This guy is really a good writer and I agree with his flexibility in terms of
the definition of Socialism, or I thought I did until I read a great deal more
of his article and discovered that for him, every definition is suspect except
for his Christian Socialism. There are people on this list who have their own
rigid definitions of socialism. Me? I'm pragmatic. But I am a Humanist and was
a member of the Ethical Humanist Society of Long Island, which is part of the
Ethical Culture Movement. So I would differ with Hart in that I think that one
can be communal, in the way that he means, without being Christian. I really
agreed with much of what he said and I kept reading to the point where he began
citing the bible. I did note, however, that as he was describing how confused
Americans are about various countries and the kinds of governments they have,
he mentioned Venezuela and I think that he was intimating that it is
undemocratic, just as Robert Kutner, who is smart about so many things in his
book, Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism?", did. Apparently, all of these
people, who are so knowledgeable about domestic matters, believe everything
they read in the Washington Post and The New York Times. They should read the
material on The Grayzone Project and Consortium News to find out what is really
happening in Venezuela. It would be interesting to see David Bentley Hart
having a discussion with Chris Hedges since Hedges is actually an ordained
minister. I've read his books and his articles, and heard him on his RT
program, On Contact, and I don't think I've heard him mention God or cite
scripture once in all these years.
Miriam
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Erica R
Sent: Tuesday, August 11, 2020 8:40 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: How did Americans become such Wimps? Silence as
Trump kills tens of Thousands, Destroys Social Security and Post Office, Plots
Election Fraud
Thank you for sharing that perspective, Miriam. That hadn't occurred to me.
I've copied the full text of the piece below for anyone who is interested, it
is quite long. Looking more at this website, I see the publication is
faith-based. From their about page: " Commonweal's mission is to provide a
forum for civil, reasoned debate on the interaction of faith with contemporary
politics and culture." Anyway, here's the essay.
Three Cheers for Socialism
Christian Love & Political Practice
By David Bentley Hart
Persons of a reflective bent all too often underestimate the enormous strength
that truly abysmal ignorance can bring. Knowledge is power, of course,
but—measured by a purely Darwinian calculus—too much knowledge can be a
dangerous weakness. At the level of the social phenotype (so to speak), the
qualities often most conducive to survival are prejudice, simplemindedness,
blind loyalty, and a militant want of curiosity. These are the virtues that
fortify us against doubt or fatal hesitation in moments of crisis. Subtlety and
imagination, by contrast, often enfeeble the will; ambiguities dull the
instincts. So while it is true that American political thought in the main
encompasses a ludicrously minuscule range of live options and consists
principally in slogans rather than ideas, this is not necessarily a defect. In
a nation’s struggle to endure and thrive, unthinking obduracy can be a precious
advantage.
Even so, I think we occasionally take it all a little too far.
Not long ago, in an op-ed column for the New York Times, I observed that it is
foolish to equate (as certain American political commentators frequently do)
the sort of “democratic socialism” currently becoming fashionable in some
quarters of this country with the totalitarian state ideologies of the
twentieth century, whose chief accomplishments were ruined societies and
mountains of corpses. For one thing, “socialism” is far from a univocal term,
and much further from a uniform philosophy. I, for instance, have a deep
affection for the tradition of British Christian socialism, which was shaped by
such figures as F. D. Maurice (1805–1872), John Ruskin (1819–1900), Charles
Kingsley (1819–1875), Thomas Hughes (1822–1896), F. J. Furnivall (1825–1910),
William Morris (1834–1896), and R. H. Tawney (1880–1962), though I have also
been influenced by such non-British social thinkers as Sergei Bulgakov
(1871–1944), Dorothy Day (1897–1980), and E. F. Schumacher (1911–1977). None of
these espoused any kind of statist, technocratic, secular, authoritarian
version of socialist economics, and none of them was what we today think of as
“liberal.” And yet their “socialist” leanings were unmistakable.
