The situation is not entirely normal in Northern Ireland.

Sligo, Irish Republic ... 1985.

"Parliament Buildings, often referred to as Stormont because of its location in the Stormont Estate area of Belfast, is the seat of the Northern Ireland Assembly, the devolved legislature for the region."

Forced remarriage: Northern Ireland gets a government again, at The Economist

Both big parties fear the alternative even more than they dislike each other

NORTHERN IRELAND’S devolved government has been reborn. After many months of hard-fought negotiations, the biggest unionist and republican parties agreed on January 10th to go back into government together, creating a new element of hope in the often unforgiving politics of Belfast. Under heavy pressure from both the government in London and their own voters, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and Sinn Fein have agreed to revive the Belfast assembly, Stormont, which has been inactive for three full years.

I suspect that insofar as Americans think at all about the outside world, which is seldom, "divisions" pop into the conversation only with considerations of North and South Korea, and maybe vague recollections of East and West Germany.

Islands can be divided, too, as with the existence of two governments on Cyprus, one Greek (internationally recognized) and the other Turkish. Somehow I haven't heard this topic arise at the pub lately.

Or, in Ireland, where Irish independence a century ago came at the cost of losing Ulster, one of four traditional Irish provinces as well as the one dominated by Protestants rather than Catholics, and which has remained under British control.

I'm not sure that many Americans, even Irish-Americans, are fully aware of the potential for unexpected consequences from Brexit, one of which is the British effectively reneging on decades of promises of eternal support for the Protestants in Ulster.

The most alarming development, from the DUP’s point of view, is that Northern Ireland’s union with Britain looks increasingly insecure. Mr Johnson’s withdrawal bill, which returned to Parliament on January 7th, draws a dotted line between the province and the rest of the country by providing for different customs arrangements in the two areas. The latest poll in Northern Ireland showed a tiny majority in favour of the reunification of Ireland. The Good Friday Agreement, which brought peace to the province, mandates a referendum on reunification when it is clear that a majority in the province wants one.

Social, economic and political conditions are weird everywhere, not only here in the USA. Is this why the planet is burning, or is the causation the other way around?

UK election 2019: Is the scene set for a return to Scottish independence?

Thursday's UK election brought a huge majority to the Tories amid Labour's cataclysmic defeat, which makes Brexit a prospective fact after three and a half years of political gridlock. Brexit will be a long, drawn-out process, but now it will happen.

Interestingly, leaving the European Union might set into motion the dissolution of the United Kingdom.

It isn't easy to explain the election's implications for perpetually fragile Northern Ireland, although it should suffice to use the word "destabilizing" -- to say the least.

DUP and Sinn Féin under pressure to restore power sharing, by Rory Carroll (The Guardian)

DUP loses big name as voters punish parties for Northern Ireland’s political dysfunction

... Boris Johnson’s election victory, which has liberated him from dependence on DUP votes in Westminster, has added to the sense of urgency. He is expected to push through a Brexit deal that will create checks and inspections on trade between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK.

Mike Nesbitt, a former leader of the Ulster Unionist party, told the BBC the election’s great irony was that for decades, unionists had feared Irish nationalism as the main threat to the union. “Then more recently it was Scottish nationalists, but it’s actually English nationalism which is posing the existential threat to the future of the union,” he said.

Lots of eggshells and tightropes in Northern Ireland. Meanwhile in Scotland, things have become very interesting. The previous Scottish independence referendum in 2014 didn't favor detachment. It might a second time, given a general pro-EU opinion.

Scottish independence vote a 'democratic right', says Sturgeon, by Severin Carrell and Libby Brooks (The Guardian)

Boris Johnson rejects first minister’s call as his spokesman says result of 2014 vote ‘should be respected’

Nicola Sturgeon is to publish a blueprint next week for a new Scottish independence referendum but Boris Johnson has rejected any moves towards a fresh vote.

The first minister said the Scottish National party’s “overwhelming” election victory in Scotland, where it won 47 of the country’s 59 Westminster seats with 1.2m votes, gave her a clear and undeniable mandate to hold one.

Sturgeon said she would publish the “detailed democratic case” for the transfer of the legal powers from Johnson’s new Conservative government, which has to authorise the Scottish parliament to stage any referendum that changes the UK’s constitutional structures.

“This isn’t about asking Boris Johnson or any other Westminster politician for permission. This is instead an assertion of the democratic right of the people of Scotland to determine our own future,” she said in a short victory speech in Edinburgh, where she declined to take questions.

snip

Sturgeon said the scale of the victory proved again that a large majority of Scots wanted to remain in the EU, three years after the country voted against Brexit by 62% to 38%. The election was a “watershed moment”, she said.

