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TechnoratiAmerica's Teacher
On September 17, in the midst of the publicity blitz for his
cinematic takedown of the capitalist order, Moore talked with Nation columnist Naomi Klein by phone about the film, the roots of
our economic crisis and the promise and peril of the present political
moment. To listen to a podcast of the full conversation, click here. Following
is an edited transcript of their conversation.- -The Nation
Editors
Naomi Klein: So, the film is wonderful. Congratulations. It is,
as many people have already heard, an unapologetic call for a revolt
against capitalist madness. But the week it premiered, a very different
kind of revolt was in the news: the so-called tea parties, seemingly a
passionate defense of capitalism and against social programs.
Meanwhile, we are not seeing too many signs of the hordes storming Wall Street. Personally, I'm hoping that your film is going to be the wake-up call and the catalyst for all of that changing. But I'm just wondering how you're coping with this odd turn of events, these revolts for capitalism led by Glenn Beck.
Michael Moore: I don't know if they're so much revolts in favor of capitalism as they are being fueled by a couple of different agendas, one being the fact that a number of Americans still haven't come to grips with the fact that there's an African-American who is their leader. And I don't think they like that.
NK: Do you see that as the main driving force for the tea parties?
MM: I think it's one of the forces--but I think there's a number of agendas at work here. The other agenda is the corporate agenda. The healthcare companies and other corporate concerns are helping to pull together what seems like a spontaneous outpouring of citizen anger.
But the third part of this is--and this is what I really have always admired about the right wing: they are organized, they are dedicated, they are up at the crack of dawn fighting their fight. And on our side, I don't really see that kind of commitment.
When they were showing up at the town-hall meetings in August--those meetings are open to everyone. So where are the people from our side? And then I thought, Wow, it's August. You ever try to organize anything on the left in August?
NK: Wasn't part of it also, though, that the left, or progressives, or whatever you want to call them, have been in something of a state of disarray with regard to the Obama administration--that most people favor universal healthcare, but they couldn't rally behind it because it wasn't on the table?
MM: Yes. And that's why Obama keeps turning around and looking for the millions behind him, supporting him, and there's nobody even standing there, because he chose to take a half measure instead of the full measure that needed to happen. Had he taken the full measure--true single-payer, universal healthcare--I think he'd have millions out there backing him up.
NK: Now that the Baucus plan is going down in flames, do you think there's another window to put universal healthcare on the table?
MM: Yes. And we need people to articulate the message and get out in front of this and lead it. You know, there's close to a hundred Democrats in Congress who had already signed on as co-signers to John Conyers's bill.
Obama, I think, realizes now that whatever he thought he was trying to do with bipartisanship or holding up the olive branch, that the other side has no interest in anything other than the total destruction of anything he has stood for or was going to try and do. So if [New York Congressman Anthony] Weiner or any of the other members of Congress want to step forward, now would be the time. And I certainly would be out there. I am out there. I mean, I would use this time right now to really rally people, because I think the majority of the country wants this.
NK: Coming back to Wall Street, I want to talk a little bit more about this strange moment that we're in, where the rage that was directed at Wall Street, what was being directed at AIG executives when people were showing up in their driveways--I don't know what happened to that.
My fear was always that this huge anger that you show in the film, the kind of uprising in the face of the bailout, which forced Congress to vote against it that first time, that if that anger wasn't continuously directed at the most powerful people in society, at the elites, at the people who had created the disaster, and channeled into a real project for changing the system, then it could easily be redirected at the most vulnerable people in society; I mean immigrants, or channeled into racist rage.
And what I'm trying to sort out now is, Is it the same rage or do you think these are totally different streams of American culture--have the people who were angry at AIG turned their rage on Obama and on the idea of health reform?
MM: I don't think that is what has happened. I'm not so sure they're the same people.
In fact, I can tell you from my travels across the country while making the film and even in the last few weeks, there is something else that's simmering beneath the surface. You can't avoid the anger boiling over at some point when you have one in eight mortgages in delinquency or foreclosure, where there's a foreclosure filing once every 7.5 seconds and the unemployment rate keeps growing. That will have its own tipping point.
And the scary thing about that is that historically, at times when that has happened, the right has been able to successfully manipulate those who have been beaten down and use their rage to support what they used to call fascism.
Where has it gone since the crash? It's a year later. I think that people felt like they got it out of their system when they voted for Obama six weeks later and that he was going to ride into town and do the right thing. And he's kind of sauntered into town promising to do the right thing but not accomplishing a whole heck of a lot.
Now, that's not to say that I'm not really happy with a number of things I've seen him do.
To hear a president of the United States admit that we overthrew a democratically elected government in Iran, that's one of the things on my list I thought I'd never hear in my lifetime. So there have been those moments.
And maybe I'm just a bit too optimistic here, but he was raised by a single mother and grandparents and he did not grow up with money. And when he was fortunate enough to be able to go to Harvard and graduate from there, he didn't then go and do something where he could become rich; he decides to go work in the inner city of Chicago.
Oh, and he decides to change his name back to what it was on the birth certificate--Barack. Not exactly the move of somebody who's trying to become a politician. So he's shown us, I think, in his lifetime many things about where his heart is, and he slipped up during the campaign and told Joe the Plumber that he believed in spreading the wealth.
And I think that those things that he believes in are still there. Now, it's kind of up to him. If he's going to listen to the Rubins and the Geithners and the Summerses, you and I lose. And a lot of people who have gotten involved, many of them for the first time, won't get involved again. He will have done more to destroy what needs to happen in this country in terms of people participating in their democracy. So I hope he understands the burden that he's carrying and does the right thing.
NK: Well, I want to push you a little bit on this, because I understand what you're saying about the way he's lived his life and certainly the character he appears to have. But he is the person who appointed Summers and Geithner, who you're very appropriately hard on in the film.
And one year later, he hasn't reined in Wall Street. He reappointed Bernanke. He's not just appointed Summers but has given him an unprecedented degree of power for a mere economic adviser.
MM: And meets with him every morning.
NK: Exactly. So what I worry about is this idea that we're always psychoanalyzing Obama, and the feeling I often hear from people is that he's being duped by these guys. But these are his choices, and so why not judge him on his actions and really say, "This is on him, not on them"?
MM: I agree. I don't think he is being duped by them; I think he's smarter than all of them.
When he first appointed them I had just finished interviewing a bank robber who didn't make it into the film, but he is a bank robber who is hired by the big banks to advise them on how to avoid bank robberies.
So in order to not sink into a deep, dark pit of despair, I said to myself that night, That's what Obama's doing. Who better to fix the mess than the people who created it? He's bringing them in to clean up their own mess. Yeah, yeah. That's it. That's it. Just keep repeating it: "There's no place like home, there's no place like home..."
NK: And now it turns out they were just being brought in to keep stealing.
MM: Right. So now it's on him.
NK: All right. Let's talk about the film some more. I saw you on Leno, and I was struck that one of his first questions to you was this objection--that it's greed that's evil, not capitalism. And this is something that I hear a lot--this idea that greed or corruption is somehow an aberration from the logic of capitalism rather than the engine and the centerpiece of capitalism. And I think that that's probably something you're already hearing about the terrific sequence in the film about those corrupt Pennsylvania judges who were sending kids to private prison and getting kickbacks. I think people would say, That's not capitalism, that's corruption.
Why is it so hard to see the connection, and how are you responding to this?
MM: Well, people want to believe that it's not the economic system that's at the core of all this. You know, it's just a few bad eggs. But the fact of the matter is that, as I said to Jay [Leno], capitalism is the legalization of this greed.
Greed has been with human beings forever. We have a number of things in our species that you would call the dark side, and greed is one of them. If you don't put certain structures in place or restrictions on those parts of our being that come from that dark place, then it gets out of control. Capitalism does the opposite of that. It not only doesn't really put any structure or restriction on it. It encourages it, it rewards it.
I'm asked this question every day, because people are pretty stunned at the end of the movie to hear me say that it should just be eliminated altogether. And they're like, "Well, what's wrong with making money? Why can't I open a shoe store?"
And I realized that [because] we no longer teach economics in high school, they don't really understand what any of it means.
The point is that when you have capitalism, capitalism encourages you to think of ways to make money or to make more money. And the judges never could have gotten the kickbacks had the county not privatized the juvenile hall. But because there's been this big push in the past twenty or thirty years to privatize government services, take it out of our hands, put it in the hands of people whose only concern is their fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders or to their own pockets, it has messed everything up.
NK: The thing that I found most exciting in the film is that you make a very convincing pitch for democratically run workplaces as the alternative to this kind of loot-and-leave capitalism.
So I'm just wondering, as you're traveling around, are you seeing any momentum out there for this idea?
MM: People love this part of the film. I've been kind of surprised because I thought people aren't maybe going to understand this or it seems too hippie-dippy--but it really has resonated in the audiences that I've seen it with.
But, of course, I've pitched it as a patriotic thing to do. So if you believe in democracy, democracy can't be being able to vote every two or four years. It has to be every part of every day of your life.
We've changed relationships and institutions around quite considerably because we've decided democracy is a better way to do it. Two hundred years ago you had to ask a woman's father for permission to marry her, and then once the marriage happened, the man was calling all the shots. And legally, women couldn't own property and things like that.
Thanks to the women's movement of the '60s and '70s, this idea was introduced to that relationship--that both people are equal and both people should have a say. And I think we're better off as a result of introducing democracy into an institution like marriage.
But we spend eight to ten to twelve hours of our daily lives at work, where we have no say. I think when anthropologists dig us up 400 years from now--if we make it that far--they're going to say, "Look at these people back then. They thought they were free. They called themselves a democracy, but they spent ten hours of every day in a totalitarian situation and they allowed the richest 1 percent to have more financial wealth than the bottom 95 percent combined."
Truly they're going to laugh at us the way we laugh at people 150 years ago who put leeches on people's bodies to cure them.
NK: It is one of those ideas that keeps coming up. At various points in history it's been an enormously popular idea. It is actually what people wanted in the former Soviet Union instead of the Wild West sort of mafia capitalism that they ended up with. And what people wanted in Poland in 1989 when they voted for Solidarity was for their state-owned companies to be turned into democratically run workplaces, not to be privatized and looted.