Moreover, just because a totalitarian regime happens to call itself
socialist—or, for that matter, a republic, or a union of republics, or a
people’s republic, or a people’s democratic republic—we are under no obligation
to take it at its word. What we call “democratic socialism” in the United
States is difficult to distinguish from the social-democratic traditions of
post-war Western Europe, and there we find little evidence that a democracy
becomes a dictatorship simply by providing such staples of basic social welfare
as universal health care. At least, it is hard not to notice that the
social-democratic governments of Europe have always gained power only by being
voted into office, and have always relinquished it peacefully when voted out
again. None of them has ever made war on free markets, even in attempting
(often all too hesitantly) to impose prudent and ethically salutary regulations
on business. Rather than gulags, death camps, secret police, arrests without
warrant, summary executions, enormous propaganda machines, killing fields, and
the like, their political achievements have been more in the line of the
milk-allowances given to British children in the post-war years, various
national health services, free eyeglasses and orthodonture for children, school
lunches, public pensions for the elderly and the disabled, humane public
housing, adequate unemployment insurance, sane labor protections, and so forth,
all of which have been accomplished without irreparable harm to economies or
treasuries.
I suppose a social-democratic state could begin to gravitate toward true
authoritarianism, in the way that any political arrangement can lead to just
about any other. The Third Reich, after all, was born out of a functioning
parliamentary democracy. The 2016 U.S. election proved that, even in a
long-established democratic republic, just about anyone or anything, no matter
how preposterously foul, can achieve political power if enough citizens are
sufficiently credulous, cowardly, and vicious. In just the past few years, we
have seen bland American neoconservatism rapidly evolving into populist,
racist, openly fascist, mystical nationalism. Anything is possible. But to this
point, it seems fair to say, the Western European democracies—as well as the
Oceanian states and Canada—have all acquitted themselves fairly well on the
civil liberties and “rule of law” fronts. And surely no one would deny that,
approve of them or not, eyeglasses and milk are not gulags and summary
executions.
Or so you would think. Judging from some of the negative reactions to my Times
column, there are a good many persons to whom this is not at all obvious. The
most lunatic response I read came from some fellow whom some jurisdiction of
the Orthodox Church has injudiciously consecrated as a priest. His attack on my
column was published in a forum associated with the Acton Institute (a sort of
toxic-waste site for the disposal of emotionally arrested and intellectually
abridged reactionaries). For this fellow, there are no differences here worth
noting: children’s milk subsidies, concentration camps, modern Denmark and
Canada, the USSR, the New Deal, the Cultural Revolution, public subsidies for
healthcare or railroads, the execution of dissidents, Victorian Christian
socialism, twentieth-century Soviet communism, present-day Venezuela,
present-day Britain, industry partly governed by labor, industry wholly seized
by the state—somehow, in his mind, it is all one and the same thing, a single
historical phenomenon inexorably leading to the same mass graves. Any day now
in Sweden, it seems, free dentistry will mutate into a secret state-police
apparatus and a sprawling archipelago of reeducation camps.
Just as absurd in its way, though perhaps more morally distasteful, was a
column by Tom Rogan in the Washington Examiner repeating certain fashionable
neoliberal lies about European, Canadian, and Oceanian health care—long delays
in triage, shortages, lack of choice among physicians, and so forth. I have
received medical attention in any number of countries over the years and, while
no nation’s system is perfect, I can assure anyone curious on the matter that,
if you are in real need of medical attention, in almost all cases you would be
far better off in France, Canada, Germany, or Italy than you are here.
Certainly we Americans—routinely running the gauntlet of finding an
“in-network” primary-care physician, securing an “establish-care” appointment
(usually months away), waiting upon referrals and insurance approvals, choosing
among expensive tests, and so on—endure “triage” processes of an especially
byzantine complexity. Choice of health-care provision is far freer in most
other countries, in fact, simply because insurance companies cannot limit one’s
decisions, while costs are either minimal or nonexistent, even though the care
is as good or better. As it happens, the only economically advanced nation in
the world today where someone is likely to be denied access to necessary care
or affordable pharmaceuticals is the United States. Only here, for instance,
can a poor person die for want of the money needed to buy insulin or undergo
dialysis.
