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Why Democracy Is Public: The American Dream Beats the Nightmare
Democracy, in the American tradition, has been defined by a simple morality: We Americans care about our fellow citizens, we act on that care and build trust, and we do our best not just for ourselves, our families, and our friends and neighbors, but for our country, for each other, for people we have never seen and never will see. 
The road ahead...
American Democracy has, over our history, called upon citizens to share an equal responsibility to work together to secure a safe and prosperous future for their families and nation. This is the central work of our democracy and it is a public enterprise. This, the American Dream, is the dream of a functioning democracy.
Public refers to people, acting together to provide what we all depend on: roads and bridges, public buildings and parks, a system of education, a strong economic system, a system of law and order with a fair and effective judiciary, dams, sewers, and a power grid, agencies to monitor disease, weather, food safety, clean air and water, and on and on. That is what we, as a people who care about each other, have given to each other.
Only a free people can take up the necessary tasks, and only a people who trust and care for one another can get the job done. The American Dream is built upon mutual care and trust.
Our tradition has not just been to share the tasks, but to share the tools as well. We come together to provide a quality education for our children. We come together to protect each other’s health and safety. We come together to build a strong, open and honest financial system. We come together to protect the institutions of democracy to guarantee that all who share in these responsibilities have an equal voice in deciding how they will be met.
What this means is that there is no such thing as a “self-made” man or woman or business. No one makes it on their own. No matter how much wealth you amass, you depend on all the things the public has provided — roads, water, law enforcement, fire and disease protection, food safety, government research, and all the rest. The only question is whether you have paid your fair share for we all have given you.
We are now faced with a nontraditional, radical view of “democracy” coming from the Republican party. It says that “democracy” means that nobody should care about anybody else, that “democracy” means only personal responsibility, not responsibility for anyone else, and it means no trust. If America accepts this radical view of “democracy,” then all that we have given each other in the past under traditional democracy will be lost: all that we have called public. Public roads and bridges: gone. Public schools: gone. Publicly funded police and firemen: gone. Safe food, air, and water: gone. Public health: gone. Everything that made America America, the crucial things that you and your family and your friends have taken for granted: gone.
The democracy of care, shared responsibility, and trust is the democracy of the American Dream. The “democracy” of no care, no shared responsibility, and no trust has produced the American Nightmare that so many of our citizens are living through.
Nightmare it is, but there is no denying credit to Republicans for their skills at framing. The recent Republican “Contract from America,” for instance, begins with a statement of their moral principles. The recommendations are special cases of those principles. It is a strategic initiative. Instead of a laundry list, each recommendation is a special case of a general strategy — to defund our American government.
Furthermore, they understand that about 20 percent of the electorate consists of people who are conservative in some ways and progressive in others. These are biconceptuals, sometimes referred to loosely by political professionals as “independents” or “swing voters.” Republicans know their job is to activate the conservative part of the brains of the biconceptuals, and they do that by sticking strictly to conservative moral principles and a clear conservative strategy. They never make the mistake of ignoring biconceptuals.
Progressives too often fail to clearly state the moral principles behind the American tradition. Our arguments often sound like an abstract defense of distant “government” rather than a celebration of our people, our public, and the moral views that have defined our tradition and the real human beings who work every day to carry them out.
There is a distinction between government as the administration of what we, as a public, provide each other, as opposed to government control. The Right wants to focus only upon control, not upon all that our tradition has given us. They do not just hide the vast positives, but they also hide the fact that governmental control, control over our daily lives, is more private than public. Private government for profit runs our lives – the health care we receive, the food we eat, the cars we can drive and the gas to fuel them, the news we get, loans for our homes, and on and on. Public government is for the benefit of all of us. Private (especially corporate) government is for the private profit of top management and stockholders. If you are concerned about your life being controlled for the benefit of others, look to the private sphere.
The institution of government, however, is not the point. We must instead defend the moral principles we seek to advance through our American government — and through ethical business practices, voluntary associations etc. The traditional view of American democracy sees government as embodying these moral goals, to protect and empower everyone equally.
If we are to successfully overcome the Republican demonizing of government and shared responsibility, we must restore faith in the mutual enterprise itself. Rather than simply defend government or government programs, we must positively advance the moral values of American democracy and the Dream, not the Nightmare.
That is why we support a renewed focus on public life, a public life that includes all Americans. We should focus on the public nature of our shared responsibilities.
Public life means meeting our shared responsibilities, caring for one another, and building the mutual trust upon which democracy depends. The recommendations below are special cases of these moral principles. They also represent a special case of a general strategy – to restore public life to American democracy.
- We must return the public to our political system and end the corrupt influence of selfish interests that have abandoned our shared responsibilities. This means public finance of campaigns, strict enforcement of the highest ethical standards in public life, and protection of the sacred right to vote.
- Our nation has vast national wealth: a huge continental landmass with wealth in minerals, agricultural land, forests, cities, beautiful places, as well as its public wealth, that is, the creative wealth of its educated citizenry and the collective wealth of all its citizens and corporations. We, the public, can put our nation’s vast wealth to use in creating jobs that make the lives of all better: building, educating, curing, and imagining. That is the Dream.
To realize the Dream, we must end the Nightmare.
- We must turn back the Right’s assault on public and higher education and meet our traditional commitment to education. Our children are tomorrow’s public. The future of democracy depends upon them.
- We must rebuild our public infrastructure, a fancy term for the necessities we share: roads, bridges, dams, parks, fair grounds, water mains, sewers, and the power grid; public agencies that monitor disease, weather and food safety. Government that works for all of us can and should create jobs that serve us all by rebuilding our shared necessities.
