Meanwhile, from Erin Brockovich, eponym of the movie in her name:

"As picks for President-elect Joe Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) transition team were announced, I felt concerned and disheartened about a chemical industry insider being on the list. Are you kidding me?

Michael McCabe, a former employee of Biden and a former deputy Environmental Protection Agency administrator, later jumped ship to work as a consultant on communication strategy for DuPont during a time when the chemical company was looking to fight regulations of their star chemical perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) also known as C8. The toxic manmade chemical is used in everything from waterproof clothes, stain-resistant textiles and food packaging to non-stick pans. The compound has been linked to lowered fertility, cancer and liver damage. The Guardian reported this week that Harvard school of public health professor Philippe Grandjean, who studies environmental health, warns that PFAS chemicals, of which PFOA is one, might reduce the efficacy of a Covid-19 vaccine. This smells of the dawn of the same old. To quote the Who: meet the new boss, same as the old boss."

These scumfucks are not 'waiting' to fuck you over - in fact they cannot wait to do exactly that. Wait and see? Perhaps consider 'seeing' right fucking now. Wait any longer and these people will pull your waiting eyeballs through your mouths while waving rainbow flags.

Why? Account for your position.

Can we discuss tactics without morally condemning others? — Benkei

I was responding to an empty, substanceless quip that engaged with nothing of what I posted. Consider it a response in kind.

which began well before the election, btw, almost as soon as Biden won the nomination. — 180 Proof

Frankly, given Biden's 40+ year record of fucking people over and ruining lives, I've begun much too late.

Didn't realize you were just an undercover corporatist shill. Shame.

The centrist muppets are already beginning to moan and bitch that the left won't play ball with Biden's corporate-soaked transition team:

https://www.politico.com/newsletters/transition-playbook/2020/11/19/is-the-left-wing-overplaying-its-hand-490948

An analysis from elsewhere which I love:

"It's interesting. On the one hand they're displaying their complete arrogance towards and disregard of the left: "Even though we've given the donors everything and you worse than nothing, shut up or we won't even occasionally dangle meager false promises while we're constantly running you down." The left is in the worst of abusive relationships with the Dems. But, on the other hand, being called out clearly bothers them. They need the left cover to keep the idiot Dem base on board with virtue signaling. The Dems brand relies on left cover, without which they would be seen for who they really are: Republicans.

So, we can either behave, in which case we are deceptively dangled the false friendship of the Biden administration while every post filled and policy enacted is adverse to our interests. Result: the movement dies and we get nothing. Or, wage open political war, strip them of their left cover, and out them for the Republican fascists they truly are. Result: the movement lives and we get nothing (or maybe something depending on how hard we fight)".

I really like this point that the dems rely on the left for 'cover'. And it's true that if stripped of this cover and attacked equally from the right, there's a chance the party will be left occupying a narrow strip of land with nowhere to hide their shitty corporate slavishness and be isolated as the neoliberal shells they truly are. All the more reason, again, for the left to forcefully divorce themselves from anything Biden touches.

On the necessity of telling the Biden administration to go fuck itself as quickly as possible:

"The Biden administration will generate backlash just like that which arose in response to the Obama administration, and that backlash will be more severe than its previous iteration. This is absolutely guaranteed. You can only oppress, neglect and enrage a population so much before the discontent begins to grow. There is absolutely nothing American leftists can do to prevent this backlash from coming. They will have absolutely no say in this administration's policies or behavior; BidenCorp has no reason to listen to them, has made no pretense of having any interest in listening to them, and is even freezing Sanders and Warren out of cabinet roles already.

All US leftists will have any control over is whether this backlash will break to the left, or if it will break to the far right. ... What the left can do is get ahead of the game. Take control of the anti-Biden, anti-establishment pushback by leading the charge--sooner, more aggressively, and more compellingly than the far right does. Use the awfulness of the Biden administration to ignite a true leftward zeitgeist in mainstream America that is so strong it eclipses the inevitable rightist backlash in energy and appeal.