Americans are, of course, the most thoroughly and passively indoctrinated
people on earth. They know next to nothing as a rule about their own history,
or the histories of other nations, or the histories of the various social
movements that have risen and fallen in the past, and they certainly know
little or nothing of the complexities and contradictions comprised within words
like “socialism” and “capitalism.” Chiefly, what they have been trained not to
know or even suspect is that, in many ways, they enjoy far fewer freedoms, and
suffer under a more intrusive centralized state, than do the citizens of
countries with more vigorous social-democratic institutions. This is at once
the most comic and most tragic aspect of the excitable alarm that talk of
social democracy or democratic socialism can elicit on these shores. An
enormous number of Americans have been persuaded to believe that they are freer
in the abstract than, say, Germans or Danes precisely because they possess far
fewer freedoms in the concrete. They are far more vulnerable to medical and
financial crisis, far more likely to receive inadequate health coverage, far
more prone to irreparable insolvency, far more unprotected against predatory
creditors, far more subject to income inequality, and so forth, while
effectively paying more in tax (when one figures in federal, state, local, and
sales taxes, and then compounds those by all the expenditures that in this
country, as almost nowhere else, their taxes do not cover). One might think
that a people who once rebelled against the mightiest empire on earth on the
principle of no taxation without representation would not meekly accept
taxation without adequate government services. But we accept what we have
become used to, I suppose. Even so, one has to ask, what state apparatus in the
“free” world could be more powerful and tyrannical than the one that taxes its
citizens while providing no substantial civic benefits in return, solely in
order to enrich a piratically overinflated military-industrial complex and to
ease the tax burdens of the immensely wealthy?
Our cruel, inefficient, and monstrously expensive health system makes this
obvious. Nations that provide either single-payer healthcare (like the UK) or a
well-administered public option (like Germany) do indeed tax their populations
for the purpose. But this is hardly a gross imposition on their citizens. For
one thing, they distribute tax liability far more equally across income
brackets than we do. For another, they strictly regulate the prices providers
may charge. The result is that the cost of health care in these countries is
roughly half what it is here per capita, and the actual cost for individuals
(especially those who are not extravagantly rich) is only a fraction of what we
are expected to pay for the same services. The relative pittance most of us
would be taxed to sustain a real public option or national health service would
be—so long as our legislators were willing simultaneously to regulate
pharmaceutical and other medical providers humanely and sensibly—as nothing
compared to what we actually pay right now for the privilege of discovering,
when the next shockingly unexpected medical bill arrives, that we still have
far more to pay.
Consider: our insurance premiums already cost most of us more than we would be
taxed for a health system like the one in Canada or in Sweden. Even if our
employers pay most of the putative bill, this results in considerably lower
real wages for us than our European counterparts receive. If we are so unlucky
as to have to buy our coverage directly, the cost is invariably exorbitant
while the benefits are meager and grudging. And at that point our financial
liabilities have only just begun. Quite often, deductibles alone far exceed any
debts the average European or Canadian or Australian need ever discharge for
medical care. Then there are, for no particular reason, the copays we have to
add to what we have already paid our insurers. Then there are the absurd prices
our bought-and-sold political class permits pharmaceutical firms to charge and
insurance companies only partly to cover. The price of insulin alone, for
example, here as nowhere else in the civilized world, is a crime against
humanity—one, in fact, that actually kills a substantial number of American
diabetics each year. If we need to use the emergency room, and especially if we
must call for an ambulance, the costs are almost unimaginably multiplied. Then,
of course, when truly serious illnesses arrive, insurance companies deploy
battalions of adjusters to deny us the very coverage we thought we were
purchasing with our atrociously excessive premiums. These vigilant souls will
do all they can to abbreviate our treatments, curtail our hospital stays, deny
us as many therapies as possible, refuse approval of the newest therapies or
drugs, or at least delay approval until (ideally) we have died. If we fall
terminally ill, we will spend our last days fighting for every penny of
coverage at each discrete stage of our illness. And then, in all likelihood,
our families will go deeply into debt anyway. Of course, even all of this is
true only if we are among those fortunate enough to have any coverage at all.
