Gary² and the Chipster: the bullying! the lying! Options

[Piperdown]

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=158758673

Cliffb reverted as "sockpuppet of banned user". Nevermind that a quick wikipedia review of Cliffb's editing reveals no such thing.

Samiharris is out of control.

Good thing tag teamer Gary...er...um...Mantanmoreland is there to revert, so "samiharris" doesn't get a 3RR.

[Kato]

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=158758673

Cliffb reverted as "sockpuppet of banned user". Nevermind that a quick wikipedia review of Cliffb's editing reveals no such thing.

Samiharris is out of control.

Good thing tag teamer Gary...er...um...Mantanmoreland is there to revert, so "samiharris" doesn't get a 3RR.

You're right. This is deeply corrupt and something needs to be done. Like... yesterday. Once someone like Cliffb gets reverted as a Wordbomb sock puppet by stooges, then the situation has clearly gone way too far.

I haven't paid much attention to this business, but it is obvious now that Mantanmoreland, who as far as we know is still protected by shadowy admins at WP, is given carte blanche to manipulate the public's perception of naked short selling via the use of wikipedia. Why? I'd like to know.

Somey recently concluded that Gary Weiss was largely the reason the Review exists. Weiss and Chip Berlet, who is also given special protection on WP for reasons that have never been explained, have debased any ideals other WP editors might have had when they embarked on editing. Of course, we all know the name of the high profile female Canadian admin who implemented this duel protection racket. Again, why? I don't know.

Attempts to rfc these situations, and bring them to eyes of "the community" have been immediately deleted and silenced. See this and this if you don't believe it. Why? I don't know.

[Somey]

Somey recently concluded that Gary Weiss was largely the reason the Review exists.

I wouldn't go quite that far - WR was started before Weiss even appeared on Wikipedia, from what I gather. What I would say is that the combined influence of Weiss and Berlet has been so disruptive and divisive - and these two people are extremely good at that, probably better than any of us here could ever hope to be - that the need to expose their malfeasance, for the good of Wikipedia and the collaborative web in general, has led to WR's being branded an enemy site. After all, don't forget that when WR first started, Erik Moeller himself was a regular poster. Even Dave Gerard posted here a few times... Not that most of us really miss those guys, of course. But their accounts are still active!

Weiss and Chip Berlet, who is also given special protection on WP for reasons that have never been explained, have debased any ideals other WP editors might have had when they embarked on editing.

At one point I had a theory which suggested that the folks in the SlimVirgin "cabal" felt that Berlet was useful because he was a leftist with a penchant for bashing other leftists. So, if they wanted to make a POV assertion somewhere in favor of, say, Israeli militarism, and include citations showing support from both "left" and right, they simply had to ask the ol' Chipster to write something up - and presto-bingo, a ready-made reliable source! And if they wanted to bash someone like Noam Chomsky for the same reason, Chip would be up for that too. In return, Chip's personal bio would always read like hagiography, in spite of the efforts of folks like Nobs et al to inject non-hagiographic (to say the least?) material.

I know it sounds a little elaborate, even for them... but if Berlet actively offered his services in that area, then who would they have been to refuse?

[Herschelkrustofsky]

At one point I had a theory which suggested that the folks in the SlimVirgin "cabal" felt that Berlet was useful because he was a leftist with a penchant for bashing other leftists.

I will interject here, as I have in the past when you raised this theory, that I don't believe that Berlet was ever a leftist in any legitimate sense. See below.

I believe that the "identity politics" that emerged in the 1970s was funded from above as a means of countering the "power structure research" that was beginning to become popular among New Left veterans. These New Left veterans like myself were almost all white males, who figured out very early that U.S. policy in Vietnam could not withstand scrutiny at any level whatsoever. A connection was becoming evident between U.S. corporate capitalism and U.S. foreign policy. The same people were running both. (It's easier to make this point now than it was a few years ago. All you have to do is look at U.S. policy in Iraq.)

The white male U.S. New Left was crushed by "identity politics" in the 1970s. It only took a few years before the feminists chased us out of our offices. We were left in the street with a confused look on our faces, hanging on to our research files, and muttering phrases such as "interlocking corporate directorates."

