The Civil War of the Left: From Class Politics to Woke Capitalism — and the Populist Backlash
For decades, the political left had a simple goal: look out for the working class, fight corporate monopolies, and tax the rich. But over the last ten years, a massive ideological civil war broke out, splitting the movement into two camps that are currently deeply hostile to each other.
On one side are the Class-First Economic Populists, who want to focus entirely on wages, healthcare, and labor unions.
On the other side are the Identity-First Intersectional Progressives, who believe economic progress means nothing without a hyper-focus on racial, gender, and transgender justice.
This is my observations of how that war started, who are fighting it, and why the economic populists are currently winning the numbers game.
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The History: How the Left Lost Its Way
The roots of this split trace back to the 2008 financial crisis and the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement. At the time, the message of the angry left was clear: the 99% vs. the 1%. Wall Street and corporate America quickly realized that a united working class was dangerous to their bottom line.
To neutralize this, massive asset managers like BlackRock — alongside its “Big Three” partners, Vanguard and State Street — came up with a brilliant plan. They began tying corporate funding to ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) scores and metrics like the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index (CEI).
The Elites / Wall Street ⟶ Fund Identity Politics (ESG/CEI/Transgenderism) ⟶ Divides the Left / Workers
This move ushered in the era of “Woke Capitalism.” Suddenly, instead of raising wages, multi-billion-dollar corporations like Target or Bud Light were plastering rainbow flags and transgender marketing campaigns everywhere to secure corporate funding. It was a massive sleight of hand: corporations got to look progressive while completely ignoring economic and class inequality.
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The Two Factions and Their Key Players
About three to four years ago, this corporate-backed identity politics shattered the political ecosystem on the left into two camps:
1. The “Identity-First” Intersectional Progressives
This camp believes that social justice is the absolute foundation of the left. They argue that dropping niche cultural battles — like transgender rights or language policing — is an act of political cowardice and a betrayal of vulnerable minorities.
* Main Players: Sam Seder and Emma Vigeland of The Majority Report, Francesca Fiorentini, and Twitch streamer Hasan Piker.
* The Trap: This faction operates in an elite academic bubble. Hosts like Emma Vigeland are infamous for being hyper-fixated on micro-identity issues, forcing viewers through college-level lectures on cultural grievances every single afternoon. This approach created a rigid “Brooklyn Left” echo chamber that actively alienates regular working-class people.
2. The “Class-First” Economic Populists
This camp argues that the modern left — DEI, ESG, and especially transgender issues — has completely destroyed its own electoral chances by prioritizing elitist academic jargon over broad economic reforms that affect everyone’s wallet.
* Main Players: Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian of The Young Turks (TYT), Krystal Ball of Breaking Points, and Jimmy Dore.
* The Blueprint: This faction treats the audience like normal adults. They operate on a simple premise: You can fiercely support unions, higher wages, and Medicare for All without forcing the audience into endless culture-war debates. They want to drop the divisive social justice rhetoric and gender pronounces so they can build a majoritarian coalition with Middle America to fight corporate monopolies and elite powers.
“2.5.” The “Pure Class” Dissident / Insurgent Left (The Left-Wing Critics of Woke)
There is a smaller, highly intellectual sub-camp that is distinct from TYT or Breaking Points. They are deeply Marxist or socialist, but they are completely hostile to “wokeness” and especially gender ideology, viewing it as a weapon used by corporations (like BlackRock) to divide the left and workers.
Jacobin Magazine: The premier socialist publication in America. Jacobin has consistently run essays arguing that “wokeness” is a product of professional-class elites. They argue that identity politics actively destroys class solidarity by dividing workers by race and gender instead of uniting them against bosses.
Freddie deBoer: A prominent leftist author and essayist who wrote “How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement”. He argues that modern “woke” culture is an exclusionary language game played by highly educated college graduates to gatekeep power, completely locking out everyday working-class people who don’t know the “correct” academic terminology.
This camp is now coalescing with the “class-first” economic populists (as they are fundamentally adversarial to the “identity first” intersectional progressive camp.)
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The Blood Feuds: The TYT Pivot
This ideological split turned deeply personal, resulting in some of the most toxic bridge-burnings in independent media history.
* The TYT vs. Jimmy Dore Feud: Jimmy Dore was a staple on TYT for a decade before breaking away. He ruthlessly mocked the mainstream left as “woke frauds.” In 2021, a nuclear fallout erupted when Ana Kasparian — who was still “superwoke” and a big proponent of trans-rights at the time — accused Dore of sexual harassment, and Dore retaliated by dedicating whole segments to mocking her. Today, even though TYT and Kasparian have pivoted to an anti-woke stance, Dore refuses to forgive them, calling their pivot pure financial opportunism.
* The TYT vs. Francesca Fiorentini Break: Three years ago in 2023, as Kasparian and Uygur began pivoting away from “woke” and “trans” ideology, long-time contributor Francesca Fiorentini criticized them on air for betraying progressive principles and “soft-pedaling authoritarians.” The professional relationship imploded, resulting in her independent videos attacking TYT for abandoning social justice issues.
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The Current Situation: The Numbers Don’t Lie
So, who is winning the civil war?
The Class-First Economic Populists have overwhelmingly won the numbers war on YouTube and social media.
Following catastrophic consumer boycotts against corporate brands and historic losses for Democrats among working-class voters, the entire political landscape realized that hyper-fixation on identity politics is an electoral liability.
On YouTube:
Class-First Combined Base
██████████████████████████████ 10.48M Subs
Identity-First Combined Base
████████████ 4.21M Subs
While The Majority Report and the intersectional camp retain the power to scold and gatekeep ideological purity inside their small, loyal bubbles, their daily active viewership has plateaued. Meanwhile, mass-market populist outlets like Breaking Points and a newly pivoted TYT command millions of subscribers and heavy daily engagement.
Middle America — whether left, right, or independent — cares about rent, grocery bills, healthcare, and local communities. By dumping the divisive “woke” baggage, the economic populists proved that material class politics is the only viable path to actually winning power.
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The “Identity-First” Intersectional Progressives Side Still Holds Immense Institutional Power — They Are the Establishment
Even though the class-first populists have stronger social engagement, the intersectional-progressive framework still has enormous influence inside universities, journalism, HR departments, nonprofits, Democratic activist networks, foundations, and corporate communications culture.
Populists may dominate audience energy, while institutional progressives often dominate elite institutions, mainstream media, and party establishment.
Why?
Because the establishment Democrats know that as long as they can keep the left preoccupied with identity politics, then they do not have to deliver on economic or class reforms that would upset their donors and sponsors.
correct, its the highest form of dog whistling i ever saw. i learned a long long time ago, that the only way to get social rights secured, is that economic rights must come first and be secure.
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Economic rights are foundational for securing social rights, as they ensure individuals have the necessary resources and conditions to live with dignity. Without adequate economic support, the realization of social rights becomes significantly more challenging.
American Bar Association Wikipedia
Economic rights are essential for the realization of social rights. They provide the necessary resources and conditions for individuals to live with dignity. Without adequate economic support, achieving social rights becomes significantly more difficult.
Economic rights include:
Right to Work: The ability to choose employment and work under just conditions.
Right to an Adequate Standard of Living: This encompasses access to food, clothing, housing, and medical care.
Right to Social Security: Protection in cases of unemployment, sickness, disability, or old age.
Relationship Between Economic and Social Rights
Economic rights serve as a foundation for social rights, which include:
Right to Education: Access to free and compulsory education.
