“If the police think we’ll go home just because they’re making things difficult, then the police don’t know how difficult things are at home. I’m eating better here, with all the donations and stuff. Back in 2008, I was so depressed that I wanted to kill myself. The only thing that stopped me was I couldn’t figure out how to do it without hurting my family. You don’t want to leave people with that thought about you.
“I was a handyman in Ft. Lauderdale for 24 years. All the work dried up in 2008 when the economy collapsed, and somebody stole my drum kit. I used to play in a band, Spontaneous Combustion, and be out all night, then get up after an hour’s sleep and dig post holes all day. Didn’t think anything about it, until it all just ended. Finally, I called my brother and said, ‘I got nothing. I’m on the street.’ He let me move into his attic in Maine, and he let me use a computer, for the first time ever. Oh man, I went down every rabbit hole doing research on that computer, learned the truth about the scumbags who work in these office buildings. Now I spend every nickel I got on making DVDs and printing flyers, trying to get the word out. In a couple days, I’m going back to Maine for the Harvest Festival. Then I’ll go to Washington on October 6 for that demonstration, or come back here. If you’re depressed, protesting is the best possible thing to do. This is how I’m going to spend the rest of my life. The only way I could be happier right now is if I was getting a blow job.”
I experienced a radical increase in my premiums with a corresponding radical increase in out of pocket and deductible expenses.
This is what my family is faced with: Premium: $700/month ( $8400/yr; this is about 13% of my income !!!) Deductible (per person): $2500 Pharmacy: 50% coverage Major Medical : 70%
The out of pocket expenses DO NOT apply to the deductible. In other words, the co-pay for pharmacy, major medical, office visits are not applied to the $2500 per person deductible. I calculated that my family receives no benefit from this insurance until we spend, out of pocket, over $12,000.
Many people do not understand the fine print of their policies or how to calculate the true cost.
This is not insurance. This is thievery. By the way, I am a nurse.
The question is: How long are Americans going to put up with this insanity? I'm 59 and have resided in Italy on and off since 1984. I have been pretty healthy, but I have had 2 minor operations and two bouts of pneumonia, as well as the occasional influenza, cold, allergy etc. I have never received a medical bill. I have never needed to make an appointment to see my family doctor, who is available 6 days a week. My hernia operation cost $ 30, but I was not rushed out the door several hours later as is the habit in the USA. I spent the night at the hospital, no problem.
Yes, taxes are high in Italy. Yes, I have occasionally had to wait for non-urgent care from the national health service, though for relatively little - a few hundred bucks - one can pay more and be treated privately. Even privately everything costs much less (except for over the counter meds like aspirin). It is true that there is no overhead TV in the waiting rooms, no Muzak and not much else in the way of the window-dressing American doctors and hospitals offer so as to compete for patients and profits. No insurance interrogations, either. When it counts - inside the operating theater - the care here is pretty much as good as in the USA, maybe better.
Are there occasional horror stories? Of course. Are Italians totally satisfied with their medical care? Of course not. Have I ever met any Italian who would trade his health care for what Americans get? Never.
Europeans are horrified at the idea of health care as just another profit-making business. The right to receive health care is in the Italian constitution. No one worries about losing a home so as to pay for health care. The average life expectancy is higher here. Infant mortality is nearly unknown. Women get fully paid leave before and after giving birth, months of it. Italians pay little more than half what Americans pay for health care. We are really chumps!
A means-tested single-payer system is the only sane option. Really!
So let me be clear: the "main danger" today to working class self-activity, self-confidence, and organizational independence is a vote for the Democratic imperialism of Barack Obama in 2012.
[...]
Most workers, indeed most socialists, will not vote for Obama because they want to. They will vote for him because they are whipped into a hysteria that the ultra-right barbarians are at the gates. But when we compare the Bush and Obama regimes, I think it is a toss-up which has been more barbaric.
...the left must realize that when progressives achieved success in the past, whether at organizing unions or fighting for equal rights, they seldom bet their future on politicians. They fashioned their own institutions — unions, women’s groups, community and immigrant centers and a witty, anti-authoritarian press — in which they spoke up for themselves and for the interests of wage-earning Americans.
