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The Democratic Socialists of Americahave a big question to answer a 24,000-person strong question. According to a recent announcement, thats how many members the group claims to have, thanks in part to the interest in socialism prompted by the insurgent presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders and as a reaction to theelection of a far-right president in Donald Trump. But, as800 delegates descend on Chicago forthe DSA conventionthis week, the group must figure out how itsmasses of card-carrying socialists will engage in electoral politics.

Local chapters have debated how much energy to put into running for office versus engaging in issue advocacy, and whether to align with Democrats or work on building a new political party.

EnterJabari Brisport a DSA-endorsed, Green Party candidate for New Yorks 35th City Council District whooffers one potential path forward for the group.

A flyer for a New York City council candidate forum hangs outside the Epiphany Lutheran School in Brooklyn, NY on July 26, 2017.

Photo: Bryan Thomas for The Intercept

Brisport is a 29-year-old African American artist and activist who was born and raised in the 35th District, which includes portions of Crown Heights, Prospect Heights, and other neighborhoods in Brooklyn. In a wide-ranging interview with The Intercept, he described his motivation for running, and his thoughts on the larger political zeitgeist.

Grassroots politics runs deep in his family as does radicalism. Brisports mother is a former Black Panther. Hespent years organizing around local causes, and was an enthusiastic backer of Sanderss presidential campaign. Unlike Sanders, however, Brisport chose to end his cooperation with Democratic Party after the election.

Last year, I was really just fed up with the party, he said. After Bernie lost the nomination, I decided to moved on out to the Greens who, honestly, ideologically Im closer to and are a better fit with me. I was also tired of arguing with other Democrats over things I think are basic, like whether money influences politics.

The New York City Councils first-past-the-post elections, where whoever gets the most votes wins outright, running as a third-party candidate is tough.But because Brooklyn is so heavily dominated by Democrats,Brisport is essentially trying to introduce atwo-party competition. In doing that, hes walking a path similar to Kshama Sawant, the Socialist Alternative councilwoman in Seattle who defeated a Democratic opponent on a platform designed around democratizing wealth and power in the city.

The incumbent in the 35th District is a former art museum executive named Laurie Cumbo,who moved into the district to run for office in 2013. Brisports main ideological difference with Cumbo is their divergent approaches to developing Brooklyn.

Hers is what Ive seen called the Guggenheim Theory of development, which is that if you bring lots of really glitzy art spaces to an area, really great concert halls, really great art museums, so on and so forth, thatll bring economic improvement to the area, he noted. Which is like a half-truth. Because it brings more wealth and improvement to the area but also pushes out the poor people.

What Brisport is describing is the process of gentrification, which has swept his part of Brooklyn in recent years, drawing the ire ofAfrican American and West Indian communitiesin the district. Brisport claims to offera more democratic form of growth guided by the local community.

Give more community control, he suggested, pointing to the redevelopment of the Bedford-Union Armory in Crown Heights. Brisport opposes plans to turn the 138,000-square-foot armory into a bonanza for private developers. Instead, he is supporting residents who want to turn the site into a community land trust. Under such a model, land development would be approved by a nonprofit controlled by the local community.

People from the community organize into a non-profit, and then you can turn over the land to them, instead of wealthy developer, he explained. They can choose who they contract out to. Maybe theyll contract out to a non-profit. Ultimately, theyll have final say in the negotiations.

That same spirit of greater localized democracy runs through the entirety of Brisports platform: From expanding participatory budgeting, to requiring police officers to live in the city, to taxing the rich to ensure a more equitable distribution of wealth and power.

One of the challenges ofBrisports run for office and for DSA, in general is defining democratic socialism in a way that Americans will embrace it as a mainstream ideology.

You tell somebody socialism without hearing somebody describe it, they automatically think government owns everything, takes away your property, he complained. Its not necessarily thinking about it as government. Its about We The People. Its about having power and agency over how things are guided.

He cited the financial crisis as an example of how a group of elites were able to negatively impact the lives of millions of people without facing democratic accountability.