But one of the biggest barriers I've found in my research around worker cooperatives is not just government and companies being resistant to it but actually unions as well. Obviously there are exceptions, like the union in your film, United Electrical Workers, which was really open to the idea of the Republic Windows & Doors factory being turned into a cooperative, if that's what the workers wanted. But in most cases, particularly with larger unions, they have their script, and when a factory is being closed down their job is to get a big payout--as big a payout as they can, as big a severance package as they can for the workers. And they have a dynamic that is in place, which is that the powerful ones, the decision-makers, are the owners.
You had your US premiere at the AFL-CIO convention. How are you finding labor leadership in relation to this idea? Are they open to it, or are you hearing, "Well, this isn't really workable"? Because I know you've also written about the idea that some of the auto plant factories or auto parts factories that are being closed down could be turned into factories producing subway cars, for instance. The unions would need to champion that idea for it to work.
MM: I sat there in the theater the other night with about 1,500 delegates of the AFL-CIO convention, and I was a little nervous as we got near that part of the film, and I was worried that it was going to get a little quiet in there.
Just the opposite. They cheered it. A couple people shouted out, "Right on!" "Absolutely!" I think that unions at this point have been so beaten down, they're open to some new thinking and some new ideas. And I was very encouraged to see that.
The next day at the convention the AFL-CIO passed a resolution supporting single-payer healthcare. I thought, Wow, you know? Things are changing.
NK: Coming back to what we were talking about a little earlier, about people's inability to understand basic economic theory: in your film you have this great scene where you can't get anybody, no matter how educated they are, to explain what a derivative is.
So it isn't just about basic education. It's that complexity is being used as a weapon against democratic control over the economy. This was Greenspan's argument--that derivatives were so complicated that lawmakers couldn't regulate them.
It's almost as if there needs to be a movement toward simplicity in economics or in financial affairs, which is something that Elizabeth Warren, the chief bailout watchdog for Congress, has been talking about in terms of the need to simplify people's relationships with lenders.
So I'm wondering what you think about that. Also, this isn't really much of a question, but isn't Elizabeth Warren sort of incredible? She's kind of like the anti-Summers. It's enough to give you hope, that she exists.
MM: Absolutely. And can I suggest a presidential ticket for 2016 or 2012 if Obama fails us? [Ohio Congresswoman] Marcy Kaptur and Elizabeth Warren.
NK: I love it. They really are the heroes of your film. I would vote for that.
I was thinking about what to call this piece, and what I'm going to suggest to my editor is "America's Teacher," because the film is this incredible piece of old-style popular education. One of the things that my colleague at The Nation Bill Greider talks about is that we don't do this kind of popular education anymore, that unions used to have budgets to do this kind of thing for their members, to just unpack economic theory and what's going on in the world and make it accessible. I know you see yourself as an entertainer, but I'm wondering, do you also see yourself as a teacher?
MM: I'm honored that you would use such a term. I like teachers.
202 Comments so far
Show All"one of the biggest barriers I've found in my research around worker cooperatives is not just government and companies being resistant to it but actually unions as well"
This reinforces the far-left's deep suspicion of trade unions. But we never were waiting for media stars to reinforce our suspicions. We always knew the unions' agendas by the unions' messages in the public dialogs. The unions never supported the people. The unions only supported unions. They did so by supporting the godzilla corporate employers. Worker cooperatives have always been a key component of the far-left agenda, with the ultimate goal of empowering all the people with full economic independence by limiting asset and enterprise size to ten man-powers. Kaka on the unions until they join the far-left.
""MM: I think it's one of the forces--but I think there's a number of agendas at work here. The other agenda is the corporate agenda. The healthcare companies and other corporate concerns are helping to pull together what seems like a spontaneous outpouring of citizen anger.
But the third part of this is--and this is what I really have always admired about the right wing: they are organized, they are dedicated, they are up at the crack of dawn fighting their fight. And on our side, I don't really see that kind of commitment.
When they were showing up at the town-hall meetings in August--those meetings are open to everyone. So where are the people from our side? And then I thought, Wow, it's August. You ever try to organize anything on the left in August?""
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This is a nail on the head because it shows such a collusion of the dems and repubs where the repubs are organized and dedicated and active and the seemly 'idle' dems just lounge around waiting their turn to 'pose' as a saviour from the repubs plans, scheme and agendas they started working on in the think tanks they created during nixon's terms to ensure capturing the power they craved even though it took them from 1992 to 2001 to gain that total power.
But broken down to cases the repubs for all their orgainzations and agendas they are far too corruptably off course to be left in charge and dictating policy, law and justice, they will always take the greediest way while the dems just, I don't know, beyond their collusion with the repubs, the average registered member just doesn't seem interested or wanting to be involved if he doesn't have to be, and this is definitely a break down in just a 2 party thing where one party hardly makes up an equal contender or confronter of the other.
a derivative is basically an IOU.
only fools and thugs would buy them
It’s great to hear two of my favorite public advocates coming up with great ideas to expose the master’s of the universe lack of clothing as well as offer potential solution to our dilemma.
I recall reading a book called The Reinvented Corporation where worker’s ideas are compensated with bonuses which I suppose favores the principal in the Anne Randian concept of; ‘The Virtue of Selfishness.’
However selfishness does not have to be monetary... If the greater good of the planet or community is works such as volunteerism or Sharia type investments... perhaps simply the charter goals of the corporation need to be changed to include a mandate for the ‘public good’ as well as ‘profit for shareholders’. Apple computer, that use public domain programming at the core of it's software engine and Wikipedia come to mind.
Glendon Wayne Toews
I agree. Did you know Naomi Klein had a hand in making an excellent documentary of her own? Her film, "The Take," about workers taking over an idle plant in Argentina, has been hailed as dramatic and inspiring, an epic achievement -- "The filmic equivalent of a '60s-era folk song by the likes of Bob Dylan," said Toronto Life. (See thetake.org for more info.)
I am afraid Michael Moore probably fell right into the GE/NBC/Leno trap, though, in condemning all business owners as "greedy." Probably lost most of his potential audience right there. Just as most people do not like to be called racists, most people will not like to be considered greedy, especially those business owners who are just struggling to get by.
BTW, Adam Smith agreed with you about the public good. I have to wonder if that isn't why he only got one or two mentions in my Economics 101 textbook. Someone really should tell the heretofore untold Adam Smith story.
The Second World War didn't just come along the Rome/Berlin/Tokyo Axis corrupted by their power and false sense of entitlement started it, and they damn paid a bit of a price for it. We are now paying for the greed and megalomania of our arrogant power elites.
Oh, and US democracy doesn't exist. The people don't rule here. That's the classic dictionary and objective definition of democracy. We have the biggest little whorehouse in our political system with the super rich power elites as pimps buying their politicians and making them their political prostitutes and the mainstream media just goes along as media prostitutes for these power elites to misinform the people of the USA, with the educational system failing to expose the fact that almost never have we been a real democracy in anything but rhetoric. Many great people have tried to bring us around to at least a minimally democratic state, if not society, but as a rule to no avail.
As a great man once said about Western civilization it's also true of US democracy, "It would be a good idea." Hey, maybe one day we'll try it.
The Second World War didn't just come along the Rome/Berlin/Tokyo Axis corrupted by their power and false sense of entitlement caused it, and they damn paid a bit of a price for it. We are now paying for the greed and megalomania of our arrogant power elites.
I've criticized Franklin D Roosevelt for defending the capitalist slave system of slavery for the working class, but when it comes to the Second World War is documented fact that he pleaded with the chief Nazi gangster not start that war as he did in 1939 by invading Poland, and FDR finally had to take all the Axis when like the gangster they were the Nazis and the Italian Fascists declared war on the USA after it declared war on Japan for launching it sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. These gangster were in alliance which committed them to go to war with any state which went to war with any of them.
Oh, and again Russia was the country well over half the Jews fleeing Nazi persecution fled to in that war.
AD
I concur in your deserving the title of America's Teacher.
Teaching can be a thankless and even dangerous role. You've made a lot of money but it is worth little if you don't live to spend it.
There is no doubt whatever in my mind that MLK, Jack, and Bobby were 'eliminated', as was Oswald.
Be careful. You can afford bodyguards; hire them and do as they tell you.
Everyone has an ego. Suppress the impulse to 'take bows' in public. Stay at home when not at work.
The truth be told, it is Naomi Klein and not MM who is truly America's teacher.
If you want to get a look at what MM could and should have done with his opportunities, have a look at the film "The Corporation" and go read "No Logo" and "The Shock Doctrine".
Maybe MM could make a "hang out with" movie on Naomi Klein ala Oliver Stone's paen on Hugo Chavez. MM could call it "North of the Border".
Poet
Poet: Thanks for reminding me about the film documentary, The Corporation -- I just added it to my library hold list.
I have read No Logo and Fences and Windows, as well as The Shock Doctrine. Naomi is definitely one of the most amazing thinkers we have. I try to read everything she writes.
Recently, I saw Leslie Cockburn's new film -- American Casino, and it is well worth your time. Ms. Cockburn succeeds in putting a human face on the sub-prime mortgage crisis, and links several human stories centered in Baltimore. As much as I knew about the crisis, I wasn't prepared for the depth of the tragedy. Everyone in the audience left in stunned silence, many with tears in their eyes. The director includes stats to back up her research, etc.
"You can't avoid the anger boiling over at some point ... That will have its own tipping point." –(Michael Moore)
–Fascist ideology, both operational and latent, has an inviolable primacy in America. That is where the 'weight' is.There is no countervailing political current with a structural locus in the masses to articulate an alternative to the dominant cultural psychology. Fascism is simply what American's know and are conversant with, including putatively liberal Americans.
The "tipping point" Michael Moore postulates, will at first be inchoate and diffuse; but the default position, after the dominant institutions of the military and the security and police apparat intervene, will be decidedly and irrevocably fascist.
The vacuum created when American democracy is shown to be the cipher it has always been will finally reveal the malignancy at its core.
In this situation, where 'faux left' (read reactionary!) elements are co-opted by proponents of 'order' to keep their economic status and privileges secure under the ancien règieme, there will be much to be said for nihilism.
Nihilism and direct action will be the only way in which a genuine left program will be able to perhaps emerge and constitute itself with a broad appeal beyond pedantic ideological paeans.