Today, such institutions are either absent or reeling. With unions embattled and on the decline, working people of all races lack a sturdy vehicle to articulate and fight for the vision of a more egalitarian society. Liberal universities, Web sites and non-governmental organizations cater mostly to a professional middle class and are more skillful at promoting social causes like legalizing same-sex marriage and protecting the environment than demanding millions of new jobs that pay a living wage.
A reconnection with ordinary Americans is vital not just to defeating conservatives in 2012 and in elections to come. Without it, the left will remain unable to state clearly and passionately what a better country would look like and what it will take to get there. To paraphrase the labor martyr Joe Hill, the left should stop mourning its recent past and start organizing to change the future.
The Obama Administration has a serious problem. Every time the numbers show that chronic Black unemployment has reached crisis levels, I think back to the Obama Administration’s delusional assertion three years ago that a “rising tide will lift all boats” (that targeted economic policy would not work as well as a general policy that helps everyone – after all, he is “everyone’s president”). Well, I’m here to report to the Obama Administration: The tide not only missed our boat, but Black folks are sinking to the bottom of the economic ocean.
One of the most telling signs of racial inequality in America is the fact that African Americans are not only subjected to the very worst economic circumstances in the country, but we are also not allowed to be upset about it. Middle class Tea Partiers can gather in Washington to complain about health care, wealthy white folks can get upset about a tiny spike in taxes, and white Americans can remain justifiably outraged over a measly eight percent rate of unemployment. But when African Americans say a word about widespread and virtually unprecedented economic suffering in the presence of a Black president, we are referred to as Uncle Toms or told that we are demanding too much.
For a long time, the institution of slavery was held up as just and right, as something that, because it had been around for thousands of years, was the fruit of inalterable Human Nature that wouldn't be going anywhere anytime soon, hippie. Abolitionists were pretty much the silly, limp-wristed idealists of their day. But, slowly, opinion began to change. And while we still have plenty of repression in our society, people no longer leap to the defense of the outright enslavement of other human beings.
Social transformation is long, arduous process. But the same change in opinion that took place with slavery can, I believe, take place with how a society views the use of violence and voluntary communalism; the hierarchies and coercion accepted as normal today need not, and I trust will not, be accepted as such forever. For now, the task of the radical is to educate people on the evils of violence, be it perpetrated by individuals or states, and the benefits of cooperation. More important than evangelism, though, is to live life in the manner you would like others to live; people tend to respond better to actions than sermons.
Transforming society will take time but, at the risk of provoking groans, anything worth fighting for usually does. And I haven't heard any better ideas.
I was under the impression that over the weekend, several thousand people gathered in New York City in an attempt to occupy Wall Street. Once there, they coordinated actions via twitter, formed affinity groups –– including one named, wonderfully, the General Assembly –– and presented a more coherent recitation of the nation’s economic ills, its causes and consequences, than we’ve heard from the President or any of the lesser D.C. pols.
But, apparently, it didn’t happen. I know this because I subscribe to the San Francisco Chronicle and there was nothing in it over the weekend, and nothing in it Monday morning, to even suggest a demonstration in NYC.
The Chronicle’s front page covered “S.F. Asian Americans a growing powerhouse,” lawsuits over a possible ‘bullet train’, and a headlined “S.F. Bay cleaner, but still in peril.”
Inside, there were other national stories. There was a major piece on a Reno plane crash investigation, and one entitled “Earth braces for giant piece of space junk.”
[...]
I had thought there was an occupation in New York City, thousands of citizens finally taking to the streets against the piggery that is international banking. Not according to the Chronicle. I must’ve been wrong.
This revelation is probably not much of a revelation at all—very few people I know can honestly claim to have had a revolutionary outlook on the world upon exiting the womb. The bigger surprise might just be how “un-radical” I used to be for much of my life and how painstaking of a process it was for me to adopt a Christian and anarchist perspective as my own.
[...]