Right to Health: The right to the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health.
Right to Participate in Cultural Life: The ability to engage in and benefit from cultural activities.
In summary, economic rights are crucial for securing social rights. They ensure that individuals have the means to live with dignity, thereby facilitating the realization of broader social rights.
Wikipedia Ontario Human Rights Commission
Key economic rights necessary for securing social rights include the right to an adequate standard of living, which encompasses access to adequate food, clothing, housing, and healthcare. Additionally, rights related to work, social security, and education are essential for ensuring individuals can live in dignity and participate fully in society.
maytree.com Human Rights Watch
Economic rights, such as fair wages and social security, directly enable people to access social rights like education, healthcare, and housing by providing the financial means to meet basic needs. Governments’ obligations under treaties like the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) require them to protect these rights so that social protections are not just formal but practically enjoyed.
maytree.com cesr.org
Economic rights like fair wages and social security have historically improved social rights by reducing poverty and inequality, enabling access to education and healthcare. The U.S. New Deal under Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1930s expanded social security, unemployment insurance, and public works, which helped address housing and food insecurity during the Great Depression.
University of Minnesota Amnesty International
i predicted a trump like would come along since 1993. its the policies stupid. and sherrod brown found that out the hard way in 2024. as soon as he saw so many in ohio speak out about what bill clinton did to them, he should have ran against clintons polices, and named names.
voters were desperate, one clintonite after another, voters could see the results of clintons policies, they lived it every day. they saw the rigging of elections to keep the clintonites in charge.
they were desperate. so i do not insult them at all. i only hope they are not so radicalized, that we cannot get them back.
the way to radicalize them even more, is to insult them.
It’s all well and fine to champion social and economic rights—essential even, but when you’re being strangled by predatory oligarchs who are running the show, it’s hard to see a way out. As has been noted here, voting isn’t going to change the system when it’s between Tweedledee and Tweedledum. Throw the bums out? Yeah, right.
There may be hope in a multipolar movement, but that requires cohesive vision and self enlightened leadership among a mountain of other interdependent factors that are beyond analysis in a blog comment section. So maybe I should just shut up and go mop the floor and make some lunch. Do something constructive with my time . . .
Now that the Soviet Union is gone, and People Of Influence And Authority no longer have to toss the masses a bone or two, they would much prefer that we dissipate our energy on dreary arguments about cultural appropriation and how many LGTBQXYZPDQ+ can dance on the head of a pin, endless and endlessly performative struggle sessions, rather than raise questions about how the economic pie is sliced.
Put another way – to paraphrase Chris Hedges – elites will gladly discuss race, they will decry gender inequality most piteously, they will demonstrate a touching sensitivity to the rights of sexual and gender minorities so oppressed that they have not even been discovered yet. Those same elites will not readily discuss economic class.
Or, in the negative formulation – if businesses were to stop opposing unionization of their workers, the result would be a transfer of wealth, of concrete material benefits, to brown and black and and tabby and yellow and white working class cats and also people greater than all the allyship statements ever penned, all the diversity committees ever instituted, all the preferred pronoun tags ever attached to a corporate email.
This piece where Chris Hedges interviews a woman journo assigned by The Nation to look into a different wrinkle of the Epstein network is fascinating. They don’t bother much with the Pedo aspect, it is more about the financial networks and how these really scummy people, Larry Summers, etc. are all linked in promoting one another and scamming, sometimes get caught but always get off the hook (Marc Rich bribes Clinton for a last-day-in-office pardon, he was violating our Sacred Sanctions and aiding the Iranians or whomever), trafficking of younger women (but adults) to elderly losers like Mark Zuckerman, he’s 91 and is asked “Is 31 too old for you?” Soon Yi Previn, Woody’s stepdaughter and then wife loved Jeff Epstein, Chomsky’s life-end wife given to him by the Network etc. Pretty dark, and as I said not the usual well-chewed and digested info: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JNkIusoUAo
When Lex Wexner comes under the eyes of the local cops, same time he’s installing Jeffrey E. as the front man, a source inside the PD helps him have the accountant whose going to spill all the beans get murdered. Lots of Russian Mafia types helping hand big industries over to favored Oligarchs in 1991, to starve the newly capitalized masses and kill 5 million. Robert Maxwell’s death, and the missing money, $1.4 Billion, stolen from a newspaper union, etc. Fascinating. Going to the local Barnes & Nobel in next couple of days, if the expose’s in this months issue will buy The Nation for first time in 15 or more years.
Bernie Sanders is very attached to the notion that “health care is a human right, not a privilege”.
It would be great if the kaleidoscope of human ambivalence ever rotated to a configuration where that principle was embraced by firmly convinced majority opinion, but depending on that happening, I think, represents the politics of trying to draw to an inside straight. “Medicare-for-all” — his umbrella slogan — was a bigger tent, because you could get into the tent with just the idea that a single-payer solution, say, was arguably likely to be cheaper, because more efficient: able to rationalize the system, face down monopolists et cetera. Sanders on television at least was never (or rarely?) great on the latter argument. When a network talking head would ask “how can we possibly afford to cover everyone?” Sanders was never (that I saw) prepared to make the argument that a single-payer architecture was a cheaper-by-design principle. That the U.S. spends more in public money per capita already than any other advanced country pays in total per capita was a factoid never on tip of his tongue.
His poor preparation is not my point. My point is that an effective populist/progressive politics will advocate for policies with a patchwork of complimentary and even contradictory-in-principle rationales. In a working democracy, there’s a lot of agreeing to disagree on philosophy on the way to agreeing to move forward on action. There’s agreeing to stand up an institution, first, followed by figuring out how that institution will work in practice and, even later, persisting to enforce standards of practice.
George Burns liked to tell old jokes, maybe because he was an old guy for so long after Gracie Allen passed away. One of them was: “the key to success in show business is sincerity . . . if you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”
In the social media world of podcasts, Substacks and YouTube, the noise of politics is the show business of grifters. Any individual could be completely and genuinely sincere, but social media is a skinner box: the feedback loops are training everyone to be a grifter to get the views, the follows and advertising support or subscriptions. If you don’t want your innocence stripped away, you shouldn’t google Krystal Ball’s deep history, just to take one example. Pretty much everyone who is famous has been asked early in their career, “do you want to be right or do you want to be famous?” and has answered one way. I am not saying everyone loses their moral compass entirely; I am saying that to navigate that world of on-line politics, no one is guided primarily or solely by a moral compass.
I think it is a reasonable judgment that the social media seas are too rough, and good, moral, political judgment is too fragile, to persist and survive intact for very long.
One reason to hate the oligarchs is their ruthlessness. They practice the politics of character assassination to eliminate anyone who might credibly hoist the banner of populist/progressive agitation and reform, because the social media environment makes that tactic effective. (Most of the oligarchs believe in escalation dominance over ethics — if character assassination doesn’t do the trick and it seems to matter, they will escalate to the real thing. I honestly think that’s what happened to Charlie Kirk.)
Emma Goldman famously said, “If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.” That’s a scary idea. John F. Kennedy warned, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”
I live in L.A. county and some right-wing pundits are currently online roasting the nebbish who is responsible for administering L.A. County’s voting machinery. They are not wrong. I don’t vote anymore because I don’t think the people in charge feel any obligation to count the vote accurately or, to phrase it more accurately, they don’t feel obligated to ensure that they are counting the vote accurately. They are going thru the motions, following procedure, and they sincerely believe the procedure will result in an accurate vote count, but they chose the procedures knowing that they would not be able to tell if they were wrong and they would be unable to correct a wrong count. Their incompetence is unintended evil.
