Blackcap Blog

Published at 23:56 on 22 January 2017

Some points:

1. The marches had only a very limited effect, which will soon dissipate. We must understand this. Yes, it is worthy to celebrate their large size. Yes, they helped delegitimatize Trump. But they’re just a blip in time. They must be merely the opening battle of a prolonged struggle.
2. Trump is still Trump. He still believes — fervently — that he is the greatest man on Earth and the greatest president ever, and has surrounded himself with sycophants who indulge him in this belief. Therefore the marches can be expected to have very little effect on Trump himself, beyond provoking him into a display of pettyness about them.
3. Conservatives are still conservatives. They are still following, by and large, their historical role of being fascism’s enablers. The honorable dissidents amongst them, such as Evan McMullin, are still in the minority.
4. The Democratic Party is still the Democratic Party. It is still infested with the craven political triangulators who coronated Hillary and thereby paved the way for Trump. On the other hand, it also remains, like it or not, the only opposition there is in the halls of government.
5. The US political system remains. Its checks and balances, a mix of genuine attempts to prevent tyranny and cynical attempts to preserve white male supremacy, have still failed to prevent a tyrant from being elected.

Given the above:

1. It’s a total waste of time to work on convincing Trump of anything. Don’t convince, oppose and taunt. He’s thin-skinned. He’ll continue acting childish and demonstrating his unfitness for office.
2. It can be good to particularly carp on basic Constitutional stuff like the Emoluments Clause. If this is done enough, and Trump’s already-low popularity tanks, it might start making enough conservatives realize that they need to abandon this sinking ship.
3. Push the Democrats hard to stand firm, like the Tea Partiers did for the Republicans against Obama.
4. But don’t be limited to electoral politics. The system has demonstrated its failure. This can itself be a liberating thing for those who oppose Trump: the legality of his victory becomes irrelevant once one considers the system’s legitimacy irrelevant. Groups like the Seattle Neighborhood Action Coalition are trying to come up with ways to build a new society in the shell of the old. Support them.

Published at 21:41 on 21 January 2017

The ferry was abnormally crowded for a Saturday morning today. Pink cat hats and protest signs were in evidence. This was despite it being the “late” boat that was sure to miss the start of the rally at Judkins Park. I had ridden my bike on the boat so as to compress time on the Seattle end and help make up for my tardiness.

It turns out not to have mattered. Throngs were walking along the sidewalks of Jackson Street on the way to the park. The sidewalks grew ever more crowded as each side street contributed its share of pedestrians. Eventually the sidewalks spilled over and the pedestrians took half the street. At that point, I parked my bike and started walking. This was a good half-mile from the park.

Soon the pedestrian traffic grew to the point where it took the whole street. This wasn’t the protest march, mind you, it was merely the pedestrian traffic heading to the pre-march rally. Three blocks from the park, everything stopped. The park was full and had the crowd had spilled out into the neighborhood street grid. I never got closer to the park for the opening rally.

Eventually, very slowly, the crowd started moving in fits and starts. There were big pauses as side-streets disgorged their share of marchers onto the main route. Cheers were passed in waves that bounced back and forth along the route. Turnout had exceeded all expectations (at least 130,000) and head of the march reached the end before the tail had started.

I spent nearly two hours waiting for the end to reach Seattle Center. There had apparently been speakers scheduled at Seattle Center but they were cancelled because the crowd was too big for the venue. It’s the largest political protest march in Seattle history, and Seattle is not alone in having vastly higher than expected turnouts.

The question is, will the energy and outrage hold. If it does, there is real hope.

Published at 22:08 on 19 January 2017

This document has been circulating quite a bit in liberal circles since the election.

While the Tea Party tactics did eventually succeed, it’s worth pointing out that it took eight years for them to do so. Do we want an eight-year Trump presidency? Really?

No, I’m not saying it’s bereft of any useful information on tactics, only that following it faithfully might lead to truly disastrous results.

Published at 12:30 on 19 January 2017

Remember their claims that a building couldn’t just collapse from heat weakening structural members and therefore it had to be a controlled demolition? Remember the claim it hadn’t happened elsewhere, ever?

Well, now it has.

Published at 08:43 on 8 January 2017

It’s something I’ve been pondering ever since the results of the election last November. Not whether or not to be part of the resistance, of course: it’s a given that I will be part of it. But how (and more importantly how much, particularly initially) to be part of it is still an issue.