“Westminster has ignored the people of Scotland for more than three years. Last night, the people of Scotland said enough,” Sturgeon said. “It’s time for Boris Johnson to start listening. I accept, regretfully, that he has a mandate for Brexit in England but he has no mandate whatsoever to take Scotland out of the EU.”

She made a direct appeal to EU citizens – a group expected to be given a vote in any independence referendum, saying the SNP would protect and champion their interests. “I will fight with everything I have to protect your right to call Scotland your home.”

Even without Trump's one-percenters and Boris's Brexiteers, "Neoliberalism has reached its Brezhnev phase."

Because the way out from detrimental neoliberalism isn't more of the same.

What we are finding with Neoliberalism Economicus is that it is not adaptive for individuals or societies. Rather it works like a parasite that bleeds energy away from its host with false stories that appear beneficial at first but are ultimately deadly. The virus grows by perpetuating fictions. These fictions are attractive because their appeal does not rely on facts but rather on the need for power and status. The neoliberal narrative has remained compelling in part because it appeals to powerful interests in society and those who emulate them.

Can someone find us a big-ass trash can, ashcan, ash heap, dustbin, dust heap or garbage heap? We'll be needing one, the other or them all to deposit the remains of neoliberalism.

The insidious ideology pushing us towards a Brexit cliff-edge, by George Monbiot (The Guardian)

At first sight it’s incomprehensible. Why risk everything for a no-deal Brexit? Breaking up their own party, losing their parliamentary majority, dismantling the UK, trashing the economy, triggering shortages of food and medicine: how could any objective, for the Conservative and Unionist party, be worth this? What good does it do them?

Yes, some people will benefit. To judge by recent donations to the Conservative party, some very rich people approve of Boris Johnson’s policies. A no-deal Brexit might favour hedge funds that thrive on uncertainty, financiers seeking to short the pound, vulture capitalists hoping to mop up cheap property if markets collapse. But the winners are likely to be greatly outnumbered by the losers, among whom are many powerful commercial interests.

We make a mistake when we assume that money is the main motivation. Our unreformed, corrupt and corrupting political funding system ensures it is an important factor. But what counts above all else is ideology, as ideology successfully pursued is the means to power. You cannot exercise true power over other people unless you can shape the way they think, and shape their behaviour on the basis of that thought. The long-term interests of ideology differ from the short-term interests of politics.

This, I believe, is the key to understanding what is happening today. The Brexit ultras in government are not just Brexit ultras. They are neoliberal ultras, and Brexit is a highly effective means of promoting this failed ideology. It’s the ultimate shock doctrine, using a public emergency to justify the imposition of policies that wouldn’t be accepted in ordinary times. Whether they really want no deal or not, the threat of it creates the political space in which they can apply their ideas ...

In the UK, it's not Brexit: "It’s a much deeper crisis. An existential crisis.”

"What Brexit has shown again is our inability to think anew about what the state and the economy are for, to sketch out what a different future might look like."

It's no great stretch to suggest that Americans resemble these remarks, and best not be chortling with more of the same tired exceptionalism. I'm reminded of the recent quip to the effect that the Democratic National Committee is 100% in favor of reform, so long as nothing changes.

Britain is in the grip of an existential crisis that reaches far beyond Brexit, by Aditya Chakrabortty (The Guardian)

Nearly three years after the referendum, Westminster has still not come to terms with the grievances that drove the result

The person who is best qualified to hold up a mirror to British politics today is neither a minister nor an academic. He is not even British. No: he is, of course, Michel Barnier, the French-born servant of Brussels. In his 1,036 days as the EU’s chief negotiator, he has sat for numbing hours opposite Theresa May, haggled with David Davis and Dominic Raab and their junior ministers and faced down countless Whitehall officials. He is the outsider who knows our system inside out. So when he popped up right at the end of the BBC’s fly on the wall Storyville documentaries on the Brexit negotiations, I leaned in to listen.

Filmed in March, as it became clear that Britain would not be leaving Europe any time soon, Barnier is shown briefing senior European parliamentarians. This latest breakdown is “more than weariness”, he tells them. “There is a very serious crisis in the UK which … isn’t linked to the text of Brexit and even less to the Irish backstop. It’s a much deeper crisis. An existential crisis.”

Barnier doesn’t do florid, so his words leapt out. After almost three years with his eye pressed to a microscope trained on the British elite, here was one of the EU’s finest declaring that the real failure wasn’t this clause or that loophole. It wasn’t even Brexit at all. The UK is in a crisis as big as the country itself.

There are times when some politicians and pundits remember this, when they jerk awake to the reality that the country stands at a moment of reckoning more profound than Suez – one in which our institutions, our economy and our system of representation are all being shown up as simply not up to the job. This week is plainly not one of those times. I watched Barnier’s remarks on Sunday night, as the first UK results from the European elections began to roll in, showing a far-right party as the clear winner. I woke up to a righteous hailstorm of commentary about What Jeremy Must Say Now and Who Replaces Theresa. Such debates can satisfactorily steam up the sash windows of central London, but set in any context they seem almost recklessly marginal ...

