"No, we will not balance the budget on the backs of the most vulnerable people in this country."

"Spend less. Be happy."

Jim Stiles:

Whether we’re talking about government debt or consumer debt, spending beyond our means seems to be the only way to keep this shaky house of cards going. If we all want to keep living beyond our means, we all need to keep spending money we don’t have. And we NEED to live beyond our means so that everybody else can do the same.

The government keeps interest rates low, hoping they can tempt us to keep borrowing. When they say there is “growing confdence in the economy,” all they mean is, it looks like people are borrowing more money than they should again.

[...]

Think about the things in Life that really make you happy and learn to live without the rest. If we all need less stuff, we won’t need to borrow more money. And we won’t have to earn as much to achieve the same result. Spend less. Be happy. Don’t worry....in that order. How’s that for proposing something that can be so completely logical and so utterly unattainable, all at the same time?

Spend less, be happy, and read the Canyon Country Zephyr!

New York Loves Gay Marriage

[source]

"Now fifty years through wind and sun and rain,
Through the sweet heyday of youth,
through life's maturity and age,
We've bloomed and withered, dearest,
side by side— two trees upon one root.
And now, dearest one, through all the lapse of years
I look into your eyes, and see them deep as ever;
Their beauty is to me a passion just as ever,
Voiceless, unfathomable, that no time can touch."
- Edward Carpenter, "Golden Wedding"

"I wish sometime that I’d be proven wrong in my pessimism."

Doug Henwood:

I wish sometime that I’d be proven wrong in my pessimism. But it looks like the great upsurge in Wisconsin has petered out. Listen to my interview with Abe Sauer in the June 25 radio show I just posted. Or read Progressive editor Matt Rothschild’s gloomy assessment from a week ago: Wisconsin Demoralized, Demobilized.

It’s the same damn story over and over. The state AFL-CIO chooses litigation and electoral politics over popular action, which dissolves everything into mush. Meanwhile, the right is vicious, crafty, and uncompromising. Guess who wins that sort of confrontation?

Please prove me wrong someday, you sad American “left.”

"The entire animal rights and environmental movements, perhaps more than any other social movements, directly threaten corporate profits."

Will Potter on why government goes after the animal rights and environmental movements:

The entire animal rights and environmental movements, perhaps more than any other social movements, directly threaten corporate profits. They do it every day. Every time activists encourage people to go vegan, every time they encourage people to stop driving, every time they http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifencourage people to consume fewer resources and live simply. Those boycotts are permanent, and these industries know it. In many ways, the Green Scare, like the Red Scare, can be seen as a culture war, a war of values.

[...]

It’s all about fear. The point is to protect corporate profits by instilling fear in the mainstream animal rights and environmental movements—and every other social movement paying attention—and make people think twice about using their First Amendment rights.

(h/t Dialogic)

"Keep alive the intellectual, moral and cultural values the corporate state has attempted to snuff out."

Unmissable Hedges.

"It will be up to us to keep alive the intellectual, moral and cultural values the corporate state has attempted to snuff out. It is either that or become drones and serfs in a global corporate dystopia. It is not much of a choice. But at least we still have one.”
- Chris Hedges

"It is still barely possible for the organized forces of progressiveness ... to overcome their timidity."

Philip Green:

It is still barely possible for the organized forces of progressiveness in the U.S.–the liberal wing of the Democratic Party chiefly–to overcome their timidity, impotence, and dependence on big money, to the extent that specific situations can be kept from getting worse than they already are; public opinion polling often shows majorities for some progressive reforms. But “public opinion” is not a political force. To countervail against the resources of capital, only a mass movement that through some combination of force and persuasion brings the ruling elite to the table can go beyond palliative reforms and bring about necessary structural changes. That would require an historical mass of political actors confronting the logic of overweening private capital accumulation and the domination of the social world that accrues to it, head-on. Those same actors would have to comprehend that the truism about absolute power tending to corrupt absolutely is as true of economic power as it is of the state; and that the contemporary crisis is the result of top-down class warfare rather than the inordinate demands of subordinate classes. To have any chance of bringing about such a vision, the American Left will have to learn to speak a different language from the reformism that is now its only recourse.

(h/t Bad Attitudes)

Get "behind the screen on which the phantasmagoria play."