In 2008, when the banks crashed the economy, we cant vote out the CEOs of those banks, we have no say over those bankers, he noted. However, if an elected official messes up the economy, you can vote them out. You have a say.

A crowd gathers for a New York City council candidate forum inside the Epiphany Lutheran School in Brooklyn, NY on July 26, 2017.

Photo: Bryan Thomas for The Intercept

One of the obstacles Sanderss presidential campaign faced in his race against Hillary Clinton was the strong loyalty shown by older African American voters to the establishment of the Democratic Party. The only cohort of the black electorate Sanders won was the youngest. The establishment party candidates also made strong showingsamong these voters of other ethnic backgrounds in races againstpopulists. In his re-election bid, Chicagos Mayor Rahm Emanuel, for instance, counted on strong black support to beat back challenger Chuy Garcia in his Democratic primary. Sanders-backed Tom Perriello suffered from a deficit among black voters in the Virginia Democratic gubernatorial primary.

For Brisports part, these shortfalls came largely thanksto a coordinated campaign by the partys establishment and the deep Southern tiesheld by Clinton and her husband, the former Arkansas governor President Bill Clinton.

The Democratic Party weaponized identity politics a little bit against Bernie Sanders, he said of last years presidential primary. As soon as he started losing the South, they made this whole thing of him not connecting with black voters. Which is insane. Because like, if Coke was really doing well in the South over Pepsi, nobody would be like, Well, I guess Pepsi is having trouble connecting with black voters!'

However, he also said Sanders should have adjusted his approach to appeal to a wider set of voters. Bernie also is a little big guilty, he conceded. At some point, he failed to move things outside of an economic lens. I think he was asked this one question at a debate that was like whats your biggest blind spot as a white person. He said, when youre white you dont know what its like to be poor. I dont know how he got to that conclusion.

I love Bernie. I would vote for him ten times. But Im not sure what he was going for with that statement, Brisport continued. I think his bigger blinder was seeing so much from an economic lens when you do need a mixture of an economic approach and an approach towards marginalized group. When I said weaponized identity politics earlier, I dont mean to say Im anti-identity politics. I understand their role. Its a double-edged sword. Its something to be addressed not something to be used as character assassination.

Brisports criticism matches that of Khalid Kamau, a DSA-backed socialist candidate who won a city council seat in South Fulton, Georgia, in the spring.

I love Bernie, but I think where his campaign failed I dont think this is a personal failure of Bernie, but perhaps of the people that were around him and advising that campaign is that there wasnt enough attention paid to people of color, Kamau told Truthout in March. I am not sure that people of color who were in that campaign were listened to the way they should have been.

New York City council candidate Jabari Brisport (second from left) meets with constituents following a candidate forum inside the Epiphany Lutheran School in Brooklyn, NY on July 26, 2017.

Photo: Bryan Thomas for The Intercept

Going forward, Brisport believes the best way for democratic socialists to build a truly multi-racial movement is to show up and support communities of every background.

DSA is multi-tendency. Its electoral but also fighting lots of different battles: housing, immigrant justice, climate, labor rights, strike solidarity, education he explained. What theyve been really great at doing is going into these conflicts where the community is fighting. And not only allying themselves with the local community, but amplifying them and also taking a backseat. Not like coming up and saying, Were DSA were running this. But also saying how can we amplify what you do?

New York Citys 2,000-member strong DSA chapter has put its money where it mouth is in diversifying the movement. So far, both of the candidates it supports for city council races comes from non-white backgrounds. In addition to Brisport, DSA voted to endorse Reverend Khader El-Yateem in his Democratic primary in Brooklyns diverse Bay Ridge neighborhood. El-Yateem is a Palestinian Christian and a supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaign (BDS) a bold stance in a city known for its stridently pro-Israel politics.

El-Yateem is Trumps worst nightmare. He supports immigrants, is Arab-American and explicitly refuses to take money from developers, NYC-DSA Co-Chairwoman Rahel Biru said in a statement.

Brisport has seen the difficulties in organizing people of different ethnic backgrounds into one movement first hand in his own backyard. He pointed to disputes between Caribbean Americans and Jewish Americans in Brooklyn over housing as an example.