"The stakes are high in the Brexit impasse precisely because the working class has not been cowed by academic disapproval, editorial condemnation, or managerial contempt."

Over at The Economist, which currently is editorializing on behalf of a second Brexit referendum, a "great rescrambling of Britain’s parties" is viewed as being underway.

PEOPLE HAVE been talking about the collapse of the British party system for decades. Now it may actually be under way. The government has lost its authority. Parties are dissolving into factions. Factions are forming left-right alliances. Backbenchers are seizing the limelight while frontbenchers are hiding in the bushes.

That's because the Tory and Labour parties seemingly are split in two on the topic of Britain's departure from the European Union, with factions in each party both for and against.

It's far too deep a topic for quick analysis, but while the political situation in Britain and America isn't altogether analogous, it isn't far-fetched to suggest that we're both on the verge of a political realignment reflecting the final disintegration of the post-WWII settlement.

For those having a difficult time imagining how a British leftist can support Brexit -- specifically, the "no deal" Brexit feared by many of his or her countrymen -- please follow this link.

It's the clearest explanation I've yet seen.

Why No Deal Is the Real Deal: Brexit and the Politics of the Interregnum, by Maurice Glasman (The Nation)

Leaving the European Union is the necessary goal of the left in Britain.

The defeat of Theresa May’s government this week by an unprecedented margin in an alliance between pro-Remain Labour MPs and no-deal Tories opens up a fraught 10 weeks in British politics. The clock is ticking toward March 29, when, deal or no deal, Britain will leave the European Union. Having lost a crucial vote by the highest margin in a century, on the following evening Parliament returned a vote of confidence in her government. These are unusual times.

In the House of Lords, barons and baronesses of the Labour movement ask me to sit down and explain how “anyone” could support Brexit. After half an hour and a cup of tea, they shake their heads in sorrowful incomprehension and drift back to their old friends. Bearing in mind that you may well agree with them, here is why I believe that leaving the European Union is the necessary goal of the left in Britain—and why staying in would doom us to a never-ending Clinton presidency in which the rich get richer and all change is good, unless it leads toward socialism. A progressive eternity of democratic impotence.

The European Union is the greatest capitalist project ever devised by the human mind. It guarantees, in treaty form, the free movement of capital, labor, goods, and services throughout its territory as a constitutional right. These are known as the “Four Freedoms.” Imagine NAFTA underpinned by a political union so that it would be illegal to resist capitalism. A union in which economic policy is decided not democratically—but by judges interpreting whether the policy is “treaty compliant.” Yet that is the institution supported by the vast majority of progressives throughout the continent—and the main cause of the palsy that has overtaken social democrats across Europe. They think political and economic liberalism as the legal form of globalization is the best you can hope for. That is the European Union.

Whenever the left cannot make the distinction between globalization and internationalism, or democracy and populism, it loses working-class support in an orgy of legalistic self-righteousness. Give up on the democratic resistance to the domination of capital, and the meaning of socialism becomes obscure to a lot of people. The stakes are high in the Brexit impasse precisely because the working class has not been cowed by academic disapproval, editorial condemnation, or managerial contempt. The “basket of deplorables” have not given up on the idea that a democratic, self-governing nation is a better bet than the European Court of Justice. They are not changing their minds ...

THE BEER BEAT: "Why Brexit could mean a pricier pint of Guinness."

Sligo, 1985.

It's worth remembering that the distance from Dublin to Belfast is a scant hundred miles, less than the drive from New Albany to Indianapolis.

Note also: The Brexit article (below) refers to cans and bottles, not kegs. Clarification is necessary, as I hope to return to the business of selling Guinness, sooner rather than later.

First, from January, 2017:

After a 63-year absence, Guinness Brewery will once again have a working brewery in the United States.

The Diageo-owned brand will be creating a version of its Dublin-based Guinness Open Gate Brewery in Relay, Maryland.

While the iconic Guinness Draught, Guinness Foreign Extra and Guinness Extra stouts will still be brewed in Dublin and exported to the U.S., the new brewery will focus on new Guinness beers created for the U.S. market.

About that Brexit thingy ...

Why Brexit could mean a pricier pint of Guinness at The Economist

IT MIGHT just be Ireland’s most famous product. And indeed, all of the Guinness that is drunk in the world is brewed at the St James’s Gate brewery in east Dublin. But the dark beer is then transported north, in tankers that have become known as “silver bullets”, to be canned and bottled in east Belfast before returning to Dublin for export. Diageo, the multinational company that owns Guinness, says that its silver bullets make some 13,000 border crossings a year. It estimates that even a short delay of 30 minutes to an hour for customs checks would add about €100 ($115) to the expense of each trip, costing the firm some €1.3m a year. If that happened, the price of Guinness might have to rise.

