Matt Bruenig, skeptical left-liberalism, #tribalism and related thoughts

Matt Bruenig

First, I'm about as glad that I'm not plugged into insider left-liberalism, socialism, as far as the American commentariat goes, etc. as I'm glad I'm not plugged into movement/scientific skepticism or Gnu Atheism.

The kerfuffle over Matt Bruenig being dismissed from Demos is a good example.

Despite the fact that, on Twitter, he appears to often be churlish at best, vituperative at worst, is the first "tell" against him. I can call out Neera Tandem for supporting the RSS and BJP in India, or Joan Walsh for being a centrist (and a sign that the Overton Window is alive and well at The Nation, if she's writing there), without being ageist, or just a general turd, you know?

And, apparently, he either doesn't know, or doesn't care, himself.

That said, per Lawyers, Guns and Money, he appears to be a bit of a hypocrite. Having a government job with the National Labor Relations Board, then saying too many lawyers are paid too much, is ... "rich." (I mean, yes, if he and his wife, 20somethings, are pulling down $100K a year in DC, and the AFL-CIO paid for his law school, he has no financial pain, even if the Demos firing gave him a haircut.)

He also (and I agree with several points by commenter Manual) appears to be a bit of a hypocrite about money again. No, he did not explicitly say Demos was his only, or even his majority, source of income, but one could easily infer that, which indicates that he was implying it. Read his GoFundMe that he set up after Demos fired him, if you don't believe me.

Nor is he that skeptically incisive of a thinker, also per LGM, though removed from his own blog, apparently, if he finds John Rawls to be highly influential. Walter Kaufmann blew Rawls out of the water long ago. I've blogged in more detail about some of Kaufmann's ideas.

This is why I raise eyebrows at left-liberals who aren't skeptical about their economic philosophy. Take self-proclaimed Marxists.

Any Hegelian-derived philosophy is a bit suspect in my eyes, in general. Any deterministic or any system-building philosophy is also suspect. The world doesn't operate in such absolutes. It's why I identify myself as a skeptical left-liberal.

That said, are non-leftist "conventional American liberals," even if they didn't get him fired from Demos, gloating over it? Did they push Demos, even if they didn't "get him fired," because, to parse Jesuitical, only Demos actually could fire him? Of course.

And, is this part of an organized attack?

Per what's happening to Carl Beijer, yes. And Beijer, at least from what I've seen on Twitter, and on occasional reading of his website, is NOT Bruenig in his general tone.

And, whether part of a mob, or simply part of stupidity, when the "labor editor" for the Great Orange Satan Tweets:

Do I understand right that Bruenig works for the NLRB? If so, what about the Hatch Act?

— Laura Clawson (@LauraClawson) May 21, 2016

We're in the land where the one-eyed is king.

And, where collateral damage, per Beijer, is sometimes deliberate.

Took me all of 30 secs on Wikipedia, as I tweeted back, to show up her ignorance, long after many others did.

Beyond this, on left-liberals of whatever exact moniker circling the wagons against plain old liberals?

What we have here is tribalism, pure and simple. Regular readers of this blog should know that I loathe tribalism in general. I've certainly been vocal about tribalism in general in this election, decrying women voting for Clinton just because she's a woman, and the #ImWithHer hashtag, asking (rhetorically, knowing some won't answer and others are clueless outside the two-party system) why they weren't with Cynthia McKinney in 2008 or Jill Stein in 2012.

And, I don't "do" tribalism. See "movement skepticism" and Gnu Atheism above.

Anyway, I certainly don't know every bit of backstory, but, especially if he had had some sort of warning from Demos before, it arguably did the right thing.

Beyond that, any allegedly liberal, let alone left-liberal, labor lawyer making ageist comments has no business holding his current daytime job, since ageism is even more insidious, and harder to prove, than sexism and racism.

Why I stopped reading Counterpunch - exemplified by Ukraine

It was because of nutbars like Paul Craig Roberts, even nuttier than Justin Raimundo.

About a year ago, I'd finally had enough of the reflexive anti-Americanism of some pieces there, stopped reading, and delinked it from my blog roll. Jeff St. Clair's stupidity about Bosnia and Syria was the last straw, coupled with fellating Hugo Chavez. But, the nuttery of Roberts, whose political ideology is smeared even more across the map than Raimundo's, means that he'll write elsewhere, and in similarly stupid fashion.

Roberts claims that what's really at stake in Ukraine is a US bid for hegemony there.

