[MB.]

Please take a moment to watch this propaganda video made by Steve Bannon and citizens United, featuring interviews with leading neoconservative talking heads such as newt Gingrich, Victor Hanson and Lou Dobbs.

In Quigley like fashion, the video argues that history follows a series of cycles called "turnings" of which the 2008 recession was a trigger for one.

Astonishingly the video argues that overregulation was the cause of the 2008 collapse, and that greed, not capitalism, was the cause of the disaster.

[The Immortal Goon]

I like the part about how greed was there in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and there was never any trouble...

...As if it were a Randian paradise with no recessions or stagnation?

Also showing the Black Panthers for virtually no reason...

6.05
OH, the moon landing. No government spending there!

I'll admit, there's something weirdly satisfying about watching conservatives get on their knees and beg to lick the taint of Kennedy.

8.20: Woodstock stuff.

A bunch of kids went to a concert. I guess that makes sense there was a bailout to save capitalism?

9.30: "The youth were out of control!" And then someone walking around with a tiger, as if that was a common pet at the time

I always like showing Jefferson, the guy that thought the Americans should be helping the Jacobins, as someone who hates radicalism.

MB, I respect you so I'm trying to watch this. But there are basically no facts in this. This is people complaining about hippies at Woodstock.

This whole turn thing turns on this idea of "universal turnings," that seems to be mostly people's hurt feelings about the 20th century that are then sort of retroactively and randomly applied to other things without offering the process for how or why this works.

In the 90s, people thought money was important! What a degenerate change!

28.30 or so, “the facts are all different.” No explanation for whatever the fuck that is supposed to mean.

"It's important to know how incestuous the political system got to be."
-Newt Gingrich, lifelong politician and Fannie Mae lobbyist.

It's pretty funny that they skip deregulation and go right to the consequences, and also make some kind of zany circular logic:

"The problem isn't that business was deregulated to make risky investments and make deep ties with the political establishment; it's that businesses made risky investments and made deep ties with the political establishment! The solution is that business be deregulated to make risky investments and make deep ties with the political establishment!"

Then it's constant harping on how, like, risky investments should be completely deregulated made by people with deep ties to the political establishment in order to stop risky investments by people with deep ties to the political establishment. What? Do they think people will be so stupid as to not see how stupid this is?

38.46: Why did the .com double happen in 1995? Why not the 1960s, why not the 1980s?

I guess because people that went to Woodstock went to Wall Street (?) and then made big risks? And they were more greedy than people in the 1980s? It seems like there’s a more logical explanation for this...

But, I mean, I generally agree that business is horrifyingly irresponsible and needs to be completely destroyed by the everyman.

Ha, Lou Hobbs, worth over 10 million dollars, is just a common man getting screwed like the rest of us, with no vested interest in anything beyond keeping it real to all us plebes lovingly licking his hands.

Americans consume more than we make in the country. Someone hold the phone, or we might end up in the unenviable position of having our own Pax Britannica.

White people trying not to be racist means black people are being crushed and you can’t do anything to help blacks because, “Unfortunately, capitalism doesn’t work like that.” Huh, I don't disagree with that—though I don't think they meant that.

I love tying Acorn to trying to pull one over on those poor banks that were just out there to help people. And then, right afterward, evil Clinton “going after” lenders that irresponsibly gave money out.

Also, the faux “pizza delivery boy” drug selling property is pretty funny, like it was poor people running these poor innocent Wall Street investors...

This is maddening in that they just kind of ignore the profit motive here for rich people to get rich.

“How can so many authorities not be able to predict this?” In fairness, Marxists have been saying this is how capitalism works for the past, what century and a half?

The Goldman-Sachs elite ruined the economy!

58 something, Newt blames Goldman-Sachs elites that were allowed to be put into the government.

Thank God a non-elite everyman billionaire with the help of Newt and the guy that made this movie is clearing out the swamp by putting Goldman-Sachs elites into the government.

