11/16 News Roundup and Open Thread – The Progressive Wing

Washington Lobbyists Know Biden Well—as Their Former Boss

Scores of Mr. Biden’s former aides now on K Street represent hundreds of companies, trade groups and foreign companies. One person in the mix for a top White House role is Mr. Biden’s campaign chairman Steve Ricchetti, who co-owned a lobbying firm for more than a decade with his brother Jeffrey Ricchetti.
Mr. Biden, unlike the four most recent presidents, has deep ties to the Washington establishment from his 44 years in the Senate and as vice president. He named at least 40 current and former registered lobbyists to his transition team.
For much of his career, Mr. Biden has advocated for policies that he said would reduce the influence of lobbyists and special interests, including pushing for expanded government financing of political campaigns.
His campaign platform included seeking legislation that would require lawmakers to publicly disclose meetings and communications with any lobbyist or special interest trying to influence the passage or defeat of a specific bill.
“He will always place the public interest at the center of his decisions, because he is accountable to every American he serves as president,” said T.J. Ducklo, a spokesman for Mr. Biden.
It is common practice for aides to both Democratic and Republican elected officials to leave their positions in government for higher-paying jobs as corporate lobbyists. But the “revolving door” can pose a tricky balance for Democrats.

There are other folks on the transition team, such as Elizabeth Warren’s Chief of Staff, Anne Reid, who is now with a lobbying firm called Co-Equal, which is to beef up interests in Congress.

More news, tweets, videos, and jibber-jabber in the comments. See you there!

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Monday Monday…

🎼👍

No shit, Sherlock!https://t.co/IAZd78z1OS
— Meows For The Working Class 😸 (@meows4all) November 15, 2020

orlbucfan

Duh, ya think BO?

magsview

I was subjected to some John Podesta on tv earlier today and everything out of his stumbling mouth (he’s such a bad speaker) was Captain Obvious. What a waste of my life to have to hear it!

Benny

Thank you for watching John Podesta so that we don’t have to!

Benny

Dear Joe Biden: Don’t Put Rahm Emanuel in Your Administration

Dear President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President–elect Kamala Harris,
When news networks called the election for you, cheers broke out in the streets of Chicago, a city that the current occupant of the White House has repeatedly demeaned, insulted, and threatened. It was the biggest rush of collective relief this city has experienced since 2019, when we had just rid ourselves of another craven egomaniac with a legacy of destruction.
That man was former mayor Rahm Emanuel. We recently learned that you are considering him for a top position in your administration. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has already warned that progressives will not accept an Emanuel nomination, which would signal a disastrous direction for the new administration. Thousands of Chicagoans have signed a petition saying the same.
As an elected city council member of Chicago, with years as an educator and activist living, working, and organizing in communities that have been devastated by the policies Emanuel pursued as mayor, I write to insist in the strongest terms possible that you do not choose Emanuel as a staffer for your administration.
If you want to root out systemic racism, defend democracy, and build a society that leaves no one behind — all worthy goals mentioned in your victory speech — I can think of few people worse for the job than the man who earned the nickname “Mayor 1%” while in office.
Rahm’s list of accomplishments in Chicago is enormous and brutal. Here are some of the highlights.
Rahm Emanuel covered up the police murder of seventeen-year-old Laquan McDonald in 2014.
Laquan McDonald’s killing — Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke shot him sixteen times, including while McDonald lay on the ground — was appalling and served as a catalyst for Black Lives Matter movement organizing in Chicago. Emanuel clearly participated in the cover-up of this murder, perhaps the most important factor in his decision not to pursue an additional mayoral term in 2019 and dooming his political future in the city.
Rahm Emanuel closed fifty public schools in Chicago.
He carried out the single largest school closure in US history — over an outcry from parents, students, educators, and community members. Most of the schools served African American children on the south and west sides of the city, which are now missing key pillars of their communities. Meanwhile, some of the schools are now being converted into expensive apartment and condo buildings.
Over the pleas and protests of mental health service users, Emanuel closed more than half of Chicago’s public clinics. This shutdown has forced patients in need of care onto long wait lists and sparked a serious care crisis in black and brown working-class neighborhoods in the city.
Rahm Emanuel lavished wealthy neighborhoods and developers with public dollars intended to be used to support poor and working-class communities.