Unintended evil — there’s a lot of that in American politics.
I apologize for the long meander. I appreciated KT Chong’s well-prepared comment. What it prompted in me are these reflections on the apparent futility of populist / progressive politics and how “woke capitalism” and class politics play a big part in making populist politics futile or hopeless.
Politics today isn’t so much something people deliberate on as part of organizing collective choice or collective action on an issue as it is a neverending story, an ongoing entertainment with heroes and villains and costumes and scenery. Principles are worn like jewelry or accessories, part of dressing up to impress. The idea that a principle is a tool of democratic deliberation, a means of agreeing on a choice without resorting simply to a calculus of raw power — “might makes right” as they say — we’ve already lost that fundamental conviction.
Democratic deliberation is about principles and democratic legislation enacts general rules so 51% don’t just vote 49% into slavery and call it a Code of Justice.
I saw the Eschaton blog today — Atrios’s blog is one of the old ladies of Democratic political blogging. At the time I saw it today, in the lead item, Atrios was snarking about the legacy news media’s reticence to report on Trump’s deteriorating health.
Not so long ago, Atrios was ridiculing anyone who pointed out Biden’s advanced Parkinson’s.
The partisan political discourse has always been partisan. Partisans have always called out the crookedness of the other side. But, I don’t know if they’ve always taken pride in being unembarrassed by their own side’s failings and shortcomings. The Biden Presidency was one huge partisan own-goal. The Democrats had one job: put in someone so much obviously better than Trump that the Republicans also have to put up someone who at least looks better than Trump, to compete. They didn’t do that and worse, they don’t seem to have wanted to do that.
Put aside the whole four years of Weekend at Biden’s, the various fake scandals they used against Trump, from 2016 on were reckless and worse, they didn’t work. The idea that a principle is needed to justify a scandal is lost on the Democratic establishment. They don’t have principles. If there were ever a guy against whom you don’t need to fake a scandal, it has got to be Trump. He exemplifies the moral derangement of the rich brat whose parents sent him to military school in lieu of parenting, because that’s who he really is: a sociopath and a cheat. So, naturally, the Democrats faked one scandal after another beginning with Russiagate — why not?
I wish I could have been as succinct and well-organized in my remarks as KT Chong or spud. And, I am probably going to wish I had proofread what I wrote more thoroughly, but natural intelligence gets old and tired and only wishes someone would finance a new power supply and an advanced reasoning model.
I have looked at the numbers and it is really hard to tell if he actually shifted the outcome — it is not obvious; you can spin a counterfactual, but you can always do that.
Gender rights are human rights … do you need to be reminded that those icky minorities are human too?
parroting right wing bullshit but nothing new here. Lot of smart people but still a lot of bad thinking. The lesson of trump was that as a society , as a people we are a lot dumber than we thought or at least there isnt anybody really smart in control anymore. But the positive takeaway is that the rich and their servants are absolute fucking morons.
Oh any one with the I predicted this… I predicted that blah blah,… yeah yeah nostradamas we all saw blade runner or anything cyberpunk, or tonnes of fantasy / sci fi that was just abstractions of our current world . Video games were great because they weren’t so afraid to say rich people bad. The fallout series some might know now originated in a games series in the 90s, the game called out a bunch of interesting bits, the rise of Scientology/ the popluarity and addictive potential of Magic the Gathering card game/ and that the us government is essentially deep state fascist dictatorship that serves only the rich. Hell tank girl is looking pretty accurate , sans kangaroo hybrids.
but yeah, everybody is special but your not that special.
Gender rights are human rights. Duh. That’s the point. Getting hung up on the alphabet crowd’s right for recognition is a deliberate divisive obscuration. It’s tiresome as are its defenders.
Even if Poppy Bush had won a second term, Clinton’s presidency would have just been deferred four years. I can’t stand the Clintons, but Bill was the most dynamic Dem candidate, bar none, since JFK and RFK and the Dem strategy was to play on that and they did in spades. That wouldn’t have expired in four years and after Bush Sr’s lame duck second term, he would have been as unpopular as ever — no Perot needed if indeed Perot did siphon Bush voters in 1992. That saying from No Country For Old Men comes to mind. You can’t stop what’s comin’ — it ain’t all waitin’ on you — that’s vanity.
Economic problems are subject to economic solutions. Liquidate surpluses, fund deficits. Cultural problems are subject to cultural solutions which are much messier and more difficult. You have to change peoples attitudes. You have to expand their sense of empathy. The problem with “wokeness” or the strawman that goes under that appellation is that it devolves into tokenism in the hothouse of American politics. “See, we’re running a black woman to be utterly corrupt tyrant for a month! Progress!” Meanwhile the Fasciitis are actively erasing entire categories of people from legal existence. Just don’t get caught with Kropotkin or Emma Goldman in your possession. It’s not just race and gender anymore. They can nail you for loitering with intent or decide that your social posts make you a Colonel in Antifa. Fair wage laws don’t help much if you don’t have the right not to be curb stomped, simply for going outside. The right to simply EXIST is the most fundamental economic right of all, and “I own my own skin” should be the first axiom of any rational, humanistic economics.
When you walk into a supermarket, you see a price tag. The BRICS see a strategic asset fundamentally reshaping the global economy through independent food pricing. Welcome back to Think BRICS, where we analyze how the BRICS alliance is dismantling western financial control over global food prices and driving a massive economic realignment via the global grain trade.
In this episode, we break down the major shift from the dollar dominance of the Chicago Board of Trade to the upcoming Indore summit in India. For decades, a handful of agribusiness giants dictated food pricing in Western currencies, transforming vital commodities into financial games. Now, the global south is using its massive production power to build a new architecture of food sovereignty. We dive deep into the mechanics of de-dollarization in agricultural trade, examining how independent grain exchange benchmarks and local currency settlements protect producers from speculative shocks.
Discover how multipolarity is taking root in the soil, fueled by India Russia agriculture ties, Chinese supply-chain resilience, and Brazilian soy logistics. From fertilizer trade routes to new standards, the BRICS expansion is moving to secure the literal backbone of human civilization.
While we analyze the structural agriculture geopolitics of global trade, this video does not focus on retail-level grocery inflation trends in Western nations, nor does it provide personal investing advice for trading agricultural futures or commodities on Western markets. We do not detail the internal domestic farming subsidies of individual European nations, nor do we analyze the specific logistical maritime security threats in the Red Sea.
Finally, while we discuss the BRICS alliance and its macro trade finance mechanisms, this episode does not detail the technical specifications of individual digital tracing software or the precise chemistry profiles behind the global fertilizer trade, focusing instead on the broader shift toward a multipolar economy.
00:00 Why BRICS+ Views Food as a Strategic Asset
00:30 The Indore Summit: A New Era for BRICS Agriculture
01:10 How the Global South Became the World’s Feeder
01:40 Ending the Chicago Monopoly on Global Food Prices
02:18 BRICS Plan for Independent Grain Price Discovery
02:54 China’s 2030 Modernization: Secular Food Security
03:52 India’s Rise: Why New Delhi Rejects the IMF Model
05:15 Russia’s Fertilizer Power Play and Food Sovereignty
06:02 The Brazil-China Alliance: Reshaping Global Trade
06:30 Multipolarity in Motion: Building Parallel Systems
07:28 Why the Global South Needs a New Food Narrative
07:56 How BRICS Coordination Shifs Global Power Balance
‘I can’t stand the Clintons, but Bill was the most dynamic Dem candidate, bar none, since JFK and RFK and the Dem strategy was to play on that and they did in spades’
Following up on my past shares on C. Klosterman’s “The 90s: A Book.”