Theres a general sense in the community that the Jews are buying up the land and controlling everything, he said of complaints hes seen in the Caribbean community. Which is upsetting. He added, Its almost like what I saw Trump do. He saw peoples real concerns about an economy that was failing them and shifting it over to Muslims and Mexicans.

Brisports goal is to end the racial infighting and unite his diverse district behind democratic socialism.

What I tell people is gentrification isnt caused by white people, its caused by capitalism, he said. If you de-commodify the land and you take the profit motive away then we can actually fight against this.

Top photo: Jabari Brisport, a 29-year-old actor-turned-activist-turned-member of the Democratic Socialists of America, poses for a portrait in Brooklyn, NY on July 26, 2017.

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Jabari Brisport Is Running For City Council to Bring Democratic Socialism to Brooklyn - The Intercept

It is enormously frustrating that conservatives cant capture the moral high ground from the phony virtue-signaling factory that is the modern Democratic Party. Conservative policies not only work better but also are morally superior.

Democrats depend on cliches and false narratives to obstruct true reform which includes shaming many Republicans from believing enough in their own agenda to pursue it with conviction. This is nowhere more apparent than in the endless debate over the fate of Obamacare and the future of American health care.

It is unconscionable that Republicans are unable to muster a simple majority to end the Obamacare monstrosity a freakish beast that does everything it promised not to do and does little it promised to do, a gargantuan scam that is destroying our health care, eroding our liberty and punishing our economy. Its a camel with its entire body already inside the tent of the American idea hellbent on completing Obamas plan to fundamentally demolish it.

Democrats are incapable of offering new ideas because they are ideologically and politically enslaved. Their worldview weds them to the historically discredited notion that great results flow from allegedly good intentions. And their lust for power impels them to exploit identity politics and perpetuate victimhood for the constituencies whose overwhelming support is essential to their political lifeblood.

For example, they cant support decentralization and competition in education, no matter how much that could improve the lives of minorities trapped in inferior schools, or support across-the-board tax cuts even though cuts for higher-income earners help stimulate economic growth, which redounds to the benefit of middle- and lower-income earners because they cannot abandon their class warfare strategy.

Now back to todays more pressing issue health care reform. Their policies have wrought untold disaster across the board, yet they will acknowledge no responsibility for these failures, much less join, in any way, those seeking solutions.

Democrats tell us they would be happy to work with Republicans to repair the glitches in Obamacare. The problem is that we are not dealing with mere glitches. The entire legislative debacle is a galloping cancer on our system.

Further exposing the Democrats fraud, almost all of the Republicans so-called repeal and replace proposals have not actually contemplated repeal at all; theyve just proposed revisions. Yet Democrats, in lockstep, will not even come to the table to discuss them. In other words, except for their failed efforts to fully repeal the bill, all Republican proposals have been efforts not to completely end Obamacare (sad to say) but to partially repair it.

Democrats dont want the system improved. They know its a barely disguised wealth redistribution scheme that if left alone will necessarily eventuate in a single-payer system a euphemism for socialized medicine.

So for now, lets forget Democrats, who have no intention of working with Republicans on this.

What about the couple of handfuls of pseudo-Republicans who dont have the decency to end this nightmare the ones who campaigned on the promise to repeal this law but wont now pull the trigger?

I dont want to hear that their consciences are involved or that they are from liberal states. How about their intellectual honesty and dignity?

Why do they enable Democratic propaganda that millions would be hurt by repealing a law that forces those millions to buy insurance against their will? Why arent they held accountable for giving life-support to a law that is already harming people and would result in socializing one-sixth of our economy?

Dont you just love hearing the self-serving protestations of these squishes, pretending to care so much about people while they are single-handedly (as Democratic intransigence is an irremediable reality) decimating world historys greatest health care system?

There is nothing compassionate about what Democrats and their sanctimonious foxhole-sharing Republican frauds are doing here.

Its time for freedom-loving, people-loving Americans to turn the tables on these charlatans and recapture the moral high ground through aggressive and intelligent messaging. Well never save this republic if we cant make the case that government largesse is fundamentally destructive and incompetent and that the invisible hand of the market yields results across the board that are more beneficial for more people than those of any other system known to man.