Don midwest

scumbags of the world unite!

orlbucfan

💩Amen! 💩

Benny

What Bernie Sanders Could Do as Secretary of Labor

The Trump administration’s Labor Department has failed to protect frontline workers in particular, and workers in general, since the pandemic hit. Sanders recognizes the need for action that addresses the immediate crisis and the stark injustice it has revealed. “I think that what this crisis does is rip away the Band-Aid and say, ‘Hey, this is the reality.’ And the reality is today that there are people going to work in dangerous jobs where they could catch the virus because they have to go to work,” he told me in April. “They’re making $12 an hour, and they’re scared to death about working in that grocery store or the drugstore or wherever they’re working, but they have to do it. And while rich folks are heading out to their second or third homes, these people are putting their lives on the line in order to take care of their families.”
As the highest-profile labor secretary since Perkins, with a charge from the president to act decisively, Sanders would be uniquely positioned to meet the crisis head-on. No one suggests that the task would be easy. He’d have to wrestle not just with Republicans but also with cautious Democrats. But he’s got a track record of doing just that.
Sanders would have a bully pulpit from which to advocate for replacing the minimum wage with a living-wage formula to lift workers out of poverty. He could lambaste anti-union “right-to-work” laws. And he could push for labor-law reforms, like those outlined in his 2020 presidential campaign’s “Workplace Democracy” agenda, which proposed to double union membership in four years.
Were Biden politically savvy enough to give his formal rival the go-ahead, Sanders could leverage his prominence and his national network of supporters to make the Labor Department a venue for advancing a workers’ rights agenda every bit as ambitious as the one FDR and Perkins championed in the 1930s. He could use the vast resources of a department with 15,000 employees and a budget of $50 billion not merely to enforce existing laws to protect working-class Americans but to develop new legislative strategies, regulations, and programs to extend those protections. He could highlight the immediate struggles of workers, and ramp up research on the future of work, automation, and the gig economy.
We’re in a moment of great enthusiasm for advancing worker rights and labor rights, and Sanders would not have to do it all on his own. In the tradition of the New Deal era, when cabinet members such as Perkins and Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace surrounded themselves with the country’s boldest thinkers and doers, Sanders could build a team to lead with him.

Benny

More from that article:

There are a number of impressive prospects for the Labor Secretary position in a Biden administration, several of whom Sanders has worked with over the years. Were the senator to get the nod from the president-elect, he could reach out to the best of these prospects. Imagine fully empowered assistant secretaries of labor such as Association of Flight Attendants President Sara Nelson developing programs to give workers a real voice on the job and across their industries; California Labor Secretary Julie Su, a cofounder of Sweatshop Watch, focusing attention on workplace discrimination and safety issues; AFL-CIO chief economist and former Assistant Secretary of Labor for Policy William Spriggs, an economics economics at Howard University, seizing “a teachable moment” to address statistical discrimination and to engage in deeper, smarter and more honest explorations of racial disparities in economic outcomes. Sanders might even consider Andrew Yang for a role framing the strategies that are needed to provide meaningful work and compensation in the next economy?
Joe Biden traveled just days before the 2020 election to Warm Springs, Ga., where he took on the mantle of FDR and promised a presidency that would enact an “economic plan that will finally reward work, not wealth in this country.” That’s a noble goal rooted in the ambitions of the New Deal. To realize it, Biden will need a Labor Department as visionary and bold as the one Frances Perkins ran in Roosevelt’s day. If Biden were to give him the go-ahead, Bernie Sanders and a team of visionary leaders could make the Labor Department a platform for launching a new New Deal.

I don’t know if Sara Nelson would be interested in the job, but she’s one lobbyist I think could turn things around and ensure workers got good bits of the government working for them. Trump was a disaster, but Labor always suffers under a GOP admin.

NYCVG

We won’t know who will be Senate Majority Leader until the results of the January 5 GA election are known.

Until that time I will remain uncommitted to having an opinion on Bernie’s best path .

If the (D) win the Senate Bernie will most likely be the Budget Committee Chairman, as he is now the minority head, or Chairman of other committees he serves on. Health, for example. Committee Chairman of the ruling senatorial party is a powerful position and it is a safe one.

A Cabinet position, on the other hand, as we have seen, can be a short-lived moment of glory. As in the revolving door of Trump’s cabinet. Shaky .

If I were Bernie I’d field all the inquiries coming at me as he has done. Maybe yes maybe no. happy to serve as best I can and so forth.

wi62

As much as i liked the ides of a cabinet position for Bernie, i doubt he would get one. The Neolibs and Pelousy heads would explode!! How dare Byedone put a progressive in his cabinet.

jcitybone

For several reasons, I don’t think Bernie will be chosen, but hopefully his public interest in the job will push Biden to choose someone for Labor more to Bernie’s liking. Nelson would be great. However, I’m thinking that all or most of Biden’s cabinet picks are going to be carefully chosen compromises between progressives and moderates.

humphrey

I agree with the first sentence. But the decisions will be made by his campaign donors leaving progressives not in the picture.