Recently, there has been a lot of talk in various places on this site about who and what is and is not “really” radical. Is Derrick Jensen really a radical? Is Bill McKibben? How about Jesus Radicals—are we still living up to the latter part of our name? Is stewardship radical? How about civil disobedience? Is the Christian Left still radical? Were they ever radical in the first place? Are we all too radical for change? Are we too radical for other radicals? How are we defining radical again? Is it possible for the same person/group/ideology to be radical in some ways and not radical in others?
[...]
I believe in being discerning and critical, dissecting and challenging. I believe in holding our sacred cows, including all our movements, ideas, practices and even Web sites, up to a critical and illuminating light that pushes us and others to go deeper into the work of resisting interpersonal, social, ecological, economic, systemic and other evil. But as someone who once was a long ways away from even thinking in these terms, I don’t think I would ever have come as far as I have if I was faced with judgment and dismissal, instead of prophetic patience and grace. What kind of place is Jesus Radicals? Is our criticism constructive? Are we a place of prophetic patience and grace?
When I reflect on my own history, I am confronted with the realization that what was once un-radical can, through diligent, ongoing engagement, be moved to another way of living in this screwed up yet beautiful world. I would like to think that I am not a fluke of nature—that other mainstream people, groups, movements, and endeavors can be positively affected by diligent, ongoing engagement with people of increasingly radical stripes, including this peculiar bunch of Christians and anarchists. This does not mean being slow to confront injustice or slow to point out differences between political ideologies and practices or slow to name when some action or movement may be inadequate for the realities we now face. I am not suggesting we need a “Can’t we all just get along?” kind of existence that glosses over our differences. To be an anarchist is to be different from other kinds of radicals. What I am wondering, however, is whether it is possible to engage others who are seeking change in ways that are not like ours in another kind of spirit—one that acknowledges that many of us did not start off where we are now and others do have room to (and often can) grow. I think it is possible because it is my own story. Do we want to be part of others’ stories as well?
"I am confronted with the realization that what was once un-radical can, through diligent, ongoing engagement, be moved to another way of living in this screwed up yet beautiful world." - Nekeisha Alexis-Baker
What was the American revolution all about and why are we acting as though the Palestinians don't deserve the very thing we cherish, independence from tyrannous rule?
“President Obama is an interesting man,” Shaath said. “He started with very positive ideas. Unfortunately, his promises – which included stopping all settlement activities and producing an independent Palestinian state before September 2011 – have not been turned into reality so far. If he gets reelected, he might have a little more influence and time to give our cause the priority it deserves.”
Despite ample grounds for reasonable doubt that have surfaced since Davis's original conviction, the prosecutors, the Pardons Board and, I'm sorry to say, the MacPhail family, seemed to show no curiosity about whether it was, in fact, the real killer who was being executed.
May I never become so certain of myself and so set in my opinions that I call for the murder of another human being.
‘You don’t understand how we feel down here,’ a white Mississippian explained in 1908. ‘When there is a row, we feel like killing a nigger whether he has done anything or not.’ [source]
Out of the seed of the plant called devil-take-the-hindmost, sown in the beginning of last century, has sprung for this age no ordered and gracious social life of friendliness humanity, of beauty and of joy, but only a wilderness of briars—as any one may plainly see who merely glances around. Briars, vigorous perhaps, strong-growing, and covering all the land—but after all, only briars. Nothing but the grafting of a new life upon these, a new spirit, a new germinating principle, will so transform them that they will blossom at last into the rose of our devotion and our love.
And this change, this new inspiration (which is already coming to us) is coming, as ever, from the outcast and the rejected. It is from the pitiful figures scarce able to hold their rags together, who flit past us like ghosts in the midnight of the richest city of the world, or huddle crouching on the riverside seats—or from those dreary cues of hopeless thousands who wait at dockyard and factory gates—that the congregated cry of suffering has gone up, which is at last awakening the slumbering soul of our modern civilisation to its human destiny, its real life. "Abandon this mad, this inhuman struggle," it says, "in which we and such as we are hourly and eternally crucified—in which your own hearts and lives are blasted. Look on us, and know that we are but yourselves in another form. Grant our claim, so unassailable, so elementary— the simple Right to Work—that we may be allowed to support ourselves—that the industrial machine may be so modified that all may bear that part, and none be excluded. Do this, and lo! in the hour that you do it you will have sown the Seed of a new Society—as far superior to the present one as the perfect rose is superior to the bramble—the society in which industry shall actually be carried on for human Use instead of for fraud and robbery.