...But the ball needs to start rolling on this now. Not after the Georgia runoffs, not after Biden takes office, not after the midterms: now. The longer US leftists wait to start pushing this thing forward, the less of a head start you'll have on the rightists while they're fixated on Trump's recounts and legal challenges. You'll only be able to lead the backlash if you get in early and hit the ground running as fast as you can".

https://caityjohnstone.medium.com/biden-will-likely-be-worse-than-obama-the-left-must-lead-the-backlash-or-the-right-will-f2cb8623d015

--

Whatever momentum and disgust people felt with Trump simply needs to be transposed and continued with the current Biden administration. The 'victory' that people got with Trump's loss was an enemy that might be more easily replaced next time. The strategy is not to 'pull Biden to the left' - a joke of a cause: it's to make a Biden-like administration impossible so that the next person does the exact opposite - and not from the right.

(Much to Putin's frustration, no doubt) — jamalrob

I think it's almost to Putin credit that he's made it seem as though Russia is a far bigger fry than it is. I think it helps too that the US likes to play Reds under the Bed every once in a while to stoke up nationalist ferver and keep them in focus (and off American domestic policy).

--

Also just to add a note now that I've said something vaguely substantial: those who want to use cartoon categories like 'good guys' and 'bad guys' to think about any of this stuff ought to go back to watching the Disney channel rather than commenting on this stuff. Like, fuck off back to the Dora the Explorer forums or something.

What Russia truly wants in terms of territory is a sphere of control in its neighbourhood – mainly, the six countries that lie between the EU and Russia and comprise what the EU calls its Eastern neighbourhood: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine. — Kadri Liik

This is super interesting. I was thinking about something along these lines today while daydreaming - that I seriously give very little shits about Russia as any kind of major world-level threat because at most - or rather, as it's overriding geopolitical ambition - it seems that they want to just secure their control over the old soviet bloc countries and ensure that they have a direct pipeline for oil into Western Europe without being undercut by intermediaries.

I was thinking in particular about a comparison to China - with Belt and Road making itself felt in every other country in the global south, and Chinese investment flooding the global north, coupled with a massive dispersal of actual Chinese people across the globe in a way that Russia can only dream of - like... Russia is small fry. It has nothing even close to that. The prominence of coverage that it gets over its actions is markedly outsized with respect to its ambition and capacity to actually project power outside a very limited geographic zone to it's west.

BuT BiDeN WiLl Be BeTtEr FoR CliMaTe ChAnGe :roll:

"Following a campaign promising bold climate action, president-elect Joe Biden’s transition team named one of the Democratic Party’s top recipients of fossil fuel industry money to a high-profile White House position focusing in part on climate issues.

During his ten years in Congress, Richmond has received roughly $341,000 from donors in the oil and gas industry — the fifth-highest total among House Democrats, according to previous reporting by Sludge. That includes corporate political action committee donations of $50,000 from Entergy, an electric and natural gas utility; $40,000 from ExxonMobil; and $10,000 apiece from oil companies Chevron, Phillips 66, and Valero Energy. Richmond has raked in that money while representing a congressional district that is home to seven of the ten most air-polluted census tracts in the country."

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/11/joe-biden-climate-fossil-fuel-industry-cedric-richmond

Isonomia and The Origins of Philosophy, Kōjin Karatan — 180 Proof

How are you finding it? It said that it was originally written as the last part of another work, and I felt that it really reads like it. Like a side project, almost. I liked it, but it did feel a little 'light'.

CR -

Perry Anderson - Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism
Perry Anderson - Considerations on Western Marxism
Paulo Freire - Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Don't be mean like that.

Felix Dzerzhinsky — jamalrob

I do like this being more creative with our murderous epithets. Everyone always makes Hitler and Stalin comparisons. Very rarely Dzerzhinsky! My go-to would be Beria, if if only because it's easier to spell (otherwise Robespierre would be up there too).

And of course no hard feelings! I just like, uh, expressive phrasing.

Idk man, before the election Biden's 'selling point' to the left who had no choice but to rationalise it for themselves after the fact was that he'd be a 'lesser evil' and that it'd be 'better to fight Biden than Trump'. Alright then, chop chop. Dude doesn't get a refractory period because of the collective-relief orgasm following Trump's loss.