Socialism kills, impoverishes and enslaves and only masquerades as compassion while facilitating the compassion merchants consolidation of power. Freedom brings prosperity and, if you insist on using compassion as the be-all-end-all yardstick, is abundantly compassionate.

^

Follow David Limbaugh on Twitter @davidlimbaugh and his website at http://www.davidlimbaugh.com.

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DAVID LIMBAUGH: Socialism kills, impoverishes, enslaves - Examiner Enterprise

Venezuela is a woeful reminder that no country is so rich that it cant be driven into the ground by revolutionary socialism.

People are now literally starving about three-quarters of the population lost weight last year in what once was the fourth-richest country in the world on a per-capita basis. A country that has more oil reserves than Saudi Arabia is suffering shortages of basic supplies. Venezuela now totters on the brink of bankruptcy and civil war, in the national catastrophe known as the Bolivarian Revolution.

The phrase is the coinage of the late Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez, succeeded by the current Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro. The Western Hemispheres answer to Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, Maduro has instituted an ongoing self-coup to make his country a one-party state.

The Chavistas have worked from the typical Communist playbook of romanticizing the masses while immiserating them. Runaway spending, price controls, nationalization of companies, corruption and the end of the rule of law its been a master class in how to destroy an economy.

The result is a sharp, yearslong recession, runaway inflation and unsustainable debt. The suffering of ordinary people is staggering, while the thieves and killers who are Chavista officials have made off with hundreds of billions of dollars. At this rate The Economist calls the countrys economic decline the steepest in modern Latin American history there will be nothing left to steal.

Any government in a democratic country that failed this spectacularly would have been relegated to the dustbin of history long ago. Maduro is getting around this problem by ending Venezuelas democracy.

The Chvistas slipped up a year or two by allowing real elections for the countrys National Assembly, which were swept by the opposition. They then undertook a war against the assembly, stripping it of its powers and culminating in a rigged vote this week to elect a constituent assembly to rewrite the constitution. The opposition boycotted the vote, and outside observers estimate less than 20 percent of the electorate participated.

The goal of Maduros alleged constitutional reforms is to no longer have a constitution worthy of the name. Immediately after the vote, his forces arrested two leading opposition figures in the dead of night. Video shows one of them, Antonio Ledezma, being taken away in his pajamas and another, Leopoldo Lpez, bundled into the back of a car.

It looks like what it truly was a pair of kidnappings.

Denied the ordinary means of dissent via the press and elections, the opposition has taken to the streets. Already more than 100 people have been killed in clashes over the past several months.

Worse is yet to come. Lacking legitimacy and representing only a fraction of the populace, the Maduro regime will rely on the final backstop of violent suppression. It is now the worst crisis in a major country in the Western Hemisphere since the heights of the Colombian civil war in the 1990s and 2000s.

There is no easy remedy to Venezuelas agony. If mediation were the solution, the country never would have gotten to this pass. Endless negotiations between the government and the opposition have gone nowhere the organized-crime syndicate that has seized power under the banner of revolution knows it has no option but to retain its hold on power by any means necessary.

The US needs to use every economic and diplomatic lever to undermine the regime and build an international coalition against it. We should impose more sanctions on specific officials and on the state-run oil company; we should advertise what we know about the details of how Chavistas park their ill-gotten gains abroad; we should nudge our allies to further isolate the Venezuelan government by pulling ambassadors and breaking diplomatic relations.

The hope is that with enough pressure, the regime will crack and high-level officials will break with Maduro, weakening his position and making a negotiated restoration of democratic rule possible.

In the meantime, the Bolivarian Revolution is proceeding according to its sick logic and there will be blood.

Read more:
Venezuela: a nation devoured by socialism - New York Post

If ever I have to live in a dictatorship, put me down for one of those right-wing set-ups. To toil under leftist autocracy would be too exhausting you plant potatoes all day, get chased around by the secret police, then have to wade through articles in the Guardian explaining why youre not experiencing true socialism.

