davel

No one has yet updated Wikipedia to reflect this new information. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_activities_in_Hungary

CIA was completely surprised by the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.

Right, the CIA was completely surprised by a fascist counterrevolution of their own device 🙄

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Natalie Wynn aka Contrapoints aka Natalie Clinton seems very worried about "The Left" always losing and "The Left" criticising her. She can't stop talking about this in her videos which come out three times per decade. Why does she do this, and why do others like her do the same?

Glenn Diesen interview.

Micheal Hudson is a renowned economist, addresses why Europe has set itself on a path to economic crisis and collapse
https://michael-hudson.com/

One of the most common refrains now, extending from liberals to conservatives, is the reference to “agency” and its supposed denial by anyone who brings attention to imperialism and the acts of Western states. “Oh, you’re pointing to the CIA’s influence in that coup? Well have you considered you’re denying the AGENCY of the people of that country when you say that? CHECKMATE!”

There’s this implication that you’re somehow nefarious, racist, xenophobic, chauvinist when you deny this “agency”, a brilliant reversal of the pro-imperialist’s position. You see, they’re not engaged in denying “agency” and all the bad things that come with it, no it’s you who are doing so.

There is no singular “agency” at play in any event, at any given time, in any given society. There is a wide variety of “agencies” at play, and when someone says you’re denying it in this or that case, they’re obfuscating the fact that they’re picking and choosing which particular “agency” they believe is most important and ought to be focused on (this is the normative claim) by presenting it as some universal, objective, valid position that everyone should accept at face value.

So take the case of a coup orchestrated by the CIA in some Latin American country. When you’re talking about this and someone says you’re “denying the agency of the people of that country” when you do so, what is the actual claim being made? It’s that you are somehow denying that the people of that country were capable of making their own decisions free from the influence of a foreign entity, the CIA in this case. It has the appearance of a profoundly moral claim, right? Who wants to deny that people are capable of carving out a path for themselves, and having the ability to pursue it? Are you saying they’re too weak or stupid to do so, and are instead in thrall of foreign powers and entities? Aren’t you just repeating the same racist/xenophobic/chauvinist/Western supremacist attitudes of the colonial masters who believed natives were pliant and weak and incapable of resisting?

It is exactly because of all this implied baggage that the term has gained such currency among supposed “leftists”, and has turned them into willful or ignorant dupes of imperialism and Western chauvinism, while imagining they’re in fact valiantly battling against it by invoking that magical word, “AGENCY!”.

Here is a basic fact: ten people, of about equal ability, are able to accomplish more tasks than one person of the same level of ability. They have more “agency”. A hundred people even more so. A thousand doesn’t even get close. How about if you introduce some other elements into this calculus: say you have ten people who are part of a well-organized, resourced, highly trained institution? So they have access to modern technology, vast funding, advanced weapons, ability to form narratives through their connections to high ranking political and media personalities, etc. etc. Do these ten people have more of an ability to affect reality than a hundred people chosen at random who lack all this? About a thousand? It seems like those ten people have more power, more “agency”, than the latter, right? If you deny this, and instead ludicrously assert that all those forms of agency enhancing capabilities those ten people embody and have access to as members of a particular institution are irrelevant, then you’re basically invalidating any kind of systemic, social analysis of power relations. If one billionaire has the same “agency” as a thousand poverty-stricken people, meaning “agency” is solely defined by numerical value, then what the fuck is the point of the concept except to justify the most grotesque inequalities and power imbalances under the pretense of being morally superior?

And that’s exactly what those who justify imperialism like so much about the term. It allows them, in the eyes of the ignorant (willful or otherwise) to play the part of paragons of virtue when in fact they’re the exact opposite.

The United States is the most powerful state in the world. It has the most wealth, it has the most advanced weaponry, it has the most well-funded intelligence services and army, navy and air force, and it extends its empire across the globe. The notion that they have the same “agency”, the same ability to affect things in the world as a poverty-stricken small country, is frankly deranged. It’s as absurd as the notion that a billionaire has the same ability to affect things as a homeless person, and obscures the very real destructive things that this power imbalance results in, which is why those on the left want to redress these imbalances.

This denial of power imbalances and preventing the doing of any kind of systemic analysis (which in turn prevents any notion of a politics that is aimed at systemic change, hence why liberals and those who imagine themselves to be radical love the term so much), is a fatal flaw that by itself invalidates the use of “agency” by anyone who seeks to justify and deflect away from the reality of imperialism.