“Government owns 40% of every wealthy individual’s income” is written as, “Government owns 40% of individual.” Which...Statement problematics aside, is a horrifyingly irresponsible citation.

Oh, the financial crush happened on THE DAY the first Baby Boomer went on Social Security. I guess the '60s radicals were right. Kill anyone over 30.

I also always like these people that couldn’t see the recession coming lecturing about how they should be listened to.

Recession brings fascism to a republic. 1.11: "Out of this terrible inflation came tyranny. Came a demand, somebody must do something; we need a strong person to do something. And I have a dreadful feeling, there's where we're coming to."



Well, I guess this movie isn't all wrong

“Stop spending this much money. Stop over regulating the economy...” So...Like, politely ask financiers to not spend money? What the fuck?

Newt Gingrich: "The elites can't be outraged, because they're in the fix." I actually laughed out loud.

I stopped paying attention, bluntly. This is all just liberal whining about liberals acting like liberals and how these liberals will be better liberals.

[MB.]

I agree that this video offers little in terms of fact beyond its propaganda. Bannon has, I think correctly been compared to Joseph gobbels and Leni refanstahl, and this, yes, highly incoherent and demonstrably ridiculous video, does live up to that comparison.

Thank you for watching it and providing the superb review, TiG. I hope this encourages others to examine this highly revealing video.

As a peice of propaganda it is superb. The video sells simple easily understood lies in such a way as to make them seem perfectly reasonable and not at all inherently contradictory. It creates an Arcadian myth of a pleasent and certain 1950s Eisenhower America when women knew their place and America achieved great acts. America won the Second World War and the generation who survived the great Depression and WW2 were not despicable greedy hippie narcissists, like all following generations

The counter culture revolution, led by communist Jew Saul Allinsky and Acorn, clearly destroyed this great era and confused women about their proper role. Democrats, weak and cowardly leaders, lost the Vietnam war and surely would have ruined America had not Reagan been elected.

There is no mention of Richard Nixon or economic deregulation by the Reagan administration.

According to the video, history follows certain patterns (such as Marxists claim, but framed as dramatic cycles notably coinciding with war), and these pattern invariably result from poor political leadership which corrupts the pure Esienhower capitalism, which, as mentioned, is portrayed as an Arcadia

Starting with Herbert bush, bill Clinton, and following through bush junior and Obama, American leadership became corrupt and enabled the rise of "crony capitalism" which financed unaffordable Dept spending and economic regulation. The middle class suffered terribly. The greedy banker Jews brought the world to brink of economic collapse. The weak black president failed and caused more socialism and regulation, which, the video argues, is what caused the crisis.

The only possible solutions would be to raise taxes- utterly unthinkable- or to adopt austerity.

A great tyrannical leader will likely emerge who will rebuild the American military, saving America from communism and fascism.

So we are told by wealthy elite neoconservative pundints in a video made by the opponents of the establishment parties.

Astonishingly, these themes are actually believed by real thinking human beings, those million s who elected Donald Trump, and we should pay very careful attention to the narrative they are designed to create, namely, that the government of the rich created by Trump is on the side of the working class, opposed to big bankers, Jews, communists, and tax and spend liberals ("globalists").

Trump will return America to Eisenhower like greatness by vast military spending, deregulation and massive tax cuts for the very elites featured in the video, and this is the only way to save America from the road to serfdom.

[One Degree]

I forced my self to watch 9 minutes, but then had to give up. I felt like I was watching a poorly made documentary for a fifth grade class.

[layman]

In Quigley like fashion, the video argues that history follows a series of cycles called "turnings" of which the 2008 recession was a trigger for one.

Turning eh ... Very profound ...

After donald trump, I'm not suprised people think they can make reality whatever they want it.

All this adds to the line of thinking that people do in fact need to be controlled by an enlightened elite and democracy is dangerous. Edward Bernays style.

[Drlee]

Unbelievable. The frightening part is that some of them actually believe this. Oh wait. No the frightening part is that they all think they can make us believe it.

