[lbo-talk] Michaels, against diversity

[brad bauerly]

shag- Not sure if you want me to produce transcripts or what.  I can only
give you my observations.  There aren't moments when people pause and say
"and now a distraction from the class struggle" or a red warning light or
anything.  It is more what they don't say or what they choose to say.  Like
I previously stated much of the talk over the last six months on Dailykos,
commondreams.org, tompainedispatch, moveon.org and other Internet sites,
along with CNN, Bill Maher and Rachal Maddow ect. has focused on the tea
baggers, ranting by Sarah Palin, the racist march on Washington ect..  They
have focused much less on the roots of the economic crisis (the people are
too dumb to understand anyway), the political connections between Democrats
and Banks, insurance companies, and big pharma.  Let's take the health care
debate as an example.  Bill Maher was going off on the racist religious
right and how this was the major reason we would not get a decent health
care bill.  He rightly placed some of the blame to on Obama for not even
starting out with a good single-payer plan, but completely failed to
elucidate why this was the case- the major campaign donors would've been a
good place to start.  He had janeane garofalo on the show too and she went
on a rant about how racist the US was and how all of Obama's problems
stemmed from the racism of the white (commondreams had an article a few
weeks ago that made the same claim).  I was waiting for her to go on a rant
about how the two coast should secede from the Union. I mean in the midst of
a huge economic crisis the very fact that most media and a lot of
left-liberals are fixated on the teabagger/palin/racists rather than the
class roots of the current major increase in exploitation of the working
class is completely mindbogglingly.  It is simply progressives grasping
tightly to the delusion that putting a black man in the White House would
shift everything. Now that it hasn't they simply claim it is the racism of
the nation that is preventing him from doing the right thing.

I know this is a huge oversimplification.  I simply think it is what is
politically needed at this moment to get those fence-sitting leftists (and
probably only them!!) out of the house of Democrats/identity politics and
into the class struggle.

Dennis Claxton- Maybe you can inform the slow and green among us exactly how
long one must wait before they can take the training wheels off.  Not sure
how to respond to paternalistic remarks, been a while.  Being 'new in town'
is actually kind of relative. I think I have been on LBO for about 5 years.
You would also need to define a rant for me.  I am still unsure if that is
what I did.

Brad