The White House razed, Wall St. fire bombed, Harvard University torched, Dick Cheney in a Mussolini 'moment.' twisting in the wind on a cold morning, Thomas Friedman facing a firing squad : Crowd pleasers all. Accountability and pay back through direct action. No time for 'elections' at that point.
Moore's 'optimism' that change will be benign rather than grimly dystopian is due to his Pollyannaish faith in an America that no longer exists. It is a figment of his imagination. The fact that they are still talking about 'Obama,' as if he even matters, is ridiculous.
"But, of course, I've pitched it as a patriotic thing to do. So if you believe in democracy..." –(Michael Moore)
–The point must be reached where 'patriotism' as we know must be destroyed with no apologies and unashamedly. Patriotism is the Predator drone. That Moore still has to rely on 'patriotism' to sell his program reveals how reactionary it really is. Adherence to "patriotism" is a sure sign that Michael Moore's criticisms remain cautionary proscriptions rather than radical insights.
As for "believing in democracy..." Nothing at all visionary there. If its down, do not resuscitate.
"because the film is this incredible piece of old-style popular education."
-(Michael Moore)
What he actually means to say is "old-style popular ENTERTAINMENT." Right now the only way Americans can be educated is through 'entertainment.' They are contraindicated and must not be conflated. Laugh AFTER Wall St. burns, not before. –(Jill Bains)
Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power."
Democracy is not the same as American democracy and American democratic principles and institutions have not always been as woefully downtrodden as they are now. American democracy had its peaks and valleys and was far superior to the aristocracies and theocracies that dominated the world at its advent. No other nation until that time and for many years thereafter had specific rights for citizens codified in its constitution; rights many of us still feel emboldened enough to assert. The American democracy fought on the side against slavery in the Civil War. If it was as bad as many on this site paint it it would have most certainly fought to keep the slaves enslaved. It has and it still does take in many of the world's poor and huddled masses-the wretched refuse of their teeming shores (now too many since we no longer have a frontier). The American democracy accepted women's sufferage and ultimately did away with Jim Crow. It created the National Park system--the first of its kind in human history. It wasn't and still isn't ALL bad. American history is too rich and diverse and too many of its people's struggles, losses and victories are too important to so easily consign the American experiment in democracy to history's dust bin as if it had nothing good to teach us and future generations.
I doubt what comes after us as the world's dominant super-power is likely to be an improvement.
America was never so materialistic as it is now, with consumerism running rampant. When did we start to measure ourselves in terms or material things? You see, part of the reason the elite are where they are is because on some level we worship them--worship their lifestyles, flare, and especially great wealth. Those who have great riches, we say, are somehow above or superior to the rest. On the flip side, if you are poor, you are inferior and/or of lesser character in some way. Sometime after the great depression, and the sixties 'revolution' things began to change (with Reagan?). Seemingly, it sneaked up on us. Was it the insidious and continuous propaganda coming from government and corporations that molded our attitudes? Was it our own inherent weakness as human beings?
America has clearly lost its soul; the majority no longer know what to think or how to think. Self-reliance, once a virtue, is all but non-existent. We are the pawns of screaming pundits and politicians who have succeeded in polarizing us, making us almost two separate countries under the same flag, narrow and vindictive. Additionally, we are a nation born of violence, beginning with Great Britain, continuing with the Indians, Civil War, Mexican-American war (ending with a land grab), etc., and continue to be exceedingly militaristic. And, not surprisingly, we still have a death penalty.
Except for the few 'gains' you cite, there have been many more losses. Even woman's suffrage came with a down-side. Where once most had a choice of staying home and caring for their children, many were later forced to work and put their children in daycare.
And was America always the land of opportunity for immigrants? Before the birth of unions, the Robber Barons were merciless in their exploitation of labor, even child labor (See The Jungle by Upton Sinclair).
America is no diamond in the rough, nor has it ever been. I grant you that the world of late seems to be slipping deeper into darkness, but America is as much a part of it as any other country, perhaps more. We squandered the great good will and economic power we had after WW2; we refused to accept the birth of any other type of government or economic system, and pursued our brand of cut-throat capitalism with its unbridled greed and shameless militarism, beginning with Korea and Vietnam, and leading to an insane nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union and China.
"I doubt what comes after us as the world's dominant super-power is likely to be an improvement."
Perhaps losing our dominance as a military super-power will allow things to improve for the fist time in a long time. I'm not sure a less nationalistic era would be such a bad thing. It's time we began to see ourselves as citizens of one fragile globe, rather than separate and competing tribes; in fact, I believe our very survival depends upon it.
Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power."
The '70s era onset of the hyper-materialism that predominates now occurred because of several complex factors that have yet to be fully evaluated and whose roots are dug into our dying culture. An unprecedented amount of concentrated historical change (unprecedented in all of human history) took place between the growth of the post-WWII middle class and the early civil rights movements in the 1950s, the landing of man on the moon in the late 1960s, and the ideological regression to popular support of de-regulated capitalism under Reagan.
In the pre-WWII, racially segregated, more class-fixed economy of the first two decades of the 20th century most Americans felt comfortable that they "knew their place" in the old phrase. There were numerous large cities teeming with various still-intact ethnic neighborhoods that had their own compartmentalized cultures replete with their own language newspapers, stage theatre, religious, civic and other social networking groups. They lived in close contact with other ethnic and religious groups and were learning how to live among them in the same cityscapes, but they still retained a firm sense of their cultural identity based their family's original heritage upon which the broader identity of being an American was still being defined.
But all these groups held certain traditional cultural and religious responsibilities in common as a general rule: Divorce was virtually unheard of; men were the economically and legally dominant breadwinners; women took care of the home and nourished and cared for the children; one's primary obligation in life was to fulfill the role of taking care of one's family and--for most--to practice one's religion--everything else was secondary. Most people had limited education and only roughly one out of three adult Americans owned their own home. The economy was still--in terms of jobs held--primarily agricultural based. The races generally kept within the broader culture's pre-defined limits regarding economic, cultural, marital and educational segregation.
Then, in short historical order, came racial desegregation within the military followed by raised expectations of returning black military men from WWII, followed by school desegregation, public bus and facilities desegregation, a social reform component to the growing folk music genre, The Great Society social programs of LBJ, rock-n-roll as a platform for rebelling with new ideas from and aimed at youth, the drug revolution, free love, the music/art/film psychedelic cultural revolution, the anti-war movement, women's liberation, the environmental movement, Watergate, the disgrace of of the office of the presidency because of Richard Nixon's personal disgrace, drug use moving from being a way to help enlighten one's thinking to a brainless leisure activity that helped avoid thinking, disillusion with the confusing themes of change that never seemed to accomplish any permanent solutions, the '60s generation starting to worry about how they would support their own children, their buying into the siren song of Reaganite capitalism at seemed to simultaneously allow them to "do their own thing," increasingly ignore the broader needs within society, and concentrate as much personal wealth as possible without feeling morally or ethically guilty--all the more so because the ruling class itself was behaving that way.
The Deep South went through profound upheavals and change in every facet of the people's lives. Until the 1960s, much of the Deep South outside a handful of urban enclaves was still the country of mule-plowed small farms, share-croppers and textile mills (often company towns). I remember Atlanta when it was still just a big Southern town not much bigger than Birmingham today. The rednecks and farmers would drive into town in their big '50s Chevy's full of fresh produce and kids dangling bare feet out of the car windows to sell their little plot's worth of vegetables by the road and then go shoot some pool or just cruise around the block near the old Plaza Pharmacy. "A man of means by no means...King of the Road." That was a million years and 10,000 Saturday football majorettes coifed in Dippity-Do's in pre-halftime hair curlers ago.
A great deal of change and social upheaval over a short period of time always produces various degrees of cultural shock, "future shock," backlash, moral and ethical desensitization from all the confusion, psychological numbness and an increasing difficulty in discerning "right from wrong" in complex cultures where there are seemingly more shades of grey than easily understood black and white. More and more people gradually lost contact with the food production cycles of the earth. More and more gradually lost their understanding of nature and what is natural and naturally healthy. More and more people's salaries depended upon them not believing in things that ran contrary to the beliefs and agendas of their corporate paymasters.
Part of the job of true leaders on the national scale is to provide a morally and ethically upright explanation of how to best to proceed toward a better understanding of and shaping of the country's future immediately up ahead. Preferably one that builds on the best founding principles of the nation and not the worst ones or even worse unrelated habits accumulated over time.
Honestly, I do not think man has fundamentally changed since the inception of civilization. Einstein knew this to a certain degree, and regretted his part in developing the atomic bomb. No matter how elaborate the analysis of outward cultural effects, it cannot really explain the current state of any social structure. We might say that the outer determines the inner, but civilizations have succumbed to the effects of greed and violence for millennia. This indicates that the inner determines the outer to a much greater extent. Certain aspects of human nature seem to gain dominance by default; for example, greed and superstition. All great civilizations have so-far succumbed. This is true because, basically, the structure of society is founded within the fear and insecurity of the collective. Paradoxically, this can only be resolved on the individual level. After all, it is many individuals together that comprise the collective, correct?
However, a radically new kind of 'individualism' is required, not one based solely on 'me' and 'my wants,' which is childish. What happens is that when a problem arises we tend to look outward and blame; i.e., it is always his or her fault, or "I wouldn't be like this if the world wasn't like that..." Essentially, then, we are self-ignorant, and because of this bump into one another at every turn, perpetually in conflict. Without our tacit agreement, the exploitative structure we live under could not exist. That is why any reform, born of ignorance, is doomed to fail; it fails to deal with the root cause and only serves to maintain it along with the status quo. Both Thoreau and Emerson understood this early on.
Emerson writes:
“Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.”
Once you gain a better understanding of human nature, metal, you begin to see history and cultural influence in a different light. You understand that nothing but corruption can come from corruption, and why the dark cycles and patterns of humanity keep repeating. Also, why Obama is behaving the way he is, and chose those he did for high positions. My take is that Obama is presently more weak than evil, but that can quickly change. Nevertheless, the result of his administration will be the same--or more of the same. Thus, simply studying history will not guarantee change as long as the dark side of human nature remains dominant, though it might provide a false feeling of confidence. For example, with the right series of catalysts we'll create a fascist government like Nazi Germany, regardless of knowledge of historical events; similar events will be given a different spin to disguise their real nature to be sure.