Got to p. 185, “[vodka on the chessboard],” his take on US fuckery with the collapsed USSR in the 90s, which Jeffrey Sachs has given a better view of. (Hell, anyone other than LAS could do a better take than Chuck here.) As Sachs shared, he bailed out Poland & juiced their economy, he was NOT allowed to by his Deep State pals in Russia’s case, they deliberately installed post-Gorbachev (today mostly hated in Russia), & 5 million Russians, mainly but not entirely older men who suffered under the monopoly Oligarchy (1 sleaze bag got the oil business, another the post offices, another heavy industry, etc. etc.) and average mortality plummeted nearly 7 years in fewer than five. People sold their children or drank themselves to death in the freezing cold. (Kind of like the deaths of despair in Appalachia by Sackler Family drugs in recent years.)
Since he’s so lazy, & evidently so afraid to offend TPTB, I think the best share would be– first, unpleasant facts he does admit. All quoted in a row.
Second I will list the pathetic rationalizations, then third might have to add more detail on his elided, erased data– he suddenly had that 50 point drop in his IQ like the one LAS said spud had when he accidentally left one letter out of a typed word.
Okay, decent title, that reflects Boris’ drunken hijinks, known to all. The first line is very telling, “There are things forgotten by chance, and there are things that are forgotten on purpose.” His M.O. here. He also confesses to “an elephantine level of discomfiting rationalization,” foreshadowing. “. . . the 1996 Russian democratic (sic) election” fits all the preceding. “Yeltsin, the boozehound incumbent overcame (passive case, sic) mass unpopularity to win reelection as Russian president”, yes the assist he admits was due to “clandestine U.S. operatives and the support of Bill Clinton.”
” . . . a masterpiece of U.S. statecraft” was “hailed” among election-stealers, & Time devoted a cover story to bragging about it. His mea culpa, “it (the theft) did happen, & it’s almost inconcievable” that Yeltsin would’ve won without “Yank” meddling.
He’d won in 1991 but got sunk in a “quagmire of chaos”, the giant landmass couldn’t pivot effectively from “state-controlled communist to capitalist sovereign [SIC!!] democracy.” Yes, by ’93 “Yeltsin deployed the military to remain in control”, kill & jail and disappear peaceful protesters. It was only a “half joke” that he was hated more than Stalin, who knows?
Yeltsin “was the opposite of perfect” (does he mean abysmal?) but “Clinton liked him personally” (what’s not to like about a fat, pliable puppet drunk?), got them a $10.2 billion” IMF Loan. Oh, that ALWAYS helps economy, dunnit? The US Op was run by 3 pretend “flat-screen TV” salesmen, staying in a luxury hotel , running Y’s daughter Tatiana Dyachenko, 36, campaign efforts and earned 1/4 million each for the espionage over 3 months. . . Yeltsin couldn’t win with claims of “a good job in his first term,” everyone knew the opposite. He only offered “grand promises for the future.” (Did AOC learn from him with M4A, which she killed, and the “Green New Deal”. Very likely .
They were brilliant though, studied the failed Bush Sr. Campaign of 1992 and, George Costanza-like, when he transformed his life, “did the opposite.” And fear, “a return to breadlines” was used to motivate the impoverished Russians to vote against their own interest.
3 closing admissions,”it’s difficult to discern precisely how vital American involvement with the ’96 election was.” It’s like the Zionist argument about who are the real indigenous people. Don’t investigate the claim from both sides, throw up your hands and accept “I’ll never know,” learned helplessness. “. . . the entire race [w]as either mildly or heavily corrupt.” A didstinction without a difference. Lastly, “Yeltsin was the best hope (Obama foreshadowing) for the expansion (sic) of democracy” (sic), via Martial Law and handing 85% of the Economy to a dozen Oligarchs to fleece the sheep.
In conclusion, “It wasn’t (sic) a conspiracy. (Uhm, 3 fake flatscreen salesmen for a Rival Power paid 3/4 of $1 million is the literal definition of a conspiracy, “breathing together.”) “It was a plan, and the plan worked.” Plan a nice “neutral” word, no clear denotation in his Zen, indiffernt mind. “It’s just not a plan WE prefer to remember.” Too bad Tonto wasn’t there to tell Klosterman “What do you mean we, white man?”
In conclusion, Klosterman didn’t (imho) suddenly suffer what happened to Matt Taibbi when the Libs threatened to jail him for conspiracy with his Bossman Elon Musk, stopped ever talking about Palestine or Genocide, or Freedom of Speech, after 3 decades of advocating for all of these. “I’m not interested”, this sketchy 3 pp. utter cop-out suggests if he’d had ANY take on the actual election theft and consequent 5 million early deaths of mostly innocent victims, he feared someone would come after him, and he spiked not just the lede but the whole story. Pathetic and cowardly, a yellow dog, not a journalist in these pp.
Just under 3 pp. of lazy and dishonest coverage of the
coverage of the event. After so many sics, I had to end with my own!! I also didn’t close a parenthetic comment with a ) . . . Must be losing my marbles, need to take a Trump Cognitive test!!
Doesn’t matter who you know or where you go it’s all the same even if the climate changes and you’re sweating it out on those mean streets or chilling in some green suite your poop stinks and your corpse will rot some day, whaddaya think? that you’re smart and immune and your possessions and position are gonna protect and save ya? buena focking suerte your ass is grass no matter what its color or however smart you think you are. You can’t influence death.
mago, sorry you’re in a bad place, friend. my weekly ephemeris said that yesterday’s energy was “askew,” I still went to a social event and that was very much the case. A couple of rude, privileged assholes “calling out” others’, me included, for daring to be themselves . . . This society is sick and mostly joyless, thus displaying joissance in front of others creates rage . . .
I actually jumped on here to add a Nota Bene I should’ve concluded with on the Yeltsin Vodka Chessboard. Klosterberg’s book published in 2022, when Maddow’s “Russiagate” insanity had long been discredited. So his hypocrisy in blandly stating “Regime Change is good when WE do it, bad and UNDEMOCRATIC when others do” is particularly flagrant, and insults the intelligence of any half-bright reader. Other parts of the book show he’s anything but stupid. But convictions (or cowardice) block honesty, he couldn’t help himself.
KT Chong
The Civil War of the Left: From Class Politics to Woke Capitalism — and the Populist Backlash
For decades, the political left had a simple goal: look out for the working class, fight corporate monopolies, and tax the rich. But over the last ten years, a massive ideological civil war broke out, splitting the movement into two camps that are currently deeply hostile to each other.
On one side are the Class-First Economic Populists, who want to focus entirely on wages, healthcare, and labor unions.
On the other side are the Identity-First Intersectional Progressives, who believe economic progress means nothing without a hyper-focus on racial, gender, and transgender justice.
This is my observations of how that war started, who are fighting it, and why the economic populists are currently winning the numbers game.
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The History: How the Left Lost Its Way
The roots of this split trace back to the 2008 financial crisis and the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement. At the time, the message of the angry left was clear: the 99% vs. the 1%. Wall Street and corporate America quickly realized that a united working class was dangerous to their bottom line.
To neutralize this, massive asset managers like BlackRock — alongside its “Big Three” partners, Vanguard and State Street — came up with a brilliant plan. They began tying corporate funding to ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) scores and metrics like the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index (CEI).