I think that you are generally on the right track here, but let me suggest a slightly different approach. One of the appealing features of the Marxist version of leftism was the notion of a universal human identity, defined by a shared interest in the general progress of humanity. The purpose of "identity politics" was to annihilate that notion, along with the notion of progress, and replace it with a Hobbesian battle of competing particularist interests.

[Daniel Brandt]

One of the appealing features of the Marxist version of leftism was the notion of a universal human identity, defined by a shared interest in the general progress of humanity. The purpose of "identity politics" was to annihilate that notion, along with the notion of progress, and replace it with a Hobbesian battle of competing particularist interests.

What happened to class struggle? I guess LaRouche isn't too hot on class consciousness, but Marx sure was, and so am I. It's the ruling class that interests me, and my identification with the U.S. Left disappeared as identity politics completely undermined class consciousness.

For example, the feminists in Berkeley in the mid-1970s, where I was in grad school, were slightly interested in class consciousness in terms of the history of the labor movements of previous decades, but they were more interested in Women as Superior to Men. Now you have split class consciousness into four classes: female working class, female ruling class, male working class, male ruling class. It does not compute when you do this, and more than a few idiotic feminist dissertations were written. Curiously, they all got their PhDs, while the Marxists were stopped cold by the System.

There was only a brief period of about two years where you could get away with studying Marxist philosophy in grad school in the 1970s Berkeley. It got suppressed, in the many subtle and not-so-subtle ways that grad students in a PhD program get suppressed by faculty committees. Now add the Ford Foundation with its millions underwriting the feminists et.al., and that's the end of class consciousness in academia.

Which meant the end of class consciousness everywhere in the U.S., since academia was the last holdout for any sort of Marxist perspective.

It might have great value. My biggest problem is that it ignores the role Black revolutionary organizations in 60s, especially Malcolm type nationalists and the Panthers. There is empirical evidence, in the form of body counts that that these folks were not part of any plot to co-opt a wider social movement. They in fact often played a leadership and inspirational role in the most dynamic aspects of the New Left.

The early ones were something of an inspiration. By the time the Panthers came along, they were rather thoroughly infiltrated by agents, in addition to the fact that some of the Panther leadership were media sensations on an ego trip, more than they were leaders with a genuine social vision.

Nevertheless, all Ford Foundation had to do was to slip some money to the Black Students Union on various campuses, earmarked for this or that community program, and they all started fighting over the funds.

It was the same story with the feminists. The final coup for the ruling class was to force affirmative action into the private sector by fiat from above. Poof, all class consciousness disappeared immediately, and everyone except working-class white males, who were not eligible, started scrambling for the crumbs tossed out by ruling-class white males.

[Herschelkrustofsky]

One of the appealing features of the Marxist version of leftism was the notion of a universal human identity, defined by a shared interest in the general progress of humanity. The purpose of "identity politics" was to annihilate that notion, along with the notion of progress, and replace it with a Hobbesian battle of competing particularist interests.

What happened to class struggle? I guess LaRouche isn't too hot on class consciousness, but Marx sure was, and so am I. It's the ruling class that interests me, and my identification with the U.S. Left disappeared as identity politics completely undermined class consciousness.

LaRouche was interested in class consciousness up until the mid-70s when he discovered the works of Henry Carey and others, what was called the American System. Carey wrote The Harmony of Interests, where he theorized that under a competent economic policy, i.e. one that emphasized constantly rising labor productivity due to better education and the introduction of better technologies, class struggle would disappear. As Ted Kennedy once said, "A rising tide lifts all boats." However, LaRouche emphatically did not lose interest in what you have called "power structure research" -- he describes the existence of mafia-like financial elites which exercise more power than elected governments, particularly via control of quasi-private central banking. He uses terms like "oligarchy" (common among Spanish-language commentators as oligarchia) or "synarchism." LaRouche regards these factions as committed to a policy of "primitive accumulation," increasing profits by gouging the living standards of the workforce, cutting entitlements, outsourcing, disinvesting in education and infrastructure -- does any of this sound familiar? -- basically, a revival of fascist economics, as opposed to the "Harmony of Interests" model.