Again we come back to same theme: civilization cannot undergo a transformation until or unless we fundamentally transform ourselves. This requires that we become more conscious and aware on every level. Sadly, I see little evidence of this happening; rather, we want to impose what we BELIEVE is right on everyone else, while blaming everyone and everything but ourselves for negative outcomes.
This was the other thief story that you reminded me of with your excellent comment;
Dudjom Rinpoche used to tell the story of a powerful bandit in India, who, after countless successful raids, realized the terrible suffering he had been causing. He yearned for some way of atoning for what he had done, and visited a famous master. He asked him: “I am a sinner, I am in torment. What’s the way out? What can I do?”
The master looked the bandit up and down and then asked him what he was good at.
“Nothing,” replied the bandit.
“Nothing?” barked the master. “You must be good at something!”
The bandit was silent for a while, and eventually admitted: “Actually there is one thing I have a talent for, and that’s stealing.”
The master chuckled: “Good! That’s exactly the skill you’ll need now. Go to a quiet place and rob all your perceptions, and steal all the stars and planets in the sky, and dissolve them into the belly of emptiness, the all-encompassing space of the nature of mind.”
Within twenty-one days, the bandit had realized the nature of his mind, and eventually came to be regarded as one of the great saints of India.
21 days?? He must have been a good 'thief' indeed. :o)
The Thief Who Became a Disciple
One evening as Shichiri Kojun was reciting sutras a thief with a sharp sword entered, demanding wither his money or his life.
Shichiri told him: “Do not disturb me. You can find the money in that drawer.” Then he resumed his recitation.
A little while afterwards he stopped and called: “Don’t take it all. I need some to pay taxes with tomorrow.”
The intruder gathered up most of the money and started to leave. “Thank a person when you receive a gift,” Shichiri added. The man thanked him and made off.
A few days afterwards the fellow was caught and confessed, among others, the offense against Shichiri. When Shichiri was called as a witness he said: “This man is no thief, at least as far as I am concerned. I gave him the money and he thanked me for it.”
After he had finished his prison term, the man went to Shichiri and became his disciple.
Thank you, Great story!
CHESSGAMES56: Thanks for this excellent post. I've been very influenced by both Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell, and I feel that they would be in agreement with your post as well.
Thank you so much. Not too familiar with Campbell. I'll have to google him.
Your distinction between "American democracy" and 'philosophical democracy' as a concept, is well taken.One has been subjected to history, while the latter exists in a textbook.
Yet American democracy has been built too precariously over a foundation of shifting sands and savaged by the very freedoms it allows.That weak foundation has been historically stressed and has imploded, leaving a fault line to be filled by irrational and fascist ideology– which has become the dominant value of that American democracy. As must be obvious to you, the world can no longer afford the malaise that is sanctified by virtue of it being produced through 'Democracy.'
It can be argued that the "peaks and valleys" of American democracy's triumphs and failings are only natural dynamic variances of struggle; the very by products of the freedom it creates. It is an ebb and flow, a give and take oscillation between entirely antithetical world views, who share an equal purchase on power through legal political expression.The freedom to legitimize and act on evil is codified as well as the freedom to build National parks.
I believe, as one commentator to your posting has pointed out, the supposed historical triumphs of American democracy are not all they are made out to be. These 'good things' are really little more than window dressing and propaganda functioning to create a Pollyannaish ideology meant to cover up monstrous acts of an ongoing depravity.
These acts have become not aberrations, but constitutive themes and permanent projections of the psychopathy of American democracy. It is well deserving of an ignominious death for it provides the legitimation of the fascism that now has obdurately consumed it. That is something that cannot be tweaked or modified for the better through existing American institutions.
Reform, even it emerges, is always more an illusion than reality; reform serves as a mere holding pattern, little more than a band-aid; even worse it is usually little more than cynical propaganda. It is no longer an 'option.' As slaughter and barbarism rage all around, reform is a fool's conceit.
Michael Moore, as the astute poster 'Ephraim' has commented on in this thread, is a sentimentalist. His views as well as his films–although critical of the depredations produced by said 'democracy' –ultimately are little more than rationalizations for it.
Attempting to sever the 'good from the bad' in America is an exercise in sophistry. Nor is it a legitimate argument for continuance by assuming that what comes after it will be worse. I have no doubt it will be, but let's see what comes up in the tumbling dice.Clearly nostalgia for as fictive lost paradise serves only reaction.
As of now American democracy must be razed or entirely retooled, with extreme prejudice. Harvard University will no longer exist, but be turned into a National park, or better a shelter for the temporarily homeless. –(Jill Bains)
You write : "As of now American democracy must be razed or entirely retooled, with extreme prejudice."
I agree, and would add that, the alternative for which I'm affraid we are heading for is World War, it has often been the answer to the failure to reconcile economic and political theories with the realities of power.
METAL: I took a look at this thread again today and read your many posts. I must say that I find you to be an extremely intelligent and a very WISE person. You have an excellent command of history and know how to get right down to real facts, not the ones we, as Americans, would like to think are the facts. Your posts are excellent!
With my first reading of this last post of yours I felt quite emotional--I really do love my country and its people. But something is not quite right here. I began to feel uneasy when you said, "The American democracy accepted women's suffrage...". I do not have the knowledge of history that you do, however it has always bothered me that the suffrage movement in the US refused to see the agony of the southern black women and instead ignored them hoping for a passage of the suffrage laws. This instance has always guided me in my life; it has always reminded me that ends never justify means, because not only did the US not get suffrage for women in that year, many years would pass before the women's suffrage amendment would pass. That was in 1920, AFTER Australia, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Finland, Iceland, Hungary, Ireland, Russia, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and many other small countries. So, I would say no pats on the back of the US for women's suffrage.
And as for Jim Crow. Well in the first place, should this really be such a thing to be proud of? And furthermore, immediately after the civil war the wealthy classes began to invent new strategies for enslavement, for instance prison work gangs and keeping the blacks in a position where they "owed their life to the company store". To some extent, they are still enslaved even today.
Perhaps I could even make some weak arguments regarding your other examples of the reasons we can be proud of our country...but this is enough for now.
Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power."
Just because the women's suffrage movement took from years to decades longer to succeed in America than in other countries does not lessen its significance to American history or American history as compared to the histories of autocracies, theocracies and communist and fascist totalitarian dictatorships. The ideal of democracy as attempted in various forms of government has always been comparatively more flexible, experimental and open to change. The degree of elasticity for change within a given attempt at democracy depends on many factors, especially the elasticity of its founding constitution (as in the U.S.) or historical principles leading very gradually toward more democratic legal and cultural precedents (as in Britain). Democracies tend to begin by allowing more rights to be enjoyed by more people than most other historical forms of government, and then a series of historical struggles is undertaken to gradually expand and better secure those rights. What took American democracy less than two centuries to achieve took those other countries (and their precursor cultures) that you cite over a thousand years to achieve.
I never said Jim Crow was "something to be proud of." I suggested that its end was something to be proud of. I'm old enough to remember segregation and have lived long enough to see some attempts by black Americans to restore educational segregation--a risky sub-experiment considering the struggle to de-segregate in the first place.
The textile companies, coal, steel and other heavy industrial companies that practiced "company store" economic indenture did so to both white and black populations and the labor movements in the 1920s and the 1930s fought back to gain the few rights workers have (and have been slowly losing again since 1980). The predations of the Right must also be viewed in the dark light of the complacency of the Left and its 30 year failure to intelligently reorganize to resist.
But none of the positive changes that took place so rapidly in America (compared to the centuries upon centuries of rigid class-fixed feudal subservience in most of the rest of the world) could have happened without the Constitution and its strong assertion of rights that emboldened such change even in the face of "official" condemnation.
I find plenty to constructively criticize about the U.S. and even I'm not sure its core founding principles are salvageable within the U.S. anymore. Like the better aspects of Roman law, the English Magna Carta and English common law, it may be for future generations to take the best of American law and culture and incorporate them into a better experiment seeking to attain the democratic ideal.
But I grow exceedingly weary of many of the posts on CD that amount to nothing more than constant blasting attacks on American history that never compare what we have accomplished in our very short history to the far longer histories of stagnant systematic religious and political oppression, completely unrestrained, inherited economic elitism and woe for what what were ancient peasant classes common in both Eastern and Western societies until the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries.
"But I grow exceedingly weary of many of the posts on CD that amount to nothing more than constant blasting attacks on American history that never compare what we have accomplished..." (metal)
–You " grow exceedingly weary?"
Exceedingly?"
Not weary enough, by any means. Please!
"What we have accomplished?" The Predator drone is what we have accomplished.
Argumentation by analogy and comparison ends up as a rationalization and apologia for the status quo based on an almost nostalgic sentimentality.
Perhaps that is what you want to convey, despite your tone of general omniscience and grasp of historical reference. It sounds solipsistic and involuted, trying to create an interpretive 'nuance' which ends up overlooking 'the forest for the trees.'
Certainly the 'grey areas' in American history are important, but they remain ancillary to the thematic, overall malignancy which your hagiographic reading seems to overlook. The upshot is a reactionary political vision which is more self-satisfied than radically critical.
Despite your eloquence and ostensibly 'critical' commentary what you ultimately convey– (at least to me)– is a tortured and finally specious argument for some kind of 'Neo-patriotism.' If anything, it is a unique position, arrived at by a circuitous chain of reasoning in full contradiction with itself. It is the very lens itself with which you view America which seems faulty and obsequious; it is a perspective which is discredited because it is created from the very problem it attempts to criticize.
You have 'hope' for America when there is no hope. The light will emerge from ashes. No more no less. Whatever good America has produced no longer matters. New politics emerge from that insight alone.
America has enough 'cheerleaders.' You are too smart to put yourself in their company.
–(Jill Bains)
Give Me A break! This guy makes millions from his movies while at the same time decrys capitalism?
Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power."
Someone's got to sell the capitalists the rope to hang themselves.
Who is Cicero? You keep repeating his BS as if he is a deity. Pity, you don't know what freedom is. Participation in power has no meaning until the exact form and consistency are spelled out. And boy is that hard.
you just made best case for the shity smell of capitalism - but Moore made same movie on time, 20 years ago "Roger and Me" . It takes 20 years to be heard when billions of dollars are stocked against you 24/7.
edweg
I'll break you off a piece of that Kit-Kat bar if you can explain to me why peoples' opinions need to be ruled by their wallets...