It occurs to me that they are exactly where they need to me on this video. It is just the thing that made a great many Americans vote against their own interest in the last election. I guess we have to remember that pieces like this are positioned to appeal to people who have never taken a significant economics class. In my own state and California as well (I only checked two) the High School graduation requirements call for one semester of government and one semester of economics. This compared to four of math and four of English. Pathetic. One can earn a BA/BS degree from the University of Arizona without taking econ. So what does this mean? My suspicion is that very few Americans really know anything about economics and damned little about government at all.

[quetzalcoatl]

"The problem isn't that business was deregulated to make risky investments and make deep ties with the political establishment; it's that businesses made risky investments and made deep ties with the political establishment! The solution is that business be deregulated to make risky investments and make deep ties with the political establishment!"

Then it's constant harping on how, like, risky investments should be completely deregulated made by people with deep ties to the political establishment in order to stop risky investments by people with deep ties to the political establishment. What? Do they think people will be so stupid as to not see how stupid this is?

Yes, they do think people will be this stupid. Evidence suggests they may right, at least on a temporary basis. And if people ever stop being so stupid - well, they have contingency plans for that, as well.

But my question is this: why are we not seeing a similar level of effective propaganda from the real left?

[The Immortal Goon]

My general opinion is that after a century of being systematically crushed by state and commercial services, the left needs to start from zero. There's no effective basis with which to apply the far left.

For instance, you might make an argument that Zizek represents the far left in the way that Newt or Dobbs represent the right in this film. Zizek has done films, but they're not really aimed at firing people up, just explaining how he views how ideology works. They can't really be effective as anything else as there's no traction, there's no ground on which it to move anything. Nor do his films claim there is.

The left is reduced to organizations like the ISO that are reduced to supporting Jill Stein, and other organizations competing with them run out of basements with barely anybody and everyone far too scared and disorganized to act. The anarchists are literally better organized

And it doesn't look much better as films like this will have followers who believe that a Jew like Saul Alinsky is secretly puppeteering Jewish communists to run Jewish Wall Street. Ignoring, you know, that's fucking ridiculous and Alinsky when asked if he would consider Marxism answered like a good liberal:

Not at any time. I've never joined any organization—not even the ones I've organized myself. I prize my own independence too much. And philosophically, I could never accept any rigid dogma or ideology, whether it's Christianity or Marxism. One of the most important things in life is what Judge Learned Hand described as 'that ever-gnawing inner doubt as to whether you're right.' If you don't have that, if you think you've got an inside track to absolute truth, you become doctrinaire, humorless and intellectually constipated. The greatest crimes in history have been perpetrated by such religious and political and racial fanatics, from the persecutions of the Inquisition on down to Communist purges and Nazi genocide.

But facts don't matter, and despite the fact the Marxists are hopelessly scattered and disorganized, there are people that believe we are controlling everything and need to be exterminated en masse.

Before we have any kind of propaganda, we need to do the unsexy work of organizing. And I think that means building unions, not even ideological unions, as the most basic building block of working people looking at their life and power as a class instead of a knucklehead nodding in agreement with Newt Gingrich's take on high government.

[quetzalcoatl]

Before we have any kind of propaganda, we need to do the unsexy work of organizing. And I think that means building unions, not even ideological unions, as the most basic building block of working people looking at their life and power as a class instead of a knucklehead nodding in agreement with Newt Gingrich's take on high government.

Agreed, in principle.

But what is now being unionized? Trades, basically, and government workers - that's about it. There is no mass industrial workforce as there was in the early 20th century. Here I will recycling some of the arguments I made in a previous thread:

Consider the following two photos:



Q: What do these two images have in common?
A: They require massive infusions of capital to build.

Q: What do they NOT have in common?
A: A requirement for mass labor.