Which is, of course, a laugher, but not an unusual one for him.

Nor is the telling of outright lies unusual for him. Like this:

"Washington overlooked that the financially viable part of today’s Ukraine consists of historical Russian provinces in the east and south that the Soviet leadership merged into Ukraine in order to dilute the fascist elements in western Ukraine that fought for Adolf Hitler against the Soviet Union.

This is simply not true! Period. After the creation of the Ukrainian SSR, the only adjustment of its borders of any note was incorporation of previously Polish land from 1939; its northeastern borders were not changed after WWII. Period and end of story.

Also, interest in the EU is not the same as interest in Washington. And, the original Orange Revolution was not directed by Washington, either.

The whole article is a tissue of distortions, lies by omission and lies by commission.

And, any organization, or individual, that gives space to stuff like this, unless realizing they've made some sort of mistake, falls on my shit list. 

Reality?  As this piece from the NYT Review of Books shows well, there's one hegemon in recent Ukraine, and his name is Vlad the Impaler. And, on Feb. 26, the news of new Russian military exercises just across the border reinforces that.

And there's a reason for all this: Ukraine could have significant shale gas deposits. And, while their are legitimate environmental concerns over fracking, it does make one wonder if Russian agents provacateur aren't stirring the pot on some anti-fracking protests in Eastern Europe.

I mean, as our history with a country like Venezuela shows, there's enough American imperialism to be mad about without inventing fake American imperialism where it doesn't exist. Or listening to loons when they claim it does.

A new example of why I call myself a #skeptical left-liberal

I do, in terms of US politics at least, consider myself a left-liberal. But, along the likes of Doug Henwood of Left Business Observer, I maintain a healthy skepticism about more wild-eyed economic ideas of some left-liberals. (Henwood was good at shooting down sillier ideas from Occupy Wall Street a year or two ago.)

In the foreign-policy side of things, we have this: Counterpunch Magazine, nuttier than anything that comes from Alternet, Truthout, or similar.

For example, in light of possible intervention in Syria (which I oppose) Jeffrey St. Clair has updated an old piece about Bosnia and Serbia that he co-wrote with the now-deceased founder of Counterpunch, Alexander Cockburn.

And, it's over-the-top indeed.

Even if Clinton did oversell some things about Serbian asshattery, nonetheless, having just read an excellent book on the run-up to WWI, "The Sleepwalkers," and another, "Kosovo: A Short History" about 2 years ago, about the history of Serbia/Serbian identity from the famed battle of Kosovo on, I can say bluntly, as I Tweeted St. Clair, that Serbs have been thugs for at least a full century, since the two Balkan Wars of 1912-13. Maybe they didn't resort to (too much? as much?) murder then, but, ethnic cleansing by thuggery short of murder was a regular practice in the new lands they acquired after those two wars.

Noel Malcolm, in his "Short History" of 500 pages, documents that Serbia was doing ethnic cleansing a century ago.  Christopher Clarke, in "Sleepwalkers," ties this in with general Serbian expansionism in the two wars, including refusal to let go of disputed territory when directly confronted by a combination of other Balkan states PLUS Austria-Hungary.

I normally reject the idea of "cultural DNA," but with the people and land of Serbia, I am more than willing to make an exception.

And, if I use "cultural DNA" more loosely, I'm willing to use it about Counterpunch, too.

St. Clair's been wrong in the past on some environmental issues, his putative specialty, because of ax-grinding. Cockburn more than once stuck at least one toe over the line of anti-Zionism into anti-Semitism. Paul Craig Roberts is less of a left-liberal than a non-socialist left-libertarian of some sort with one foot back in David Stockman's world.

At times, while not being anti-American overall, the St. Clair-Cockburn duo do, though, seem to be opposed to any major action of whatever American president/polity is in power "just because." And, the Bosnia story, based on what I've actually read about Serbia, is a tipping point.

Beyond that, the Bosnia-Serbia situation was much more "clear" as far as bad and not-so-bad actors than Syria is. Either St. Clair and Cockburn knew that 20 years ago, or their duplicity is matched by their stupidity.

So, for now, Counterpunch is unlinked from my link list.

Good-bye, Alexander Cockburn

The left-liberal long-time editor of Counterpunch magazine died earlier this week. In today's world of opinion magazines, where The Nation refuses to look outside the two-party fold for endorsing candidates, and even Truthout and Alternet don't do a lot of that explicitly, Counterpunch was and is a refreshingly different voice.