A little duplication, a technical giitch dawg, seems to have occurred. Hey, I did it. I confess but my punishment is I have to sleep with an upscale white wench from Manhattan's lower east side or from Beverly Hills. Hey, that's punishment enough for a self respecting working class kid or one with that background. Oh, and Hank Paulson wife or whore, no that's really off the head.
AD
Being of working class background and now suffering from an injury inflicted on me by a jack ass who wouldn't stop at a stop sign with me on foot and led to me having to get major surgery and now having to recover from same while not being sure just how the bills for same will get paid, but to the health insurance industry tyranny over health care in the USA, I have some spare time to let go on these lower than rat excrement bastards as my paternal grandfather would call them.
I like Michael Parenti have that working class background which help me to see things as they really are in this bananna republic seeking to pass itself off as a democracy and to tell
our power elites kiss my booty, being in the proud George McGovern Christian tradition of turning the other cheek and actually both of them to these lower than rat excrement types. After all the prince of peace did drive the money changers from the temple and demonstrate a muscular type of Christianity with all out hypocrites such as our current neo cons and fake Christians such as Billy Graham and his son.
I know communism and socialism aren't monolithic. Thus in regard to my prior remarks, let me put this to right here and now. For those who regard such states as Sweden, Britain, and other West European states as capitalist then my remarks don't apply. They don't apply to Canada at least they haven't. Canada and these other states just referred to, and we're talking about nation states, not the US use of the term, which is normally the same as provinces in other countries, aren't capitalist in the sense of the USA and certain other states, mainly US client states in the Third World. They have what at a minimum must be called socialized capitalism with Canada not being clearly as socialized in its version of capitalism as say the Scandinavian states and most West European states including Italy. Britain is losing some of its socialization of capitalism "thanks" to Tony Blair, the illegitimate son of Maggie Thatcher, as he's known north of the border, in Scotland.
But fortunately for that UK country and Wales, devolution which Blairite Labor had never thought would have any impact. Those UK countries have been able to keep their capitalism more under control with socialization of same. Scotland has historically been more socialist and with the program than England and several elections saved England from itself, much it in the same way blacks and other people of color have saved white Yanks from ourselves.
Nor has communism been monolithic, as Bill Fulbright tried to tell the USA back in 1964 with his book "Cold War Myths and New Realities" and later with the "Arrogance of Power" in 1966.
But to try to put up some false moral equivalency between those communist states even at their worst and the capitalist states at their worst is a fallacy of false equivalency. The moral compass of such socialist states is still on a far higher plane than these scum bag capitalist states such as Chile under the Pinochet tyranny. The same is true of other capitalist and client states of the USA or US big business interests such as Colombia, with all its hard drug pushing and kill crazy genocide against its own people. Cuba has a much better human rights record than such capitalist states such as these except in the fiction and damn propaganda which passes for news the US mainstream far right booty kissing media and our failed Star and Stripes" waving "The USA always fights for freedom" educational system, which I know about first hand. It was only after my formal education that I got a real education reading I F Stone, later Christopher Simpson, and in between but not through my formal education reading Martin Luther King Jr's "Trumpet of Conscience." I went to college in the US North, Oregon, but it wasn't even on a required reading list, as it should have been. Today Zinn, Dr King, and Simpson key books shining a light on the real country we live in should be required reading in junior highs and middle schools for us to have an informed populace not so easily misled by our prostituted mainstream media selling their souls for thirty pieces of silver at the drop of a hat.
Being of working class background and now suffering from an injury inflicted on me by a jack ass who wouldn't stop at a stop sign with me on foot and led to me having to get major surgery and now having to recover from same while not being sure just how the bills for same will get paid, due to the health insurance industry tyranny over health care in the USA, I have some spare time to let go on these lower than rat excrement bastards as my paternal grandfather would call them.
I like Michael Parenti have that working class background which help me to see things as they really are in this bananna republic seeking to pass itself off as a democracy and to tell
our power elites kiss my booty, being in the proud George McGovern Christian tradition of turning the other cheek and actually both of them to these lower than rat excrement types. After all the prince of peace did drive the money changers from the temple and demonstrate a muscular type of Christianity with all out hypocrites such as our current neo cons and fake Christians such as Billy Graham and his son.
I know communism and socialism aren't monolithic. Thus in regard to my prior remarks, let me put this to right here and now. For those who regard such states as Sweden, Britain, and other West European states as capitalist then my remarks don't apply. They don't apply to Canada at least they haven't. Canada and these other states just referred to, and we're talking about nation states, not the US use of the term, which is normally the same as provinces in other countries, aren't capitalist in the sense of the USA and certain other states, mainly US client states in the Third World. They have what at a minimum must be called socialized capitalism with Canada not being clearly as socialized in its version of capitalism as say the Scandinavian states and most West European states including Italy. Britain is losing some of its socialization of capitalism "thanks" to Tony Blair, the illegitimate son of Maggie Thatcher, as he's known north of the border, in Scotland.
But fortunately for that UK country and Wales, devolution which Blairite Labor had never thought would have any impact. Those UK countries have been able to keep their capitalism more under control with socialization of same. Scotland has historically been more socialist and with the program than England and several elections saved England from itself, much it in the same way blacks and other people of color have saved white Yanks from ourselves.
Nor has communism been monolithic, as Bill Fulbright tried to tell the USA back in 1964 with his book "Cold War Myths and New Realities" and later with the "Arrogance of Power" in 1966.
But to try to put up some false moral equivalency between those communist states even at their worst and the capitalist states at their worst is a fallacy of false equivalency. The moral compass of such socialist states is still on a far higher plane than these scum bag capitalist states such as Chile under the Pinochet tyranny. The same is true of other capitalist and client states of the USA or US big business interests such as Colombia, with all its hard drug pushing and kill crazy genocide against its own people. Cuba has a much better human rights record than such capitalist states such as these except in the fiction and damn propaganda which passes for news the US mainstream far right booty kissing media and our failed Star and Stripes" waving "The USA always fights for freedom" educational system, which I know about first hand. It was only after my formal education that I got a real education reading I F Stone, later Christopher Simpson, and in between but not through my formal education reading Martin Luther King Jr's "Trumpet of Conscience." I went to college in the US North, Oregon, but it wasn't even on a required reading list, as it should have been. Today Zinn, Dr King, and Simpson's key books shining a light on the real country we live in should be required reading in junior highs and middle schools for us to have an informed populace not so easily misled by our prostituted mainstream media selling their souls for thirty pieces of silver at the drop of a hat while they lead on down, need I say it, a primrose path to Hell.
Damn I'd make a great preacher.
Being of working class background and now suffering from an injury inflicted on me by a jack ass who wouldn't stop at a stop sign with me on foot and led to me having to get major surgery and now having to recover from same while not being sure just how the bills for same will get paid, due to the health insurance industry tyranny over health care in the USA, I have some spare time to let go on these lower than rat excrement bastards as my paternal grandfather would call them.
I like Michael Parenti have that working class background which help me to see things as they really are in this bananna republic seeking to pass itself off as a democracy and to tell
our power elites kiss my booty, being in the proud George McGovern Christian tradition of turning the other cheek and actually both of them to these lower than rat excrement types. After all the prince of peace did drive the money changers from the temple and demonstrate a muscular type of Christianity with all out hypocrites such as our current neo cons and fake Christians such as Billy Graham and his son.
I know communism and socialism aren't monolithic. Thus in regard to my prior remarks, let me put this to right here and now. For those who regard such states as Sweden, Britain, and other West European states as capitalist then my remarks don't apply. They don't apply to Canada at least they haven't. Canada and these other states just referred to, and we're talking about nation states, not the US use of the term, which is normally the same as provinces in other countries, aren't capitalist in the sense of the USA and certain other states, mainly US client states in the Third World. They have what at a minimum must be called socialized capitalism with Canada not being clearly as socialized in its version of capitalism as say the Scandinavian states and most West European states including Italy. Britain is losing some of its socialization of capitalism "thanks" to Tony Blair, the illegitimate son of Maggie Thatcher, as he's known north of the border, in Scotland.
But fortunately for that UK country and Wales, devolution which Blairite Labor had never thought would have any impact. Those UK countries have been able to keep their capitalism more under control with socialization of same. Scotland has historically been more socialist and with the program than England and several elections saved England from itself, much it in the same way blacks and other people of color have saved white Yanks from ourselves.
Nor has communism been monolithic, as Bill Fulbright tried to tell the USA back in 1964 with his book "Cold War Myths and New Realities" and later with the "Arrogance of Power" in 1966.
But to try to put up some false moral equivalency between those communist states even at their worst and the capitalist states at their worst is a fallacy of false equivalency. The moral compass of such socialist states is still on a far higher plane than these scum bag capitalist states such as Chile under the Pinochet tyranny. The same is true of other capitalist and client states of the USA or US big business interests such as Colombia, with all its hard drug pushing and kill crazy genocide against its own people. Cuba has a much better human rights record than such capitalist states such as these except in the fiction and damn propaganda which passes for news the US mainstream far right booty kissing media and our failed Star and Stripes" waving "The USA always fights for freedom" educational system, which I know about first hand. It was only after my formal education that I got a real education reading I F Stone, later Christopher Simpson, and in between but not through my formal education reading Martin Luther King Jr's "Trumpet of Conscience." I went to college in the US North, Oregon, but it wasn't even on a required reading list, as it should have been. Today Zinn, Dr King, and Simpson's key books shining a light on the real country we live in should be required reading in junior highs and middle schools for us to have an informed populace not so easily misled by our prostituted mainstream media selling their souls for thirty pieces of silver at the drop of a hat while they lead on down, need I say it, a primrose path to Hell.
Damn I'd make a great preacher.
PREACH ON , AD!!!
you remind of John Steinbeck!!!
Ever notice how it's women - Warren, Edmonds, Watkins, Greenhouse - who are the ones blowing the whistles and playing watchdog, while the (white) men loot, pillage and burn all which their eyes can see, and also some more on top of that...?