It’s a given that I shouldn’t simply cling to my class privilege and let that compromise my activism. In turn that means I must be willing to risk my home and my material possessions. When I decided to try giving being more settled one last try, it was always on the basis of giving it up and bailing if it didn’t work out. I never anticipated it not working out in this particular way, but the nature of the future is that you cannot always anticipate it. Unexpected turns of events happen.

But, as with many things, it’s not so simple. Let’s play with Establishment economics a bit; it’s still very relevant, considering we still have an Establishment economic system.

It’s possible Trump will start a trade war. Some talk as if its a certainty. I disagree; the capitalist class has a lot of influence in Washington, DC, and a trade war would be bad for business. But it’s definitely a possibility: the capitalist class has gambled — incorrectly — that it can control a fascist more than once, only to later regret its mistake.

If a trade war happens, stagflation is the likely result. That’s because free trade has been the modus operandi for three decades or so, with the result (as Trump keeps correctly pointing out) that US manufacturing jobs have been decimated. Most of those factories closed a decade or more ago. The machinery has been removed and shipped abroad and the buildings have fallen into ruins. It’s called the Rust Belt for a reason.

The result is that at present there simply is not enough domestic manufacturing capacity to supply anything near the domestic demand for manufactured items. If tariffs increase the cost of imported goods buy 25%, 33%, or more, it simply won’t be possible to dodge them by shifting to now-cheaper domestically-made goods. In fact, the few remaining domestic manufacturers will now earn super-profits, because the tariffs will raise the market value of their goods to the price of the tariffed imported ones.

Those super-profits will attract investment in expanding domestic manufacturing, of course, but such expansion cannot happen immediately. It takes time to plan and build a factory. Moreover, building a factory takes extensive amounts of manufactured goods to accomplish (and remember, the trade war has just increased the price of those).

So a trade war will cause a series of price shocks for manufactured goods to hit the economy, much like OPEC caused a series of price shocks for energy to hit the economy in the 1970’s. The result will be the same: stagflation.

That will cause many people to suffer, as prices increase and economic opportunity declines. Hanging on to my home will serve me as a hedge against inflation (and a very effective one, since it’s a leveraged purchase). That will leave me better equipped to financially back the resistance. Moreover, I have room to host a roommate, and can use that space to host a fellow member of the resistance at a below-market rent.

So the correct course to take is at this time unclear. Maybe there will be a trade war, maybe there won’t be. Even if there is, maybe the resistance will most need my help in ways other than financial and housing.

It’s also quite likely that Trump will be impeached and not serve out his full term. Many observers have already predicted this, including both Allan Lichtman and Michael Moore, both of whom correctly foresaw that a Trump win was either likely or possible. In that case, the struggle will be transformed into a far more mundane one of opposition to a more traditionally conservative administration.

All I can say is, at this stage, it is not the time to make any rash decisions with my life. I suspect the correct course to take will manifest itself within six to twelve months.

Published at 08:40 on 6 January 2017

I believe Glenn Greenwald errs on the side of dismissing Russian influence in American politics (more about that below), but he does have a point about the “Russia hacked our electric grid” story.

Basically, Russia didn’t “hack the grid.” The hacked computer was a laptop that played no role in controlling the electric grid. Hacking an electric utility is not the same thing as hacking the electric grid.

The reason I believe Russia is significantly involved is not simply that the US intelligence community asserts so, but that it makes larger sense in the context of many observable unclassified facts.

By contrast, the claims of the Bush regime about Iraq being a threat were not believable in the context of observable unclassified facts:

• The intelligence community actually disagreed with many of the things Bush was saying publicly. Whistleblowers such as Joseph Wilson, and scandals like the regime’s retaliation against his wife resulted.
• UN weapons inspectors such as Scott Ritter and Hans Blix disagreed that Iraq was stockpiling WMD.
• Saddam Hussein was a secular nationalist and Islamists such as Al Qaeda were his ideological enemies. There was no reason to believe Iraq had any connection whatsoever with the 9/11 attacks.

Yes, sometimes the intelligence community lies at the behest of the White House. But sometimes it tells the truth. Sometimes it lies but the lie is minor and doesn’t discredit a larger truth. We do not live in a simplistic melodrama world where institutions are either lying evildoers or truthful protagonists. This applies to the Russian government as much as it does to the US intelligence community.

In this case, the thesis that the intelligence community is generally being accurate and truthful is the one that is more consistent with observable reality. Moreover, the thesis that Russia did not hack the grid agrees with observable reality far more than the claim that it did.