Post-trutherism: "We have become passive consumers of bullshit."

Three new books, each with a variation on a theme of George Orwell: “The moral to be drawn from this dangerous nightmare situation is a simple one: don’t let it happen. It depends on you.”

​'Bullshit is a greater enemy than lies' –​ lessons from three new books on the post-truth era, by Stuart Jeffries (The Guardian)

From Trump’s phoney claims to the Brexit ‘£350m a week for the NHS’ promise, we have become mired in a sea of bogus truths. But what can we do about it?

Bullshit is having a moment. A spate of new books, including Newsnight presenter Evan Davis’s Post-Truth: Why We Have Reached Peak Bullshit and What We Can Do About It, Buzzfeed correspondent James Ball’s Post-Truth: How Bullshit Conquered the World, and political journalist Matthew d’Ancona’s Post Truth: The New War on Truth and How to Fight Back are all premised on the notion that we are in a new era.

A bit about each book. First:

Post-Truth: Why We Have Reached Peak Bullshit and What We Can Do About It, by Evan Davis

What’s the big idea?

Western societies have become rather like the Soviet Union “in being characterised by a pervasive tendency of those in authority to overstate their case. They bombard us with messages that are disconnected from reality as we see it. In the Soviet case it was the reality that was shameful; in ours, it is the communicators.”

Second:

Post Truth: The New War on Truth and How to Fight Back, by Matthew d’Ancona

What’s the big idea?

Post-truth came into being long before Trump, d’Ancona concedes. Anthropologists say we have been lying since early humans organised themselves in tribes. But in the 20th century humanity went shamelessly beyond just lying. French postmodernists argued there was no such thing as truth and objectivity, only power and interests. Unwittingly, the likes of Jean-François Lyotard were paving the way for Trump’s senior aide Kellyanne Conway.

Third:

Post-Truth: How Bullshit Conquered The World, by James Ball

What’s the big idea?

We mustn’t just focus on new technologies in explaining the rise of bullshit. We should follow the money. Old media outlets are suffering falls in ad revenue, which results in fewer reporters, which results in a journalistic ecology wherein regurgitating what politicians say is more cost effective than digging into what they’re saying. Fake news sites take this economic imperative to its conclusion: if a story is going to be unchecked or exaggerated, why not just make it up altogether and reduce production costs to next to nothing? The end result of this ecology, Ball argues, is that we give no more weight to the BBC or the New York Times than to a Facebook status or American Patriot Daily.

Even major news sites have sponsored links at the foot of their stories, often linking to fake or hyped news. As a result, Ball, argues: “Traditional media boosts and profits from fake news even as it tries to fight it.”

Grexit to Brexit, "Yanis Varoufakis has written one of the greatest political memoirs of all time."

Our plans to seek exile in Cornwall have been muddied by Brexit, and Yanis Varoufakis is keeping me informed about it.

The six Brexit traps that will defeat Theresa May

Two years ago Yanis Varoufakis led Greece’s failed attempt to negotiate with the EU. He explains how the Brussels establishment will do everything to frustrate and outmanoeuvre the British prime minister, using tactics ranging from truth reversal to ‘the Penelope ruse’

On the same topic, a reminder:

Superlative current events panel discussion: "Brexit: An unorthodox view," with Yanis Varoufakis, Srećko Horvat and Elif Shafak.

I consider this absolutely essential viewing for anyone interested in learning numerous themes (generally) specific to the UK and the EU, but at the same time applicable to current events in America. Yes, it's 90 minutes. I'd say it's worth an hour and a half for context alone, and recommend especially to local Democrats.

This brings us to Varoufakis's new book.

Adults in the Room by Yanis Varoufakis review – one of the greatest political memoirs ever? by Paul Mason (The Guardian)

The leftwing Greek economist and former minister of finance tells a startling story about his encounter with Europe’s ‘deep establishment’

Yanis Varoufakis once bought me a gin and tonic. His wife once gave me a cup of tea. While dodging my questions, as finance ministers are obliged to, he never once told me an outright lie. And I’ve hosted him at two all-ticketed events. I list these transactions because of what I am about to say: that Varoufakis has written one of the greatest political memoirs of all time. It stands alongside Alan Clark’s for frankness, Denis Healey’s for attacks on former allies, and – as a manual for exploring the perils of statecraft – will probably gain the same stature as Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon B Johnson.