"But do it not, and the hour of your ruin is at hand. The writing is already on the wall. No nation can continue for long, without serious disaster, to harbor huge masses of its population in a decaying and diseased states—forbidden from the land and all the conditions of healthy industry and life—its very own limbs and members mortifying. The crisis draws rapidly near. Whether it comes from within, by the disorganisation of your own internal affairs, or whether from without, by direct foreign attack—unless you set your house in order, and that right soon, a great catastrophe awaits you."
Most of our labor leaders are as out of touch with working people as are Obama and politicians of both parties. They live in separate worlds. Ordinary workers in the United States don’t make much money. More than a quarter of all jobs pay a wage that does not support a family of four at the poverty level of income. For ordinary workers, health care and pension benefits are increasingly rare commodities. What is more, for them, pay has stagnated for nearly forty years.
[...]
What is needed is an understanding that capitalism is now a dead end for all workers. It always was for those in the poor countries. Some workers in the rich nations were able to stake out a reasonably good life, partly at the expense of the super exploitation of the proletariat in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Today this exploitation redounds solely to the benefit of the capitalists. This is not going to change. The trajectory of working class life is downward and permanently so. There is no way, for example, for unions, no matter how democratically controlled, to prevent the movement of capital from rich to poor nations or to prevent the use of cheap labor in these countries from doing every imaginable kind of service work electronically. It is not possible either for unions to stop the use of the military force or police actions used to maintain the subservience of labor to capital.
Unless, that is, a radical transformation of the system itself becomes the goal of the labor movement. A labor movement that begins to dare to ask what work is under capitalism and what it could be in societies in which human beings were not considered to be simply commodities, societies in which, as Marx put it, “the free development of each is a condition for the free development of all.”
Check out Jodi Dean (one of my favorite academics) on Doug Lain's Diet Soap podcast (one of my favorite podcasts!). Good stuff! Jodi Dean keeps the excellent I Cite blog.
"Democracy now is making us stage our own submission. That's sick." - Jodi Dean
"Democracy doesn't provide a standpoint of normative critique any longer - because of its merger with capitalism." - Jodi Dean
"We have to have an organized communist revolution. ... Everyone gets a guaranteed income." - Jodi Dean
Social Security is based on a principle. It’s based on the principle that you care about other people. You care whether the widow across town, a disabled widow, is going to be able to have food to eat. And that’s a notion you have to drive out of people’s heads. The idea of solidarity, sympathy, mutual support, that’s doctrinally dangerous. The preferred doctrines are just care about yourself, don’t care about anyone else. That’s a very good way to trap and control people. And the very idea that we’re in it together, that we care about each other, that we have responsibility for one another, that’s sort of frightening to those who want a society which is dominated by power, authority, wealth, in which people are passive and obedient.
If we're in it together, we're going to form unions, strike for higher wages,and act in solidarity in actions against giant corporations. If we're in it for ourselves, none of those things happen. We become less than human, cogs in the capitalist machine.
To them I'm just a happy meal Can't sleep, the clowns will eat me - Alice Cooper
From the beginning, I knew it would be very, very, bad. I knew that, without wise leadership (which we lacked entirely), the country’s response would not be for justice, much less forgiveness, repentance for our part in creating such hatred, or work for reconciliation, but a thirst for REVENGE that would blind us to idiocy and immorality of our own actions. The U.S. was traumatized on 9/11, and I am not sure we have recovered much from that trauma in the following decade. We continue to act in blind rage. We refuse to ask seriously “Why do they hate us?” and continue to give ourselves the cheap and easy non-answer of “they hate our freedoms,” even while we barter away that freedom for “homeland security” that does little to make us secure. We have loudly retold ourselves the myths of our national innocence (even sinlessness) and refused to examine our foreign policies to see where we are sowing the seeds of hatred and fear that is reaped in terrorist attacks. People from over 50 nations perished in the Twin Towers on 9/11, but we in the U.S. act as if we were the only victims. And we are far too willing to victimize others in return.