The Elites / Wall Street ⟶ Fund Identity Politics (ESG/CEI/Transgenderism) ⟶ Divides the Left / Workers
This move ushered in the era of “Woke Capitalism.” Suddenly, instead of raising wages, multi-billion-dollar corporations like Target or Bud Light were plastering rainbow flags and transgender marketing campaigns everywhere to secure corporate funding. It was a massive sleight of hand: corporations got to look progressive while completely ignoring economic and class inequality.
—
The Two Factions and Their Key Players
About three to four years ago, this corporate-backed identity politics shattered the political ecosystem on the left into two camps:
1. The “Identity-First” Intersectional Progressives
This camp believes that social justice is the absolute foundation of the left. They argue that dropping niche cultural battles — like transgender rights or language policing — is an act of political cowardice and a betrayal of vulnerable minorities.
* Main Players: Sam Seder and Emma Vigeland of The Majority Report, Francesca Fiorentini, and Twitch streamer Hasan Piker.
* The Trap: This faction operates in an elite academic bubble. Hosts like Emma Vigeland are infamous for being hyper-fixated on micro-identity issues, forcing viewers through college-level lectures on cultural grievances every single afternoon. This approach created a rigid “Brooklyn Left” echo chamber that actively alienates regular working-class people.
2. The “Class-First” Economic Populists
This camp argues that the modern left — DEI, ESG, and especially transgender issues — has completely destroyed its own electoral chances by prioritizing elitist academic jargon over broad economic reforms that affect everyone’s wallet.
* Main Players: Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian of The Young Turks (TYT), Krystal Ball of Breaking Points, and Jimmy Dore.
* The Blueprint: This faction treats the audience like normal adults. They operate on a simple premise: You can fiercely support unions, higher wages, and Medicare for All without forcing the audience into endless culture-war debates. They want to drop the divisive social justice rhetoric and gender pronounces so they can build a majoritarian coalition with Middle America to fight corporate monopolies and elite powers.
“2.5.” The “Pure Class” Dissident / Insurgent Left (The Left-Wing Critics of Woke)
There is a smaller, highly intellectual sub-camp that is distinct from TYT or Breaking Points. They are deeply Marxist or socialist, but they are completely hostile to “wokeness” and especially gender ideology, viewing it as a weapon used by corporations (like BlackRock) to divide the left and workers.
Jacobin Magazine: The premier socialist publication in America. Jacobin has consistently run essays arguing that “wokeness” is a product of professional-class elites. They argue that identity politics actively destroys class solidarity by dividing workers by race and gender instead of uniting them against bosses.
Freddie deBoer: A prominent leftist author and essayist who wrote “How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement”. He argues that modern “woke” culture is an exclusionary language game played by highly educated college graduates to gatekeep power, completely locking out everyday working-class people who don’t know the “correct” academic terminology.
This camp is now coalescing with the “class-first” economic populists (as they are fundamentally adversarial to the “identity first” intersectional progressive camp.)
—
The Blood Feuds: The TYT Pivot
This ideological split turned deeply personal, resulting in some of the most toxic bridge-burnings in independent media history.
* The TYT vs. Jimmy Dore Feud: Jimmy Dore was a staple on TYT for a decade before breaking away. He ruthlessly mocked the mainstream left as “woke frauds.” In 2021, a nuclear fallout erupted when Ana Kasparian — who was still “superwoke” and a big proponent of trans-rights at the time — accused Dore of sexual harassment, and Dore retaliated by dedicating whole segments to mocking her. Today, even though TYT and Kasparian have pivoted to an anti-woke stance, Dore refuses to forgive them, calling their pivot pure financial opportunism.
* The TYT vs. Francesca Fiorentini Break: Three years ago in 2023, as Kasparian and Uygur began pivoting away from “woke” and “trans” ideology, long-time contributor Francesca Fiorentini criticized them on air for betraying progressive principles and “soft-pedaling authoritarians.” The professional relationship imploded, resulting in her independent videos attacking TYT for abandoning social justice issues.
—
The Current Situation: The Numbers Don’t Lie
So, who is winning the civil war?
The Class-First Economic Populists have overwhelmingly won the numbers war on YouTube and social media.
Following catastrophic consumer boycotts against corporate brands and historic losses for Democrats among working-class voters, the entire political landscape realized that hyper-fixation on identity politics is an electoral liability.
On YouTube:
Class-First Combined Base
██████████████████████████████ 10.48M Subs
Identity-First Combined Base
████████████ 4.21M Subs
While The Majority Report and the intersectional camp retain the power to scold and gatekeep ideological purity inside their small, loyal bubbles, their daily active viewership has plateaued. Meanwhile, mass-market populist outlets like Breaking Points and a newly pivoted TYT command millions of subscribers and heavy daily engagement.
Middle America — whether left, right, or independent — cares about rent, grocery bills, healthcare, and local communities. By dumping the divisive “woke” baggage, the economic populists proved that material class politics is the only viable path to actually winning power.
—
The “Identity-First” Intersectional Progressives Side Still Holds Immense Institutional Power — They Are the Establishment
Even though the class-first populists have stronger social engagement, the intersectional-progressive framework still has enormous influence inside universities, journalism, HR departments, nonprofits, Democratic activist networks, foundations, and corporate communications culture.
Populists may dominate audience energy, while institutional progressives often dominate elite institutions, mainstream media, and party establishment.
Why?
Because the establishment Democrats know that as long as they can keep the left preoccupied with identity politics, then they do not have to deliver on economic or class reforms that would upset their donors and sponsors.
spud
KT Chong:
correct, its the highest form of dog whistling i ever saw. i learned a long long time ago, that the only way to get social rights secured, is that economic rights must come first and be secure.
————-
Economic rights are foundational for securing social rights, as they ensure individuals have the necessary resources and conditions to live with dignity. Without adequate economic support, the realization of social rights becomes significantly more challenging.
American Bar Association Wikipedia
Economic rights are essential for the realization of social rights. They provide the necessary resources and conditions for individuals to live with dignity. Without adequate economic support, achieving social rights becomes significantly more difficult.
Economic rights include:
Right to Work: The ability to choose employment and work under just conditions.
Right to an Adequate Standard of Living: This encompasses access to food, clothing, housing, and medical care.
Right to Social Security: Protection in cases of unemployment, sickness, disability, or old age.
Relationship Between Economic and Social Rights
Economic rights serve as a foundation for social rights, which include:
Right to Education: Access to free and compulsory education.
Right to Health: The right to the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health.
Right to Participate in Cultural Life: The ability to engage in and benefit from cultural activities.
In summary, economic rights are crucial for securing social rights. They ensure that individuals have the means to live with dignity, thereby facilitating the realization of broader social rights.
Wikipedia Ontario Human Rights Commission
Key economic rights necessary for securing social rights include the right to an adequate standard of living, which encompasses access to adequate food, clothing, housing, and healthcare. Additionally, rights related to work, social security, and education are essential for ensuring individuals can live in dignity and participate fully in society.
maytree.com Human Rights Watch
Economic rights, such as fair wages and social security, directly enable people to access social rights like education, healthcare, and housing by providing the financial means to meet basic needs. Governments’ obligations under treaties like the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) require them to protect these rights so that social protections are not just formal but practically enjoyed.
maytree.com cesr.org
Economic rights like fair wages and social security have historically improved social rights by reducing poverty and inequality, enabling access to education and healthcare. The U.S. New Deal under Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1930s expanded social security, unemployment insurance, and public works, which helped address housing and food insecurity during the Great Depression.