[source]

"...courage is better than conventionality: take your stand and let the world come round to you. Do not think you are right and everybody else wrong. If you think you are wrong then you may be right; but if you think you are right then you are certainly wrong. Your deepest highest moral conceptions are only for a time. They have to give place. They are the envelopes of Freedom – that eternal Freedom which cannot be represented – that peace which passes understanding. Somewhere here is the invisible vital principle, the seed within the seed. It may be held but not thought, felt but not represented – except by Life and History. Every individual so far as he touches this stands at the source of social progress – behind the screen on which the phantasmagoria play."
- Edward Carpenter, from "Social Progress and Individual Effort"

"I would be nastier."

"If I had my life to live over, I would do it all again, but this time I would be nastier."
- pacifist Jeannette Rankin

In 1929 Rankin wrote:

There can be no compromise with war; it cannot be reformed or controlled; cannot be disciplined into decency or codified into common sense; for war is the slaughter of human beings, temporarily regarded as enemies, on as large a scale as possible.

"Demolish Obamism and what it has done to a once proud but now thoroughly corrupt and complicit Democratic Party."

Scarecrow:

You’ve had your chance to prove you are indeed different, and you’ve failed on every front. Even though I have often decried the intolerant, inhumane, radical extremism, nuttiness and willful ignorance of what the Tea-GOP has become, I no longer believe that President Obama is meaningly different from what President Mitt Romney would be or indeed would have been.

And as I could never vote for the unprincipled moral chameleon Romney, I cannot vote again for a faux Democrat whose policies and moral sentiments now seem little different from Romney’s.

[...]Barack Obama was handed a once in a lifetime opportunity to be the agent of needed change, but he blew it. He did only what the original anti-Bush momentum would have demanded of a moderate Republican, and then he became the opponent of real change at every level. He deliberately threw away the opportunity for change and became the destroyer of hope.

No man with that record of failure, misrepresentation, and betrayal should be rewarded with another term. And if we have to put up with a moral chameleon like Mitt Romney, indistinguishable from Obama, in order to demolish Obamism and what it has done to a once proud but now thoroughly corrupt and complicit Democratic Party, then so be it.

A commenter on Scarecrow's post:

President Obama appears to believe in nothing except that which is politically expedient. Gay marriage? Single Payer? Sure, he believed in both when it was expedient running as a Senator from Illinois. National Office? Not so much. I think every position he has ever held on any topic is only what he is required to pretend to believe in in order to get elected.

"As far as the AARP is concerned, I can assure you I will never join them now."

Chris, a N.Y. Times commenter, on the recent AARP decision to support Social Security cuts:

No, no, no, no!

Before cutting any benefits for the middle class and poor, stop the wars, get rid of the tax cuts for the very rich, stop corporate welfare, and cut benefits for all members of Congress.

If we are still left with a deficit after taking all those steps, let's talk about middle class and poor benefit cuts.

If it happens any other way, the oligarchy is bucking for a revolution.

As far as the AARP is concerned, I can assure you I will never join them now.

My sentiments exactly. Screw the AARP, join the Grey Panthers.

BE IT RESOLVED, that Gray Panthers opposes any and all efforts to reduce the effectiveness and reliability of the Social Security Program.

BE IT RESOLVED, that Gray Panthers support efforts to increase outreach to those who are eligible for SSI and expand enrollment to get a greater number of older adults in poverty into the program; and

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that Gray Panthers supports exploration of a variety of methods to safeguard against shortfalls in the Social Security system, including lifting of the cap on income subject to social security tax, inclusion of State and Local government employees, and other measures that enhance the program. [source]

"The Earth is full."

Paul Gilding:

THE Earth is full. In fact our human society and economy is now so large we have passed the limits of our planet's capacity to support us and it is overflowing.

Our current model of economic growth is driving this system, the one we rely upon for our present and future prosperity, over the cliff.

This in itself presents a major problem. It becomes a much larger challenge when we consider that billions of people are living desperate lives in appalling poverty and need their personal economy to grow rapidly to alleviate their suffering. But there is no room left.

This means things are going to change. Not because we will choose change out of philosophical or political preference, but because if we don't transform our society and economy, we risk social and economic collapse and the descent into chaos. The science on this is now clear and accepted by any rational observer.