Its the standard response of Western radicals faced with the brutal truth about the regimes they fetishise. They will not bedissuaded by evidence that their ideology tends to result in mass immiseration and exciting opportunities in the garbage-scavenging economy. For no evidence is possible: when command economies go wrong, it turns out real socialists were never in command.

Venezuela is shaping up to be the next false dawn and soon its erstwhile champions will airily assure us that it too wasnt run along genuine socialist lines. Incumbent president Nicols Maduro is celebrating his victory in Sundays election in which he took Bertolt Brecht somewhat literally and dissolved the peoples parliament and elected another.

The 2015 election, which saw moderate parties wrest control of the National Assembly, was the first major reversal in power forMaduro. Since then he has been busy packing the courts, suspending regional elections, and intimidating the opposition. He has also overseen an economic implosion. Hugo Chvez was able to bankroll his socialist paradise with oil revenues. But when petroleum prices plummeted, so too did Venezuelas ability to fund its expansive social welfare system and generous fuel subsidies. This has produced public unrest and growing hostility towards the regime amongst even its loyalest constituencies, including the poor and rural. The Chavista miracle is over.

Maduros new Constituent Assembly, which will replace the National Assembly, will be composed entirely of candidates nominated by his United Socialist Party. It will be empowered to rewrite the constitution to remove what precious checks and balances remain. The United States has branded the move another step toward dictatorship and termed the Maduro junta architects of authoritarianism. Socialism the real variety or otherwise having failed, the Venezuelan people will have no choice but to live with it for some time to come.

The unfolding crisis has prompted calls for Jeremy Corbyn and other former Chvez fan boys to acknowledge yet another failure of their worldview. The Labour leader hailed Chvez for showing that the poor matter and wealth can be shared and making massive contributions to Venezuela [and] a very wide world. Diane Abbott once declared that Chavez shows another world is possible. Owen Jones pronounced him an icon for Venezuelas long-suffering poor who represented a break from years of corrupt regimes with often dire human rights records. All this he achieved despite an aggressively hostile media and bitter foreign critics, Jones gushed.

In large part it was their shared anti-Americanism that brought Chvez and the Western far-left together. He was a plucky little Simn Bolvar for the 21st century, defying latter day imperialists and defending the independence of Latin America. Like them, he despised neoliberalism. (Neo is Greek for new and Leftist for all forms of.) It hardly mattered that Chvez, while undoubtedly giving the poor more of a hearing than most of his predecessors, was in truth a thug and a strongman. Those notorious right-wingers at Human Rights Watch said his regime was characterised by a dramatic concentration of power and open disregard for basic human rights guarantees.

Human rights monitors were deported and a judge who freed one of Chvezs critics from arbitrary detention found herself summarily jailed then placed under house arrest. Commercial TV stations had their licences revoked and restrictions were placed on critical newspapers. When Globovisin, the last remaining independent broadcaster, covered a prison riot that was poorly handled by the government, it was fined millions of dollars for promot[ing] hatred for political reasons that generated anxiety in the population. After Globovisins owner accused Chvez of not respecting press freedoms, he was arrested for disseminating false information and offending the president. Even mans best friend wasnt safe from the megalomaniac dictator. When a soap opera mocked Chavez by naming a dog after him, his government had the show cancelled.

Asking Corbyn and his fellow-travellers to recant their cheerleading for the extinguishing of Venezuelan democracy is futile. They would not accept the premise, then theyd accuse you of being a CIA asset, and when every excuse had been exhausted they would invoke the not-real-socialism clause. The question they should be pressed on is this: If Chavismo is so progressive and egalitarian, why do they not support it for Britain? Why does Jeremy Corbyn prescribe full-bloodedsocialism for Venezuela but wont do the same for Britain? The far-left has spent decades pointing to political miserablism inflicted on the worlds poor and prating that another world is possible and yet now that they are in control of the Labour Party they seem pretty relaxed about the world we have. They are like Leninists lost on a gap year: Capitalism in one country, to the barricades everywhere else.