[...]
Since 9/11, I have become more cynical about my government and about the moral sensibility of the vast majority of the American people. I now see the U.S. as primarily a force for injustice and violence in the world and not a force for justice or peace.
"To be! To live! To have an intense enjoyment in every inspiration of breath; in every beat of the pulse; in every movement of the limbs; in every sense! ... All things are joyously beautiful to those who feel themselves to be...." - Richard Jefferies, from The Dewy Morn ( 1884)
BOSTON – Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard law professor who has battled the financial industry as a consumer advocate, will announce her candidacy Wednesday for what will likely be a high-profile race against Senator Scott P. Brown.
"One does not defend freedom by wiping out amendments to the Bill of Rights, kidnapping citizens and holding them without trial, torturing thousands and holding them in prisons without habeas corpus, and conducting warrantless wiretapping and unrestricted electronic surveillance of an entire citizenry. That is how one attacks freedom. ... Whoever brought down the buildings did not bring down America’s freedom. We have managed that on our own." - Rick Raznikov
Listening to Obama talk about jobs and shared prosperity yesterday reminded me that we are back in campaign mode and Barack Obama has started doing again what he does best – play the part of a progressive. He's good at it. It sounds like he has a natural affinity for union workers and ordinary people when he makes these speeches. But his policies are crafted by representatives of corporate/financial America, who happen to entirely make up his inner circle.
I just don't believe this guy anymore, and it's become almost painful to listen to him.
I am a devotee of the C-Realm Podcast. A recent guest was Charles Eisenstein. Here's a bit of his online book, The Ascent of Humanity.
The teenagers in their idealism and their defiance, the depressed in their rejection of the lives offered them, the anxiety-ridden in their sense that something is not right... all are quite sane. Any psychiatry that doesn't recognize this is doomed from the start. It tells us the problem is not the world, it is ourselves. It merely adds to the chorus of voices telling us, "All is well, all is normal—who are you to think any differently?" That's the same message we get from the media that immerse us, suggesting with their subject matter that we can afford to care about the trivial and the superficial: the sports, celebrities, and so forth. As well, the whole mania for "entertainment" suggests that our world is sound enough that we can afford constant distraction from it. "Things will be fine. Don't worry." I imagine myself on board the Titanic. "Hey guys, we're pretty far north, don't you think we should slow down? Hey guys, isn't that an iceberg up ahead?"
"Charles, relax! Have a drink. Come listen to the band. Everything is fine—see, no one else is worried."
Not only do we live today in a fraudulent, life-denying society into which nobody fits, but the incompatibility of that society with human fulfillment only grows with each passing year. Along with it grows the need for medicating expanding swaths of the population. We have seen this happening with the increasing ubiquity of SSRIs and similar drugs across every age group. The world grows more painful physically as an increasingly toxic environment gives rise to new diseases, as commerce and industry corrupt the food supply, and as the tempo and pressure of life-as-usual quickens. All of these factors accelerate the conversion of citizens into patients.
[...]
When we awaken to the enormity of our crisis and the magnitude of our loss, often the first response is a crushing despair. I have been through that; I know what it is like. Yet on the other side of despair is fullness and an urgency to live life beautifully. We can choose a different world—the "more beautiful world our hearts tell us is possible" and to which I have dedicated this book—but to choose it we must be familiar with what we are choosing. We must be fully cognizant of the world we have chosen up until now. Knowing the pain of the world fills me with energy and confirms the rightness of my life's direction. Otherwise what would stop me from occupying my hours with the trivial and the vain, staying comfortable for as long as possible until I died? We need not avert our gaze from ugliness and pain in order to live a happy life. Ignorance is not bliss. Quite the contrary: the more we insulate ourselves, the weaker we become, the less able we are to take on reality. The more we numb and defer the pain, the more afraid of it we are, until we willingly submit to confinement in the (temporarily) secure, predictable, controlled semblance of life our society offers.
Three quarters of a century ago, the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt found the resources to put millions of Americans to work through programs like the Works Progress Administration, that were responsible for nationwide construction and repair of basic infrastructure, from highways to airports to national parks.
