Tuesday Reading List: November 29, 2016

It’s been three weeks since Donald Trump became President-elect.

The Green Party is starting to fracture over the three-state recount initiated by Jill Stein. Brandy Baker explains her position on the party at CounterPunch.

Jill Stein’s 2016 Green Party presidential campaign was the second most successful in the Party’s history that gave us recognition in the national and global media and gave us a strong candidate who did many great things to carry our message.

Jill Stein’s 2016 Green Party presidential campaign portrayed in more than one instance the Green Party as an appendage of the Democrats, and it has been a campaign led by strategists who are too mired in the non-profit world to truly look out for the Green Party’s interests. Both statements can be, and are, true.

Members of the Green Party signed a statement criticizing Stein’s action. It’s up on Margaret Flowers’ site. Flowers was a Green candidate for Senate in Maryland in 2016.

The decision to pursue a recount was not made in a democratic or a strategic way, nor did it respect the established decision making processes and structures of the Green Party of the United States (GPUS). The recount has created confusion about the relationship between the Green and Democratic parties because the states chosen for the recount are only states in which Hillary Clinton lost. There were close races in other states such as New Hampshire and Minnesota where Clinton won, but which were not part of the recount. And this recount does not address the disenfranchisement of voters; it recounts votes that were already counted rather than restoring the suffrage of voters who were prevented from voting.

Over at Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi delivers a blistering critique of a Washington Post story that accused (without verifiable proof) certain news outlets of propagandizing for Russia.

The piece relied on what it claimed were “two teams of independent researchers,” but the citing of a report by the longtime anticommunist Foreign Policy Research Institute was really window dressing.

The meat of the story relied on a report by unnamed analysts from a single mysterious “organization” called PropOrNot — we don’t know if it’s one person or, as it claims, over 30 — a “group” that seems to have been in existence for just a few months.

Moustafa Bayoumi penned a piece for The Guardian on the increasingly likely possibility that the Trump administration will create a “Muslim registry.” Look to what’s realistically possible, says Bayoumi.

My worry extends beyond the realm of what this administration says and reaches into what it will do. Building a wall on the US-Mexico border is a near physical impossibility. The immediate deportation of millions of people is much harder to execute than it sounds. But the Muslim stuff? That can — and most likely will –happen.

Finally, James Livingston argues at Aeon that maybe it’s work — and jobs — that are the problem. The recession and increasing automation means we need to start envisioning a post-work world, says Livingston.

In short, it lets us say: enough already. Fuck work.

Certainly this crisis makes us ask: what comes after work? What would you do without your job as the external discipline that organises your waking life — as the social imperative that gets you up and on your way to the factory, the office, the store, the warehouse, the restaurant, wherever you work and, no matter how much you hate it, keeps you coming back? What would you do if you didn’t have to work to receive an income?

And what would society and civilisation be like if we didn’t have to ‘earn’ a living — if leisure was not our choice but our lot? Would we hang out at the local Starbucks, laptops open? Or volunteer to teach children in less-developed places, such as Mississippi? Or smoke weed and watch reality TV all day?

Fuck work. Let us play.