Yet Varoufakis’s account of the crisis that has scarred Greece between 2010 and today also stands in a category of its own: it is the inside story of high politics told by an outsider. Varoufakis began on the outside – both of elite politics and the Greek far left – swerved to the inside, and then abruptly abandoned it, after he was sacked by his former ally, Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras, in July 2015. He dramatises his intent throughout the crisis with a telling anecdote. He’s in Washington for a meeting with Larry Summers, the former US treasury secretary and Obama confidant. Summers asks him point blank: do you want to be on the inside or the outside? “Outsiders prioritise their freedom to speak their version of the truth. The price is that they are ignored by the insiders, who make the important decisions,” Summers warns.

Elected politicians have little power; Wall Street and a network of hedge funds, billionaires and media owners have the real power, and the art of being in politics is to recognise this as a fact of life and achieve what you can without disrupting the system. That was the offer. Varoufakis not only rejected it – by describing it in frank detail now, he is arming us against the stupidity of the left’s occasional fantasies that the system built by neoliberalism can somehow bend or compromise to our desire for social justice.

In this book, then, Varoufakis gives one of the most accurate and detailed descriptions of modern power ever written – an achievement that outweighs his desire for self-justification during the Greek crisis ...

"Sleaford Mods have taken charge of Britain after staging a coup against the government."

Their relevance escalates as the election draws near.

Keeping Dry Under Storm Clouds: An Interview with Sleaford Mods, by Dan Derks (Pop Matters)

Before reading on, whether you’re seasoned or green with Sleaford Mods, it’d be helpful to watch two videos of the band. “Jobseeker”, performed on Later… with Jools Holland, and “Tied Up In Nottz” are certainly good starting places.

 ... The band’s discography is built on wordplay that offends and indicts, each syllable recounting the British class wars that have shaped Williamson’s life. Equal parts manifestos and barroom rants, Sleaford Mods songs find power in the amorphous boundary between the two. English Tapas, their newest release, is no exception.

There is an alternative.

Sleaford Mods overthrow government (The Daily Mash)

SLEAFORD Mods have taken charge of Britain after staging a coup against the government.

The Nottingham double act stormed Whitehall armed with loud rants about the current state of affairs and successfully removed Theresa May’s government in less than eight minutes ...

Sleaford Mods: "Our shows are a bit like resistance in motion."

Brexshit: Also, view parts 1/3 and 2/3.

Henceforth, the duo known as Sleaford Mods has been a very British phenomenon. Since last year's Brexit referendum, the analysis has reached the continent.

The angriest (and most political) band in Britain

We’re in a situation now where I think people really need to take on a responsibility to learn, and to educate themselves. People need to feel angry about it; they should feel angry about it. In the poorer areas, there’s no education about politics. There’s no education about the system and how it works and what we need to do to survive.

As I write, Jason and Andrew are stateside for their first-ever American dates.

Sleaford Mods: We Gotta Get Out Of This Place, by Sasha Frere-Jones (Stereogum)

... The healing here is in the act of throwing yourself into a hopeless vision, a spin on the “getting on with it” intrinsic to Britishness. This impulse could be borrowed. Before Americans can sort out how many different cohorts sold out how many other cohorts, they — we — can find a way to say “we fucked up” without giving up.

I'll be kicking myself in the arse for not going to Chicago on Monday.

Superlative current events panel discussion: "Brexit: An unorthodox view," with Yanis Varoufakis, Srećko Horvat and Elif Shafak.

I consider this absolutely essential viewing for anyone interested in learning numerous themes (generally) specific to the UK and the EU, but at the same time applicable to current events in America.

Yes, it's 90 minutes. I'd say it's worth an hour and a half for context alone, and recommend especially to local Democrats.

Brexit: An unorthodox view, Yanis Varoufakis, Srećko Horvat & Elif Shafak (full)

Published on Feb 14, 2017

Srećko Horvat, a Croat philosopher, Elif Shafak, renowned Turkish novelist, and Yanis Varoufakis, Greece’s former finance minister, bring to this conversation an intriguing perspective. As intellectuals who know Britain well, they understand first hand the perils of nationalism, disintegration, isolationism and marginalisation. They place post-Brexit Britain in a context informed by a view of Europe and Britain from the continent’s opposite ‘corner’, sharing insights from Greece’s tensions with Brussels and Berlin, Yugoslavia’s disintegration, and Turkey’s fraught relationship with a Europe that both courts and marginalises it.

More here

"Quite simply, progressives must discover progress."

Woe is us -- what are we to do when we keep repeating the same act and it keeps turning out the same way?

Here's how: Just stop it. Vary the routine. Come up with a new plan.

The Floyd County Democratic Party has kicked off the New Year with the same old Disney song and dance, so it doesn't look like the tried and true is going to be of any assistance.

Isn't it time to trade in that battered hulk for something new and progressive? Here are two articles from The Guardian that make the case.