Driven by tumultuous struggles of the American working class and the fears that example of the 1917 workers’ revolution Russia could be repeated, Roosevelt set about to save capitalism from itself.
Today, Obama cannot even hint at creating such a program. The protracted crisis of American capitalism has left the United States a declining power and the most heavily indebted country in the world. Moreover, the American ruling elite is increasingly dominated by a financial oligarchy that has amassed obscene fortunes not through production, but rather Wall Street speculation that crosses over into criminality.
This ruling class is prosecuting a savage assault on living standards and basic social rights of the working class, in which mass unemployment is viewed as an indispensable weapon in driving down wages and ripping up fundamental social programs.
Note to Barack Obama. A payroll tax cut will make me spend less money, not more. Why? Because a payroll tax cut is another nail in the coffin of Social Security, something I was relying on in my senior years. What your tax cut giveth today, it taketh away tomorrow. Your jobs act scare me.
I don't know if I can add anything to the insights of others who have already said that cuts into Social Security play into the hands of Republicans who want to destroy it.
The complicity of President Obama in adding this fiduciary irresponsibility and stick to beat the social contract to death is hardly surprising, but it certainy is depressing.
"He sure does talk purdy, doesn’t he?" - Ian Welsh
I am heartbroken and horrified by President Obama’s refusal to update smog standards. Updating the standards is long overdue, and such updates would have a highly beneficial effect on health care costs as well as pushing corporations to invest in the kind of essential technology and infrastructure needed to reduce pollution and create jobs.
Perhaps the most distressing aspect of the president’s action is that he appears to believe, and act on, the lies disseminated by the right, particularly members of the Tea Party, about the prohibitive cost of environmental protection, rather than acknowledging the truth: that the cost of not protecting the environment is overwhelming and irreversible.
What has happened to the passionate, committed man we elected?
EDWINA TRENTHAM Moodus, Conn., Sept. 5, 2011
What has happened? Obama told us during the election that we would have to make him do things; these are not the words of a passionate and committed man. In terms of making him do things, the pressure he acknowledges and responds to is that which comes from the right.
When President Obama cusses out Cornel West and personally demands that historic stalwarts of the movement for peace and justice “cut him some slack” on black unemployment, on foreclosures and the prison state, on torture and the military budget, on unjust wars and corporate welfare, on fulfilling the just demands of those who elected him, our first black president is revealing his real self. Far from saying “make me do it,” President Obama is saying how dare you pressure me to do what you elected me to do.
No, the compassionate, committed man does not exist.
The banks are getting whatever they want, no questions asked.
They will continue to get whatever they want, no questions asked.
All of the economic inequality that is destroying the fabric of this country will continue unchecked throughout the Obama administration.
The disparities between rich and poor will be exacerbated 4 and 8 years from now because Obama will have managed to make them worse, by catering to the banksters and Wall Street greed.
On the eve of Obama's big jobs speech, which comes far too late for far too many Americans, I see no reason to put any more hope in the presidency of Barack Obama. He just plain lacks the guts to deal effectively with the major issues confronting the country. His forte is backtracking. While Obama dithers, the inequality deepens. Inequality will be his legacy. Post-White House, I imagine him on the golf courses of the world, oblivious to the damage he has done. Hobnobbing with the rich. Elder statesman as douche bag (see George W. Bush). No Habitat for Humanity for old Barack. Just another crap ex-politician.
Oligarchic rule has always been a system defined by legalized looting that leaves a wasteland of want, deprivation and unfocused rage in its wake.
[...]
Under Disaster Capitalism, the people in the underclass have had economic violence inflicted upon them since birth, yet the corporate-state mass media doesn’t seem to notice the situation, until young men burn down the night. Then media elitists wax indignant, carrying on as if these desperate acts are devoid of cultural context.
A mindset has been instilled in these young men and boys that they are nothing sans the accoutrements of consumerism. Yet when they loot an i-Phone, as opposed to creating economy-shredding derivative scams, we’re prompted by the corporate media to become indignant.
