🏀 KuBuckets Archive

Nothing like this ever gets published without a lot of PR planning. It is a thoughtful point of view thoughtfully articulated, thoughtfully positioned and thoughtfully disseminated. The African-American lobby seems to be working hard to re-position for 2018 and 2020, same as the US-Israel Lobby, the Women's Lobby, the LGBT Lobby, the Caucasian-American Lobby, The Alt. Right Lobby, the Fundamentalist Lobby, The Protestant Lobby, The Roman Catholic Lobby, Big Ag Lobby, Big Oil Lobby, Big Car Lobby, The aerospace lobby, the climate lobby, the High Tech Lobby, the Gun Lobby, the Real estate lobby, the mining lobby, the timber lobby, the Pentagon Lobby, the Military-Industrial Complex Lobby, the NatSec Lobby, the tax lobby, the banking lobby, the retail lobby, the warehousing lobby, the highway lobby, and the infrastructure lobby. This is America. Everybody's got a lobby.

Fuggedabout Identity Politics. No one's got any identity at all without a lobby.

America is about Lobby Politics.

Keep your eyes on the Lobbies.

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2018/jan/09/jaylen-brown-boston-celtics-nba-interview ↗

@jaybate-1.0 How did you miss Hobby Lobby?

And, Building Lobby (millions of these).

@mayjay

I didn’t miss it. I set it up for you! 😀

Isn’t it hilarious that in the midst of all this rancor and cancor in Washington that the real pimps for the private oligarchy—the myriad lobbies—come out almost completely unscathed and unmentioned?

Perhaps we will know when/if the action gets VERY serious in DC , by when/if the big lobbies start getting taken in for questioning by Mr. Mueller. I so hope Mr. Mueller gets to keep looking and asking who did what?

I forget. Did you say you work in the swamp? If so, it must be a fascintating time to watch all the dancing. You ought to start reporting DC from your POV on this web site. I would read it!!

Rock Chalk!

@jaybate-1.0 Retired from the swamp. Moved to SC in 2006.

Out of the Swamp, into pure Hell.

@mayjay

Sorry to hear about the hell part.

Hang in!

@jaybate-1.0 The Union should have insisted when Lee and Grant met at Appomattox: we will let you back in immediately if, and only if, you shove SC out to sea.

@mayjay

If by SC you mean South Carolina, they are a different bunch, aren't they?

I always found that it helped me, when I was pulling my hair out in such places, to study the colonial and post colonial relationship of Britain and France in other places like the Caribbean, or the Guyanas, or the Southwest Pacific, to get the objectivity to appreciate the long term British and French overlap in the American South. Scholars don't talk much about it, but there really was a British-French co-depency dynamic in colonialism, as they played catch-up with the more expansive and (early on) more sophisticated colonial apparatus of Spain. Once you get enough detachment you can see the strong parallels with the British-French co-dependent regions and then remember that it was a combination of British banking in New York City financing South Carolinian planationism (that expanded westward to New Orleans and then into Texas), trying to do to the South much the same as the British had done to Ireland, coupled with British and French buyers of the plantation products that jointly shaped both the political and commercial law and so sensibilities of the Deep South. Remember, also, that it was British insurance companies, not northern insurance companies, that decisively insured the rebuilding of Southern infrastructure and commercial and real estate enterprise from the earliest stages of reconstruction, and that it was the British and to lesser degree the French that found safe haven jobs for Confederate political and military officials during reconstruction that otherwise might have hung under the puritan streak's yearning for justice for the North. It was not a coincidence that Confederate AG/SecDef/SecState Judah Benjamin fled to London and had a fine life and business career there after attempting to dissolve (and so destroy the strategic and commercial and military viability of the remaining North due to eventual asymmetries in rail/telegraph/canal cost-benefit) the USA in the US Civil War, nor was it a coincidence that Confederate soldiers founded communities in places like the Guyanas, or that Confederate generals found military assignments in English colonies after the Civil War. Further, Yankees may love English riding tack and the taste of French cooking, but they struggle mightily with English admiralty law and French maritime and civil law and the sensibilities (and political and business ethics) they nurture over long periods in places like Charleston and New Orleans and now after a century of Federal incorporation, perhaps even Washington, D.C., itself, I reckon. What is charming to a Northern American on vacation in the South of France maybe quite frustrating to that same American on business or doing law enforcement work in Charleston and New Orleans.

At least that's my humble, layman's take on the things looking back on my time, which is already an archaism of its own.

Reconstruction ended in one great triumph of bipartisanship in the Compromise of 1877--when the Republicans agreed to let the Democrats in the South do whatever the hell they wanted to (to rebuild the South and to enact Jim Crow laws) in exchange for letting Hayes steal the election (leaving the Repubs in the WH).

@mayjay

I haven’t read about Hayes yet. You’ve stimulated my curiosity. I wonder if John Hay were involved in Rutherford B. Hayes, too?