Think about it - not a single female CEO bankster... probably because they just can't be trusted to lie, cheat and steal like the boys...
women nurture, value love and loyalty, they parent.
men embody rapacious greed, they kill, destroy
and maim for petty personal gain.
generalizations yes, but generally true.
rainbows and angels, or
guns, beer & pick-ups.
Insipid.
Communism and Socialism are about what the Judeo/Christian faith teach, justice, decency, solidarity with those who suffer injustice and freedom. Capitalism is about destroying the same in the name of greed and booty sucking up to the super rich who got where they are by robbing the rest of us. We want what we earned back, That's muscular Christianity of the social gospel type exemplified by Franklin D Roosevelt. Communism except for some of the time under Joseph Stalin at his worse in Moscow didn't do that bad. They had two of the four freedoms FDR talked about-- freedom of religion and freedom from want. What did the USA ever have freedom of religion, and that's it, and no it didn't damn work for the working class and middle class. Get damn real. I come from a working class background. The US predator, social darwinist capitalism destroys families, other social ties, and creates a high crime rate making it dangerous for people except the super rich. It isn't worth a damn, and it's a full fledged failure. Oh, and socialist governments have done mighty fine as long as the CIA and other US national security gangsters in the Cold War laid off them. The British Labor government elected in 1945 gave the British people much, and even the Tories or Conservative when they won elections left most of it the hell alone. The same was true in Scandinavia with regard to the Christian Democrats when they prevailed over the Social Democrats there. This was also the case in Italy for the most part. This has held true in much of the industrialized world which is safer, has less crime, better social ties of the people to each other, and families not being destroyed by their systems as greed and "the love of money" isn't so damn glorified and even genuflected to by politicians as it is in the USA.
Better to be communized than neo constipated.
AD
Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power."
I suggest you take a closer look at the USSR under Lenin as well as Stalin. Forced relocations and resulting mass starvation began under Lenin. You need to also look at conditions in China during the Cultural Revolution and what they did and are still doing to Tibet. Pol Pot is another example of run amok "communism." Communism never worked in the real world except temporarily on the small scale of the Israeli kibbutz agricultural collective. All attempts at communism in populous countries failed spectacularly and even the Chinese finally chose capitalist totalitarianism over communist totalitarianism (of course that experiment is not over yet).
What makes contemporary American capitalism and the overtly fascist direction it has taken equally grotesque is that the ruthlessness of US capitalist profiteering has exceeded the ruthlessness of the Nazi SS profiteers who ran the labor and death camps.
The SS (Schutzstaffeln) in the Arbeitslager and Vernichtungslager looted warehouses full of the personal possessions of the inmates (or gas chamber victims) both after they stepped off the trains (clothing, jewelry, shoes, eye-glasses, etc.) and before the ones who were gassed were cremated (they would pull all the gold fillings from the corpses' teeth). These commodities were sold into the SS black market for which they issued stock certificates that could only be owned by other members of the SS and certain Nazi elite. But this was only a one-off profit taking: Each victim could be looted in the camps only once.
Contemporary American capitalism, by comparison, has learned to de-regulate a host of parasitic industries to effect multiple lootings of every non-wealthy citizen from cradle to grave: The health insurance industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the financial industry, the auto industry, corporate agri-giants, privatized prisons, privatized education, the diamond monopolies, the funeral industry, etc. Americans are the crop and the market for their own slow, repeated harvest (until the final harvest to that great big genetically modified Elysium field in the sky).
Far too many Americans have let the capitalists condition them to abandon all spiritual, moral or ethical precepts in order to be complicit in this slow methodical capitalist death scything by eagerly screwing over their fellow Americans for comparatively miniscule percentages of the take. The ruling corporate oligarchs are the true harvesters not just of our means, but our futures. They are the ones who pull out our potential like gold fillings from a cadaver. They are the ones who render meaningless the lives of those they dupe into doing their most foul dirty work against their fellow Americans and in stealing other nation's resources and other nation's futures.
"Stop shaking the tyrant's bloody robes in my face, or I will believe that you wish to put Rome in chains."
–(Maxamillien Robespierre, "Virtue and Terror.")
Lurking in the interstices of this fine posting is little more than a cleverly masked, if not shrouded apologia for American capitalism. This is despite your otherwise accurate and well stated assessments of just how awful that species has become.
Categorically denigrating primitive attempts at Communism is little more than Libertarian 'clap trap' and specious argument by analogy.
As one commentator has noted, the first attempts at flight ended wretchedly, but the 'idea' of flight persisting, eventually triumphed.
It no longer suffices to cite the depredations of Stalin, Mao or Lenin or the Nazi SS as an argument by proxy comparison.
Suggested reading, especially the chapter on the Chinese Cultural Revolution: Alain Badiou, "Polemics," (Verso Books, 2006)
Not for the faint of heart or the intellectually or morally timid. –(Jill Bains)
Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power."
My previous post was hardly an apologia for American capitalism. Your reaction comes closer to unquestioning praise for communism. I have never hidden the fact that I believe in SOME COMPONENTS of capitalism that communism has always failed to adequately or honestly address (I list them below). I do not categorically denigrate primitive attempts at communism that, in the Soviet Union especially, provided a tremendous improvement for most Russians as compared to the abject peonage of the Tsarist epoch. But the Tsars had their secret guard, cossacks and Cheka and the Tsarist Cheka was absorbed directly into Lenin's communist State to execute the very same job. From the Cheka came the NKVD and thence, the KGB.
The basic tsarist mission of the imperial Cheka to "find" treason and eliminate it was essentially the same as the one given to Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the first head of the Cheka, by the ruling cabinet, the Council of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom) under Lenin:
1. To investigate and liquidate all attempts or actions connected with counter-revolution or sabotage, no matter from whom they may come, throughout Russia.
2. The handing over for trial by Revolutionary Tribunal of all saboteurs and counter-revolutionaries, and the elaboration of measures to fight them. These were kangaroo courts that selectively produced show trials, forced deportations of hundreds of thousands to Siberia or politically expedient, silent secret executions.
In the first year of Lenin's new government, the Cheka had set up its own three-man courts, known as troikas, to carry out extra-judicial reprisal. This extra-judicial reprisal gave the communist Cheka the power to perform investigation, arrest, interrogation, prosecution, trial, and execution of the verdict, including the death penalty. THAT is large-scale communist "social justice" in the real world and China was and still is hardly better within its historical boundaries and especially within Tibet. The more you look at the FACTS of the history of the USSR, the People's Republic of China, the Democratic Republic of East Germany, Cambodia under Pol Pot, etc., the uglier it gets. If you want to cite a better example to defend communism you should cite post-Soviet Cuba--even though it still has problems with civil liberties there are as many political prisoners in the U.S these days. But Cuba has a better defined moral and ethical set of principles based on the economic fairness and social justice principles within idealized communism than exists under contemporary industrial and post-industrial American capitalism extending back to the 1880s--against which American democratic, progressive, and socialist movements have comprised the best resistance so far. I include MLK Jr.'s civil rights movement as a democratic resistance movement although it was also religiously based.
Until either capitalism in all its present incarnations or communism succeed at honestly and comprehensively addressing current real world conditions as they exist in the real world, and until either of these systems or their variants actually SUCCEED at little more than primitive attempts, they are both deserving of strong criticism. The historically unpleasant fact for many old guard far-Leftists who post in this cite is that BOTH major large-scale attempts at communism failed bitterly while the capitalists around the world still remain. In terms of the longevity of attempts at civilization, communism was a fart in a tornado: Poorly elaborated and too theoretical and against basic human psychological drives to be financially independent, pride of ownership of at least small business, and incentives to innovate in the creation of new and better goods and services.
If you are going to be honest, you need to apply the same intense scrutiny to both capitalist and communism failures. And, by your own logic, just because previous attempts at democracy failed under wretched circumstances that does not mean that the idea of democracy won't persist and eventually triumph.
metal: Thanks for this post. The historical references you site are important. I agree that both communism and capitalism are "deserving of strong criticism," and that we need to "apply the same intense scrutiny to the failures" of both belief systems.
I can dig it.
Your analysis is bone-chillingly accurate.
Michal Moore is wrong to think that just because Obama is a nouveau riche - having grown up lower middle class but acquiring wealth as an adult - it follows that he would have more compassion and empathy for the less fortunate and be more willing to fight harder for equality and justice than those of us who were born with a silver spoon in our mouths. There is plenty of evidence to the contrary.
FDR was quite rich. Richard Nixon was nouveau. Hoover was an orphan at eight. JFK had the silver spoon as a baby.
"Wanna-being," or just getting ahead, takes a lot of energy, commitment, and single-mindedness, not to mention all the sucking up you must practice on a daily basis. When you're born into money, you're not coveting from the material world, you have the time to dabble in charity, good works, you are privileged, you wear old clothes who cares!, you don't have to suck up to anyone. You realize that it feels good to be good. You've got the time, you've got the money. Children brought up with wealth often have a kind of malaise mixed with guilt that can be ameliorated by helping the less fortunate. And they often take this path.
you are right that human psyche is independent from a life condition, though this not always the case / - more influence has the love of parents on the character -most influence on world view has intelligence for the p.left and smartness for the p. right.
edweg
Good comment, except
"...helping the less fortunate." Fortunate implies something unexpected, uncertain, luck or an outcome based on small odds.
I'd suggest that wealth distribution in the U.S. is very certain and controlled. It is the economic system that is designed to support and enrich the wealthy. That's what MM is saying and I agree.
This colloquialism of the "less fortunate" is a mind set that feeds into and reinforces this current economic system. We need to choose are words carefully.
The phrase "less fortunate" also obscures the fact that it is a condition more effected by deliberate design, than the casual dispensations of fortune.
–(Jill Bains)
A significant similar problem with the use of "WE"...
Yeah, I see your point and agree.
Keen observation.
MM: '.... I think the majority of the country wants this (universal health care)'.
Moore is more correct than he thought. The latest NYTimes/CBS poll (Sept 25) shows that more than twice as many people want a public option 'like Medicare' than not. 'Medicare for all option' is the most robust public option one can ask for, and 65% of us want it!
Interestingly, those who don't want a 'Medicare option for all' (26%) number about the same as those who think (1) the government will mandate death for our elders (26%), and (2) illegal immigrants will be covered (30%), both utter nonsense, outright lies from the health care industry publicized during the month Obama took off to play golf at Martha's Vineyard with corporate titans. Would he had worked as hard for us!