Trump and Brexit left progressives aghast – they should be emboldened, by Jeff Sparrow

As a movement dedicated to social transformation, the left must reclaim the idea of progress from the reactionaries and demagogues

 ... Unfortunately, so much of what passes for activism now centres on an individualised moralism, less about changing the world than about making yourself feel (or perhaps sound) good while all about you everything remains exactly the same.

In 1959, Raymond Williams described the seemingly insurmountable gulf between the progressive intellectuals of his day and the great bulk of the population. “Nothing,” he wrote, “has done more to sour the democratic idea among its natural supporters, and to drive them back into angry self-exile, than the plain, overwhelming cultural issues: the apparent division of our culture into, on the one hand, a remote and self-gracious sophistication, on the other hand, a doped mass.”

Since, then, of course, that division has only widened ...

 ... How then will we respond? The temptation will be, once again, to defend liberal values by reinforcing the institutions of liberalism. But that’s not going to work. Quite simply, progressives must discover progress. Rather than buttressing a moribund status quo, the left needs to place itself on the side of change. That’s how we win – by reclaiming the notion of a better future from the reactionaries and demagogues.

And ...

Themes of 2016: Progressive parties have to address the people’s anger, by Michael Sandel

The election of Donald Trump and the triumph of Brexit – the two political earthquakes of 2016 – resulted from the failure of elites to grasp the discontent in democracies around the world. The populist revolt marked the rejection of a technocratic approach to politics incapable of understanding the resentments of voters who feel the economy and the culture have left them behind.

Some denounce populism as little more than a racist, xenophobic reaction against immigrants and multiculturalism. Others view it as a protest against the job losses brought about by global trade and new technologies. But to see only the bigotry in populist protest, or to view that protest only in economic terms, misses the fact that the upheavals of 2016 stemmed from the establishment’s inability to address – or even adequately recognise – genuine grievances ...

... Before they can hope to win back public support, progressive parties must rethink their mission and purpose. To do so, they should learn from the populist protest that has displaced them, not by emulating its xenophobia and strident nationalism, but by taking seriously the legitimate grievances with which these sentiments are entangled. And that means recognising that the grievances are about social esteem, not just wages and jobs.

"Gets pulled apart and bust": Sleaford Mods on the occasion of Christmas.

A review of the band's new EP at Pitchfork.

A full-length release is due in 2017, and this is cause for joy in my world. Meanwhile, a spot of interpretive video.

Sleaford Mods on Brexit: 'You can't ignore things any more' (The Guardian)

In early 2014 the Guardian hailed duo Sleaford Mods as ‘the most uncompromising British protest music made in years’. Here, we go backstage at a Sleaford Mods gig in their hometown of Nottingham to hear what singer Jason Williamson thinks about Brexit and the politicians drawing up the rules, while fans applaud the band for representing the world they live in.

Two side of precisely the same economic elitism, so let's choose our own path of internet radicalization.

As the right wing pageantry grinds to its oafish conclusion in Cleveland, with the duopoly's brethren preparing for its own spectacle in Philadelphia, let us return to important considerations of why neither political party can be trusted.

Donald Trump and the Revolt of the Proles, by Mike Whitney (CounterPunch)

 ... Economic insecurity. Brexit was about economic insecurity. The Trump phenom is about economic insecurity. The rise of left and right-wing groups across Europe and the US is about economic insecurity. This isn’t about ideology, it’s about reality; the reality of not knowing if you’re ever going to be able to retire or put your kids through school or make your house payment or scrape by until payday. The reality of muddling by in an economy where the prospects for survival look worse with every passing day. That’s the reality that made Trump possible, and that’s what this election is about, economic insecurity.

And:

The world is taking its revenge against elites. When will America's wake up? by Thomas Frank (The Guardian)

It felt so right, this Democratic infatuation with the triumphant young global professional. So right, and for a certain class of successful Americans, so very, very obvious. What you do with winners like these is you celebrate them. Winners need to win. Winners need to have their loan payments deferred, to have venture capital directed their way by a former president. That all these gestures might actually represent self-serving behavior by an insular elite does not appear to have crossed our leaders’ minds in those complacent days of June 2016.

But by the time of Hillary Clinton’s speech the happy, complacent mood was already beginning to crumble.

Brexit: "The British establishment ... asked the nation to pat them on the back. The invitation to a punch in the face was too good to miss."

Either you "get" it or you don't.

But what are these "Augean stables" referred to by the author? In Greek mythology, Hercules did penance for an act of murderous insanity by performing twelve labors at the direction of Eurystheus.

