When Bartoleme de las Casas damned Africans to save the Amerindians, they became pseudo-serfs and African slaves became the economic engine for the Americas as slavery once had for Rome. The factory frees serfs from the land but separates workers from their food. Better, but still unfree.

try:
Anne Carson (Glass Essay and Autobiography in Red)
Adrienne Rich
Audre Lord
Elizabeth Bishop
Gertrude Stein
HD

read the influences and friends of poets you enjoy. we must start somewhere, but ultimately the starting matters more than where we start. Don't avoid long poems.

I can agree that the Dem establishment is in large part responsible for the problems we face. The "fall in line" attitude and sense of entitlement of our votes has always been tonedeaf. Shit's not gonna change if we don't make it though, Dem establishment or otherwise. Just my thoughts

I think for this to happen, we're going to have to take a different approach. The reactive desire of the Dems (party) needs to give way to active desire: this could easily be a central, defining focus for policy (UHC?) or it could be mass protest or something else, but we need something.

What's going to defeat Trump is a willingness to imagine new worlds. He is a symptom of crises, not their cause. To treat the illness, we have to get to its root: economic precarity as social policy and the destruction of community, in a word, neoliberalism. We need an alternative to beat him.

I agree with your intuition that the answer lies to the left. I think, however, preserving democracy must mean advocating against the ideas that undermined democratic ideals to the point of collapse -- I think the solution starts with acknowledging the problem. Global autocracy isn't an accident.

rather than a collective WW3. Second, and related, I'm wondering where NATO has prevented what would otherwise be a nuclear event? Neither the USA nor the USSR wanted nuclear war, and in the past thirty years, rogue states have continued to proliferate nuclear arms and make landgrabs. Help me here

The benefits seem minor compared to the benefits of Social Security and Medicaid -- I would think these would be top of the list instead. For 3), I have two related thoughts. First, the future of war is decentralized crises across the globe (I-P, Myanmar, Ecuador, Mediterranean, US Border) (cont)

Please explain. Only 2) seems to the direct benefit of American people, 1) and 3) might benefit indirectly but they're more important as tools of Empire? And while there hasn't been WW3, there won't be one: zones of conflict will proliferate and spread until war is decentralized and globalized.

I'm seeing the Musk reference as serving two goals: (1) building in-roads with people attracted to the idea of Gov't austerity and (2) shocking Dems and allies to reconsider our perspectives on military spending. The capitulation of lawmakers has been gross, but I hope and think that's not it here

Don't be deceived by Gaetz -- Sanders is not supporting Trump and his orbit of nitwits here. Instead, he's expressing a long-held and historically liberal opposition to the military-industrial complex and the war economy. His criticism is that we should spend on healthcare what we do on the military

This misreads why we lost. We lost because we embrace neoliberalism at the price of the progressive imaginary. We lost because we insisted there was no alternative. We didn't lose because some leftists abstained: we lost because our ideas couldn't defeat fascism. We need better ideas.

Through conspiracy culture, charismatics and evangelicals have inherited some of the USA neo-nazi cryptography, but their signs are clumsy and their identity politics explicit. They would be easy to single out for McCarthyist expulsion, but neoliberals would before long command the purge.

Neoliberals bring an added danger: they are adept at wearing masks, at manipulating social movements to their own benefit, at grifting. Candace Owens embodies a neoliberal subjectivity that sees political commentary as a purely entrepreneurial enterprise. Neolibs sell to the highest bidder.

The same can and should be said about neoliberals, and both groups irreparably corrupt State institutions, both ideologically and through the active dismantling and liquidation of the State for private profit. One desires market wealth as a sign of God's Grace, the other merely desires wealth.