Not that Cockburn bought every modern alleged progressive idea. Just 10 days or so ago, I read a great column of his where he expressed a fair amount of the same skepticism about Occupy Wall Street, including the disorganization of its alleged leaderlessness and more, than I first did several months ago.

(And, he had this delicious skewering of Christopher Hitchens as an "obituary" for Hitchens last year,  which I somehow missed at the time. Coming from the left, it's even better than Glenn Greenwald's more famous takedown.)

That said, he wasn't always perfect. Sometimes, his anti-Zionism at least flirted with the edges of anti-Semitism, or so it seemed here.

And, per his Wikipedia bio, he was arguably an elitist himself, having gone to Oxford and having noble roots. And, being a global warming "skeptic"/denialist-lite (at best) is a definite black eye.

In April 2007 Cockburn wrote that "there is still zero empirical evidence that anthropogenic production of CO2 is making any measurable contribution to the world's present warming trend. The greenhouse fearmongers rely entirely on unverified, crudely oversimplified computer models to finger mankind's sinful contribution."

Quote is at Sourcewatch's Cockburn page.

WHY Cockburn had that stance, especially when his longtime Counterpunch co-editor, Jeffrey St. Clair, is a HUGE environmentalist, I don't know.

But, that said, he didn't pull punches. And he didn't suck up to the Democratic party line.

As the Democratic hierarchy drifts further and further down the road of neoliberalism, those two things are important indeed.

I hope St. Clair, his Counterpunch co-editor for several years, finds a new voice to help him carry on the editorial oversight of the magazine with that same drive.

William O. Douglas - Iconoclastic liberal

The Court Years: The Autobiography Of William O. Douglas by William Orville Douglas

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


A good overview of Bill Douglas' court years. Not totally shocked by what he thought of LBJ, including how much he manipulated us into Vietnam. I am shocked that he didn't always rate Thurgood Marshall highly outside of civil rights issues. That said, per Douglas, that Marshall never would vote for cert. on Vietnam War draft protesters appealing their draft calls because Congress never declared war, makes Douglas' feelings understandable.

To me, they had a great case, constitutionally. It's sad that most of the time, Hugo Black was apparently the only other judge who would grant cert.

The book gives you a good look at Douglas, a liberal for sure in America, but also an iconoclastic one.



View all my reviews

Brooks, Nocera, liberals and messaging

David Brooks rightly notes (yikes!) that many people are actually liberals in their support for individual government programs, but don't trust the federal government as the instrument to implement those programs.

He adds that many perceive the government as being open to rent-seekers.

Joe Nocera, on the BP liability disbursement program, though, notes that government can and does still work well.

So, what's the issue? It really is that the "rent seekers" aren't Reagan's welfare queens, but are bipartisan rich fat cats, fat cats that gave Barack Obama more money overall than John McCain in 2008, and a bigger portion of respective campaign fundraising money.

And, that, in turn, is the difference between traditional American liberalism of New Deal and other varieties, and neoliberalism, technocratic ersatz liberalism, that started to grow under Jimmy Carter and continued ever since. After Carter, Walter Mondale's been the only traditional liberal nominated for president by Democrats. But, real liberals have continued to acquiesce in neoliberals glad-handing rent-seekers.

So, the Democratic Party's messaging problem here is self-inflicted, with additional collateral damage starting with Tip O'Neill, a paleoliberal, refusing to stand tougher against Ronald Reagan.

And, that's why people like me have to, in the face of David Brooks columns, often add an adjective like left-liberal.

Greg Palast: One reason I don't support Truthout

Greg Palast is the kind of left-liberal that led me to identify myself on this blog and elsewhere as a skeptical left-liberal.

Non-skeptical left-liberals can be counted on for one or more of the following foibles:
1. Supporting the "woo" of alt-med pseudomedicine. (Antivaxxers get lumped here.)
2. Supporting some anti-government conspiracy thinking.
3. Being rabidly opposed to nuclear power.

The Fukushima radiation release levels get put into context.

The details?

And, in this Truthout piece, that's Greg Palast. (He also falls in category 2 at times.)

I don't know the law in Japan, so I can't tell you if Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) can plead insanity to the homicides about to happen.

Incindiary, at the least. If made in reference to a similar disaster in the U.S., arguably legally libelous.