Is this freedom? From what, exactly? Certainly not from the state. The heavy
hand of centralized government is no lighter—its proprietary power over its
citizens is no smaller—here than anywhere else in the developed world. Quite
the reverse. Certainly, where taxes are concerned, no government in the
developed world is any more rapacious and no legal authority any more
draconian. Here, moreover, no less than anywhere else, the state governs trade,
makes war, passes laws, delivers mail, does all the most basic things the
modern state does; but here also, to a greater degree than in any other
advanced economy, the government raises its revenues for the express purpose of
transferring as much wealth as possible from the working and middle classes to
corporations and plutocrats. It really would be hard to imagine a democracy
whose state wields greater power over the lives of average persons. To me, at
least, it seems obvious that, where health care in particular is concerned,
Americans are slaves thrice-bound: wholly at the mercy of a government that
despoils them for the sake of the rich, as well as of employers from whom they
will receive only such benefits as the law absolutely requires, as well as of
insurance companies that can rob them of the care for which they have paid.
All this being true, the classical social democrat or democratic socialist
might be forgiven for thinking that Americans are curiously deluded regarding
their own supposed inalienable liberties. He or she might contend, at any rate,
that a state that uses its power chiefly to dilute consumer and environmental
protections in the interests of large corporations and private investors, while
withholding even the most basic civil goods that taxpayers have a right to
expect (such as a well-maintained infrastructure or decent public transport),
is no smaller—and certainly no less invasive and dictatorial—than one that is
actually obliged by the popular will and the social contract to deliver
services in exchange for the taxes it collects. He or she might think that a
government whose engorged military budget is squandered on wasteful (because
profitable) redundancy, but whose public services are minimal at best, presides
over a far more controlled economy—and a far more coercive redistribution of
wealth—than does a government forced to return public funds to its citizens in
the forms of substantial civic benefits. He or she might even have the temerity
to see social democracy, properly practiced, not as an enlargement of the
state’s prerogatives, but quite the opposite: a democratic seizure of power
from both state and corporate entities, as well as a greater democratic control
over public policy, taxation, production, and trade.
After all, though we often speak as if the centralized state and corporate
“free” enterprise were antagonists, they are in fact mutually sustaining.
Global capital depends upon the state’s power, its diplomatic access to other
nations and markets, the trade treaties it negotiates, and (if needed) its
judicious deployments of terror. States depend upon capital for revenues,
material goods, and political patronage. Without the support of an
omnicompetent, vastly prosperous, orderly, and violent state, global corporate
capitalism could not thrive. Without corporations, the modern state would lack
the resources necessary to perpetuate its supremacy over every sphere of life.
Over against the twin colossi of state and capital, a truly functioning form of
social democracy might well be viewed as an incomplete but still benign
devolution of sovereignty, away from capital to labor, away from the state to
the public. It might even be seen as a feeble gesture toward a society based on
some kind of real subsidiarity. At least, this scarcely seems an implausible
view of the matter.
Whether that is achievable, however—or as achievable as it should be—I am not
prepared to opine. In America, even democratic socialists often have only a
very hazy notion of what the full spectrum of socialist thought has been in the
past, and what it might be in the future. There is always the likelihood that
much of the mainstream of American democratic socialism will ultimately turn
into just another form of classically liberal social philosophy. I have, in an
inconstant and largely flirtatious way, been a member of the Democratic
Socialists of America over the years. I admit, however, that certain recent
tendencies of the DSA make me suspect that, as time passes, it will look less
and less like the kind of pro-labor, anti-capitalist organization it purports
to be, and more and more like simply another incarnation of sanctimonious,
ethically voluntarist, pro-choice American liberalism (with all its bourgeois
narcissisms, morbid psychological fragilities, and lovingly cultivated
neuroses), which I like no better than sanctimonious, ethically voluntarist,
libertarian American conservatism (with all its bourgeois narcissisms, morbid
psychological fragilities, and lovingly cultivated resentments). Just as we
Americans have succeeded in turning “Christianity” into another name for a
system of values almost totally antithetical to those of the Gospel, I have
every confidence that we will find a way to turn “socialism” into just another
name for late-modern liberal individualism. I still support most of the
genuinely communitarian aims of the democratic-socialist movement. But, in the
end, it is that tradition of Christian socialism mentioned above to which I
remain loyal. And I do not know if it could now flourish here.