University of Minnesota Amnesty International
bruce wilder
@KT Chong
https://youtu.be/FIeTG8P9oQw?si=2u5E-WmkhfwPvXPB
How do you type rhetoric that mocks “MAGA” as low-class hicks and fools, on whom Trump allegedly “backfires”?
spud
bruce wilder:
i predicted a trump like would come along since 1993. its the policies stupid. and sherrod brown found that out the hard way in 2024. as soon as he saw so many in ohio speak out about what bill clinton did to them, he should have ran against clintons polices, and named names.
voters were desperate, one clintonite after another, voters could see the results of clintons policies, they lived it every day. they saw the rigging of elections to keep the clintonites in charge.
they were desperate. so i do not insult them at all. i only hope they are not so radicalized, that we cannot get them back.
the way to radicalize them even more, is to insult them.
mago
It’s all well and fine to champion social and economic rights—essential even, but when you’re being strangled by predatory oligarchs who are running the show, it’s hard to see a way out. As has been noted here, voting isn’t going to change the system when it’s between Tweedledee and Tweedledum. Throw the bums out? Yeah, right.
There may be hope in a multipolar movement, but that requires cohesive vision and self enlightened leadership among a mountain of other interdependent factors that are beyond analysis in a blog comment section. So maybe I should just shut up and go mop the floor and make some lunch. Do something constructive with my time . . .
Feral Finster
Now that the Soviet Union is gone, and People Of Influence And Authority no longer have to toss the masses a bone or two, they would much prefer that we dissipate our energy on dreary arguments about cultural appropriation and how many LGTBQXYZPDQ+ can dance on the head of a pin, endless and endlessly performative struggle sessions, rather than raise questions about how the economic pie is sliced.
Put another way – to paraphrase Chris Hedges – elites will gladly discuss race, they will decry gender inequality most piteously, they will demonstrate a touching sensitivity to the rights of sexual and gender minorities so oppressed that they have not even been discovered yet. Those same elites will not readily discuss economic class.
Or, in the negative formulation – if businesses were to stop opposing unionization of their workers, the result would be a transfer of wealth, of concrete material benefits, to brown and black and and tabby and yellow and white working class cats and also people greater than all the allyship statements ever penned, all the diversity committees ever instituted, all the preferred pronoun tags ever attached to a corporate email.
Which is precisely why they will not do this.
Feral Finster
@spud
“i predicted a trump like would come along since 1993.”
*cough* H. Ross Perot. *cough*. Hell, Perot was leading in national polls into the summer before he suddenly dropped out, only to re-emerge later.
Still, were it not for Perot in 1992, Clinton likely would have been a footnote in history.
mago
Just wanted to add that I couldn’t care less about gender rights, but I’m a strong proponent of human rights.
Mark Level
This piece where Chris Hedges interviews a woman journo assigned by The Nation to look into a different wrinkle of the Epstein network is fascinating. They don’t bother much with the Pedo aspect, it is more about the financial networks and how these really scummy people, Larry Summers, etc. are all linked in promoting one another and scamming, sometimes get caught but always get off the hook (Marc Rich bribes Clinton for a last-day-in-office pardon, he was violating our Sacred Sanctions and aiding the Iranians or whomever), trafficking of younger women (but adults) to elderly losers like Mark Zuckerman, he’s 91 and is asked “Is 31 too old for you?” Soon Yi Previn, Woody’s stepdaughter and then wife loved Jeff Epstein, Chomsky’s life-end wife given to him by the Network etc. Pretty dark, and as I said not the usual well-chewed and digested info: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JNkIusoUAo
When Lex Wexner comes under the eyes of the local cops, same time he’s installing Jeffrey E. as the front man, a source inside the PD helps him have the accountant whose going to spill all the beans get murdered. Lots of Russian Mafia types helping hand big industries over to favored Oligarchs in 1991, to starve the newly capitalized masses and kill 5 million. Robert Maxwell’s death, and the missing money, $1.4 Billion, stolen from a newspaper union, etc. Fascinating. Going to the local Barnes & Nobel in next couple of days, if the expose’s in this months issue will buy The Nation for first time in 15 or more years.
Mark Level
(Sic) Mort Zuckerman. He didn’t want to leave his assets to his 2 daughters, for whatever reason, so Jeffrey got his hands on most of it.
bruce wilder
Bernie Sanders is very attached to the notion that “health care is a human right, not a privilege”.
It would be great if the kaleidoscope of human ambivalence ever rotated to a configuration where that principle was embraced by firmly convinced majority opinion, but depending on that happening, I think, represents the politics of trying to draw to an inside straight. “Medicare-for-all” — his umbrella slogan — was a bigger tent, because you could get into the tent with just the idea that a single-payer solution, say, was arguably likely to be cheaper, because more efficient: able to rationalize the system, face down monopolists et cetera. Sanders on television at least was never (or rarely?) great on the latter argument. When a network talking head would ask “how can we possibly afford to cover everyone?” Sanders was never (that I saw) prepared to make the argument that a single-payer architecture was a cheaper-by-design principle. That the U.S. spends more in public money per capita already than any other advanced country pays in total per capita was a factoid never on tip of his tongue.
His poor preparation is not my point. My point is that an effective populist/progressive politics will advocate for policies with a patchwork of complimentary and even contradictory-in-principle rationales. In a working democracy, there’s a lot of agreeing to disagree on philosophy on the way to agreeing to move forward on action. There’s agreeing to stand up an institution, first, followed by figuring out how that institution will work in practice and, even later, persisting to enforce standards of practice.
George Burns liked to tell old jokes, maybe because he was an old guy for so long after Gracie Allen passed away. One of them was: “the key to success in show business is sincerity . . . if you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”
In the social media world of podcasts, Substacks and YouTube, the noise of politics is the show business of grifters. Any individual could be completely and genuinely sincere, but social media is a skinner box: the feedback loops are training everyone to be a grifter to get the views, the follows and advertising support or subscriptions. If you don’t want your innocence stripped away, you shouldn’t google Krystal Ball’s deep history, just to take one example. Pretty much everyone who is famous has been asked early in their career, “do you want to be right or do you want to be famous?” and has answered one way. I am not saying everyone loses their moral compass entirely; I am saying that to navigate that world of on-line politics, no one is guided primarily or solely by a moral compass.
I think it is a reasonable judgment that the social media seas are too rough, and good, moral, political judgment is too fragile, to persist and survive intact for very long.
One reason to hate the oligarchs is their ruthlessness. They practice the politics of character assassination to eliminate anyone who might credibly hoist the banner of populist/progressive agitation and reform, because the social media environment makes that tactic effective. (Most of the oligarchs believe in escalation dominance over ethics — if character assassination doesn’t do the trick and it seems to matter, they will escalate to the real thing. I honestly think that’s what happened to Charlie Kirk.)
Emma Goldman famously said, “If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.” That’s a scary idea. John F. Kennedy warned, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”
I live in L.A. county and some right-wing pundits are currently online roasting the nebbish who is responsible for administering L.A. County’s voting machinery. They are not wrong. I don’t vote anymore because I don’t think the people in charge feel any obligation to count the vote accurately or, to phrase it more accurately, they don’t feel obligated to ensure that they are counting the vote accurately. They are going thru the motions, following procedure, and they sincerely believe the procedure will result in an accurate vote count, but they chose the procedures knowing that they would not be able to tell if they were wrong and they would be unable to correct a wrong count. Their incompetence is unintended evil.