But there are other flaws equally fatal. I mentioned in passing already the question of the vagueness and ambiguity of the term whenever it’s used while there’s a pretense that it’s in fact highly specific and concrete. But whose agency are you talking about? Societies are complex, and the larger they are the more complex they are. There are many forces at play, from political parties to unions to business organizations to obviously the state and its armed components (police, military, intelligence services). Charismatic leaders on whatever side play an outsized role. People who are incredibly wealthy. And all this is just internal. Then you have the wide variety of external forces: competing countries, business interests, foreign agents, NGOs, all the money that’s sloshing around in various organizations and among various people. Corruption, or as it’s called in the West, lobbying. All this complexity is reduced to a simplistic picture of Good versus Evil, where the person who employs “agency” is obviously on the side of the former and the one whom it’s being used against is on the side of the latter.

Ambiguity and vagueness masquerading as profundity and virtue. But you’ve already taken sides without acknowledging it. You’ve chosen which forces in this complex whole are the solely legitimate holders of “agency”, and which are totally irrelevant and don’t enter into your calculations (namely, Western forces and those internal who are aligned with them).

Those who cry “AGENCY!” in situations like these reveal just how hollow that phrase really is. There is no serious analysis or understanding, only cheap moralism hiding behind a thin veil of profundity and clarity. Lumumba, Allende and Árbenz were overthrown because they and the mass movements they represented were too weak, incompetent, stupid to understand the “agency” they had. Because after all, the only “agency” that exists is that of the supposed all-powerful monolithic “natives” who should act and behave on the side of the Good as defined by the user of the phrase. And if they don’t, it’s their fault and their fault alone. That is the actual claim being made, and it’s a profoundly depraved one.

Related articles:

• Once more on agency
• Ezra Klein and the liberal Zionist laundering of the ongoing genocide through "agency"

In his interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ezra Klein repeatedly—over and over again—launders the ongoing genocide by blaming Palestinians for it. He does this through the term "agency," the favorite liberal and pseudo-intellectual buzzword used to justify all their genocidal mania.

This is the magic of "agency": it turns everything into whatever you want while pretending you are making an objective, fair, and reasonable analytical point. It allows you to posture as intellectually honest and serious. That is who Ezra Klein is. He is the paragon of moral virtue, the quintessential New York Times liberal. He determines what is just and unjust for the world today and throughout history. The Ezra Kleins embody virtue.

So, are Palestinians being subjected to genocide by Ezra Kleins? That, in their moral framework, is virtue. That is moral necessity. That is the height of morality itself.

Why? Because "agency," a pseudo-intellectual concept I have thoroughly dismantled before.

In this public News Brief, we discuss the media and high-profile Democratic Party leaders and 'Free Speech' crowd's muted—or, in many cases, completely silent—response to the greatest attack on free speech in recent memory: Trump's kidnapping and disappearing of Palestinian solidarity students.

I’d never heard of the “Harper’s letter”: https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate/

Found through an American Prestige podcast interview, “The Constitutional Order Leading to Trump w/ Aziz Rana” (paywalled). 🏴‍☠️ version: https://files.catbox.moe/cir0in.mp3

To understand what is unfolding, it is necessary to grasp the content of the US constitutional order. This includes a series of ideological and institutional components, in line with what Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal in 1944 famously labelled the ‘American creed’ – the idea that the United States stood for the promise of equal liberty for all. At a time of global rivalry with the Soviet Union over a decolonizing world, national elites explicitly rallied to this creedal constitutional frame. Its constitutive elements encompassed a reading of the Constitution as committed to the steady amelioration of racial inequality grounded in principles of anti-discrimination; an anti-totalitarian account of civil liberty and speech rights; a defence of market capitalism, partially hedged by a constitutionally entrenched regulatory and social welfare state; an embrace of institutional checks and balances, with the federal courts, particularly the Supreme Court, as the ultimate arbiter of the law; and a commitment to US global primacy organized through robust presidential power.

This iteration of American constitutionalism had both a domestic and international face. Domestically, it created a set of shared institutional and cultural practices. Republicans and Democrats understood themselves as jointly stewarding an American hegemonic project against the Soviet Union. Officials could toast their electoral foes across the partisan aisle, because whatever their internal differences, politicians and judges both had drunk deeply from the well of American exceptionalism. Whatever the election outcome, both sides were bound, above all, by a common national narrative. This narrative – deepened by suffering and victory during World War II and tested through ongoing rivalry with the Soviets – assumed the genius of the constitutional founders, the near-ideal quality of American institutions, and the unfolding internal progress of American society.

Internationally, this narrative also allowed the US to project authority on the global stage – propagating the mythology that its constitutional commitments to equal liberty were interests shared by everyone around the world. The result was an American postwar order marked by two interconnected features – a focus on rules-based legality, alongside the continual American defection from those rules, whether in Vietnam or Gaza today. National elites saw US-generated multilateral institutions as an expression of underlying American constitutional values, and therefore critical to uphold. But they also viewed global security as requiring the US to serve as an international backstop. In effect, this created an endless balancing act between promoting the rule of law and disobeying it through military actions and interventions, covert and overt. Resulting violations were justified as necessary to preserve collective stability – no matter that things looked very different for those in the crosshairs, especially in the previously colonized world.