As I have already noted, that tradition was never, especially in the Anglophone
world, a centralizing philosophy. It was friendly neither to the absolute state
nor to ungoverned business. Neither was it even a form of political “leftism”
(however one might define that term). It emanates from a time when the
political leanings we think of as right or left, conservative or progressive,
had not yet coalesced into anything like the present arrangement of ideological
or class allegiances. At times, its tacit social vision could be positively
quaint. Thomas Hughes seemed convinced that social amelioration could be
achieved only by new generations of Christian gentlemen devoted to the common
good out of, in part, a sense of noblesse oblige. The single most influential
figure in the British tradition of Christian socialism (though he himself never
settled on a single official term for his political and economic philosophy)
was John Ruskin, who was a convinced Tory monarchist. As far as he was
concerned, a principled Christian “communism”—by which he meant not state
ownership of property, but a prior communal claim upon the goods of the earth
and upon excess resources by those in need—was the only possible civilized and
truly charitable alternative to modern liberalism, whether fiscal or social. He
opposed classical liberalism for the simple reason that he thought it created
social injustices of a kind clearly contrary to the explicit dictates of
Christian conscience.
Inasmuch as the two major political parties in America are both “liberal” in
the classical sense—the one devoted a bit more to something like John Stuart
Mill’s economic philosophy, the other a bit more to something like his social
philosophy, and neither of them to the communal ethics of Christian
tradition—it is hard for most Americans to make sense of such views. Contrary
to conventional wisdom, Christianity has never really taken deep root in
America or had any success in forming American consciousness; in its place, we
have invented a kind of Orphic mystery religion of personal liberation,
fecundated and sustained by a cult of Mammon.
Even so, anyone familiar with the oldest and richest stream of real socialism
in the Anglophone world understands that it was in large part a Romantic
rebellion against modernity, a longing for a truly Christian understanding of
community, an essentially nostalgic belief in the hierarchy of those subsidiary
estates and institutions that naturally evolve out of religious, communal, and
social life. At times, it proved susceptible to a mistily idealized view of the
past—the Middle Ages especially—but it was essentially a Christian-humanist
protest against the inhuman scale of both government and industry in the late
modern age. It was not a rejection of free enterprise, but rather a critique of
a system of enterprise that had destroyed the free guilds of late medieval
Europe, disenfranchised individual craftsmen, produced a system of wage
slavery, allowed the large-scale division of labor to disenfranchise workers,
turned labor into a commodity to be traded or a natural resource to be
exploited, accepted the gross superstition of the “iron law of wages,”
eliminated the common lands and goods once recognized as the universal
patrimony of free citizens so as to make state and capital the sole proprietors
of civic wealth, radically reduced legally recognized community usufructs,
removed both the means and the profits of production from the possession of
laborers and yielded them over to an investment class of owners, enlarged the
central state and its power of taxation, displaced the center of society from
the realm of the sacred to that of commercial consumption, and created a
rapacious debt-and-credit system that is little more than the chronic legal
spoilation of the poor by private lenders.
This kind of socialism proposed a use of civic wealth for common human ends
precisely in order to restore the Christian order of values—the Christian law
of love of neighbor and faith in God’s charity—that modernity has displaced by
its reliance instead on the forces of self-interest. In fact, it presumed the
radical notion that charity is a more original and fertile impulse of the human
soul than greed is. It was an attempt to preserve the best of the moral
inheritance of Christian ethical beliefs in an age when Christian civilization
had been—so the proponents of the movement believed—eclipsed by an ethos that
prizes personal acquisition over communal love. It was, in short, a deeply
Christian revolt against those tendencies of post-Christian modern liberal
economics and social philosophy that tend toward the destruction of landscapes
and cityscapes and inscapes, by reducing or subordinating everything to the
impersonal mechanisms of production and consumption.