Benny

I agree with that statement.

polarbear4

agree. https://thegrayzone.com/2020/11/14/bidens-transition-team-war-profiteers-chickenhawks-corporate-consultants/

a tidbit:

An eye-popping array of corporate consultants, war profiteers, and national security hawks have been appointed by President-elect Joe Biden to agency review teams that will set the agenda for his administration. A substantial percentage of them worked in the United States government when Barack Obama was president.
The appointments should provide a rude awakening to anyone who believed a Biden administration could be pressured to move in a progressive direction, especially on foreign policy.
If the agency teams are any indication, Biden will be firmly insulated from any pressure to depart from the neoliberal status quo, which the former vice president has pledged to restore. Instead, he is likely to be pushed in an opposite direction, towards an interventionist foreign policy dictated by elite Beltway interests and consumed by Cold War fever.
Regime change addicts and revolving doors
A prime example of the interventionist-minded establishment-oriented figures filling the Biden-Harris Defense Department agency team is Lisa Sawyer. She served as director for NATO and European strategic affairs for the National Security Council from 2014 to 2015, and worked for Wall Street’s JPMorgan Chase as a foreign policy adviser. Sawyer was part of the Center for a New American Security’s “Task Force on the Future of US Coercive Economic Statecraft,” which essentially means she participated in meetings that focused on methods of economic warfare that could be used to destabilize countries that refused to bow to American empire.
Sawyer believes the US government is not doing enough to deter Russian “aggression,” US troop levels in Europe should return to the levels they were at in 2012, and offensive weapons shipments to Ukraine should continue and increase in violation of the Minsk Agreements.
“Instead of saying we will lift sanctions when Russia decides to comply with the next agreement, say that we will raise them until they do. Instead of kowtowing to Russia’s supposed spears of influence, provide Ukraine the lethal assistance it so desperately needs and increase US support to vulnerable nations in the gray zone,” Sawyer declared when testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee in 2017.

Benny

Imagine being a campaign operative and pretending to be a “no free stuff!” libertarian when our profession is effectively government protected parasites (laws require elections, no foreign competition, socially accepted way to buy policies opposed by voters) pic.twitter.com/DAvYgNskAC
— tyson brody (@tysonbrody) November 16, 2020

Benny

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/526106-perdue-declines-to-participate-in-debate-with-ossoff-ahead-of-georgia-senate-runoff

Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.) will not participate in a debate with Jon Ossoff, his Democratic challenger in one of two Georgia Senate races headed for a runoff in January, the incumbent’s campaign said.
Perdue’s campaign informed the Atlanta Press Club, which was set to host a debate early next month, that the senator would not attend, according to CNN.
The Democratic challenger took aim at Perdue following news that he had declined to participate, dubbing him “David ’empty podium’ Perdue.”

Last debate didn’t go so well for Purdue, so I guess he decided it was better to hammer it out on ads. I’m sure conservaDems will pitch in.

Aint Supposed to Die A Natural Death

Well I guess our candidate, Ossoff, will have to debate himself against these progressive issues.

Aint Supposed to Die A Natural Death

Sadly, I will be voting for this dude.

magsview

Oh, you poor thing! 🙁 Look at that self-satisfied smirk, he’s so unlikeable!!

But I would too, vote for him, I’d do it for Bernie.