One of the appealing features of the Marxist version of leftism was the notion of a universal human identity, defined by a shared interest in the general progress of humanity. The purpose of "identity politics" was to annihilate that notion, along with the notion of progress, and replace it with a Hobbesian battle of competing particularist interests.

I've been trying to get my mind around this idea ever since DB recently voiced it. It might have great value. My biggest problem is that it ignores the role Black revolutionary organizations in 60s, especially Malcolm type nationalists and the Panthers. There is empirical evidence, in the form of body counts that that these folks were not part of any plot to co-opt a wider social movement. They in fact often played a leadership and inspirational role in the most dynamic aspects of the New Left. I suppose you could say that these Black revolutionary were not pursuing identity politics at all, but were addressing racism (along with the Vietnam War) as one of the central concerns of the entire left. I'm not saying that DB idea is without merit, but it needs to incorporate this reality.

The Black Power people essentially destroyed the movement of Martin Luther King, which was a human rights movement of the universal sort that I mentioned. However, LaRouche was successful in recruiting some of the brightest people from the Panthers and many other New Left groupings, and was seen as a real threat by the Ford Foundation and others who were promoting Identity Politics (also known as "Divide and Conquer.") It is ironic that they sent Chip Berlet after him to label him racist, sexist, anti-Semitic, ad nauseum, because the LaRouche organization has always been run by a regular Rainbow Coalition of blacks, Jews, women, and every other sub-grouping you could imagine. However, they refer to their outlook as "humanist."

[Daniel Brandt]

LaRouche was interested in class consciousness up until the mid-70s when he discovered the works of Henry Carey and others, what was called the American System. Carey wrote The Harmony of Interests, where he theorized that under a competent economic policy, i.e. one that emphasized constantly rising labor productivity due to better education and the introduction of better technologies, class struggle would disappear. As Ted Kennedy once said, "A rising tide lifts all boats." However, LaRouche emphatically did not lose interest in what you have called "power structure research" -- he describes the existence of mafia-like financial elites which exercise more power than elected governments, particularly via control of quasi-private central banking. He uses terms like "oligarchy" (common among Spanish-language commentators as oligarchia) or "synarchism." LaRouche regards these factions as committed to a policy of "primitive accumulation," increasing profits by gouging the living standards of the workforce, cutting entitlements, outsourcing, disinvesting in education and infrastructure -- does any of this sound familiar? -- basically, a revival of fascist economics, as opposed to the "Harmony of Interests" model.

Thanks, Hersch. I agree that the LaRouche organization is very diverse, and I agree that LaRouche is keen on power structure research. Another organization that's the target of Berlet and his sidekick Dennis King, the Lenora Fulani/Fred Newman organization, is also very diverse. Both the LaRouche and Fulani organizations have some very bright people in them.

I had never heard of Henry Carey before. This helps explain LaRouche's technological optimism, as well as his persistent interest in the philosopy of science. He has always been in favor of nuclear power, and I believe LaRouche supported the Strategic Defense Initiative ("Star Wars"). I tried to look up Henry Carey in Dennis King's horrible anti-LaRouche book, Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism (1989), which enjoyed funding from the spooky Smith-Richardson Foundation and the League for Industrial Democracy (two intel-connected foundations), and research assistance from the Anti-Defamation League. But there was no mention of Carey in King's book, and that's touted as the most complete book on LaRouche.

Still, I think LaRouche is much too optimistic about technology. The differences between British capitalism and American capitalism, up until the time that Carey wrote, are probably better explained by Frederick Jackson Turner in The Significance of the Frontier in American History.

My bias is due to the fact that I had an American-history teacher in high school in 1963-64 who plugged Turner, and he was a rather hard grader. You don't find history teachers like that anymore in public high schools — the students are all copying and pasting from Wikipedia. My term paper for that class was on the Great White Fleet that Teddy Roosevelt sent around the world. I had to use original sources, which meant I had to spend hours at the Los Angeles Public Library downtown, reading old newspapers that concurrently described the trip.

Those sources aren't on the web yet. So much for high-tech. And I only got a B+ for that term paper!