I posted this on another thread on CD but I feel it appropriate to the subject of NK's interview of MM, and in any case the more people that know this the better:
Here is a small story which some would not see the relevance in but I think makes you realize how hopeless the US situation is, and has been completely hidden by the media:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601092&sid=afX0BWHToC1g
This means that two lots of bonds have been seized on the Italian Swiss border, one of $134 billion and this one of $100 billion. Those of you who say these must be forgeries must answer two questions. Why does it take the secret service from July to September to study the matter? Why any forger would be so stupid as to waste his time on a document that can be easily traced. The third question must be has anybody met a stupid Swiss banker?
Yes, no mistake BILLIONS : These are the astronomical amounts that have been caught by the Italian financial police. How much has passed through and where is it destined? You cannot cash these bonds in at 500 million a pop. You can lodge them as security, perhaps, if you can find the right banker.
What this means is in fact that the dollar as a reserve currency is finished, at least as far as the owners of these bearer bonds are concerned. Once the dollar starts its implosion it will collapse very quickly.
The G20 is floating a delusion that the crises is over and the recovery has started. The reality is that the players at the casino lost, then borrowed to double up, and now are about to loose again.
After having stolen your future, they are gambling away your assets, but they have lost before the dice are cast. They have lost because they forgot that “money” has only a value when it circulates widely and to replace the asset they invented and destroyed in the banks of the world, they had to vacume all the capital and call in every marker.
Now banks look good but can't lend, defeating their reason for existance in the capitalist system. But, I don't even want to borrow. I, like most people in the world, want to honestly earn my daily bread and to do so I just need what is mine by right; my future and my freedom. Both have been stolen by the banks and their paid government cronies who say we must follow them or else!
we know money don't grow on threes, but we often forget they don't dissipater either - so where are they physically? People who realize how private bank accounts are stuffed with billions that together made tens of trillions also realize how much money is needed just to serve interest on these accounts - so they took advantage of Obama economic orientation and handled him a bill telling him it's on our behalf. That's why he thinks he is saving the economy.
edweg
great post ezeflyer
Thanx azjoe
NO, BOYGRAMPS is exactly in the correct thread!!! We are at a crucial turningpoint that begs for enlightenment within the soul of every last "majority Democratic Party voter!!!"
When FDR became president in 1933, he inspired "radical" economic legislation during his first 100 days, some of which was almost directly copied from legislation he pushed through as Governor of New York State the years before;conversely,brilliant motivational speaker Audacity of Hope if not Change, campaigner Senator Obama (shockingly?) morphed into Wall Street Contributions Beholden "Possibly Centrist" President Obama who during his first 100 days, allowed Rubin,Summers, Gaither,Bernanke foxes free reign in the citizens' economic chicken coop, irrationally rewarding the enablers of the economic meltdown.FDR called them "Ecomomic Royalists." For Obama, they constitute "key advisors." My friends tell me, give the President "more time,""he's between a rock and a hard place." Enough with 'liberals' fencesitting,I say I refuse to allow myself to be misled any more.
If this country is to have a viable future, its economic system has to be a creative blend of the "best"of Socialism and Capitalism---which means, taking human nature into account---the capitalism has to be assiduously REGULATED!! Bring back Glass-Steagell, for starters!!
del
The Teabagger Socialist-Free Purity Pledge
by Laura Clawson
I, ________________________, do solemnly swear to uphold the principles of a socialism-free society and heretofore pledge my word that I shall strictly adhere to the following:
I will complain about the destruction of 1st Amendment Rights in this country, while I am duly being allowed to exercise my 1st Amendment Rights.
I will complain about the destruction of my 2nd Amendment Rights in this country, while I am duly being allowed to exercise my 2nd Amendment rights by legally but brazenly brandishing unconcealed firearms in public.
I will foreswear the time-honored principles of fairness, decency, and respect by screaming unintelligible platitudes regarding tyranny, Nazi-ism, and socialism at public town halls. Also.
I pledge to eliminate all government intervention in my life. I will abstain from the use of and participation in any socialist goods and services including but not limited to the following:
* Social Security
* Medicare/Medicaid
* State Children’s Health Insurance Programs (SCHIP)
* Police, Fire, and Emergency Services
* US Postal Service
* Roads and Highways
* Air Travel (regulated by the socialist FAA)
* The US Railway System
* Public Subways and Metro Systems
* Public Bus and Lightrail Systems
* Rest Areas on Highways
* Sidewalks
* All Government-Funded Local/State Projects (e.g., see Iowa 2009 federal senate appropriations)
* Public Water and Sewer Services (goodbye socialist toilet, shower, dishwasher, kitchen sink, outdoor hose!)
* Public and State Universities and Colleges
* Public Primary and Secondary Schools
* Sesame Street
* Publicly Funded Anti-Drug Use Education for Children
* Public Museums
* Libraries
* Public Parks and Beaches
* State and National Parks
* Public Zoos
* Unemployment Insurance
* Municipal Garbage and Recycling Services
This is great. I called my sister today and read this to her. She believes single payer is communist or socialist. "In that case, tear up your SS check!" And she loves the national parks. "The national parks should all go to the highest bidder. Down with socialism!"
We need to remember, though, only a minority think this way. The great majority prefer single payer, and that is what our president and insurance fat cats want to keep a secret. Why do you think Obama and Baucus kept single payer advocates out of the limelight? shhh. don't say er ... something like, um,... singlepayer.
(cont.)
* Treatment at Any Hospital or Clinic That Ever Received Funding From Local, State or Federal Government (pretty much all of them)
* Medical Services and Medications That Were Created or Derived From Any Government Grant or Research Funding (again, pretty much all of them)
* Socialist Byproducts of Government Investment Such as Duct Tape and Velcro (Nazi-NASA Inventions)
* Use of the Internets, email, and networked computers, as the DoD's ARPANET was the basis for subsequent computer networking
* Foodstuffs, Meats, Produce and Crops That Were Grown With, Fed With, Raised With or That Contain Inputs From Crops Grown With Government Subsidies
* Clothing Made from Crops (e.g. cotton) That Were Grown With or That Contain Inputs From Government Subsidies
If a veteran of the government-run socialist US military, I will forego my VA benefits and insist on paying for my own medical care
I will not tour socialist government buildings like the Capitol in Washington, D.C.
I pledge to never take myself, my family, or my children on a tour of the following types of socialist locations, including but not limited to:
* Smithsonian Museums such as the Air and Space Museum or Museum of American History
* The socialist Washington, Lincoln, and Jefferson Monuments
* The government-operated Statue of Liberty
* The Grand Canyon
* The socialist World War II and Vietnam Veterans Memorials
* The government-run socialist-propaganda location known as Arlington National Cemetery
* All other public-funded socialist sites, whether it be in my state or in Washington, DC
I will urge my Member of Congress and Senators to forego their government salary and government-provided healthcare.
I will oppose and condemn the government-funded and therefore socialist military of the United States of America.
I will boycott the products of socialist defense contractors such as GE, Lockheed-Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, Raytheon, Humana, FedEx, General Motors, Honeywell, and hundreds of others that are paid by our socialist government to produce goods for our socialist army.
I will protest socialist security departments such as the Pentagon, FBI, CIA, Department of Homeland Security, TSA, Department of Justice and their socialist employees.
Upon reaching eligible retirement age, I will tear up my socialist Social Security checks.
Upon reaching age 65, I will forego Medicare and pay for my own private health insurance until I die.
SWORN ON A BIBLE AND SIGNED THIS DAY OF __________ IN THE YEAR ___.
_____________ _________________________
Signed Printed Name/Town and State
Excellant EZ .be well.well said! peace
Here's the original link for those who are interested: it was a letter to Daily Kos.
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/9/18/783895/-The-Teabagger-Socialist-Free-Purity-Pledge
Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power."
Absolutely brilliant. I'm emailing this one around asap.
Yes this is a good example of how the reality of our mixed system gets confused with black and white and pure spin definitions of capitalism VS Socialism tired old arguments.....
There is no pure capitalism regulated or not or pure socialism regulated or not.... every system on the planet is mixed and always was.
Conservative's solution to confusion:
black is bad, white is good,
poor is bad, rich is good
pot is bad, beer is good
peace is bad, war is good
generosity is bad, greed is good
environmentalists are bad, polluters are good
hippies are bad, bankers are good
and so on, ad nauseaum
Sioux Rose
EZE: This is the type of thing that if posted as a FULL PAGE AD in a newspaper that the right wing loves could possibly jerk some minds back to a reality-check. If you emailed it to SOROS, maybe he'd bankroll the ad?
Or if you took your top TEN and configured them on paper inside the image of a tablet (where I live lots of people post The Ten Commandments outside their property, it's kind of funny), you could refer to it as "Socialism's Ten American Commandments" or something to that tune. Excellent work! The list is impressive.
Thank you SR. Pass it along y'all.
Brilliant! Great summary and list, showing exactly what brainless buffoons the tea-baggers are. Even when they say "Keep government out of my Medicare!" and it's pointed out that Medicare is a gov't program, they accuse whoever explains this of being a socialist. It's really a kind of literal retardation. How can we ever expect intelligent public discourse on these issues when half the population is too ignorant and stupid to pass an 8th grade history or civics test?
"How can we ever expect intelligent public discourse on these issues when half the population is too ignorant and stupid to pass an 8th grade history or civics test?" –(Ephraim)
Yes. "Literal retardation" is an exact précis.
Unfortunately literal retardation is also evinced by those who believe continuing to suffer the consequences of said retardation is somehow tolerable.
You can't "discourse" with them. They cannot be 'convinced' of anything. The point must be reached where you don't have to discourse with them. In a sense their politics are more mature than ours because they have no intention of 'discoursing' with us.The evidence for that, as you correctly point out, is prima facie. They should be accorded the same treatment, only in reverse.
A true or mature left politics begin to emerge when fascism is not a tenable option or given political franchise, much less expression. Otherwise it remains the cannibal next door.