For the fifth labor, Eurystheus ordered Hercules to clean up King Augeas' stables. Hercules knew this job would mean getting dirty and smelly, but sometimes even a hero has to do these things. Then Eurystheus made Hercules' task even harder: he had to clean up after the cattle of Augeas in a single day. Now King Augeas owned more cattle than anyone in Greece. Some say that he was a son of one of the great gods, and others that he was a son of a mortal; whosever son he was, Augeas was very rich, and he had many herds of cows, bulls, goats, sheep and horses.

You might say that Hercules solved the stables cleaning problem by a feat of stormwater diversion.

Ignore the prophets of doom. Brexit will be good for Britain, by Simon Jenkins (The Guardian)

A stale leadership class is on the way out and the property bubble will burst. I can’t see the bad news

"We have had no end of a lesson: it will do us no end of good!” So said Rudyard Kipling of the Boer war, and he might well say the same today. David Cameron’s wild European gamble has failed. He and the British establishment took democracy for granted. They lined up all the toffs and boffins, the chief executives, tycoons and clever-clogs in the (south of the) land, and asked the nation to pat them on the back. The invitation to a punch in the face was too good to miss.

All governments, democratic as well as authoritarian, tend in time towards the Augean stables. They need regular cleaning out. But the cleaning is rarely at moments of their choosing, and the effort can be Herculean ...

... Social democracy and capitalism both need hitting over the head from time to time. It detoxifies them of bureaucracy, monopoly and cronyism. Britain is experiencing such a time. It should do us no end of good.

Marohn: "Our words and actions are making it impossible for us to listen to each other. Not only does this hurt our communities, it is making us ripe for exploitation."

At times, the best course of action is cutting to the chase. However, you'll want to click through and read Marohn's views on the Brexit vote.

Listening is the ultimate two-way street, isn't it?

THE IGNORANT AND THE ELITES, by Charles Marohn (Strong Towns)

 ... I'm going to today end with this: I'm not going to argue with you in the comments section about whether the Brexit is a good thing or a bad thing. I'm not going to debate whether or not the people who voted Leave are ignorant or enlightened. I don't want to discuss the global ramifications of Brexit. None of these topics are important to building a Strong Town.

What is important, and it's the only reason I'm writing this piece, is that we're not listening to each other. Even worse, our words and actions are making it impossible for us to listen to each other. Not only does this hurt our communities, it is making us ripe for exploitation.

If you follow us here at Strong Towns, you know that things are going to get more difficult for America -- much more difficult -- before they get better. You can be left-of-center and be a Strong Towns advocate and you can be right-of-center and be a Strong Towns advocate. Your politics doesn't matter. What really matters is whether or not you listen.

We need a movement of people who can work with others. People who, in desperate times, facing a vast array of complex problems, can lead people to respond rationally. If you want to be one of those people -- and I hope you will -- join me in working on your listening skills.

CounterPunch: "The Neoliberal Prison: Brexit Hysteria and the Liberal Mind."

Thanks to Bluegill for the prompt.

CounterPunch is a monthly magazine published in the United States that covers politics in a manner its editors describe as "muckraking with a radical attitude". It has been described as left-wing by both supporters and detractors.

This alone: "The Brexit vote is a huge challenge to the left to face facts."

The Neoliberal Prison: Brexit Hysteria and the Liberal Mind, by Jonathan Cook (CounterPunch)

The enraged liberal reaction to the Brexit vote is in full flood. The anger is pathological – and helps to shed light on why a majority of Britons voted for leaving the European Union, just as earlier a majority of Labour party members voted for Jeremy Corbyn as leader.

A few years ago the American writer Chris Hedges wrote a book he titled the Death of the Liberal Class. His argument was not so much that liberals had disappeared, but that they had become so coopted by the right wing and its goals – from the subversion of progressive economic and social ideals by neoliberalism, to the enthusiastic embrace of neoconservative doctrine in prosecuting aggressive and expansionist wars overseas in the guise of “humanitarian intervention” – that liberalism had been hollowed out of all substance.

Liberal pundits sensitively agonise over, but invariably end up backing, policies designed to benefit the bankers and arms manufacturers, and ones that wreak havoc domestically and abroad. They are the “useful idiots” of modern western societies ...

Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.

"The Reaction to Brexit Is the Reason Brexit Happened."

A writer for the New York Times visits Sunderland.

 ... when the decision to pull out of the European Union sent markets into a tailspin, Ken Walker, a retired construction worker, was unfazed.

“I don’t have any money in the stock market,” Mr. Walker, 59, said as he drank a pint of beer in a pub. “So what’s it to me?”

The pub, called the Speculation, still had “Vote Leave” posters on its walls, and a fellow drinker exclaimed “Aye!” and banged the counter in agreement.

There's a novel idea. Leave be the social wedge issues, and concentrate on chipping away at the stock portfolios of your "betters." Hit 'em in their wallets. Make 'em squeal. Are you hurting yourself by doing so? Maybe, but you were hurting already.