"When people come to value beauty in their daily life more than they do now..."

Edward Carpenter, from Towards Industrial Freedom

When people come to value beauty in their daily life more than they do now, when they long intensely for that kind of industrial freedom which causes man's handiwork to become an art and a joy, when they perceive that the glory and the sweetness of the blue sky and a clean air are assets which we cannot neglect without peril to our souls and bodies, when they understand that cooperation is not only valuable because it increases the industrial freedom of men, but much more valuable when it liberates their dormant instinct of mutual helpfulness and love - when they see that all these inner things and many others are of more importance for human happiness than the mere increase of external riches - then indeed the Shopkeeping Age will have passed away.

I came across this beautiful quotation in a libertarian pamphlet from 1932, Edward Carpenter: The British Tolstoi. Good reading.

"The class warfare is over. We lost!"

"As long as capital rules without a radical presence fighting against it, neoclassical economics will rule as well."

"Marx’s truths have been lost because the class struggle waged by the working class has not succeeding in effectively challenging the rule of capital. Neoclassical economics is the economics of capital, as Marx’s political economy is that of the working class. As long as capital rules without a radical presence fighting against it, neoclassical economics will rule as well. No such presence exists today in any rich capitalist country, or, with a handful of exceptions, in any poor nation, either."
- Michael Yates

"Money is not required to buy one necessary of the soul."

[source]

“Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. ... We are often reminded that if there were bestowed on us the wealth of Croesus, our aims must still be the same, and our means essentially the same. ... Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only. Money is not required to buy one necessary of the soul.”
- Henry David Thoreau, from Walden

"I was propelled with a kind of explosive force ... right out of the middle of the nineteenth century and far on into the twentieth!"

Edward Carpenter on his seventieth birthday in 1914:

If in my small way I have done anything towards the social evolution of which I speak, it is I think chiefly due to the fact that I was born in the midst of that Commercial Era, and that consequently my early days were days of considerable suffering. The iron of it, I suppose, entered into my soul. Coming to my first consciousness, as it were, of the world at the age of 16 (at Brighton in 1860) I found myself—and without knowing where I was— in the middle of that strange period of human evolution, the Victorian Age, which in some respects, one now thinks, marked the lowest ebb of modern civilised society: a period in which not only commercialism in public life, but cant in religion, pure materialism in science, futility in social conventions, the worship of stocks and shares, the starving of the human heart, the denial of the human body and its needs, the huddling concealment of the body in clothes, the "impure hush" on matters of sex, class-division, contempt of manual labour, and the cruel barring of women from every natural and useful expression of their lives, were carried to an extremity of folly difficult for us now to realise.

As I say, I did not know where I was. I had no certain tidings of any other feasible state of society than that which loafed along the Brighton parade or tittle-tattled in drawing-rooms. I only knew I hated my surroundings. I even sometimes, out of the midst of that absurd life, looked with envy I remember on the men with pick and shovel in the roadway and wished to join in their labour; but between of course was a great and impassable gulf fixed, and before I could cross that I had to pass through many stages. I only remember how the tension and pressure of those years grew and increased—as it might do in an old boiler when the steamports are closed and the safety-valve shut down; till at last, and when the time came that I could bear it no longer, I was propelled with a kind of explosive force, and with considerable velocity, right out of the middle of the nineteenth century and far on into the twentieth!

Weiner's wiener: "What a sad repressed little country this is."

Two N.Y. Times commenters weigh in on Weiner's wiener.

Jane Grey:

What a sad repressed little country this is. If we truly valued sex as something good and beautiful, we would not be recoiling in disgust over anyone's genitalia. Don't any of you have a man or women you love enough to feel genuine fondness for your own and their man or lady parts? You can tell a lot about a person's sex life by the way they have reacted to this Weiner affair.

If genitals disgust you, you need the therapy, not Weiner.

Carsten:

What is the big deal with flirting sexually on the internet? It's not a psychological problem that needs to be treated..it's human nature. This country has a real problem by treating harmless behavior between consenting adults as a sickness. It is not a sickness. One should not lose his job. Everyone needs to step back and take a look at themselves. We will all need to be in a treatment center soon for being in denial of our own human temptations and harmless flirtations. Denying a little harmless fun and repressing our little naughty flirtations and fantasies is what usually ends up in true perversion.

