This is What Democracy Looks Like. The WTO Shutdown 21 Years Later.

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photo: Stephanie Greenwood

cross-posted from G&R

In 2020, as crises around COVID-19, a crashing economy, climate change and a racist police state crash into one another, and mass uprisings in the U.S. fight back against the crisis and the power elite behind them, I look back both at movement moments of the past and the current wave of global uprisings we’ve seen in the last year in places like Chile, Paris, Hong Kong, Beirut and elsewhere for how to move forward in these dangerous times.

This day in history, 21 years ago today, masses of people organizing under the umbrella of the Direct Action Network (DAN) blockaded and shutdown the World Trade Organization (WTO) in the streets of Seattle.

Politics and the Coronavirus. Thanksgiving Edition w/ Prof. Sarah Koster

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We’re rejoined by our friend and comrade Prof. Sarah Koster of Samuel Merritt University to discuss the latest surge of COVID-19 cases.

Listen in: https://bit.ly/ThanksgivingGandR

The U.S. is being hit hard by the latest surge of COVID cases. Last week, the country surpassed 250,000 deaths with over 2,000 deaths daily.  The state of North Dakota has the worst COVID infection rate on the planet. NYC is closing it’s schools once again. California is putting an “emergency brake” on it’s re-opening. El Paso County, TX is having another massive outbreak and has brought in ten mobile morgues to hold bodies and is paying prisoners $2 a day to move bodies. Meanwhile, Trump plays golf and the federal government does very little in the way of relief from the pandemic or the economic crisis it’s causing.

The Road to 9/11: The U.S. and the Middle East.

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The latest, and final for the semester, U.S. history lecture from Green and Red Podcast co-host, and University of Houston history professor, Bob Buzzanco.

Prof. Buzzanco goes into The U.S. and the Middle East and what put us on the road to September 11th. He discusses oil, Israel and Nationalism. Then Palestine, Mandates and Balfour. He covers Red Line Agreement, World War II, Holocaust, Israel and Nakba.

He then gets into Anti-Americanism, Mossadegh, Nasser, Suez and Iraq. It includes discussin on OPEC, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, the Six Day War and the Ramadan/Yom Kippur Wars. Getting in Arab-Israeli relations, he talks about Camp David and Oslo and the Intifada and conflict over the Settlements.

As Trump’s Attempts to Undo Election Fail, Fears of “Coup” Prove Unfounded

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MEDIA ADVISORY

As Trump’s Attempts to Undo Election Fail, Fears of “Coup” Prove Unfounded

(Erin Schaff/The New York Times)

“Georgia and Michigan Deliver Blows to Trump’s Efforts to Undo the Election”

“Business and World Leaders Move On As Trump Fights to Reverse Election”

–New York Times online headline, 20 November 2020

******

Donald Trump’s plans to overturn the 2020 election results hit a huge barrier today as legislators in Georgia and Michigan affirmed that they would designate Joe Biden’s electors as the official representatives to the Electoral College.

On Green and Red Podcast and elsewhere, Scott Parkin and Bob Buzzanco have been discussing this issue frequently over the past two months and, contrary to most media analyses, have made it clear that Trump was not going to stage a “coup” or otherwise remain in office.

Jimmy Carter is a Liberal Saint Now, Was a War Criminal Then…..

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cross-posted from Afflict the Comfortable

by Professor Bob Buzzanco

Jimmy Carter as ex-President has built homes for the poor, brokered peace agreements, overseen elections, and engaged in humanitarian acts without fail.  He never cashed in like most ex-Presidents do with huge media deals or constant P.R. appearances.  And that’s good on him.

But in the interests of historical accuracy, and to understand why today’s political system has (d)evolved for the past four decades or so, looking at his time as president really tells us a lot about how we got to where we are today.

I’ve been tweaking some lectures in the past few days on the latter stages of the Cold War and was reminded of the turmoil and disorder Carter brought to the global scene.

Carter might be a secular saint to many in the 21st Century, but when it came to engaging with the world during his one-term presidency, he was a war criminal.  In Africa, in Asia, in Latin America, Carter created violent programs, aided terrorists, and contributed to death and destruction at a high level. His stewardship over the empire also is instructive in the ways of Liberal militarism and imperialism.

From Clinton to Trump: America in Tatters.

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Photographer: Alex Brandon/Bloomberg

The latest U.S. history lecture from Green and Red Podcast co-host, and University of Houston history professor, Bob Buzzanco.

From Clinton to Trump: America in Tatters. He begins with the roaring 90s: Clinton and the “New Democrats”; Welfare and Crime “reform”; Right-Wing Hardball; Globalization and Financialization.

And the goes into the George W. Bush and Barack Obama eras–Tax Cuts and Patriot Act; Obama and the Great Recession; saving Wall Street; Obamacare; Black Lives Matter.

Bob takes on Reagan’s America

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The latest U.S. history lecture from Green and Red Podcast co-host, and University of Houston history professor, Bob Buzzanco.

We hear about the aftermath of Watergate. The 1980s–the Backlash Continues: Reagan and the Triumphant Right.

The Moral Majority and Phyllis Schlafly; Reagan’sEvil Empire Speech; Reverse Robin Hood Economics and De-Industrialization in placeslike Youngstown. The new New Cold War; SDI and slaughters in Central America. And then the cultural resistance of the period that includes Punk and Hip Hop.  And ends with Rodney King and the LA Rebellion.

Hysteria about Fascism and Coups Hurt the Left

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cross-posted from Afflict the Comfortable

by Prof. Robert Buzzanco

Since 1/20/2017 huge numbers of people, liberals and on the Left alike, have been adamant, and often apoplectic, that Trump was guiding the U.S. toward fascism, that he was the new American Hitler, and that his followers were Nazis.  More recently, we’ve been inundated with increasingly-panicked warnings that a coup was imminent because he was unlikely to win the election fairly or he’d refuse to leave office if he lost.

And we’re not just being told that Trump is a fascist. Some people on the Left have gone further and insisted that nobody should even question that perspective, that fact–as they see it. The most extreme, unhinged example of attacking coup skeptics was probably Counterpoint’s feature write Paul Street, who shrieked that “any asshole ‘radical left’ douchebag who goes around posting and publishing denialist bullshit based on the absence of full on parallels with the Third Reich disgraces themselves and pollutes the discourse with ahistorical drivel.” I guess then I’ll cop to being a disgraceful polluter.

Ruling Class 101 and the Coup That Wasn’t

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We’re not ones to subscribe to popular world views, even those held on  the left. So, in our latest episode, Green and Red dive deep into the  history and politics of the American Ruling Class, coups at other points  in history,  and the great coup of 2020 (that wasn’t).

Listen here: https://bit.ly/RulingClassGandR

We start off with a conversation about what is a coup and not a coup. We  talk about coups in places like Indonesia in 1965, Chile in 1973, and  in other points of history; and how the end of the Trump regime has yet to constitute what is considered “coup.”