Young Master Smeet
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Seems it’s all over. For now:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-54882564
It looks like it was mostly for domestic Azerbaijani consumption, since it just involves taking back some towns lost in ’94.
Protestors have stormed the Armenian parliament.
The problem is, without massive ethnic cleansing, those Armenians are not going away, and will not be governed as second class citizens of Azerbaijan.
Well, the key thing is how central to the existence of that society wages were. For example, a Saxon peasant getting paid to work over summer, but who still had access to his own land and the commons/waste is very different from a nineteenth century agricultural labourer (and even there, some very strange and convoluted customs and practices limited the labour markets).
ISTR somewhere Marx mentions mercenaries as the first proletarians, but obviously, they would be part and parcel of the chattel slave antique societies or feudalisms they sold their labour power in.
They were marginal to the reproduction of the social system.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-54862180
The BBC seems very even handed over who started this war: it does seem to me to be very much Azerbaijan who have started the latest round of the war. They seem to be doing quite well, obviously going to plan…
Argentina, 2001, spoilt ballots brought down the government. So, no, you don’t have to vote for them, and open expression of non-voting, when done by enough people, can have political effects.
The only good president is no president, so vote for no-one…
Socialists organising in the states don’t need to take the presidency, only gain sufficient power for a constitutional convention… (so that’s control of the legislatures of 38 states, easy).
It does look like in Pennsylvania the Libertarian vote will be greater than the margin of victory:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election/us2020/states/pa
Fnar…
Don’t be sure Trump is finished, the 12th Amendment is in play, if he can make sure that Biden doesn’t get to 270 electoral college votes (by making sure, say, Pennsylvania never gets to certify electors) then the appointment to the VP goes to the Senate, and the President gets elected by the House voting by state (and the GOP controls the majority of state delegations).
The game is afoot.
Well, Trump has out performed the polls again.
As some have pointed out, even if Biden edges it, he’s going to spend four years pandering to the Trump base. Millions have voted for Trump despite knowing exactly what he is, or because. That’s where we start: and then there is the clear racialisation of the vote…
Lobster has a range of reviews on books by Never Trump republicans:
https://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/free/lobster80/lob80-never-trumpers.pdf
The interesting thing is the bipartisan foreign policy, that Truimp has upset:
“The Republican foreign policy
establishment was by and large bipartisan in sympathy, looking as far as
possible to achieve consensus with their Democrat opposite numbers. As
Saldin and Teles point out, they sometimes overlapped. Mike Green, for
example, had been offered jobs by both George W Bush and Al Gore
before the 2000 Presidential election, while Eliot Cohen, ‘Condoleezza
Rice’s top aide at the State Department’, had voted for the Democrat,
John Kerry, in 2004. (pp. 31-32) Now once Trump won the nomination,
they became ‘the purest strain of Never Trumpism’”It was precisely because they were monolithic and bipartisan that trump was able to upset the Applecart…
Of course, and as Cde. Newells blog remind us, Marx worked on a secret history of 18th C. diplomacy:
https://marxists.info/archive/marx/works/1857/russia/index.htm
(side note, Brexit seems to have re-opened the door to secret diplomacy, after all, Truss signed a trade deal with Japan on her own, no need for any parliamentary scrutiny nor approval, Royal Prerogative is back).
It won’t have been Israeli lobbyists alone that would have wanted to prevent BDS, but British capitalists and their geostrategic interests would have been working to crush him.
I’d suggest talk of ‘divided loyalties’ is poor form, people and political actors in the UK have connections, interests and sympathies for many different countries around the world, and lobbying on their behalf is perfectly normal and reasonable.
I’m not sure what bringing his wife and children’s religion into things achieves.
Nor spotting up the perfectly normal and legitimate lobbying activity of a businessman. The class analysis is that the vast majority, Jewish and non-Jewish alike are locked out by this kind lobbying. If it wasn’t Chinn it’d be some other businessman because their power of the purse is required to get ahead in politics.
All governments and state actors lobby and influence other states: Churchill (beloved of the right) interfered in American politics to drag them into the war on the British side.
They’re not likely to be helped by the British capitalist class (indeed, I’d argue those waving the prospect of third party political/military intervention are doing them an active disservice).