Unintended evil — there’s a lot of that in American politics.
I apologize for the long meander. I appreciated KT Chong’s well-prepared comment. What it prompted in me are these reflections on the apparent futility of populist / progressive politics and how “woke capitalism” and class politics play a big part in making populist politics futile or hopeless.
Politics today isn’t so much something people deliberate on as part of organizing collective choice or collective action on an issue as it is a neverending story, an ongoing entertainment with heroes and villains and costumes and scenery. Principles are worn like jewelry or accessories, part of dressing up to impress. The idea that a principle is a tool of democratic deliberation, a means of agreeing on a choice without resorting simply to a calculus of raw power — “might makes right” as they say — we’ve already lost that fundamental conviction.
Democratic deliberation is about principles and democratic legislation enacts general rules so 51% don’t just vote 49% into slavery and call it a Code of Justice.
I saw the Eschaton blog today — Atrios’s blog is one of the old ladies of Democratic political blogging. At the time I saw it today, in the lead item, Atrios was snarking about the legacy news media’s reticence to report on Trump’s deteriorating health.
Not so long ago, Atrios was ridiculing anyone who pointed out Biden’s advanced Parkinson’s.
The partisan political discourse has always been partisan. Partisans have always called out the crookedness of the other side. But, I don’t know if they’ve always taken pride in being unembarrassed by their own side’s failings and shortcomings. The Biden Presidency was one huge partisan own-goal. The Democrats had one job: put in someone so much obviously better than Trump that the Republicans also have to put up someone who at least looks better than Trump, to compete. They didn’t do that and worse, they don’t seem to have wanted to do that.
Put aside the whole four years of Weekend at Biden’s, the various fake scandals they used against Trump, from 2016 on were reckless and worse, they didn’t work. The idea that a principle is needed to justify a scandal is lost on the Democratic establishment. They don’t have principles. If there were ever a guy against whom you don’t need to fake a scandal, it has got to be Trump. He exemplifies the moral derangement of the rich brat whose parents sent him to military school in lieu of parenting, because that’s who he really is: a sociopath and a cheat. So, naturally, the Democrats faked one scandal after another beginning with Russiagate — why not?
I wish I could have been as succinct and well-organized in my remarks as KT Chong or spud. And, I am probably going to wish I had proofread what I wrote more thoroughly, but natural intelligence gets old and tired and only wishes someone would finance a new power supply and an advanced reasoning model.
bruce wilder
@ F F
I think Perot functioned as a Cassandra.
I have looked at the numbers and it is really hard to tell if he actually shifted the outcome — it is not obvious; you can spin a counterfactual, but you can always do that.
spud
Feral Finster:
yep perot could have won. but your right, bush sr. would have won without perot.
Warvigilent
Bunch of puritans….
Gender rights are human rights … do you need to be reminded that those icky minorities are human too?
parroting right wing bullshit but nothing new here. Lot of smart people but still a lot of bad thinking. The lesson of trump was that as a society , as a people we are a lot dumber than we thought or at least there isnt anybody really smart in control anymore. But the positive takeaway is that the rich and their servants are absolute fucking morons.
Oh any one with the I predicted this… I predicted that blah blah,… yeah yeah nostradamas we all saw blade runner or anything cyberpunk, or tonnes of fantasy / sci fi that was just abstractions of our current world . Video games were great because they weren’t so afraid to say rich people bad. The fallout series some might know now originated in a games series in the 90s, the game called out a bunch of interesting bits, the rise of Scientology/ the popluarity and addictive potential of Magic the Gathering card game/ and that the us government is essentially deep state fascist dictatorship that serves only the rich. Hell tank girl is looking pretty accurate , sans kangaroo hybrids.
but yeah, everybody is special but your not that special.
mago
Gender rights are human rights. Duh. That’s the point. Getting hung up on the alphabet crowd’s right for recognition is a deliberate divisive obscuration. It’s tiresome as are its defenders.
Like & Subscribe
Even if Poppy Bush had won a second term, Clinton’s presidency would have just been deferred four years. I can’t stand the Clintons, but Bill was the most dynamic Dem candidate, bar none, since JFK and RFK and the Dem strategy was to play on that and they did in spades. That wouldn’t have expired in four years and after Bush Sr’s lame duck second term, he would have been as unpopular as ever — no Perot needed if indeed Perot did siphon Bush voters in 1992. That saying from No Country For Old Men comes to mind. You can’t stop what’s comin’ — it ain’t all waitin’ on you — that’s vanity.
Starting at 1:46.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1U3MyX0pmE
DMC
Economic problems are subject to economic solutions. Liquidate surpluses, fund deficits. Cultural problems are subject to cultural solutions which are much messier and more difficult. You have to change peoples attitudes. You have to expand their sense of empathy. The problem with “wokeness” or the strawman that goes under that appellation is that it devolves into tokenism in the hothouse of American politics. “See, we’re running a black woman to be utterly corrupt tyrant for a month! Progress!” Meanwhile the Fasciitis are actively erasing entire categories of people from legal existence. Just don’t get caught with Kropotkin or Emma Goldman in your possession. It’s not just race and gender anymore. They can nail you for loitering with intent or decide that your social posts make you a Colonel in Antifa. Fair wage laws don’t help much if you don’t have the right not to be curb stomped, simply for going outside. The right to simply EXIST is the most fundamental economic right of all, and “I own my own skin” should be the first axiom of any rational, humanistic economics.
spud
remember, bill clinton deregulated commodities, and turned control over just about everything, to financial parasites and leeches.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVxAMPRaers
When you walk into a supermarket, you see a price tag. The BRICS see a strategic asset fundamentally reshaping the global economy through independent food pricing. Welcome back to Think BRICS, where we analyze how the BRICS alliance is dismantling western financial control over global food prices and driving a massive economic realignment via the global grain trade.
In this episode, we break down the major shift from the dollar dominance of the Chicago Board of Trade to the upcoming Indore summit in India. For decades, a handful of agribusiness giants dictated food pricing in Western currencies, transforming vital commodities into financial games. Now, the global south is using its massive production power to build a new architecture of food sovereignty. We dive deep into the mechanics of de-dollarization in agricultural trade, examining how independent grain exchange benchmarks and local currency settlements protect producers from speculative shocks.
Discover how multipolarity is taking root in the soil, fueled by India Russia agriculture ties, Chinese supply-chain resilience, and Brazilian soy logistics. From fertilizer trade routes to new standards, the BRICS expansion is moving to secure the literal backbone of human civilization.
While we analyze the structural agriculture geopolitics of global trade, this video does not focus on retail-level grocery inflation trends in Western nations, nor does it provide personal investing advice for trading agricultural futures or commodities on Western markets. We do not detail the internal domestic farming subsidies of individual European nations, nor do we analyze the specific logistical maritime security threats in the Red Sea.
Finally, while we discuss the BRICS alliance and its macro trade finance mechanisms, this episode does not detail the technical specifications of individual digital tracing software or the precise chemistry profiles behind the global fertilizer trade, focusing instead on the broader shift toward a multipolar economy.