The first picture (Ford, 1913) is quite revealing. The workers are literally standing elbow-to-elbow. And this is not even the main auto assembly plant, just an ancillary wheel assembly unit. The requirement for a large 'army' of human hands to facilitate this enterprise is the central point. I use the word 'army' because these early industrial systems attacked production in the same way they prosecuted wars - i.e., on a massive scale with lots of labor.

The second picture is just as telling. You see one lone figure standing at the top left. The purpose of human workers in new automated factories is to provide monitoring and occasional intervention if something goes awry.

The "lump-of-labor fallacy" critique makes the unwarranted (and unstated) assumption that new technologies always create more jobs than they destroy. New technologies DO create new jobs, but there is no guarantee concerning their number. Indeed, the principle defining feature of new technologies is their independence of human labor. By definition, labor-saving devices eliminate labor.

The usual response is "Intellectual labor is required to design and maintain these systems, and therefore what's required is skill retraining." This is even more absurd. Are we really going to replace the armies of workers shown in the first photo, with the handful of technocrats required to maintain the new automated system?

Even the most conservative extrapolation from these trends is breathtaking. Half of existing US jobs will be automated out of existence in two decades. There won't just be individual jobs eliminated - entire categories of human work will simply disappear.

Indeed, barring some total breakdown, the vector of human work being superseded by automation is now unalterable. The inevitable outcome is that the design, construction, and maintenance of automated systems will be done by machines (not to mention its raw material inputs and the distribution of its products).

So the question remains, "Why are we still hustling for the next paycheck?"

The advantage of labor in the first photo is numbers - with numbers comes a certain power, even if that power might be limited. Labor, suddenly being a critical component of production, can decide to interfere with the process. This makes capital vulnerable to labor. This vulnerability is what gave labor its new power at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Without this vulnerability, even an ameliorist reaction like the New Deal would never have happened.

Today the balance of power has shifted back to capital in the most radical fashion imaginable - an unintentional byproduct of the automation revolution.

Most workers today, as far as I can see, occupy some kind of make-work niche, either in government or the corporate sector. They have no strike leverage, inasmuch as their activities are not strictly necessary for production. This makes traditional organizing problematic at best.

Without eliminating right-to-work laws and re-instituting mandatory collective bargaining, it's hard to imagine a resurgence of unionism. The first union members were willing to fight and die and only had desperation as an incentive for organization.

Ironically, the social safety net has allowed us to short-circuit the desperation of sheer privation. The poor now sink into drug oblivion or cultural reaction.

Not meaning to be a downer here - I would love to be an optimist. But I really do struggle to find some legitimate organizing principle for the left. One that can actually work in a dispirited, corrupted population.

[Drlee]

Not meaning to be a downer here - I would love to be an optimist.But I really do struggle to find some legitimate organizing principle for the left. One that can actually work in a dispirited, corrupted population.

Ginormous problem with "the left". The members won't budge. This is different from the far right who do not "have" to budge. Incremental change is rarely acceptable.

Look at Arizona. We just overwhelmingly passed a referendum raising the minimum wage to $10.00 an hour. The vote was hardly in before the Chamber of Commerce was challenging the law in court over a minor detail. Fortunately the state SC denied a stay and the law went into effect. Now I am not so concerned that it might be overturned but rather that the business community is so brazen that it feels it can ignore 60+ percent of the voters. And in a bright red state nonetheless. Why? Because it know that there is no organized opposition.

The democrats have proved to be stunning wimps. They are going to cave in opposition to the dismantling of social programs as sure as tomorrow. As long as every legislator but one has to spend a great deal of their day as organized telemarketers nothing will change in that regard. The democrats are beholden to the same money as the republicans.

In order for their to be an opposition from the left there first has to BE a left. And none exists in the US.

[QatzelOk]

In the first five minutes, there's an unsettling statement that: "If the banksters hadn't been gifted trillions of dollars of taxpayer money, it would have meant that end of capitalism in its current form!"

What a disaster. Let's keep bombing and pillaging small nations, allowing our poor citizens to grow up ignorant and angry, and watching lots of entertainment videos... just so that capitalism - Holy Sacred Capitalism - can continue its path.