jcitybone

A reason to hope that Warnock and Ossoff win

https://theintercept.com/2020/11/16/david-perdue-dollar-general-minimum-wage/

GEORGIA SEN. DAVID PERDUE claims in his official biography that during his time as CEO of Dollar General from 2003 to 2007, “he created thousands of quality jobs and helped working families make it from payday to payday.”
During that time, Dollar General opened up over 100 new stores in Georgia, bringing the total to 464 in the state. While Perdue earned over $50 million in total compensation from the company, the employees holding those allegedly quality jobs launched multiple lawsuits claiming that Perdue’s generous executive compensation was the product of wage theft and systemic exploitation.
Under Perdue’s leadership, no less than four class-action lawsuits — eventually combined into one — were filed against the company for wage theft, alleging systematic misclassification of managers to deny them overtime pay. The company’s business model relied on exploiting a loophole in overtime rules. If an employee could be classified as a “manager,” then the company could push them to work 60 or 80 hours a week but pay them no overtime or extra salary.
The company’s annual reports during the time Perdue ran it emphasized that Dollar General pursued “lean staffing of usually two to three employees in the store at any time” and stressed that “changes in minimum wage laws” could undermine the company’s bottom line. The company also warned that profits would be hit if “a significant portion of our employee base unionizes, or attempts to unionize.”
Dollar General paid $8.4 million in 2014 to settle allegations that it had withheld overtime compensation to its managers, who rarely performed managerial duties and instead performed the normal functions of running a Dollar General store, for 60 to 90 hours per week. The lawsuit was filed on Purdue’s watch in 2006. Dollar General had also paid out $18.7 million the same year for gender-based pay discrimination for violations that had also occurred on Perdue’s watch.
In his successful 2014 campaign for the U.S. Senate, Perdue showed that his own views closely mirror those described in Dollar General’s financial statements. “As I have said, if you increase the minimum wage, you will kill jobs in this country,” Perdue said in a debate with his Democratic opponent.
The Republican Senate majority has steadfastly refused to take up a possible hike in the minimum wage. The Democrat-controlled House passed a minimum-wage increase that would raise the wage from the current $7.25 to $15 by 2024, which all but six Democrats voted for and all but three Republicans voted against.
The two Senate races in Georgia, which will hold a runoff on January 5, will determine both control of the Senate and the likelihood of an increase in the minimum wage, which is virtually guaranteed if Democrats win control of the Senate.

Aint Supposed to Die A Natural Death

Wow!!! “he created thousands of quality jobs and helped working families make it from payday to payday.” That’s all working peons need – to make it from payday to payday. What a pos.

Benny

I got a note from Bernie’s fundraisers that he is soliciting donations to be split with Rev Warnock. However, Ossoff’s name is omitted from the text.

polarbear4

i hope Ossof is hammering on this.

LieparDestin

I CAN WALK! https://t.co/rxOgfZTyp2
— Ady Barkan (@AdyBarkan) November 16, 2020

polarbear4

this is good, i guess, although anyone who still believes isn’t going to stop over something like this, and it makes us all ok with twitter and FB telling us what is true.

i can’t stand all the FB and twitter notices that you cannot avoid, saying no fraud in our voting system. everyone please go back to sleep now, nothing to see here.

Don midwest

wonderful!! we do have a 2 party system!!!

time to bridge the gap!!!

Go For It JOE!!!

This completes the evolution that started in the 1980s. Rs have constantly moved right, and Ds shadowed them moving right too. This has now reached an end, b/c there is no more space on the extreme right where one can move. So Ds can now become the party of the moderate right. https://t.co/bfIIUyE00v
— Branko Milanovic (@BrankoMilan) November 15, 2020

polarbear4

“People are just the flesh the party uses to vote.”

And it's not just 30 years without debating opponents; it's 30 years of actively refusing to debate opposing candidates in a safe D district. It puts voters at a structural disadvantage relative to the party's infrastructure. People are just the flesh the party uses to vote with. https://t.co/AsiFV1mTHF
— Irami Osei-Frimpong (@IramiOF) November 15, 2020

wi62

Zero sum game i guess, Millions of us are still screwed

Benny

Anyone care to explain this election result?

2016 presidential results in Chicago, IL:
Clinton 912,943 (84%)
Trump 135,317 (12%)
2020 presidential results in Chicago, IL:
Biden 932,556 (83%)
Trump 179,278 (16%)
— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) November 16, 2020

Benny

2016 presidential results in San Francisco, CA:
Clinton 345,084 (85%)
Trump 37,688 (9%)
2020 presidential results in San Francisco, CA:
Biden 375,630 (85%)
Trump 55,988 (13%)
— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) November 16, 2020

Aint Supposed to Die A Natural Death

Sad, sad, sad. Blame it on the progressives. Blame it on defund the police. Blame it on Green New Deal. Blame it on Medicare for All. Blame it on Black lives Matter.