#BRICS #GlobalSouth #DeDollarization #foodsovereignty
00:00 Why BRICS+ Views Food as a Strategic Asset
00:30 The Indore Summit: A New Era for BRICS Agriculture
01:10 How the Global South Became the World’s Feeder
01:40 Ending the Chicago Monopoly on Global Food Prices
02:18 BRICS Plan for Independent Grain Price Discovery
02:54 China’s 2030 Modernization: Secular Food Security
03:52 India’s Rise: Why New Delhi Rejects the IMF Model
05:15 Russia’s Fertilizer Power Play and Food Sovereignty
06:02 The Brazil-China Alliance: Reshaping Global Trade
06:30 Multipolarity in Motion: Building Parallel Systems
07:28 Why the Global South Needs a New Food Narrative
07:56 How BRICS Coordination Shifs Global Power Balance
Dan Kelly
‘I can’t stand the Clintons, but Bill was the most dynamic Dem candidate, bar none, since JFK and RFK and the Dem strategy was to play on that and they did in spades’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQ2dquaHO7Q
Mark Level
Following up on my past shares on C. Klosterman’s “The 90s: A Book.”
Got to p. 185, “[vodka on the chessboard],” his take on US fuckery with the collapsed USSR in the 90s, which Jeffrey Sachs has given a better view of. (Hell, anyone other than LAS could do a better take than Chuck here.) As Sachs shared, he bailed out Poland & juiced their economy, he was NOT allowed to by his Deep State pals in Russia’s case, they deliberately installed post-Gorbachev (today mostly hated in Russia), & 5 million Russians, mainly but not entirely older men who suffered under the monopoly Oligarchy (1 sleaze bag got the oil business, another the post offices, another heavy industry, etc. etc.) and average mortality plummeted nearly 7 years in fewer than five. People sold their children or drank themselves to death in the freezing cold. (Kind of like the deaths of despair in Appalachia by Sackler Family drugs in recent years.)
Since he’s so lazy, & evidently so afraid to offend TPTB, I think the best share would be– first, unpleasant facts he does admit. All quoted in a row.
Second I will list the pathetic rationalizations, then third might have to add more detail on his elided, erased data– he suddenly had that 50 point drop in his IQ like the one LAS said spud had when he accidentally left one letter out of a typed word.
Okay, decent title, that reflects Boris’ drunken hijinks, known to all. The first line is very telling, “There are things forgotten by chance, and there are things that are forgotten on purpose.” His M.O. here. He also confesses to “an elephantine level of discomfiting rationalization,” foreshadowing. “. . . the 1996 Russian democratic (sic) election” fits all the preceding. “Yeltsin, the boozehound incumbent overcame (passive case, sic) mass unpopularity to win reelection as Russian president”, yes the assist he admits was due to “clandestine U.S. operatives and the support of Bill Clinton.”
” . . . a masterpiece of U.S. statecraft” was “hailed” among election-stealers, & Time devoted a cover story to bragging about it. His mea culpa, “it (the theft) did happen, & it’s almost inconcievable” that Yeltsin would’ve won without “Yank” meddling.
He’d won in 1991 but got sunk in a “quagmire of chaos”, the giant landmass couldn’t pivot effectively from “state-controlled communist to capitalist sovereign [SIC!!] democracy.” Yes, by ’93 “Yeltsin deployed the military to remain in control”, kill & jail and disappear peaceful protesters. It was only a “half joke” that he was hated more than Stalin, who knows?
Yeltsin “was the opposite of perfect” (does he mean abysmal?) but “Clinton liked him personally” (what’s not to like about a fat, pliable puppet drunk?), got them a $10.2 billion” IMF Loan. Oh, that ALWAYS helps economy, dunnit? The US Op was run by 3 pretend “flat-screen TV” salesmen, staying in a luxury hotel , running Y’s daughter Tatiana Dyachenko, 36, campaign efforts and earned 1/4 million each for the espionage over 3 months. . . Yeltsin couldn’t win with claims of “a good job in his first term,” everyone knew the opposite. He only offered “grand promises for the future.” (Did AOC learn from him with M4A, which she killed, and the “Green New Deal”. Very likely .
They were brilliant though, studied the failed Bush Sr. Campaign of 1992 and, George Costanza-like, when he transformed his life, “did the opposite.” And fear, “a return to breadlines” was used to motivate the impoverished Russians to vote against their own interest.
3 closing admissions,”it’s difficult to discern precisely how vital American involvement with the ’96 election was.” It’s like the Zionist argument about who are the real indigenous people. Don’t investigate the claim from both sides, throw up your hands and accept “I’ll never know,” learned helplessness. “. . . the entire race [w]as either mildly or heavily corrupt.” A didstinction without a difference. Lastly, “Yeltsin was the best hope (Obama foreshadowing) for the expansion (sic) of democracy” (sic), via Martial Law and handing 85% of the Economy to a dozen Oligarchs to fleece the sheep.
In conclusion, “It wasn’t (sic) a conspiracy. (Uhm, 3 fake flatscreen salesmen for a Rival Power paid 3/4 of $1 million is the literal definition of a conspiracy, “breathing together.”) “It was a plan, and the plan worked.” Plan a nice “neutral” word, no clear denotation in his Zen, indiffernt mind. “It’s just not a plan WE prefer to remember.” Too bad Tonto wasn’t there to tell Klosterman “What do you mean we, white man?”
In conclusion, Klosterman didn’t (imho) suddenly suffer what happened to Matt Taibbi when the Libs threatened to jail him for conspiracy with his Bossman Elon Musk, stopped ever talking about Palestine or Genocide, or Freedom of Speech, after 3 decades of advocating for all of these. “I’m not interested”, this sketchy 3 pp. utter cop-out suggests if he’d had ANY take on the actual election theft and consequent 5 million early deaths of mostly innocent victims, he feared someone would come after him, and he spiked not just the lede but the whole story. Pathetic and cowardly, a yellow dog, not a journalist in these pp.
Just under 3 pp. of lazy and dishonest coverage of the
Mark Level
coverage of the event. After so many sics, I had to end with my own!! I also didn’t close a parenthetic comment with a ) . . . Must be losing my marbles, need to take a Trump Cognitive test!!
mago
Doesn’t matter who you know or where you go it’s all the same even if the climate changes and you’re sweating it out on those mean streets or chilling in some green suite your poop stinks and your corpse will rot some day, whaddaya think? that you’re smart and immune and your possessions and position are gonna protect and save ya? buena focking suerte your ass is grass no matter what its color or however smart you think you are. You can’t influence death.
Mark Level
mago, sorry you’re in a bad place, friend. my weekly ephemeris said that yesterday’s energy was “askew,” I still went to a social event and that was very much the case. A couple of rude, privileged assholes “calling out” others’, me included, for daring to be themselves . . . This society is sick and mostly joyless, thus displaying joissance in front of others creates rage . . .
I actually jumped on here to add a Nota Bene I should’ve concluded with on the Yeltsin Vodka Chessboard. Klosterberg’s book published in 2022, when Maddow’s “Russiagate” insanity had long been discredited. So his hypocrisy in blandly stating “Regime Change is good when WE do it, bad and UNDEMOCRATIC when others do” is particularly flagrant, and insults the intelligence of any half-bright reader. Other parts of the book show he’s anything but stupid. But convictions (or cowardice) block honesty, he couldn’t help himself.
different clue
From the “interesting” subreddit, ” In a Japanese zoo, the gorilla Kiyomasa gets into a fight with his mate and she kicks him out of their den.”
https://www.reddit.com/r/interesting/comments/1u1ib63/in_a_japanese_zoo_the_gorilla_kiyomasa_gets_into/
Most of the video is him sitting alone and looking sad afterwards.
different clue
” A male gorilla tries his best to reconcile with his angry wife. ”
https://www.reddit.com/r/interesting/comments/1u430cs/a_male_gorilla_tries_his_best_to_reconcile_with/
Say . . . is this the same gorilla as in the video above?