It's not about giving him a pass, it's about using him insofar as it's possible in a strategic way. — Baden

This is unimaginably naive. Do me favour. Take a quick read of this rundown of Biden prep appointees. We can keep Hillary and - Rahm fucking Emmanuel, an apparently new contender - out of it for now, despite the fact that Biden hasn't made immediate moves to quash the very idea of their appointments (you want something concrete? I'd start there). Anyway:

Get to the end of that and tell me with a straight face that anyone who isn't a neoliberal warhawk will actually manage to make any kind of policy impression on a Biden administration. You think you can use Biden? And I'm the nutjob? With that kind of a team at hand? That's fantasy. Fairytales for the easily duped. You want concrete? Read that list of actual people, with actual hands, on actual nascent policy levers. It's funny: people tell me I'm the ideologue divorced from reality, when I'm literally the only one here bringing specific, actual moves Biden has so far made to the table of discussion. Everything else has been projections of misplaced hope and fantasizing warped by the black hole of Trump to make even shit look shiny.

Honestly, most of your reply makes no sense as a response to what I wrote. I didn't so much as even mention the name 'Bernie', nor BLM or it's slogans, yet a full two thirds of your post was spent tilting at those windmills. I mean, fine, if they stand as the most prominent barometers of the kinds of discontinuity that I'm calling for, and if you think they are tactically compromised than so be it. This doesn't change the fact that a Biden presidency doing everything it can to Make America Obamaish Again is just about the most straightforward recipe for Trump 2.0 anyone could deign to come up with. Resetting the clock 6 years back, to the precise time at which the conditions for a Trump were brewing with furious consistency - lack of senate control and all - is just about the height of political stupidity. A height which Biden is on track to scale with both enthusiasm and abandon.

As for the senate, considering the change in seats is looking to be on the order of the number of the limbs I have, it's not exactly as if Biden's vacuity as a candidate was what one might call sharp litmus test here. As for this much vaunted 'smarter approach' - which boils down to what? Giving the status quo a chance? The poor thing, it's only been at work for the last 5 decades, I'm sure it really needs it - it's the same ineffectual gently-gently nothingness that got the US to where it is now. And as for forgetting 'what got us here'? No, I remember it all too well: it was the current president-elect, and everything he continues to stand for.

I'm just not hearing anything of substance from you that you haven't said a million times before that is relevant to the specific place we're in right now and what can be done about it. — Baden

What? I was critical of Biden before and now that's he poised to continue doing the very things I'd criticized him before on, I'm supposed to get a new line because, what, it's very tiring for you? As I said I've been posting in response to his transition team appointments and vetting considerations, so if that's not specific enough for you perhaps you can suggest exactly what it is you think counts as specific enough.

And gosh, it's not like I'm saying much other than to remain vigorously critical of Biden, especially in his role as a Trump lubrication machine. That this is seen as some out of touch idealism is so stupid I don't know where to begin. As for this analysis:

any shift left in the Dems will result in a concomitant shift right — Baden

I can't disagree more. First, worrying about a 'shift on the right' when the right in the US is basically Nazi apologetics is simply not a concern anyone should take seriously. North of the north pole is nothing. Second, the narrative being pushed - and which I'm afraid that you're uncritically reproducing - that left-wing policy and candidates have no political viability is quite frankly empirically false. The fact is that progressive politics does well in the US when not set against the force of national-level propaganda. Case in point:

Moreover, it is blindingly obvious to anyone that it was precisely the strategy to 'stick to the centre' that resulted in Biden's frankly dismal showing. The fact is that he barely eeked out a win over one of the most abhorrent political leaders in US electoral history, and did so only on account - as you noted - that he wasn't Trump. Add to that the fact that Trump increased his share of republican votes, and the idea of playing it to the centre is a recipe for political death. Further:

(Source).

Americans are clamouring for change. The so-called centre doesn't do well - and is a recipe for Trumpism. The 'right' is occupied territory. That leaves one option, which at every turn shows up to be successful. Conclusion: I do not buy - and no one should buy - into the idea that progressive politics are a dead-end for the democratic party. The exact opposite holds true: not engaging in that policy direction is a royal road to more Trump.