Benny

One of my moderate buds also tried to blame progressives today, especially in the south. I had to point out the DNC poisoned the well for Bernie, not to mention that Bernie would have had some issues winning in the south because his religious (or in his case, not religious) affiliations. Many PoC have issues with Jews or those who don’t crack open the Good Book frequently.

jcitybone

Biden’s biggest gains were in the suburbs, the cities were flat, losses in the rurals

https://www.ft.com/content/31a0273a-d745-4ed5-b497-c7c61c26e32d

But in key swing states Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia, he gained a net 355,210 votes in suburban areas, more than double his gains in large metro areas. This shift allowed him to win the suburbs in these states outright after Mrs Clinton lost them by more than 200,000 votes in 2016.
By contrast in the biggest cities in all of these states, Mr Biden either lost ground or remained stagnant compared with 2016.
Mr Biden flipped Wisconsin, the “tipping point” state that pushed Mr Trump over the 270 electoral vote threshold in 2016. This year, record turnout topped 3.2m statewide, but in the city of Milwaukee the number of votes cast stayed flat. Instead, it was Milwaukee’s inner suburbs that delivered the “blue wave” for Mr Biden.
It was a similar story in Pennsylvania and Georgia, where the suburbs drove Mr Biden to victory.
The suburban swing was opposed by a red rural wave. The Democrats lost ground to the Republicans in the rural portions of 37 of the 40 states for which sufficient data exist, continuing the country’s steady geographical polarisation

Aint Supposed to Die A Natural Death

Sad.

humphrey

I find it hard to believe that Biden didn’t inspire the masses.😜🤦‍♀️

https://i.insider.com/5fa076e891178a0019b3dc96?width=1100&format=jpeg&auto=webp

bernin

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/nov/11/joe-biden-voters-republicans-trump

Democrats went into last Tuesday’s election with a clear strategy: flip enough suburban Republican voters to beat Donald Trump.
Biden’s coalition was whiter and wealthier than any Democrat’s before. Biden’s winning margins depended on suburban voters who were entirely motivated by personal animus towards Trump, who voted Republican down-ballot and will certainly be voting Republican in future elections.
Most concerningly, Democrats hemorrhaged votes among non-white working-class voters. Losses among Latino voters could also be seen in huge margins in the Rio Grande valley, one of the most impoverished regions in the country, in Osceola county, Florida, and up and down the map from El Centro, California, to Lawrence, Massachusetts. Early returns also show consistent gains for Republicans among black voters across the board. Even in the crucial states Biden was able to flip, Trump reduced Democratic margins in Detroit, Milwaukee and Philadelphia. These results should be setting off alarm bells among Democrats.
Some centrist Democrats say an aversion to “socialism” was the issue, causing voters to flee the Democrats. Luckily, we have a good test of this idea from just this year, the primary run of avowed socialist Bernie Sanders. Far from fleeing in horror, Latino voters went for the socialist Sanders by enormous margins. In the nearly all-Latino Rio Grande valley, where Trump saw his largest gains anywhere, Sanders took nearly every county. Outside of Florida, Sanders won nearly every majority-Latino jurisdiction where Trump saw gains this year. These voters aren’t opposed to “socialism” – they are skeptical of the political establishment, not receptive to Democratic messaging about “decency” and political norms, and, most importantly, can’t be taken for granted.
An analysis of swing seats by Justice Democrats showed that more conservative voting records were actually correlated with decreased vote share among incumbent Democrats. In Florida, where Democrats distanced themselves from a ballot measure to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, the result was a huge win for the $15 minimum wage and a bloodbath for Democratic candidates. For many voters, the Democratic party isn’t associated with raising the minimum wage, and with the Democrats’ messaging strategy, why should it be?
Democrats are now staring down the barrel of a future where Republicans have a real foothold among working-class voters, including non-white voters. This election has proven the moderate suburbanite strategy is unsustainable. The only path forward for the left is one of confrontation with the Democratic establishment and a message of economic populism aimed at working-class voters of all races.

polarbear4

shared. bernin, do you have a twitter handle you would like me to credit?

bernin

nope, i’m not on twitter. so fire away! 🙂

Benny

I’ll fire one — Thank you!!!

Torabs

Reading way too much into things to say “Republicans have a real foothold among working-class voters.” Laughable in view that, in the same article, they acknowledge how popular Sanders was with that group.

The message should be: bet on the fickle suburbs at your own risk, Democrats.

Benny

The House Democratic leadership elections are this week, and despite a failed strategy and a lost election, the team will look almost exactly the same next year. Congress is where accountability goes to die. My report:https://t.co/ynamwS9FkZ
— David Dayen (@ddayen) November 16, 2020

Don midwest

my hypothesis: the coup will continue as the factions continue their games

capitalism continues in power

but without the person who stood for capitalism, but was a jerk, Trump

the others do a wonderful job to hide their true priorities under the ongoing controversies that make the main stream news

why can’t I like everyone else day it is all the fault of the media?

