"Kavanagh"

JIM KAVANAGH—As someone who finds it insulting to go to demonstrations in America’s most liberal cities, where protestors are literally penned in like cattle, I’d just like to ask those Americans who have seen what happened to their fellow citizen protestors in Seattle, and Pittsburgh, and Wall Street: If protestors from Zuccotti, or Central, or Lincoln, or Lafayette Park, tried to seize and occupy a nearby civil administration building, exactly how many inches do you think they would advance into that structure, exactly how many cops would they set on fire, before they would have the living shit beaten out of them? Before any means that were necessary to stop them were deployed against them?

Parting thought: “War on ISIS alway a pretext & sham. Could have…

JIM KAVANAGH—For the U.S. left to build a working-class socialist movement, it must become what it decidedly is not, and hasn’t evinced much interest in being—a pole of attraction for millions of people who are not socialists, do not agree with many of the motley commandments that have become the dogma of the “woke” American left, and are still largely held as “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” (Steinbeck actually said “capitalists”) in capitalist ideology. Given the enormous ideological work done by the Fox-MSBNC, Breitbart-NYT media universe, which is the primary source of political education in this country, what else could you expect?

JIM KAVANAGH—For whatever opportunistic reasons and however fragmentarily, they have opened the door for questioning the “payroll tax/trust fund” structure, which is actually a weak and failing line of defense for SS&M that must be abandoned. The better response of the left is not to reflexively reject what they are saying, but to say “You’re right. The tax isn’t necessary,” and take the discussion in a much more productive direction.

Pushback with Aaron Maté The catastrophic explosion in Beirut followed years of ignored warnings by government officials about the ammonium nitrate stored at the port. Lecturer and activist Rania Masri says that the disaster is the product of a corrupt, sectarian political system maintained by foreign powers. Guest: Rania Masri, lecturer and activist.