Though I walk through the Valley of Impending Extinction, I will speak no evil. I will sit back and let my behaviorism-addicted elites continue to domesticate me and ruin the natural environment.

Ironically, the social safety net has allowed us to short-circuit the desperation of sheer privation. The poor now sink into drug oblivion or cultural reaction

This isn't ironic at all. This was its real purpose. That you see this as "ironic" is a result of our general social ignorance vis-a-vis powerful institutions. Religion and mass media have taught us to "love" our powerful institutions.

[The Immortal Goon]

Drlee has some good points. I'm reminded a bit of how the Democrats had a way to underhandedly (but constitutionally) shove in a Supreme Court justice and they didn't, presumably because it would be mean or something. This is the kind of play that the Republicans, who arbitrarily decided that 1/4 of the president's term doesn't count for some reason (I'm sure they'll totally apply this sterling logic if RBG dies in the last year of a Trump presidency) have no problem at all putting into practice.

And, so much as this relates to what you ask about unions, they are (as the Soviets said) the schools of the working class. I'm not a Democrat, but even the very marginal liberal left is happy to sort of sit there and shake their heads while their representatives happily clap and swear to make it easy for reactionaries that claimed the same liberal representatives were lying secret Nazis controlled by Jews that must be eliminated before they take control and put everybody into secret FEMA camps.

And at root this apathy comes because there is absolutely no systematic representation of the left. It has, as has been said, ruthlessly suppressed and torn asunder for the last century (at least). And even now, apparently, we are told to smash any thought that might bring them back.

So the question remains, "Why are we still hustling for the next paycheck?"

Your first question that I cut there is important. Why hustle for the next paycheck?

When the Industrial Revolution occurred, the work of one man could do what 1,000 had done previously. The result was not that we had more leisure time since we were so much more productive, but that we had to work more. That our children had to work more. Though hardly a scientific work (and using William Thompson more than Marx), I can hardly be expected to write better than Jack London:

“Five men,” he said, “can produce bread for a thousand. One man can produce cotton cloth for two hundred and fifty people, woollens for three hundred, and boots and shoes for a thousand. One would conclude from this that under a capable management of society modern civilized man would be a great deal better off than the cave-man. But is he? Let us see. In the United States to-day there are fifteen million[8] people living in poverty; and by poverty is meant that condition in life in which, through lack of food and adequate shelter, the mere standard of working efficiency cannot be maintained. In the United States to-day, in spite of all your so-called labor legislation, there are three millions of child laborers.[9] In twelve years their numbers have been doubled. And in passing I will ask you managers of society why you did not make public the census figures of 1910? And I will answer for you, that you were afraid. The figures of misery would have precipitated the revolution that even now is gathering.

“But to return to my indictment. If modern man”s producing power is a thousand times greater than that of the cave-man, why then, in the United States to-day, are there fifteen million people who are not properly sheltered and properly fed? Why then, in the United States to-day, are there three million child laborers? It is a true indictment. The capitalist class has mismanaged. In face of the facts that modern man lives more wretchedly than the cave-man, and that his producing power is a thousand times greater than that of the cave-man, no other conclusion is possible than that the capitalist class has mismanaged, that you have mismanaged, my masters, that you have criminally and selfishly mismanaged. And on this count you cannot answer me here to-night, face to face, any more than can your whole class answer the million and a half of revolutionists in the United States. You cannot answer. I challenge you to answer. And furthermore, I dare to say to you now that when I have finished you will not answer. On that point you will be tongue-tied, though you will talk wordily enough about other things.

“You have failed in your management. You have made a shambles of civilization. You have been blind and greedy. You have risen up (as you to-day rise up), shamelessly, in our legislative halls, and declared that profits were impossible without the toil of children and babes. Don”t take my word for it. It is all in the records against you. You have lulled your conscience to sleep with prattle of sweet ideals and dear moralities. You are fat with power and possession, drunken with success; and you have no more hope against us than have the drones, clustered about the honey-vats, when the worker-bees spring upon them to end their rotund existence. You have failed in your management of society, and your management is to be taken away from you.