The Reaction to Brexit Is the Reason Brexit Happened, by Matt Taibbi (Rolling Stone)

If you believe there's such a thing as "too much democracy," you probably don't believe in democracy at all

... Because the vote was viewed as having been driven by the same racist passions that are fueling the campaign of Donald Trump, a wide swath of commentators suggested that democracy erred, and the vote should perhaps be canceled, for the Britons' own good.

Social media was filled with such calls ...

... You have to be a snob of the first order, completely high on your own gas, to try to apply these arguments to present-day politics, imagining yourself as an analog to Plato's philosopher-kings.

And you have to have a cast-iron head to not grasp that saying stuff like this out loud is part of what inspires populations to movements like Brexit or the Trump campaign in the first place.

Brexit, final -- for now: "We will leave the EU but remain within the neoliberal system."

A brief breakdown of the referendum, from City Lab.

The divide is more than geographical, however. As this exit poll makes clear, younger people voted Remain while older people voted Leave, thus swinging the vote away from the people who will experience Brexit most keenly and for the longest. This statistic itself is fueling anger among the young, but there’s no denying a basic truth: this was a referendum with a high turnout, in which the Leave camp won.

Two days later, the question has become this: Who will dare to pull the trigger on article 50?

The EU seems united at this early juncture:

They spoke with one voice, in essence: "There’s the door. Please don’t let it slam on your way out."

Gary Younge captured the Friday morning mood.

After this vote the UK is diminished, our politics poisoned, by Gary Younge (The Guardian)

... Britain is no more sovereign today than it was yesterday. We will leave the EU but remain within the neoliberal system. Left to the mercy of the markets we are arguably now less capable of directing our affairs than we were. We are not independent. We are simply isolated.

We are also diminished. Our politics are poisoned, our discourse is fragile, our leaders are discredited. Facts ceased to matter, knowledge ceased to be valued, compassion appeared to evaporate. As large majorities for one side or the other racked up in various parts of the country it became clear that for many of us, beyond our families, we didn’t just disagree with the other side. We literally didn’t know them. Britain is not greater for this decision and this campaign but smaller, weaker and more vulnerable.

Coming full circle, from the Berlin Wall to Brexit.

Al Jourgensen was there at the very inception of the New World Order. It goes to show that we all should listen to more Ministry.

Above all else, Brexit to me is a symbol of my life of the mind, coming full circle. It has been an exhausting few days, and I'm not even British.

Since the early 1980s, I've rightly or wrongly accused the drunken stork of depositing me on the wrong continent. Even when stretched thin and utterly distracted by life, I've tried to stay abreast all all things European.

On Friday, after the referendum vote was announced, it dawned on me that I was feeling extremes of depression and exhilaration, and the last time these conflicting emotions were so strong was 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down.

Back then, I was not unlike many others. We thought that with the Cold War ending, there'd be the opportunity for progressive solutions to world problems. I struggled with the notion of pulling stakes and trying to be a part of this, on the ground, somewhere on the continent, but after much thought, my choice was to go into business, be an American Europhile in exile, and take a stab at indie capitalism.

Now, 25 years later, I'm finished with that chapter -- and Britain says it's done with Europe. I've learned quite a lot, and am no longer interested in binaries, whether Leave or Remain, or Democrat or Republican. During my quarter century of NABC, I was too busy pouring myself into grassroots this-or-that, right here at the local level, to fully grasp the implications of neoliberalism.

It's all gone sour, folks. The facts changed, and I changed my mind. I regret that it took so long. Incrementalism probably isn't going to cut it.

Brexit has been immensely emotional for me, but the one sure thing is that cramming these events through the familiar American-centric shape shifter isn't tremendously useful. There's more to it than Yanks bitching about their 401Ks, or trying to create memes with strained Trump/Clinton analogies.

In many respects, Timothy Garton Ash guided me through the fall of Communism in Europe and its aftermath. I own several of his books, and I feel his pain. His final sentence in the passage quoted below is especially relevant.

As a lifelong English European, this is the biggest defeat of my political life (The Guardian)

Yet the origins of this debacle are as much European as British. As so often, the seeds of disaster were sown in the moment of triumph; of nemesis in prior hubris. It would be an exaggeration to say that a wall will be going up at Dover because a wall came down in Berlin, but there is a connection nonetheless. In fact, there are three connections. As their price for supporting German unification, France and Italy pinned Germany down to a timetable for an overhasty, ill-designed and overextended European monetary union. As a result of their liberation from Soviet communist control, many poorer countries in eastern Europe were set on a path to EU membership, including its core freedom of movement. And 1989 opened the door to globalisation, with spectacular winners and numerous losers."