Stalin and Mao both tried to expedite or accelerate history. They are exhibits A and B respectively of both what to and what not to do. Making a grim little problem in political mechanics less grim is what is called the human project. Alain Badiou's remarks on the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the nature of politics, are a prescient philosophical analysis of this conundrum. –(Jill Bains)
This is all true but ... get a reality check people: The teabaggers, the anti-single payers are in the minority (moron-ority). Why should they be getting so much attention?
Yesterday I spent the day checking polls, all kinds and over several years. The anti-single payer, right wing-nuts are IN THE MINORITY! Their party has been discredited and has one of the lowest approval ratings in history. The Democrats enjoyed very high ratings but now are plummeting because they have turned their backs on THE MAJORITY of We the People.
The MSM wants Americans to believe that single payer advocates are just a few left wing radicals. Well, sure, some of us are. But many are just ordinary thinking people who know how to fix the health care problem. Many of us are capitalists, for heaven's sake.
I sent it to conservative friends but they haven't reacted yet. Maybe Glenn Beck is on.
Incredible. After all that's happened, these two still believe in this president? They think that he perhaps applied the incorrect strategy (or whatever) for healthcare? Really?
Obama and his people are plenty of things--liars, looters and thugs--just like Bush and his bunch. However, two things they're not are stupid or naive.
Neither are Moore & Klein.
It's not that they 'believe in this president' so much as they just recognize he is one of the many significant chunks of WHAT WE HAVE TO WORK WITH. Ever see 'Hedwig's Angry Inch"?.... sorta like that.
I did not vote for Obama nor McCain. My vote went to Nader. Many people believe he's crazy and sometimes it's true, but overall he stands on a platform that is truly progressive and democratic.
Obama, I get the feeling, conned the public into thinking he was truly progressive and out to reform our broken government.
I applaud Moore, and think that he's just saying he still believes Obama for general acceptance among his crowd. Moore's "Sicko" ought to be replayed in theaters, libraries, town halls, etc. to get the health care bill reformed for a true universal care, single payer.
Good interview, thank you for it.
Who believes Ralph is crazy? He's one of the most giftedly sane people I know. Do they say this about him because he eschewed the relationship trap? How many dreams die once the wedding and honeymoon are over? Do they say it because he clearly sees through BS? That's not crazy, it's gifted.
It's probably already been brought up in this thread, I haven't read all the comments (and most I have read are excellent), but the trouble with Moore, not shared by the far less taken-in Naomi Klein, is that he's so often a sentimentalist concerning the powerful. Especially in Obama's case. He's so desperate to see Obama fulfill his mythic persona as populist savior of the left that he's willing to give him far more slack than he deserves.
Believing Obama appointed corporate shills like Geithner, Summers, Rubin, and reappointed Bernanke--all of them carnival barkers for Wall St.--just so he could watch the culprits clean up their own mess, is staggeringly naive. Klein called him on it and he at least admitted his silliness. But Moore is always like this. The more time he spends hounding the rich and powerful from their bunkers and bubbles, out into the open for the public to witness their venality and depravity, the more he seems enamored of the idea that they may end up saving us all somehow, yet.
Obama may as well BE Geithner and Summers. He differs from them not an iota regarding how to "save" this predatory, greed-soaked financial system, and capitalism itself. He may have said once to Joe the "Plumber" something about spreading the wealth, but that's probably because he thought Joe was a leftie populist. It was a slip up without meaning. He actually only wants to spread a little more wealth among the already stinking rich, so a few more multi-millionaires can become billionaires and the billionaires zillionaires.
Obama has no more time for Moore's populist theatrics, good and helpful and they are, than Bush ever did. How much longer will Moore be carrying the torch for Obysmal? He needs to pay more attention to Klein's "Shock Doctrine." There is no such naivete in her work.
Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power."
"The more time he spends hounding the rich and powerful from their bunkers and bubbles, out into the open for the public to witness their venality and depravity, the more he seems enamored of the idea that they may end up saving us all somehow, yet."
I think Moore keeps hoping to ignite enough of a fire in enough of the public that they will pressure some of the elites into reforms. He knows that even FDR had to be pressured from the Left in his day. Believing in pressuring reform from elites is not the same thing as believing they are saviors.
Good stuff.
Sentimentality distorts, clouds and ultimately blinds their entire perspective and frame of reference.
They continue to see everything through 'rose colored glasses." Skewed. Predetermined.
As you said, Moore certainly more so than Naomi Klein. –(Jill Bains)
Mr. Moore,
Hope is the opiate of the masses.
You were taken in by the shiny trinkets that Obama offered. But you forgot to look at the real substance. You forgot to look at Obama's record of action, and instead was mesmerized by his manner of talk.
In short, you were taken in by a better salesman.
Had a republican done the things that Obama is doing you would have taken offense at their actions (possibly resulting in another movie). I hear a few mild criticisms but there is no display of outrage as Obama betrays the 'progressive' causes like single payer health care, ending the middle east war/occupation etc.
When people like Mr. Moore continue to support the democratic party, he is also supporting the status quo.
And the status quo is that the power elite get to make all the rules, get to keep all the gold, and other people's suffering and pain isn't considered in any part of the equation.
so it goes,
www.NotOneMore.US
That we are to stand by the president, right or wrong is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. ~Theodore Roosevelt
"There must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has and it never will."-- Frederick Douglass 1857
NOM,
You are one of the few posters here among the supposed "progressives" who really gets it and who is always dead on. The reason simply is that you value truth more than agendas or silly ideologies. If our country had more independent thinkers like you, they wouldn't be fooled by CIA-front magazines like the Nation and their fawning over MM, another sellout who dares to still praise the virtues of Al Gore while trashing the infinitely more precious and honorable Ralph Nader. But alas our electorate is bereft of both the ability, information, and fortitude to do what is necessary to once and for all win this fight. Worse, they are dedicated to the death to defending their own slavery status and the structures which keep them in their shackles. In the meantime our "leaders," the prostitutes to the real owners of this country, continue to purposely pursue policies that will lead to the collapse of our dollar and economy. If there were reason to hope I might, but, from where I sit, we are all headed for the slaughterhouse.
no, hope is our strength when we lose brutal fights and battles but don't give up on the war,
hope is belief that your essence is more sacred than external humiliation endured
the righteous abandoned Palestinians survive with hope
hope springs from despair; not an opiated state....
smoked some at a dead show once, whew, whoah...my.
great article-and better thread, mm 4 president.
LEBAUE & teddy spoke truly though of War & Imperialism; Captialism in it's later stages IS imperialism-the stealing of resources abroad, oil, alloys, timber, lives.
Every big corporation in America is a multi-national. raping the world w/ US guns on point.
Capitalism? Every soldier should wear an EXXON patch on his uniform. clarity of mission
wonderful thread
"The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind. And greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA. Thank you very much. "
"Evolutionary spirit" and "the upward surge of mankind":
That thin layer called the cerebral cortex, which generates what is called "conscious thought" or "reason," sits atop the limbic system and reptilian complex, a region of the brain 3 inches thick, which generates emotions, intuitions, desires, urges. What chance does a thin membrane of reason have of containing a thick lump of urge, desire, impulse, reaction? Humans, like other animals, spend most of their lives pursuing food, mates, territory, social position. Couple this with the fact that civilized society generally discourages nonconformity, independent thought, radical ideas [like challenging human extremism], dissenting views, etc. Most people are concerned with political gain and economic comfort. "If a man has twenty million collars in blue chip stocks, a mountain chalet, a yacht, several wives in sequence, and various kids, he has proven his fitness in the prevailing system: he's won mates, territory, a good position on the pecking order -- in short, he's satisfied the demands of his limbic system and his reptilian complex. He's not about to question the illusions under which he has gained all this."
Lets cut to the chase: It does not matter what form of Capitalism a Government or country has; as long as they put profit before people and you have industrial hegemony, selfishness, pollution and wars ect. it is an anathema to any real democracy. Obesiance to the people that allowed Obama to become President is his only choice and I do not share MM's optimism that Obama will eventually do what is right for America, but I would love to be wrong!
When I was in the government, our agency was going through a 'reorganization' and a co-worker commented, "You have to be organized before you can get reorganized."
When a government does not protect the human rights of all, it fails doing what is necessary to have a viable, sustainable society. It should be unacceptable to the community to have a government that fails to protect the common good.
Changing the government won't make a difference if we can't get the dominate culture to act in a manner that protects the basic human rights, ie: the right to healthy clean air and water, school, health care, and a right to participate in a democracy without fear of being labeled a terrorist.
Hope is the opiate of the masses.
So Ole MM isn't actually saying Capitalism is evil, he is saying Greed is evil. He is saying unregulated Capitalism that we've had for the last decade is evil, not Capitalism.
I guess Greed, A Love Story wouldn't have sold near as well as Capitalism, A Love Story?
"the terrific sequence in the film about those corrupt Pennsylvania judges who were sending kids to private prison and getting kickbacks. I think people would say, That's not capitalism, that's corruption."
The idea of using an instance like this as "proof" of the evil of a system is absurd. You casn find similar and worse in any governmental system in the world almost any day.
Is his solution a Socialist government? I haven't seen the film yet so I don't know, but I assume so. There are so many sucessful examples of that...like none.
Another push poll from Moore, get your conclusion and find what you need to support it. His last honest film was Roger and Me.
Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power."
Small, resource rich, comparatively homogenous cultures can often make socialism work well for them. Examples are Norway, Sweden, Venezuela, the early Israeli kibbutz agricultural communities, some early religious communities that pre-date doctrinal socialism but lived under such a system nonetheless.
Your attempt to generalize from a specific example is specious. You cannot find similar situations to the one described in Pennsylvania in "any governmental system in the world almost any day."
Capitalism is inherently evil because it is both essentially amoral and its sole motive is selfish profit: It is to its very core nothing more than greed stripped of conscience. As Rush Limbaugh proudly blurted the other night on the Jay Leno Show,
"Capitalism isn't about need!"
Well, tough nuggies: Human beings have spiritual, moral, ethical, legal and material needs crucial to everything from basic physical survival to social cohesiveness, and capitalism is too powerful an economic system for distributing resources critical to those compelling human needs to be allowed to operate free from spiritual, moral, ethical, legal and material constraints. Such constraints are imposed upon capitalism to compel it, to a greater or lesser politically achieved degree, to more fairly meet all those needs or more unfairly fail to do so. Capitalism for its own sake is the religion of soulless robots.