It was you who pointed out more strongly than anyone else that the focus on Trump for being Trump was misguided. You're making the same mistake with Biden (and Hillary) as far as I can see. — Baden

So far my posts have been spurred by the appointments to Biden's transition team and the news that Clinton is even under consideration at all from a UN posting, so I really don't think that's the case.

And as far as the caricatures of 'revolution' vs 'triage' - as if 50 years of losers calling for 'triage' and continuing to lose hasn't taught anyone anything - or the farcical idea that Biden would indeed put any kind of dent into neoliberal hegemony - that's projected idiocy designed to stop conversation. The only relevant question right now is how to prevent the next Trump, that's it. No one seriously expects Biden to end capitalism tomorrow, but holy shit he can at least pretend to try and mark a break with the very politics that catapulted Trump to power rather than chummy right back up to it from day minus-90 or whatever it currently is. That's the choice for Biden: to forcefully distinguish himself from the politics which Trump - correctly - turned America's collective anger against, or to act as a red carpet to the next piece of shit ready and willing to strike up the Trumpian embers - still glowing hot - once again.

People need to get into their thick skulls that Biden lies on a line continuous with Trump - he literally preceded and so enabled him - and that unless he flags some measure of discontinuity, of actively breaking with the politics of the present - 'revolution' be damned for all I care at this point - then the next Trump is already in the pipeline, to be lubricated by a vaseline Biden, all the better to stick up America's already bleeding rear-end.

So I really, honest-to-ever-loving-God, in all sincerity, mean it when I say - anyone who is not as critical of Biden as they were of Trump may as well be a Trump supporter.

Nah, Hilary should be dead in a ditch or strung up, veins popping, not in any position of power - just because what? You want your petty revenge over some tool for power? No time for these dumb games. Biden's a fucking scumbag and I will continue to treat him like one until his fucking dementia catches up to him.

Seriously, anyone who is not as critical of Biden as they were of Trump may as well be a Trump supporter.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-election-2020/biden-administration-hillary-clinton-un-ambassador-b1722378.html

"Joe Biden is reported to be considering Hillary Clinton for a role in his administration, with the former secretary of state in the running to become the US ambassador to the United Nations."

If Biden actually does this, I think it would be fair to say that he is, in all seriousness, a bigger moron than Trump could ever be. People - rightly - detested Hillary so much that they took to the polls to vote in a swamp creature like Trump, and now this utter fucking moron reckons it's a good idea to even want to have the slightest thing to do with her? Trump should just put Biden on his staff and get it over with. It'd do away with the pretence that Biden isn't doing everything in his power to get Trump - or someone exactly in his mould - to get reelected in 2024.

That's just the start of it.

"Of the twenty-three people who comprise the Department of Defense agency review team, eight of them — or just over a third — list their “most recent employment” as organizations, think tanks, or companies that either directly receive money from the weapons industry, or are part of this industry. These figures may be an undercount, as the writer was not immediately able to exhaustively source the funding of every employer.

...Of those remaining, one team member works for JPMorgan Chase & Co., another is retired from the State Department, a few work for universities and other organizations, and one works for the Nuclear Threat Initiative, which says it strives to “prevent catastrophic attacks with weapons of mass destruction and disruption — nuclear, biological, radiological, chemical and cyber.” Lisa Coe, also on the team, lists as her most recent employer OtherSide Consulting, a defense industry consultant, according to Defense News. However, because we were unable to independently verify this, Coe is not being included in our count of team members funded by the military or weapons industry."

https://jacobinmag.com/2020/11/joe-biden-transition-team-war-hawks

Not that anyone expected anything different from this fuckface.

In the memory of Alec Baillie :sad:

So much change and hope under Biden :hearts: :heart: :hearts: :flower:

Дерьмо. Мы разоблачены. Пора бежать, товарищи.

Terrible news.

"Joe Biden, in his acceptance speech, called for unity and healing. He would work “to win the confidence of the whole people”.I just hope he doesn’t mean it. If he does, it means that nothing has been learned since Barack Obama made roughly the same speech in 2008. The United States of America is fundamentally divided. It is divided between exploiter and exploited, oppressor and oppressed. There is no unity to be found with kleptocrats and oligarchs. Any attempt to pretend there is will lead to political failure. It will lead not to healing but to a deflected polarisation. If Americans are not polarised against plutocrats, they will be polarised against each other.