What remains of that tradition now I cannot say with any certainty. To some
extent, it was always a dream of an impossible future sustained by fantasies of
a nonexistent past. And some of its aspects, however well-intended—those overly
rosy views of class distinction, for instance, or that gauzily gleaming
pre-Raphaelite medievalism—are not worth preserving or reviving, except perhaps
in radically qualified form. But I honestly cannot imagine how anyone who takes
the teachings of Christ seriously, and who is willing to listen to those
teachings with a good will and an open mind, can fail to see that in the late
modern world something like such socialism is the only possible way of
embodying Christian love in concrete political practices. I have heard American
Christians claim (based on a distinction unknown in the New Testament) that
Christ calls his followers only to acts of private largesse, not to support for
public policies that provide for the common welfare. What they imagine Christ
was doing in publicly denouncing the unjust economic and social practice of his
day I cannot guess. But it should be obvious that certain moral ends can be
accomplished only by a society as a whole, employing instruments of governance,
distribution, and support that private citizens alone cannot command. We, as
individuals, can often aid our brothers and sisters only by acting through
collective social and political structures. I admit that the New Testament
makes still more radical demands upon Christians (Matthew 5:42; 6:3; 6:19–20;
Luke 6:24–25; 12:33; 14:33; 16:25; Acts 2:43–46; 4:32; 4:35), and I would
certainly agree that it is just as bad to relinquish all one’s moral
responsibilities to the state as it is to promote policies that do not oblige
human government to obey the laws of divine charity. I know that Christ in the
Gospels calls his followers to a different kind of “politics” altogether—for
want of a better term, the politics of the Kingdom. Of this, even the wisest,
most compassionate, and most provident form of democratic socialism could never
be anything more than a faint premonitory shadow.
Even so, a shadow is not nothing.
On Tue, Aug 11, 2020 at 2:30 PM Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<mailto:miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> > wrote:
It's a really good passage. My one response to it is that the Americans who
originally revolted against taxation without representation, were businessmen
and landowners and they were revolting against a monarchy located across an
ocean. The common folk wouldn't have revolted if not persuaded by the wealthy
because they owned nothing and weren't being taxed. The wealthy are still
rebelling against paying taxes and the Republican administration and senators
are doing their bidding.
Miriam
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> > On Behalf Of Erica R
Sent: Tuesday, August 11, 2020 2:18 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <mailto:blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: How did Americans become such Wimps? Silence as
Trump kills tens of Thousands, Destroys Social Security and Post Office, Plots
Election Fraud
This is reminiscent to me of an opinion piece I saw a few months ago in The
Commonweal titled "Three Cheers for Socialism" by David Bentley Hart. I don't
know much about the writer or the publication, I just happened across this
particular piece. I've shared a passage from it below that reflects my feelings
on the issue.
Americans are, of course, the most thoroughly and passively indoctrinated
people on earth. They know next to nothing as a rule about their own history,
or the histories of other nations, or the histories of the various social
movements that have risen and fallen in the past, and they certainly know
little or nothing of the complexities and contradictions comprised within words
like “socialism” and “capitalism.” Chiefly, what they have been trained not to
know or even suspect is that, in many ways, they enjoy far fewer freedoms, and
suffer under a more intrusive centralized state, than do the citizens of
countries with more vigorous social-democratic institutions. This is at once
the most comic and most tragic aspect of the excitable alarm that talk of
social democracy or democratic socialism can elicit on these shores. An
enormous number of Americans have been persuaded to believe that they are freer
in the abstract than, say, Germans or Danes precisely because they possess far
fewer freedoms in the concrete. They are far more vulnerable to medical and
financial crisis, far more likely to receive inadequate health coverage, far
more prone to irreparable insolvency, far more unprotected against predatory
creditors, far more subject to income inequality, and so forth, while
effectively paying more in tax (when one figures in federal, state, local, and
sales taxes, and then compounds those by all the expenditures that in this
country, as almost nowhere else, their taxes do not cover). One might think
that a people who once rebelled against the mightiest empire on earth on the
principle of no taxation without representation would not meekly accept
taxation without adequate government services. But we accept what we have
become used to, I suppose. Even so, one has to ask, what state apparatus in the
“free” world could be more powerful and tyrannical than the one that taxes its
citizens while providing no substantial civic benefits in return, solely in
order to enrich a piratically overinflated military-industrial complex and to
ease the tax burdens of the immensely wealthy?