Published at 08:19 on 1 January 2017

Suppose I had the ear of Donald Trump. Suppose I wanted to destroy (or at least badly damage) Israel.

What I’d do is get Trump to be as fawning to the Israeli right as possible. I’d have no problems with settlement construction in the West Bank. I’d appoint an ambassador who wants to move the US embassy there to Jerusalem.

I’d move the embassy, preferably to occupied East Jerusalem. I’d back Israel 100% in settlement building (and in oppressive police measures, and anything else ethically questionable Israel does to the Palestinians). Then I’d let the inevitable blowback hit — and dump Israel.

Trump need not even be aware of the overall plan. His right-wing Christian backers almost certainly aren’t. They’ll support the initial stages as being pro-Israel, as the Israeli government will. But after the war heats up, the anti-semites (together with the unwitting support of the antiwar left and many middle Americans who both would be rightly afraid of a dangerous entanglement) will get Trump’s ear and convince him that his bread is now buttered on the side of isolationism and letting Israel fend for itself.

Not saying that’s actually what’s going on, of course. But given the ties of the Trump regime to the far right, it just might be. Moreover, they’ve already done the things detailed in the second paragraph of this post. Finally, the Israeli right is ideologically vulnerable to being played like a fiddle into doing its utmost to provoke a conflict with the Arabs.

Published at 22:00 on 29 December 2016

This. (It’s not the best-designed web site. Click on the three dot-dash symbols at upper left if it seems to end mid-work without showing the whole thing.)

Yes, Derrick Jensen is something of an asshole (check out some of his rants about anarchists and transgendered people if you don’t believe me). No, I don’t buy his claim that the only viable alternative to civilization is stone-age tribalism.

But, that said, the guy (and his co-authors) does have some valid promises about this civilization being so destructive that it must be ended, the sooner the better, in part because the official mechanisms of power are pretty much useless for the purpose of arresting and reversing the destruction.

Update: Note that this endorsement of the book with the title Deep Green Resistance is not an endorsement of the organization by the same name. The latter appears to be dominated by a cult of personality around Derrick Jensen as much as the Revolutionary Communist Party is by a cult of personality around Bob Avakian.

Published at 09:10 on 26 December 2016

On first glance, Mattis seems to be an atypically good pick, given the general hideous nature of Trump’s cabinet picks.

Then you get to what I called at the time the Rape of Fallujah, a deliberate attempt on my part to draw parallels between what Japanese fascists did in Nanking during World War II. I wasn’t exaggerating when I coined that phrase; at the time well in excess of 90% of the casualties were civilians. According to Wikipedia, when the dust settled the civilian casualty rate was between 71.5% and 77% of the total casualties.

Guess what? James Mattis was in charge of that operation.

Update: Democracy Now has a piece on the Rape of Fallujah here.

Published at 08:21 on 21 December 2016

What we need is realism. Sometimes that means accepting an unpleasant fact, but sometimes that means refusing to fall into false despair.

One such instance of despair is assuming there’s nothing that can be done about Trump; because given how Republican-dominated the government will be, there will be little we can do about it. This ignores the reality that Trump has at least one huge easily-observable vulnerability: his sociopathy.

He’s exceedingly self-centered, small-minded, selfish, and irritable. This is war, and in war your job is to determine and exploit your enemy’s vulnerabilities.

In war, you should also in general simply know your enemy, period. Our enemy is not just Trump, it is the larger Republican Party which is deciding to ally with him. That party is overwhelmingly conservative, and conservatives tend to place great importance on nationalism and patriotism. The latter is also a vulnerability we can exploit.

When an incoming president has the foreign entanglements that Trump has, to the point that he tweets disparagingly about protesters, news reporters, parents of deceased veterans, Broadway actors, and so on — yet refuses to say anything at all about Russia, this pushes some hot buttons for your typical conservative. We can use this to our advantage to split the Republicans in Congress and turn some of Trump’s own party against him and ally instead with us.

It may sound strange for a radical leftist to advocate making common cause with conservatives, but recall that this is war and war often requires making common cause to forge alliances with people you have many disagreements with. Churchill and Stalin had disagreements that paled in comparison to those I have with traditional American conservatives, yet managed to forge an effective alliance which defeated the Nazis.

If successful, it wouldn’t be a lasting alliance (the one with the Soviets promptly collapsed after World War II ended), but that’s not the point. The point is to neutralize a common enemy; both the Left and traditional conservatism are better off if they are slugging it out in an open society rather than being brutally repressed in a fascist state.