Corbyn and his ilk are not revolutionaries but revolution tourists. They find far-flung political struggles exotic and romantic; they wouldnt like to live in Venezuela but its a sun-kissed break from the dreary managerialism of Britain. This is nothing more than the cultural appropriation they denounce in its every other manifestation but what a thrilling form it takes, allowing absolute white boys from hipster London to join the Latin American proletariat until they get bored and alight upon a new cause to patronise. They will never find true socialism because they only want it for others, not themselves.

More here:
Socialism is destroying Venezuela but the left will never admit it - Spectator.co.uk (blog)

Vox published an interesting interview Sunday with Eric Weinstein. Weinstein is a managing director at Peter Thiels investment firm and is also the brother of (former?) Evergreen State College professor Bret Weinstein. The interview is about the future of capitalism and Vox has titled it Why capitalism cant survive without socialism.

What Weinsteinactually has to say about the future of capitalism is more interesting than the headline suggests. He believes the production and assembly jobs of yesteryear are not coming back. As computer technology improves a greater and greater percentage of what we consider traditional work will no longer require human hands:

Since the Industrial Revolution, technology has been a helpful pursuer, chasing workers from the activities of lowest value into repetitive behaviors of far higher value. The problem with computer technology is that it would appear to target all repetitive behaviors. If you break up all human activity into behaviors that happen only once and do not reset themselves, together with those that cycle on a daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly basis, you see that technology is in danger of removing the cyclic behaviors rather than chasing us from cyclic behaviors of low importance to ones of high value.

But that does not mean that Weinstein believes the end of free markets areat hand. On the contrary, he suggests the market will need to become more free for the people capable of creating new things. But for everyone else? He suggests the kind of assembly line jobs that used to provide high school grads with a decent wage need to be replaced by something and that something is some form of socialism:

I believe capitalism will need to be much more unfettered. Certain fields will need to undergo a process of radical deregulation in order to give the minority of minds that are capable of our greatest feats of creation the leeway to experiment and to play, as they deliver us the wonders on which our future economy will be based.

By the same token, we have to understand that our population is not a collection of workers to be input to the machine of capitalism, but rather a nation of souls whose dignity, well-being, and health must be considered on independent, humanitarian terms. Now, that does not mean we can afford to indulge in national welfare of a kind that would rob our most vulnerable of a dignity that has previously been supplied by the workplace.

People will have to be engaged in socially positive activities, but not all of those socially positive activities may be able to command a sufficient share of the market to consume at an appropriate level, and so I think were going to have to augment the hypercapitalism which will provide the growth of the hypersocialism based on both dignity and need.

Theres a lot to unpack here but clearly what hes describing is really a two-tier system. There are those minority of minds who will continue to thrive in some kind of hypercapitalism. Meanwhile, everyone else will need to rely on some kind of universal basic income.

Elsewhere in the piece, Weinstein talks about the danger of todays truly rich being out of touch with how the majority of people live. But his prediction of the future sounds like a place where that would be even more the case than it is now. How does a hypercaptialist relate to millions of people who dont feel the need to work at all? I joked on Twitter that this is how you get the Eloi and the Morlocks, two groups who no longer seem to have anything in common.

Weinstein also acknowledges the dignity of work in his comments about the future. Whats not clear is how his system would avoid the problem of free riders, i.e. once people are no longer expected to make it on their own why would they even try? Why not just stay home and collect subsistence? Im not saying everyone would do that but what if 15% of the population did? Could society carry the weight of all those who refuse to do anything for themselves?

And what is the political system that guides this future? Do the capitalists and socialists each get the same vote? If so, whats to keep the socialists (who are in the majority) from voting themselves a raise every six months. What prevents a Hugo Chavez figure from running on a platform to add a tax on the hypercapitalistsor simply expropriate all of their earnings and products en masse for the good of the people. That sort of thing is usually popular in socialist countries until it begins to backfire as it is now in Venezuela.

Obviously, Im not convinced by this argument, but it does raise some interesting questions. When machines can do a better job at most things than human workers, how will the millions of people who once had those jobs survive? People on the right should be thinking about this because you can bet people on the left are already doing so.

Original post:
Is this the future? Capitalism for the brightest and socialism for everyone else - Hot Air