I am happy with my general statements that are free of details….

Benny

The Lincoln Project was always bullshit — and they will be using liberals’ money to demand Democrats capitulate to Mitch McConnell. Congratulations liberals. https://t.co/cxbmtbb9As
— David Sirota (@davidsirota) November 16, 2020

Aint Supposed to Die A Natural Death

Just another reminder that $$$ talks and bs walks.

polarbear4

Biden got lucky. He reeks of grift.

orlbucfan

T and R, Ms. Benny!! 😊☮️👍

Benny

This is our life in Texas now:
Thousands of cars form lines to collect food in Covid-hit Texas. https://t.co/xLF38IfkBc
— Ms. Sema (@_SemaHernandez_) November 16, 2020

Don midwest

my mechanic friend said that Covid would be over after the election

what happened?

NYCVG

lol

wi62

I’ve asked the same question to the trumpers in my circle, They fallen back to the Fake news BS.

NYCVG

Just horrifying.

Tell me again about the land of the free and the home of the brave…..complete bs.

Benny

Yes, instead of standing in line at soup kitchens, we use cars in the era of COVID.

polarbear4

good one.

Don midwest

the plurality of world views were squashed as the west conquered native peoples

the wooden ship were burned on arrival so there would be no way back

forward progress!!

colonize the heathens!!

“We have never been modern,” Bruno Latour announced in the title of his 1991 book. But what is the nature of this modernity that we have never been? And what does Latour’s understanding of modernity offer to those who feel that they are indeed modern, but don’t quite understand how or why?

modernity colonizes the earth with general concepts and maps

the details of say, Native American lifeworld are wiped out, ignored, jailed. Until 1924, Native Americans had to move off the reservation and denounce their tribal sovereignty to be able to vote (Meteor Blades at DK pointed this out.)

To answer this question, we might first of all take a step back. Latour does not frame his definition of modernity in terms of a particular culture, sociology, or geography.

wait a minute. Destruction of a culture is a culture issue. Land grab is a geography issue. Destroying tribal structure is a social issue. How can I understand that last sentence that is quoted?

What he has in mind is fundamentally epistemological. For Latour, there is no situation that can’t be explained by zooming in to the microscopic level. His strategy, then, is always to seek a more particular account of the world.

what gobbledygook. Throw in a big word, epistemology, theory of knowledge. But a more street definition of epistemology “how to you make sense of what goes on around here?” And for sure there is nothing in native american spirituality that would be of interest to the modern world because it lacks a basis in our rationality.

“Details, please, always more details,” as he puts it in Reassembling the Social (2006).

what? is he asking us to slow down and look at details. I am too busy chasing progress.

The moderns, by contrast, are those who remove their eye from the lens and prefer to subsume the plurality of the world under broad, generic categories.

do you mean like culture, geography, etc?

Famously for Latour these would include such apparently benign categories as “Nature,” “Society,” and “the Economy.” We might describe some physical occurrence as adhering to “the laws of Nature,” or we might analyze human behavior in terms of the “norms of the Social world,” or we might refer to the circulation of “Economic forces.” But in each case, the category is reductive of the concrete reality it is purporting to explain. The moderns, then, are those who exchange the complexity of the local for the simplicity of the global.

so this is how we get progress! simplicity of the global that is reductive of the local. In other words, reduce the local to unimportant, throw it out

my god, this guy is really radical. where did he get the idea that our categories to understand the world are, as he says, “benign categories” Well, fuck him. I cannot get by without them. (humorous note: I made a typing mistake and typed “buy” instead of “by” — according to Latour Capitalism has become the second nature and just as the first Nature was used as a backdrop {can’t deny laws of nature} in our politics today, can’t be against capitalism — so cannot get buy without them …

***
This is another strange comment.

In talking about politics, we operate in the realm of the concepts like nature, culture, science based on laws of nature, etc. We don’t notice the unconscious frame used to understand what is going on

***
the first 2 paragraphs from an article on Latour’s modernity

We Have Always Never Been Modern

polarbear4

Thanks, Don, for bringing us Latour in your words. :O)

Benny

Also this is incoherent. Pete is good but the town halls hurt the effort to pull ads from a company that just pulled $70 billion from Disney?
Hate for Profit? Joe’s top lawyer for his transition came from Facebook! You probably remember when she worked in the WH the first time. pic.twitter.com/d6TlidJB6O
— tyson brody (@tysonbrody) November 16, 2020

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