all its various manifestations: segregation, disenfranchisement, lynching, peonage, and second-class citizenship across the board. But the monuments were not merely commemorative. They were designed to conceal a past that their designers wanted to suppress. That past was the period after Reconstruction and before Jim Crow, years in which African Americans in the former Confederacy exercised political power, ran for public office, published newspapers, marched as militias, ran businesses, organized voluntary associations, built schools and churches: a time, in other words, when they participated as full members of society.

This description of history jibes with my readings of that history. I have read about the progress toward equality that was made after the Civil War and how it was turned back in the early 20^th century. This is the history we must remember when having arguments over statues that glorify the Confederate cause.

Current Affairs has the definitive article Thinking Strategically About Free Speech And Violence.

There are many great ideas in the article. There is one that I would like to give special emphasis to by quoting it below.

The battle is not for the hearts and minds of white supremacists, but for the hearts and minds of the general public.

I always keep this in mind for postings on this blog and any discussions I get into on the internet. I never assume that I can change the mind of the opponent in a discussion. I am just hoping that I can present a reasonable argument that the silent readers of the discussion can think about. I don’t want the readers to think that there is no rebuttal to the argument my opponent uses.

YouTube has a video President Donald Trump Spoke about War in Afghanistan.

If there is going to be a discussion of what President Trump said, we might as well base it on what he actually said. Here are his words with nobody else telling you what he said.

Its Going Down! has the article Soros, ‘Globalism,’ and Grassroots Revolt: How the Right Uses Conspiracy Theories to Appear Revolutionary.

At the end of the day, the myth of Soros and the globalists is helpful to the far-Right because quite simply it explains why people revolt; for the Right, it’s simple: they are paid to and on their own, are too dumb or incapable of organizing anything. This myth goes back to the anti-Semitic and racist views of old, and the anti-communist lines held by the John Birch Society that a select group of puppet masters are playing the good workers and poor in an elaborate scheme for world domination.

If people are going to publish anti-Soros propaganda, I figured that maybe i should have my own counter-propaganda ready to spring on them.

Rawstory has the article Far-right anti-semites and far-right Israel supporters attack George Soros after email leaks

As one commenter put it.

Matt Love: Good on you for fighting the Soros conspiracy theories. Points subtracted for believing the idiotic Russia Russia Russia ™ conspiracy theories.

Democracy Now has a very important two part piece. Antifa: A Look at the Anti-Fascist Movement Confronting White Supremacists in the Streets and Part 2 || Antifa: A Look at the Anti-Fascist Movement Confronting White Supremacists in the Streets.

President Trump is facing widespread criticism for his latest comments on the deadly white supremacist protest in Charlottesville, Virginia. Speaking at Trump Tower on Tuesday, Trump said the violence was in part caused by what he called the “alt-left.” President Trump’s comment were widely decried. Former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney wrote on Twitter, “No, not the same. One side is racist, bigoted, Nazi. The other opposes racism and bigotry. Morally different universes.” We look at one of the groups who confronted the white supremacists in the streets: the anti-fascists known as antifa. We speak to Mark Bray, author of the new book, “Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook.”

Until the events in Charlottesville, the group Antifa was barely on my radar. Even I fell for some of the corporate press and Trump insinuations about the organization. There is nothing like hearing it explained by an authority on the subject.

When I posted the first part of the interview on my Facebook page, I made the following introduction:

This is the kind of discussion of Anti-Fa that we need to hear. The only part I disagree with is the need to use any tactic that is needed to stop fascism. I still hope that tactics that comport with our Constitution will be enough. We should stick to protecting civil liberties as long as we possibly can.

Remember that the First Amendment simply says “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

It protects the right “peaceably to assemble”. It does not protect the right to violently assemble. There is a vast difference between these two.

After listening to the second part, I am not nearly so sure of myself. I think it requires a deeper analysis than I have given before I can support or disparage any of their tactics. Perhaps we all need to read the new book, “Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook.” According to Amazon, the book will be shipped only after September 12, 2017. You can pre-order the Kindle version or the physical book now.

I have been receiving push back from some quarters about Antifa. The claim is that there are numerous YouTube video that show what Antifa means by approving “use any tactic that is needed to stop fascism”. The claim is that if I see some of what they have done, I won’t approve of some of those actions.

I haven’t found a suitable example video yet, so I cannot form an opinion yet on whether or not I approve of actions that Antifa has taken in the USA. I’ll have to do more research, but I did want to acknowledge that I heard the feedback and did not dismiss it out of hand.

I was told to do a Google search on “Tim Pool Antifa” to see videos of some of the things that have been reported about Antifa. I can’t decide which video to show on this blog, so I’ll let you look at the search results (at the previous link) and decide for yourself. It’s not looking too good for Antifa.

The Real News Network has the article GOP and Democrats Push Trump on Tax Reform. You can watch the video and/or read the transcript at their web site above.

Former financial regulator Bill Black says the Democrats’ demands are the result of bad economics and bad politics, while Trump’s vision is “the type of thing that comes from ingesting too much peyote”

I am glad Bill Black doesn’t get tired of explaining this because the best way to fight misinformation is to tell the truth over and over again. There are major aspects of the Democratic and Republican tax “plans” that make absolutely no economic sense. If we keep doing these things, our economy will never recover.

As citizens of this country, why would we want plans that make our situation worse? If our leaders have the incentive to propose plans that hurt the bottom 99%, we in the bottom 99% should at least stop encouraging them to harm us.

Forbes has the article China-Like Wages Now Part Of U.S. Employment Boom.

“The impact of globalization and in, particular, the entry of China into the WTO in 2002 increased the global labor supply markedly,” he says. “Excess supply of Chinese labor and the stream of low cost Chinese goods into the world economy was a boon for global consumers and contributed to disinflationary price pressures, which some central banks said was the result of their successful inflation-targeting policies,” he says, in a jab to central bankers.

This has not come as a surprise to me since 2002.

I have been predicting for probably 40 years or more that the USA has no God given right to a higher standard of living than other countries in the world. My prediction was that the standard of living in other parts of the world would rise some, and the standard of living in the USA would fall some. Policy could impact the sizes of these rises and falls, but the trend toward equalization could not be stopped peacefully.

The policies we could have adopted could have made both the rich and the poor share in the adjustment, but nothing like that has happened. The rich are still getting ahead of other parts of the world, whereas only the workers are suffering the adjustment. I don’t know if that turn of events can be fixed peacefully.

I don’t think even the rich in this country can stave off forever some adjustment in standard of living. After all, an over payed executive in the USA can be replaced by a much cheaper executive from other countries in the world. It is already happening.