When the slow-motion, elitist-manipulated mob action known as our faux democratic/consumerist culture deprives people of their basic human rights and personal dignity — then, in turn, we should not be shocked when a mob of the underclass fails to bestow those virtues upon others.
The commercial mass media’s narrative of narrowed context (emotional, anecdotal and unreflective in nature) serves as a form of corporate state propaganda, promulgated to ensure the general population continues to rage against the symptoms rather than the disease of neoliberalism.
[...]
Keep in mind: When watching the BBC or the corporate media, one is receiving a limited narrative (tacitly) approved by the global power elite, created by informal arrangements among a careerist cartel comprised of business, governmental and media personality types who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, even if, in doing so, they serve as operatives of a burgeoning police state.
[...]
...the most profound act of selfless devotion (commonly called love) in relationship to a society gripped by a sociopathic mode of being is creative resistance. Submission is madness. Sanity entails subversion. The heart insists on it; otherwise, life is only a slog to the graveyard; mouth, full of ashes; heart, a receptacle for dust.
"Submission is madness. Sanity entails subversion. The heart insists on it; otherwise, life is only a slog to the graveyard."
- Phil Rockstroh
The reality is the capitalist system has reached its limits. In the past, it was able to develop the productive forces at a colossal pace. The recent period of globalization and intensification of world trade reflects the latest efforts of the system to overcome its contradictions. Credit was used to extend the market beyond the limits of capitalism but this has now reached its limits also. Every country is deleveraging. Austerity and debt reduction is on top of all the agendas.
The problem with credit is that it has to be paid back with interest. As a result, consumer spending, which makes up two-thirds of US economic activity, is stagnant or shrinking.
While corporations are flush with cash, they are not prepared to invest given the lack of markets but without investment there can be no recovery. This, in turn, adds to a collapse in demand. It is a vicious circle.
[...]
The capitalist system is being buffeted by a whole series of shocks. The contradictions of private ownership and the nation states have come to the surface. It is not this or that problem that determines the crisis, but the general organic malaise of the system. In the past, the world economy would have rebounded. For instance, after the 1982 recession, the US economy leapt forward by 5.6%, as opposed to 1.6% today. The capitalist system finds itself in a complete impasse. No amount of “stimulation” will do any good. The drugs don’t work any longer.
As for the working class, they are faced with unparalleled austerity. All the gains of the past can no longer be afforded by capitalism. Only with the overthrow of the system can the nightmare of capitalism be put behind us. On this basis, a socialist plan of production can be organized which would allow the resources of society to be fully utilized in the interests of the majority, and with it an expansion of the productive forces to an undreamed of level.
Poverty, squalor, unemployment, homelessness and the other evils of capitalism can be abolished once and for all. The alternatives of ‘Socialism or Barbarism’ explained by Rosa Luxemburg, are now more relevant than ever. For us, the only choice is socialism.
"It is not this or that problem that determines the crisis, but the general organic malaise of the system. ... Only with the overthrow of the system can the nightmare of capitalism be put behind us."
This jobs report make it that more likely that Rick Perry will be nominated president. In baseball, hitting "for the cycle" means getting a home run, a triple, a double and a single in the same game. It is a very rare accomplishment. If Perry follows George W. Bush and Obama into the presidency, the American electorate will have nearly "hit for a cycle" of terrible president. Bush was the homerun of bad presidents and Obama has been a triple. We'll be very, very lucky if Perry is only a double.
Thank you to all the liberals and progressives (and you know who you are) who gave us Obama as the Democratic Party's nominee for the presidency in 2008. When you elect amateurs, you get amateur shows--or much, much worse.
Obama: make yourself relevant. You don't want to go down in history as a waste of space who did nothing but plot his next worthless speech. Propose something that will actually help and then have the fortitude to see it through without giving up.
Okay, I think Perry would be a a GRAND SLAM home run of a disaster. That leaves second base open. Ron Paul, anyone? Who's on first? Does that base stand for competency? Does such a politician exist?
Just as the rich feel entitled to their tax cuts, I feel entitled to Social Security. I will not stand for its destruction or take the "cushioned" blow of "reform" as anything other than a complete betrayal by the Democrats. If you cut or privatize Social Security, you will never get my vote again.