...Obama’s attempt to reconcile irreconcilable forces, to paper over the chasms, arguably gave Donald Trump his opening. Rather than confronting the banks whose reckless greed had caused the financial crisis, he allowed his Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, to “foam the runway” for them by allowing 10 million families to lose their homes. His justice department and the attorney general blocked efforts to pursue apparent wrongdoing by the financiers. He pressed for trade agreements that would erode workers’ rights and environmental standards, and presided over the widening of inequality and the concentration of wealth, casualisation of labour and record mergers and acquisitions. [i.e. Fuck Obama - SX]"

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/nov/11/us-trump-biden-president-elect

King Monbiot.

Back to 'normal'.

Fuck Biden.

but partly because he has delusions that the Russian people want American help. — jamalrob

Ugh, there are few more hell-paved paths than Americans with good intentions. I guess I also wonder about how the world's coming pivot on oil and coal is going to affect Russia (and consequently US relations to them). I mean, that's the literal power-house of the Russian economy, and if demand begins to wane - coupled with overproduction - I wonder if a resurgent Russian imperialism might reassert itself as compensation and (domestic) distraction. That, I imagine, would give cause for the US to play white knight and Biden - or Biden-adjacents - to play out his fantasies.

My guess is what Biden would want is getting Iran to abide to the JCPAO again with the offer to sign up again to it from the US side. I'm not sure to what extent it is feasible though after 1+ year of Iran enriching uranium above agreed limits. — Benkei

Yeah that's the vibe I'm getting too. I also wonder where Israel stands on this - is a treaty too passive for them? I really dunno.

Please stop talking to me (like, in general) you're a moron and beneath response and it would save us both time.

What led me to this stuff in the first place was my narrow focus on Biden's aggressive attitude to Russia. — jamalrob

I honestly think the focus on Russia has largely been played for the domestic audience: It's Russia which 'explains Trump', and not the fact that the democratic party is a hollow waste of space that no one cares for if it wasn't for the even larger unmitigated disaster that is Trump. Also Trump is friendly to Big Bad Russian Tyrant, and Democrats are not, so please vote for us. That's not the whole story of course - Russian support for Iran no doubt plays into it, especially if the neocons are trying to weasel their way into democratic FP decision making. The animosity to Russia makes very little strategic sense for me otherwise. Any clues?

My country is not in NATO, but the US fucking right out of Europe would be great either way. The Americans 'agreeable to such an outcome' are some of the very few of them with their heads screwed on right. In any case I've little to say to a shill for American imperialism who posts pictures of war criminals in deference to them.

The US ought to fuck right off from anywhere possible.

Was the neoconservative flavour of Biden's rhetoric just a reflection of his need to oppose everything Trump was seen to stand for, in this case realism and isolationism in international relations? Or will we really see the US aggressively attempting to reassert its role as world policeman? Is that even a bad thing? — jamalrob

Biden's rhetoric is exactly continuous with his lifelong hawkish policy commitments, and I see very little reason to think he's taken some kind of hard turn away from that. That said, I'm curious as to how that would be exercised given that state of things atm. I don't see direct military deployment anywhere being particularly viable, given the war weariness of the domestic population (maybe to the South China Sea to try and check Chinese claims there?; Reinforcing both the Philippines and Japan?). So sanctions, trade policy, and diplomacy (especially 'renormalizing' relations with European institutions) are probably the more the likely routes of US influence wrangling. At the very least they'll likely be a significant uptick of intensity on the last two in comparison to Trump.

If anything, I think IP and tech is where Biden is going to make his push against China. He flagged IP in particular in his FP proposals, and he's got every reason to try and maintain the supremacy of US tech. Exactly how I'm not sure. Perhaps banning Chinese tech, especially for public services (like Australia did with Chinese 5G tech). That seems to make more sense than Trump's disastrous trade wars. As for the neocons, they always wanted to wipe Iran off the face of the earth, but I don't yet see how that would fit into Biden's announced policy plans, which looks, once again, to renormalize and renegotiate nuclear treaties with them. I wonder which arena, exactly, they'd be pushing for action for (making South America a US plaything again?). I really don't know. In general Biden's FP strikes me as nostalgic and promissory, rather than concrete. Alot of it seems centred around repair and not vision - like the rest of his domestic 'policies'.