In 1967, they rightly predicted that the computer would have the power to increase the productive capacity of that industrial revolution person from what had been 500 people, to maybe 10,000—and we'd get a lot of leisure time as a result:

This seems obvious. But it did not turn out to be. We actually work more than we did at the time:

Author Juliet Schor, who wrote the best-selling book The Overworked American in 1992, concluded that in 1990 Americans worked an average of nearly one month more per year than in 1970.

There are also volumes of surveys that ask people if they're working more than they used to. Generally, people say yes, of course they are. And they also estimate almost 10 more hours a week than the government does.

The can all produce infinitely more than we could in the past, and yet we still rely on children in Asia to produce for us, we have robots building our things, but we have to be available from work by email and phone almost 24/7. Pretty much every person I know works far more for less money than their parents before the great tech boom that was supposed to save us from all of this.

And this brings us to the crux of what you brought up:

The advantage of labor in the first photo is numbers - with numbers comes a certain power, even if that power might be limited. Labor, suddenly being a critical component of production, can decide to interfere with the process. This makes capital vulnerable to labor. This vulnerability is what gave labor its new power at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Without this vulnerability, even an ameliorist reaction like the New Deal would never have happened.

Today the balance of power has shifted back to capital in the most radical fashion imaginable - an unintentional byproduct of the automation revolution.

Most workers today, as far as I can see, occupy some kind of make-work niche, either in government or the corporate sector. They have no strike leverage, inasmuch as their activities are not strictly necessary for production. This makes traditional organizing problematic at best.

Without eliminating right-to-work laws and re-instituting mandatory collective bargaining, it's hard to imagine a resurgence of unionism. The first union members were willing to fight and die and only had desperation as an incentive for organization.

Ironically, the social safety net has allowed us to short-circuit the desperation of sheer privation. The poor now sink into drug oblivion or cultural reaction.

Not meaning to be a downer here - I would love to be an optimist. But I really do struggle to find some legitimate organizing principle for the left. One that can actually work in a dispirited, corrupted population.

The workers are getting a raw deal, somewhere in the equation, and need to be represented. They are easy to crush now because even the thought of participating in a union is a virtual thoughtcrime. And one companies are only too happy to say that they can, and will, ruthlessly crush.

However, enough people participating make it virtually impossible to stop a union from happening. I've started three in my life, two have stuck. Not only do they guarantee a certain amount of control over the problems brought up in this thread—but more importantly—it creates a culture of action and control instead of self-pity and weary resignation. Once this very basic organization principle is adhered to, that you can do something and stop blaming others—even if the individual remains politically conservative or whatever—it is a gain for the working class as a whole.

They're closing down a factory due to atomization? Even your most staunchly conservative Reaganite would nod in agreement that the workers that built that factory to the point they could automize it deserved a fair shake—whether that be job training to help take the load off of the white-collars (who would almost certainly be happy themselves to not have to be on call 24 hours a day) or a pension and job placement service.

Nothing radical, just a mechanism for the working class to begin to think what they're owed.

I tend to think that after this, people will see the benefits and radicalize further. Though there are plenty that would say I'm wrong. That's fine.

But, more to the point, there would be traction than for a Zizek (or anyone else) to begin to build a narrative pitched to the left that would have some kind of traction beyond the completely abstract.

[Kaiserschmarrn]

I forced my self to watch 9 minutes, but then had to give up. I felt like I was watching a poorly made documentary for a fifth grade class.

I couldn't even get that far. Apart from the exaggerated ominous tone and imagery, which is common in many current documentaries, the most annoying thing was that the music was far too loud. I could hardly understand the speakers.

So I can't comment on the content of the documentary unfortunately. However, having read the responses, my guess is that I would agree with at least some of it.