Followed by innuendo of open-ended implications:

Nuclear plants the world over must be certified for what is called "SQ" or "Seismic Qualification." That is, the owners swear that all components are designed for the maximum conceivable shaking event, be it from an earthquake or an exploding Christmas card from al-Qaeda.

The most inexpensive way to meet your SQ is to lie. The industry does it all the time.

Hey, douchebag:
1. Japan never had a 9.0 before.
2. The plant survived that, even though not certified that high.
3. The seawall that was supposed to protect the diesel generators maybe should have been built even higher, but unfortunately wasn't.

And, speaking of both that and "category 2":

Last night, I heard CNN reporters repeat the official line that the tsunami disabled the pumps needed to cool the reactors, implying that water unexpectedly got into the diesel generators that run the pumps.

Oh, Truthout has some good stuff that's not reprinted in other locations, so I won't ask to come off its e-mailing list.

But, with a numbnuts like Palast, it won't get my money. (Oh, and Greg, the cheesy 1940s Clark Kent "reporter" hat on your Twitter pic? Thanks for the laugh.)

Update: Palast is busted in another lie. He claims Tokyo Electric is going to build two new nuclear plants in south Texas?

The reality? No, it was just seeking to become a 10 percent owner.

And, speaking of realities?

The reality on nuclear power dangers in general?

William Saletan of Slate has an excellent article, in the wake of Japan's nuclear concerns, about how nuclear power is saving lives every day compared to fossil fuels.

And, my blog thoughts here.

Meanwhile, the latest nonhysterical, non-axe-grinding information on Japan's plants (as fo the start of March 15 in my part of the U.S.) is here.

(And, per Leo L. on Facebook, none of this mentions Truthout's wholesale copy-and-paste of previously used material. Either the NYT is OK with quick-term giveaways of Krugman's material, or Truthout is too poor and too far off its radar screen on fair use issues to matter.)

Is the blogosphere a true kill zone for left-liberalism

In a long screed making the rounds, Freddie de Boer certainly thinks so.

Then again, he seems to think Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias were at one time really liberal (at least Yggs) then got corrupted or something. Actually, they never were that, that liberal.

And, he thinks Markos Moulitsas, Kos, apparently is the victim of a freezeout from neolib talking head types, and I'm inferring Freddie thinks that is because Kos is too liberal.

The man who cares about Dems winning first? Who thinks there's a phalanx of secret liberals inside the CIA? He's too liberal?

With left-liberal friends like this ...

A progressive manifesto

Here's a list of eight (for now) progressive items of important President Obama and Congressional Democratic leaders should be doing. (But aren't, really.)

1. Reinstate the broad parameters of Glass-Steagall, updating the new legislation for hedge funds, various derivatives, etc.
2. Revise the minimum wage again, above all by making a COLA, a cost of living adjustment, part of it. (I begged Congressional Democrats to do this in 2007.)
3. Pass a federal "guaranteed vacation time" law.
4. You want to reform education? How about a 200-day school year, and not just at charter schools? States won't be anxious to unilaterally extend their school years, so the federal carrot and stick will be needed.
5. Reform the tax code to tax capital gains — indexed for inflation — as straight income.
6. Ditto on hedge fund management fees, etc.
7. Provide serious funding for vocational training and adult re-education. That's more needed than getting even more kids, who don't all need to, to go to college.
8. Along with that, if you want to give tax credits, look at business tax credits for funding re-education for their employees. And target smaller businesses.
9. Cut the defense budget. Don't just slow its rate of growth. Cut it. If you stop putting troops in the Middle East, in Latin America and elsewhere, this is easy.
10. Related to that, stop using the "war on terror" as an excuse to intervene in more and more countries' domestic affairs.

Progressives lack progressivism

Harold Meyerson has a great column about how today's progressives, as compared to the New Deal or Great Society eras, largely lack a movement:

If there's a common feature to the political landscapes in which Carter, Clinton and now Obama were compelled to work, it's the absence of a vibrant left movement. ... In America, major liberal reforms require not just liberal governments, but autonomous, vibrant mass movements, usually led by activists who stand at or beyond liberalism's left fringe.

But, Meyerson doesn't just point the finger at progressives. He points at The One, too:

(Obama) has consistently declined to activate his activists to help him win legislative battles by pressuring, for instance, those Democratic members of Congress who have weakened or blocked his major bills. To be sure, loosing the activists would have brought problems of its own: Unlike Roosevelt or Johnson, who benefited from autonomous movements, Obama would be answerable for every loopy tactic his followers employed. But in the absence of both a free-standing movement and a legion of loyalists, Congress isn't feeling much pressure from the left to move Obama's agenda.