I fall firmly into the anti-puritanical camp. In fact, I'd like to see more Congressional wieners on the Internet. Get 'em all out there. Maybe then, it won't seem like such a big deal and we won't have to pretend that male members of Congress don't have sex lives.

"I’ll never be one to call for a revolution, or to man barricades or carry banners, but..."

Ilargi:

I’ll never be one to call for a revolution, or to man barricades or carry banners, but still, you know, I’m thinking there's not all that much available in the range of options. Electing different politicians, whatever country you're in, makes no difference anymore, whatsoever. The financial world's grip on public coffers all over the place has reached a pretty "absolute form". Perhaps when you look at the ways in which the ECB and IMF are planning to drain and sell off Greece, you shouldn't just shudder, you should also realize that that gravy train will one day make a full stop in your country, city, community, load up all the goodies and leave with them. And why? Because you let them.

The best hope there seems to be on the horizon for many places is the very young and unemployed that have begun taking over the squares of their cities, from Spain to Greece to Yemen to Egypt et al. If these kids don't make it, if they don't persevere in those squares, their communities stand to be sucked dry of all remaining wealth by the financiers' army of politicians and police forces and what have you, which have all, oh sweet irony, been paid for with your very own tax money.

If you want to know what the state of affairs is in the world, and in your particular part of it, don't listen any longer to Bernanke, or Obama, or Merkel, Smaghi, Christine Lagarde, or Trichet. Start listening to the kids in the squares. Their version of reality has a lot more to do with yours, and certainly yours in the future, than any of the mouthpieces bought and paid for in the political slave auction we for some obscure reason still insist on calling democracy.

"Applauding the military while taxiing to the gate is a new spectacle."

Dennis Perrin:

The plane lands at Reagan National. The steward says to stay in our seats, it's safe to use cells and so on. His voice rises a few octaves. "And to those military personnel aboard, we thank you for your sacrifice and patriotism." Passengers erupt in applause and cheers.

[...]

Applauding the military while taxiing to the gate is a new spectacle. Beefy hands slapping camouflaged backs. Expressions of gratitude and support. Whether or not these guys have seen or will see action is beside the point. Their uniforms alone merit adulation. If we were under siege from invading armies laying waste to cities and suburbs, I could see it. Military/civilian distinctions would evaporate. We'd all be part of the resistance.

But the opposite is reality. We're the invaders decimating occupied people. In deluded moments we pose as selfless liberators. When honesty emerges we boast of our destructive power -- the Fuck Yeah! approach. Those passengers weren't cheering necessary sacrifice. They were celebrating charred Afghan civilians. Deformed Iraqi children. Extrajudicial assassination. They probably give more thought to the TruGreen on their lawns than to depleted uranium in Fallujah's soil and water.

Too harsh? Sorry. After a decade of death, lies, torture, and corruption, what the fuck is there to celebrate? Are Americans that clueless or simply callous? Now that we've entered the next round of managerial ratification (i.e. presidential election season), the race is on to see who can best finesse our endless violence.

"The plutocracy had always stood and still stands for special privilege in its most vicious form."

Scott Nearing, from The Great Madness (1917):

The entrance of the United States into the world war on April 6, 1917, was the greatest victory that the American plutocracy has won over the American democracy since the declaration of war with Spain in 1898. The American plutocracy urged the war; shouted for it; demanded it; insisted upon it, and finally got it.

The plutocracy welcomed the war not because it was a war, but because it meant a chance to get a stronger grip on the United States.

[...]

The business interests were "in clover." After years of unpopularity, after being forced to endure investigation, criticism, and antagonistic legislation, after being condemned by even the conservative element in public life as a menace to American progress and well-being, the business interests suddenly found themselves in a movement that was carrying the people, and they worked it for all it was worth.

"Patriotism" was the refrain of every speech and every article - a patriotism of their own particular brand.

The plutocratic brand of patriotism won the endorsement of the press, the pulpit, the college, and every other important channel of public information in the United States. The "educated," "cultured," "refined," "high-principled" editors, ministers, professors and lawyers accepted it and proclaimed it as though it were their own. Turning their backs upon principle, throwing morals and ideals to the winds, they tumbled over one another in a wild scramble to be the first to join the chorus of plutocratic patriotism.

