It's time to stop buying into tooth-fairy politics. No one's bringing salvation
Trump or Harris, a further slide towards authoritarianism and repression was on the cards. A corrupt, failed system won't admit its mistakes. It will find scapegoats.
Kamala Harris didn't lose because she's a woman or because she's black.
She lost because, if your political and media system – rigged by donors – limits the choice to two hardline neoliberal candidates, with anything else denounced as “communism”, the most hardline, neoliberal candidate has an edge.
Over time, the system keeps moving further to the hardline, neoliberal right. You can't stop that relentless shift by voting for one of the two symptoms of your diseased political system.
You have to rise up against the diseased system itself.
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Notice a pattern of behaviour by the establishment media that week after week told us Kamala Harris was poised for a narrow win, that her “politics of joy” would ultimately swing the day.
For more than two years, that same establishment media told us Ukraine would win if only we sent a few more bombs / tanks / planes. None of those weapons helped. They just incentivised each side to invest more deeply in war. What happened instead was entirely predictable: lots of Ukrainians and Russians have died fighting a protracted war Ukraine could never win and that could have been snuffed out early on with a peace agreement – an agreement that was actively blocked by the US and Britain.
Over the past year, that same establishment media told us that Israel wasn't committing a genocide, even as we watched it kill and maim 10,000s of children in Gaza. That same media told us that our leaders were “working tirelessly” for peace, even as they sent Israel more and more weapons to kill and maim.
The establishment media isn't there to report the world as it is. It is there to shape our consciousness of it – to the benefit of the establishment.
It is there to sell us pipe-dreams.
It is there to buy time.
It is there to make us believe next time will be different.
It is there to buy our docility.
It is there to conceal the fact that our leaders are sociopaths, more committed to lining their pockets than saving the only world we have.
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The Guardian’s editor, Kath Viner, lost no time in trying to cash in on her readers’ fears of a second Trump presidency. She quoted the paper’s media columnist, Margaret Sullivan, warning: “Trump poses a clear threat to journalists, to news organisations and to press freedom in the US and around the world.”
She noted that Kash Patel, who may be Trump’s choice for FBI director or attorney general, has threatened: “We’re going to come after people in the media.”
Viner herself added that the Guardian “will stand up to these threats, but it will take brave, well-funded independent journalism. It will take reporting that can’t be leaned upon by a billionaire owner terrified of retribution from a bully in the White House.”
Viner wants readers to dig deep and send more money to the Guardian’s already brim-full coffers to wage that fight on their behalf.
Except… every time the Guardian has been tested, every time it has needed to stand up for genuinely independent journalism and journalists, it has failed dismally – even before Trump’s return to the White House.
For more than a decade, the Guardian led the smearing of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange – the most high-profile and truly independent journalist of our era.
The US and UK went after him for exposing their war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was locked up in a high-security prison in London for years while the US sought his extradition on preposterous “espionage” charges. He faced a 175-year jail sentence.
The Guardian not only raised barely a peep against his years-long persecution, but it actively colluded in that persecution, as I have explained on several occasions.
Most notoriously of all, Viner’s paper recycled an utterly false story – presumably supplied to it by the British security services – smearing Assange as a Russian agent. Even though the story has been thoroughly discredited, Viner has never retracted it.
The failure to defend Assange wasn’t a one-off.
Precisely how brave was the Guardian in standing up to the UK’s security services when they came knocking at its door in 2013 after it published Edward Snowden’s revelations that we were all being illegally spied on by, or on behalf of, the NSA? Did the paper use its huge funds to fight the intelligence agencies and protect the public’s right to know how their governments were breaking the law?
No, the Guardian agreed to destroy the hard drives containing Snowden’s leaks with angle grinders, watched by UK intelligence officials.
But worse than that, the Guardian then proved to the security agencies that it had turned over a new leaf. It would not go rogue again by airing the dirty secrets of the British state and its Washington patron.
As Declassified UK has documented at length, the paper jumped into bed with Britain’s security services, agreeing for the first time to become a member of the Ministry of Defence’s so-called D-Notice Committee, overseeing reporting restrictions. It didn't fight for independent journalism. It became a member of the club that enforces secrecy on journalists.
It was rewarded with world-exclusive scoops: a series of interviews with the heads of Britain’s secret services, puffing up their repressive security agenda. The Guardian had become a fully tamed stenographer to power.
The consequences of the paper’s collusion with the UK security state has been on show in the last few months as Keir Starmer’s government has waged war on independent journalists trying to draw attention to British complicity in Israel’s genocide.
In as many months, three journalists – Richard Medhurst, Sarah Wilkinson and Asa Winstanley – have been raided by counter-terrorism police, and are being investigated under Britain’s draconian Terrorism Act for “encouraging terrorism” by criticising Israel.
You might imagine from Viner’s pleas to readers to help her challenge the threat of state repression that the Guardian has been leading the defence of journalists targeted by the British state for intimidation.
Not a bit. The paper has not written a word about any of these recent attacks on independent journalists, attacks taking place on the Guardian’s doorstep.
Viner wants you to believe she and her paper will act as torch-bearers for honest, adversarial journalism abroad, when she has consistently shown zero courage in defending independent journalism at home.
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The outcome of this election was never going to make a meaningful difference to the victims of the US empire, whatever we were told.
Trump or Harris, the engines of “economic growth” – meaning accelerated, wasteful, resource-depleting, suicidal consumption – would continue to burn white-hot.
Trump or Harris, arms would still flow to Israel to slaughter and maim the children of Gaza. Israel would still receive diplomatic cover to starve 2.3 million Palestinians there. And protests against this genocide would still be smeared as antisemitic.
Trump or Harris, the politics of the tooth fairy was going to triumph. Each side would continue to believe its chieftain – a black woman or a white billionaire – was the only, true saviour. Each would blame the other as the reason salvation never arrives.
And Trump or Harris, the winner would slide us further down the slope towards authoritarianism and repression. Because salvation isn’t arriving, not as long as we cling to this provably corrupt, failed system, and believe these charlatans and the parties they lead have our interests – rather their own – at heart.
[Many thanks to Matthew Alford for the audio reading of this article.]
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Mr. Cook presents a clear-headed, insightful analysis here, and with less hyperbole than Caitlin Johnstone. I absolutely agree that both Trump and Harris deserved to lose, and that Trump's election will bring no change in the current downward trajectory of American politics, public discourse, personal freedom, and individual happiness. And that the election of Harris would make no real difference. The choice for the lesser of two evils is no longer between slow poison and a knife, but rather between two poisons, one with sweet flavor and one with bitter flavor.
But when it comes to the underlying problem, I think it is capitalist economics itself, not just the neoliberal form. I think neoliberal capitalism is the transnational product of its earlier, nation-bounded form. What I mean is, and I think Mr. Cook also understands, is that under neoliberal capitalism the dominating power lies with corporations which have no national allegiance.
If that is the case, I'm skeptical that any of us can 'fight the system' and I'm more inclined to believe that building back non-capitalist relationships is our best hope. And I think that begins with building community upward from the most elementary levels (family) through local affiliations (neighborhoods) and so on.
I no longer believe we can vote out the bastards, but I still believe we can make them irrelevant.
Trump is a symptom, not the cause, of the decay of a corporately-captured, corrupt and venal system that has lost its soul, abrogated human connection, abandoned human dignity and compassion, subjugating it to 'profit' and material advantage. A recipe for catastrophic human suffering.