I think Meyerson misses a bit of a point, though. FDR halfway co-opted some of the farther left. Call it triangulation, but in another direction from Bill Clinton.

Apparently, Speaker Nancy Pelosi would like to see more from Obama, too.

The Nation has narrow definition of ‘The Left’

At The Nation, Eyal Press “kindly” defines left-liberals like this, in talking about a Rachel Maddow show episode where she expressed the left’s dissatisfaction with President Obama:

Maddow, presumably, was referring to a much smaller cohort of self-identified (white) progressives: people who favor a single-payer universal health-care system, have attended antiwar demonstrations, believe catastrophic global warming is imminent, support shutting down Guantanamo immediately, champion full equality for gays and lesbians, and perhaps supported John Edwards or Dennis Kucinich in the Democratic primary before finally coming around to Obama.

So, I guess Green voters don’t even count, not on the pages of The Nation? The same mag that has never endorsed a third-party presidential candidate during all the time I’ve read it?

As long as The Nation decides to keep both feet planted inside the Donkey’s ass, when push comes to shove, it loses a certain amount of relevance.

Maybe I should submit this to the Carnival of the Liberals for one final rejection!

Poetic thoughts while waiting for Joan Baez (extended play)

I wrote the following poem while waiting to meet a friend of mine who had tickets for Joan Baez’s Dallas concert Feb.24. This is an “extended play” of an earlier version.

Halfway sellout
Real liberals of another era
Trying to recapture
Cash-on-demand nostalgia
For the price of admission.
I don’t sign every petition
And I don’t avoid Wal-Mart every day of the year.
But, if I asked you,
Mr. ’60s – and Mr. ’90s corner office – were good to me,
What all is in your IRA?
Or your company’s 401,
Or if you ever tried to get it to divest
Some of the stocks you suspect it might have,
What would you say?
I don’t have a corner office.
Or a 401(k).
Or an IRA.
But, as much as possible,
I still own my own brand.

Old man, take a look at my life,
You could be like I am.
When did you trade your life identity
For your job identity?
You and your fellow yuppies,
The not-yet-digested piglet
Stuck in the gullet of the American python.
Oh, yes, you played with greed
After you quit playing with grass,
And greed swallowed you,
Far more than the grass ever did.

No, old man, on second thought,
DON’T take a look at my life.
Indirectly, you’re already screwing it up enough,
Trying to turn the Me Generation
Into the Me Millennium.

Old man, get away from me.
I don’t wanna be like you are.

Poetic thoughts while waiting for Joan Baez

I wrote the following poem while waiting to meet a friend of mine who had tickets for Joan Baez’s Dallas concert.

Halfway sellout
Real liberals of another era
Trying to recapture
Cash-on-demand nostalgia
For the price of admission.
I don’t sign every petition
And I don’t avoid Wal-Mart every day of the year.
But, if I asked you,
Mr. ’60s – and Mr. ’90s corner office – were good to me,
What all is in your IRA?
Or your company’s 401,
Or if you ever tried to get it to divest
Some of the stocks you suspect it might have,
What would you say?
I don’t have a corner office.
Or a 401(k).
Or an IRA.
But, as much as possible,
I still own my own brand.

Judis to progressives – Keep Obama honest from left

Amen to John Judis’ call for progressives, from the ground up, to keep President Barack Obama’s feet to the fire to deliver some mess of pottage that can at least halfway be Change We Can Believe In.

Says Judis:

I think the main reason that Obama is having trouble is that there is not a popular left movement that is agitating for him to go well beyond where he would even ideally like to go. Sure, there are leftwing intellectuals like Paul Krugman who are beating the drums for nationalizing the banks and for a $1 trillion-plus stimulus. But I am not referring to intellectuals, but to movements that stir up trouble among voters and get people really angry. Instead, what exists of a popular left is either incapable of action or in Obama's pocket.

I’ll riff on that last line.

That’s why people like me are the unpopular left to not just full-fledged Obamiacs but to most MSLBs, who are more the neo-lib intelligentsia.

Judis goes on to note the differences between now and FDR, who DID have an organized, or semi-organized, real Left, personified by Huey Long, pushing him hard.

Instead, MSLBers may slap Congressional Democrats, especially Harry Reid, around a bit, while going in the tank for Just.Another.Politician.™