That a distinct twentieth-century US constitutional order emerged in parallel with the Soviet Union is often elided, thanks in part to the peculiar features associated with American institutions and its national narrative. For starters, the US Constitution is notorious for being perhaps the hardest in the world to amend. Constitutional change does not typically occur through formal alterations to the 1787 document, let alone through its wholesale replacement, but through shifts in court-based interpretations of the existing text along with the implementation of landmark pieces of legislation that establish new terms for collective life. Indeed, the present order was consolidated through the passage of key mid-century bills – the Social Security Act, the National Labor Relations Act, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the Medicare Act – in conjunction with Supreme Court rulings that upheld their constitutionality. Together, Congress and the courts broke substantially from the preceding racial and economic order. Yet, crucially, this meant that there was no rewritten twentieth-century Constitution separate from an earlier one.

At the same time, the shared story about these legal shifts was that they represented the fulfilment of an inherently liberal national essence. In truth, the consolidation of this order had been a contingent product of domestic and global mid-twentieth-century developments, diverging markedly from the long-established structures of explicit white-settler supremacy in the United States. But that reality did not fit with the emerging national narrative – which presented the US as committed, from its founding, to the egalitarian principles of the Declaration of Independence, and thus on an ineluctable path to this new model.

The Yemeni Armed Forces (YAF) successfully targeted an E-2 command and control aircraft belonging to the US aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman, a senior Sanaa government source told Al Mayadeen on Sunday.

According to the source, "The Truman lost command capabilities following the attack, while both the White House and the US Department of Defense (Pentagon) have launched an investigation into the incident."

Details on the targeted E-2 aircraft

The targeted E-2 aircraft is designed to provide critical intelligence on potential threats faced by the warship during military operations. While it does not directly participate in attacks, it plays a crucial role in surveillance and tracking.

The aircraft, operated by a five-member crew—including two pilots and three radar specialists—lost its defensive protection, making it more vulnerable to attacks from Yemeni missiles and drones.

YAF target 'Israel's' Ben Gurion Airport

Earlier today, the Yemeni Armed Forces also announced that they had targeted "Israel's" Ben Gurion Airport in the occupied Yafa (Tel Aviv) area, spokesperson Brigadier General Yahya Saree announced.

Saree stated that the military operation was carried out using a Zulfiqar ballistic missile and successfully achieved its objective, adding that the latest strike was in support of the Palestinian people and their Resistance.

The spokesperson pointed out that the YAF reaffirmed the failure of the US aggression in preventing Yemen from continuing its support for the Palestinian people.

He stressed that "dozens of daily airstrikes [on Yemen] will not deter the armed forces from fulfilling their duties," underscoring that Yemeni operations against "Israel" will persist until the aggression on Gaza ceases and the blockade imposed on the Palestinian enclave is lifted.

Sirens sounded across central "Israel" and al-Quds at midday on Sunday following the launch of a missile from Yemen. Debris was also found in Modi’in and Tel Aviv.

According to "Israel's" Channel 12, two people were injured in Gush Dan. One woman exited her vehicle when the sirens went off and fell into a five-meter-deep pit, while another person sustained a head injury in Tel Aviv while heading to a shelter.

Read more: YAF say engaged with US aircraft carrier Truman 3 times within 24 hrs

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grumman_E-2_Hawkeye

The Northrop Grumman E-2 Hawkeye is an American all-weather, carrier-capable tactical airborne early warning (AEW) aircraft.

They get into the perverse ways that our pensions & 401(k)s work against our working class interests.

Steve’s guest is Michael McCarthy, author of ‘The Master’s Tools: How Finance Wrecked Democracy and a Radical Plan to Rebuild It.’ They explore McCarthy’s analysis of financialization as a deliberate class project to dismantle working-class power and exacerbate inequality.

They look at the historical shift from a robust Social Security system to a privatized, financialized pension system as well as the rise of neoliberal policies post-1970s, facilitated by monetary policy changes (anybody remember the gold standard?) The conversation goes into the failure of both traditional and direct democracies to serve the working class.

The episode also weaves through MMT perspectives and the impact of government policies. They touch on the potential of public banking and democratizing finance to empower the working class as well as the challenges of implementing these ideas.

Michael A. McCarthy is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of Community Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His book Dismantling Solidarity: Capitalist Politics and American Pensions since the New Deal was awarded the Paul Sweezy Book Award as well as an honorable mention for the Labor and Labor Movements Book Award. His most recent book is The Master’s Tools: How Finance Wrecked Democracy (And a Radical Plan to Rebuild It). Mike has written for the Boston Review, The Guardian, Jacobin, Noema, and the Washington Post.