The American plutocracy was magnified, deified, and consecrated to the task of making the world safe for democracy.

[...]

The patriots of plutocracy did not confine their attention to Congressmen. The term "traitor" was flung in the teeth of anyone who opposed the seven league steps that the administration was taking toward war. Radicals who had always opposed war; ministers who had spent their lives in preaching Peace on earth ; scientists whose work had brought them into contact with the peoples of the whole world; public men who believed that the United States could do greater and better work for democracy by staying out of the war were persecuted as zealously as though they had sided with Protestantism in Catholic Spain under the Inquisition. The plutocracy had declared for war, and woe betide the heedless or willful one who still insisted upon urging the gospel of peace.

The liberal and radical forces of American life - the men and women who had sacrificed, suffered, labored and struggled to make America safe for democracy, were brushed aside by the triumphant Patriotic plutocracy: Morgan, Rockefeller, Guggenheim, Willard, Gary, Schwab, Stotesbury, - were the great patriots. All who opposed them were traitors. The plutocracy had always stood and still stands for special privilege in its most vicious form.

"Peace is indivisible ... understand that nobody can survive at the expense of anybody else."

"I define peace, not as the absence of war, but as the presence of justice and the absence of fear. There is peace when people don't have to be afraid. And people don't have to be afraid when there's genuine justice. Period. It seems to be so, so difficult, although it's so, so obvious."
- Ursula Franklin

"Make opposition to war absolute."

From the Public statement of the Yearly Meeting of Aotearoa/New Zealand, 1987:

We totally oppose all wars, all preparation for war, all use of weapons and coercion by force, and all military alliances: no end could ever justify such means.

We equally and actively oppose all that leads to violence among people and nations, and violence to other species and to our planet.

Refusal to fight with weapons is not surrender. We are not passive when threatened by the greedy, the cruel, the tyrant, the unjust.

We will struggle to remove the causes of impasse and confrontation by every means of nonviolent resistance available.

[...]

We must start with our own hearts and minds. Wars will stop only when each of us is convinced that war is never the way.

The places to begin acquiring the skills and maturity and generosity to avoid or to resolve conflicts are in our own homes, our personal relationships, our schools, our workplaces, and wherever decisions are made.

We must relinquish the desire to own other people, to have power over them, and to force our views on to them. We must own up to our own negative side and not look for scapegoats to blame, punish, or exclude. We must resist the urge towards waste and the accumulation of possessions.

Conflicts are inevitable and must not be repressed or ignored but worked through painfully and carefully. We must develop the skills of being sensitive to oppression and grievances, sharing power in decision-making, creating consensus, and making reparation.

In speaking out, we acknowledge that we ourselves are as limited and as erring as anyone else. When put to the test, we each may fall short.

We do not have a blueprint for peace that spells out every stepping stone towards the goal that we share. In any particular situation, a variety of personal decisions could be made with integrity.

We may disagree with the views and actions of the politician or the soldier who opts for a military solution, but we still respect and cherish the person.

What we call for in this statement is a commitment to make the building of peace a priority and to make opposition to war absolute.

[...]

"We must relinquish the desire to own other people, to have power over them, and to force our views on to them. We must own up to our own negative side and not look for scapegoats to blame, punish, or exclude."

For more Quaker Peace Testimony, visit this Quaker web site in the U.K.

"He thus modifies his provincialism..."

Jane Addams, from Twenty Years at Hull-House:

Mr. Howells has said that we are all so besotted with our novel reading that we have lost the power of seeing certain aspects of life with any sense of reality because we are continually looking for the possible romance.

[...]

If I may illustrate one of these romantic discoveries from my own experience, I would cite the indications of an internationalism as sturdy and virile as it is unprecedented which I have seen in our cosmopolitan neighborhood: when a South Italian Catholic is forced by the very exigencies of the situation to make friends with an Austrian Jew representing another nationality and another religion, both of which cut into all his most cherished prejudices, he finds it harder to utilize them a second time and gradually loses them. He thus modifies his provincialism, for if an old enemy working by his side has turned into a friend, almost anything may happen.