I'm seriously questioning whether the current Biden win may in fact not be worse than a Trump victory - a judgement conditional on what happens from here on out. Trump's utter incompetence and obvious clowncar quality was - is - among the greatest advantages an organizing left can have. You could not ask for a better idiot against which to have to fight. The lesson the right will learn from his defeat is that the problem lay in the execution, not the programme. And the next executioner may well be far more effective.

Liberals, who are political illiterates, will indeed reckon - are reckoning, all over the place - that Trump's defeat equate to a defeat of the right. 4 years from now they will be wondering aghast at just how anyone could possibly vote for whichever new demagogue emerges to fill the void of Trump's absence. Still, my God, it'll be good to see the back of that fat, warbling fuck.

In short, this election has strengthened the far right ideological bubble, while completely arresting the momentum of the progressive movement, and will bring back a tepid and meaningless policy framework that will be ineffective in solving any actual problems within the US or that we face globally. Biden will take the blame for the un-going crisis of the pandemic, and the next crisis in the pipes. If a "competent Trump" arises (one who proposes a coherent ideology, inspires a truly loyal cadre of top level bureaucrats at the top and brown shirts at the bottom, and has a grasp of the cogs of government), such a figure will easily defeat Biden, older and even less coherent and with all the same weaknesses as today, in 4 years time. — boethius

Yep.

An abuser is most destructive in the period just after the breakup. Or, to swap metaphors, a cornered dog is the most dangerous. Expect this next few months to be scorched earth destruction on the part of Trump. Yall ain't done at all.

I imagine that some will capitalize on the momentum of a ‘stolen election’ and therefore never concede that it was fair. — praxis

I'm not sure about this. Trump's attempt to go full tilt at this is largely falling on indifferent or deaf ears as his allies - with the exception of the utterly pathetic Giuliani - drop him like the rotten hot potato that he is. Short of some still-possible court shenanigans, the vibe is that people seem to be accepting the results for what they are. But maybe that's 'cause I don't follow Q or Breitbart or whatever close enough.

"While stalwart Trumpists in the party will no doubt make their own bid for party leadership, the election results suggest a bright future for figures like Marco Rubio, adept at combining Trumpist demagoguery with politics more rooted in the party establishment. A Republican like Rubio who can provide a veneer of competency over Trump-style reactionary performance art has the potential to win back the marginal Republicans Joe Biden succeeded in wooing this time and, in doing so, cut deeply into the Democrats’ persistent majority in the popular vote.

Second, the failure of anathematization means that the politics most favored by the Democrats’ increasingly college-educated base, which focus on pointing out Trump’s grotesque racism and sexism, have utterly failed to resonate with huge sections of the electorate. Ironically, Donald Trump, who took the GOP’s famous “autopsy” report blaming their 2012 defeat on their hard-line immigration policies and spit on it, clearly consolidated an increased base among Latino voters, particularly in the key states of Texas and Florida. Moreover, exit polls, which may well be unreliable this year due to the extent of early voting, suggest that he also increased his standing slightly with black voters."

https://jacobinmag.com/2020/11/2020-election-biden-trump-democrats

Or: anyone who thinks that demographic change is going to 'shrink the GOP voter base' has another thing coming.

Someone else can come along and mimic his policies, but its his personal appeal that makes people abandon sense and follow the rubbish he talks. I think his will be a hard act to follow. — Tim3003

The rightwing mediascape - i.e. the American mediascape - is a veritable training academy for Trump-talk, and has had ample time now to perfect the art. Shamelessness, narcissism, virtue signalling (that exemplary right-wing value), and saying-it-enough-times-that-it-becomes-true is a dime-a-dozen set of skills among a swathe of wannabe Trumps who have been watching and learning for the last four years. I agree that it's not policy that's the difference - Trump was a policy failure on multiple fronts - but that 'act' is far more available and pervasive than I think you give it credit for.