On Tue, Aug 11, 2020 at 12:23 PM Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<mailto:miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> > wrote:
Yes, but whatever union movement we had, has been co-opted. We have nothing
that resembles the peace movement of the 1960's. Our whole society has been
corrupted by the worship of material success and if you compare what we have
now to the 40's and 50's, everything has been privatized and the profit motive
is the rule. Certainly, there are people fighting back. But I'm afraid that
Chris Hedges' view of our reality is closer to the truth than we'd like to
admit.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> > On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Tuesday, August 11, 2020 11:47 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <mailto:blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: How did Americans become such Wimps? Silence as
Trump kills tens of Thousands, Destroys Social Security and Post Office, Plots
Election Fraud
Interesting. my spin is that there is a greater, and a growing, level of
protest.
And this protest is not reserved to just one issue. The signs, to me, is that
the American Empire is following the path of all Empires. As the Empire
spirals downward the Ruling Class is being confronted on all sides, forcing it
to wildly charge its former supporters of treasonous activities. Donald Trump
has conducted an ever more vicious attack on Journalists and the Media in
general. He has stepped up his attack on Joe Biden and the "Leftist Democrat
Party".
He has robbed the National Treasury, giving huge piles of taxpayer's money to
his billionaire supporters. He has fought against creating work programs such
as those created by the Roosevelt administration during the Great Depression.
He has failed the Working Class Americans by not providing any positive
leadership. He has doubled up in his efforts to trash public education and the
Post Office. He has caused Americans to not trust their own government by
trashing high government officials(many of whom he originally appointed).
Through all of this negativity he is turning a once mighty Empire into
Trash...just as he did with his fabulous Taj Mahal.
Carl Jarvis
On 8/11/20, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<mailto:miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> > wrote:
How did Americans become such Wimps? Silence as Trump kills tens of
Thousands, Destroys Social Security and Post Office, Plots Election
Fraud JUAN COLE
08/10/2020
2KSHARES
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) - Nicole Winfield and Lisa Marie Pane at
the Associated Press write at the unbelief with which Europeans are
staring at the United States, as we head for 300,000 dead from the
coronavirus and our economy shrank 33% on an annualized basis last
quarter, and we just appear to be all right with that.
Not only are we perfectly willing to toss grandma in an early grave on
Trump's say-so, but we are supine as he openly engineers the
destruction of social security and medicare, and of the post office,
on behalf of himself and the billionaire class he represents. That is
after we sat by while he completely gutted all environmental
regulations that got in the way of corporations making money off
poisoning us. I don't think the neutering of the EPA has even been
reported on daytime cable news, though the prime time magazine shows on MSNBC
have at least brought it up.
Americans imagine themselves rugged individualists. A cartoonist did a
satire on us showing brawny guys, shirts off, with the logo "Rugged
individualism works best when we obey."
In fact, Americans are masochistic sheeple who let the rich and
powerful walk all over them and thank them for the privilege.
We have become wimps. The word wimp may come from "whimper." It was
used in a newspaper in 1920, and then not again until 1960. Since then
it may have been influenced by the character of "Wimpy" in the Popeye
cartoons, who did not have much gumption. He was only good at mooching
off people in search of a hamburger.
I always thought Americans were the plucky Popeye, who knew how to get
iron in their diets and show some spunk.
Turns out we have been reduced to begging for our meals.
The rich figured out in the 1980s that Americans are all form over
substance, and if you put up for president a Hollywood actor like
Ronald Reagan who used to play cowboys, they would swoon over him. In
1984 when Reagan ran against Walter Mondale, I saw a middle aged white
Detroit auto worker interviewed who said he woudn't vote for Mondale
because he was a "panty-waist." Reagan took away their right to strike
and took away government services by running up the deficit and
cutting taxes on the rich simultaneously, then claiming the government
couldn't provide the services the people had paid for because it is broke.
Reagan raised the retirement age from 65 to 67. Why? Most young people
don't realize that their health will decline in their late 60s and
they often won't actually get any golden years.
What did Americans do in response? They just bent over and took it.
Actually, it is the French who are much more like Americans imagine
themselves to be. President Emmanuel Macron last December tried to
raise the retirement age from 62 to 64. I can't understand why. France
has persistently high unemployment as it is.
In response, all hell broke loose. Some 30 unions went on strike, and
they supported each other. Trains were interrupted. Trucking was interrupted.
Life was interrupted. A million people came out into the streets. But
one poll had 61% of the French approving of the strikes. They went on
for months, and were very inconvenient.