- We must come together publically to mutually ensure the health of all America. Health is not a private matter. It is public one.
- We must protect the prior earnings of American workers set aside in Social Security or private pensions. They have been earned through hard work and discipline. Taking these earnings away is theft, despite the Right’s use of the word “entitlements.”
- A public of unequal voices is not a democratic public. We need a progressive tax system through which all Americans pay their fair share and a business ethics that fairly rewards those whose work creates productivity and profit.
- We must put the American individual above abstract corporate entities. We must end “corporate personhood,” which gives transnational corporations a greater voice than individuals in our public deliberations.
- We must end the move to “privatize” institutions through which we meet our shared responsibilities. When the public is removed, the private sphere takes over, charging more, and often creating unaccountable monopolies that bilk the public. Privatization of the public typically means that most citizens just pay more, often a lot more.
- Discrimination of all kinds must be overcome. Public life depends upon recognition of our equal humanity.
This is why Democracy is, and must remain, public. This is why America has traditionally been a beacon to the world. This is the example America has set. We dare not give it up. The alternative is the Nightmare.
41 Comments so far
Show AllI was born and raised sympathetic to many of the ideas in this article - in a nutshell "The American Dream."
And I wish it were so.
Bill Tilman, one of my favorite mountaineers and writers, was a decorated officer in both world wars, fighting in both of them from beginning to end.
He never bought into the idea that we would make things better this time around. So he climbed mountains and sailed small boats to the far ends of the Earth in a long life.
It is very difficult to give up hope - perhaps impossible.
But today, as I survey the scene in its broadest sense, given my limited powers to 'see', there is every reason to think that Himal Bill was correct.
Certainly these pie in the sky prescriptions for change need to be replaced by far more serious dialogue.
Manysummits
======
There is a reflexive quality, as Soros would put it, to terms like "The American Tradition" or "The American Dream" The US psyche defines these terms for itself and whatever it believes most fervently becomes the new reality for it. In meta terms like Lakoff uses, one framing is not better than another. So there is little point in asserting that one version of the American dream, our version is genuine and the other is a false attempt to usurp it. The question we should be asking is why people with wealth, power and political influence in this country have one version that they are inflicting on us while we hold to another. How do we end up electing these people? Why do they have us, as Donna Smith says, "clamoring for our own demise/" And why in this supposed democracy do we seem so powerless to do anything about it?
Simply beautiful. The progressive platform for a new progressive populist party. And none of these points are new. They are , indeed, traditional. The right's ideas are the "new strange beast" in our midst. This platform will also serve as the line of demarcation, smoking out everyone, on just exactly where they do stand. Very well done. The flag that marks the rallying point has been raised.
It just blows my mind that someone as intellectually incisive as George Lakoff could have such an absolute blind-spot when it comes to Democrats acting in complicity with all the corrupt elements he links with "the conservative right."
He seems utterly naive about the way big money has controlled The Conversation through the ownership of media, added to long-term investments in think tanks that then produce their own experts to reinforce the "adult" mores, and agreed-upon messages of the times.
Most people who read CD would agree with Lakoff's list of "must do's," and yet we also realize that our present political system doesn't give us much room to implement these very sane and humane initiatives.
Few within the political system will deviate from the script of The Pay Masters, and lobbyists work the puppet strings of most reps. The press & media are in the hands of those interests that WANT war, ecocide (rabid resource depletion that is already sending the natural world into paroxysms of over-kill) ; and our Supreme Court is a bad joke insofar as resembling any remote concept of Justice.
With BOTH parties selling Americans out, a ground swell will form... our home values have been decimated, our jobs sent overseas, our natural assets bleeding toxic chemicals in too many places, our Social Security being eviscerated, our medical system in the hands of amoral profiteers, our elections and the processes that lead up to them, thoroughly corrupt; and the fruit of war, in the form of karmic blowback, only beginning to impact the nation. In sports parlance, this ain't a good score!
Crisis is when change is possible; and while the experts in Disaster Capitalism, seldom meet a crisis they don't enact or manage for profitable ends, The People will also have a chance to collectively respond to crisis. How many will turn to the right and seek to use their guns on their neighbors, and how many will turn to a higher ideal of working together to shape something new out of what's become The American Nightmare, is yet to be seen. Had media not been turned over to the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly, a healthier collective consciousness would abound when the shit hit the fan. Which is now...
Even the best intelligence can't guarantee what's fair and best. I get caught up like Lakoff too.
"1.Our nation has vast national wealth: a huge continental landmass with wealth in minerals, agricultural land, forests, cities, beautiful places, as well as its public wealth, that is, the creative wealth of its educated citizenry and the collective wealth of all its citizens and corporations. We, the public, can put our nation’s vast wealth to use in creating jobs that make the lives of all better: building, educating, curing, and imagining. That is the Dream."
But the sad fact is we've leased most of it out to multinational corporations which have no stake in our national prosperity. The people and government of the US no longer control those natural resources.
"American Democracy has, over our history, called upon citizens to share an equal responsibility to work together to secure a safe and prosperous future for their families and nation. This is the central work of our democracy and it is a public enterprise. This, the American Dream, is the dream of a functioning democracy. "
NO IT HASN'T. NOT FOR ONE MINUTE.
There has been slavery. There has been genocide and theft of the lands. Suffrage was not universal.
As George Carlin said: "It's called 'The American Dream' because you have to be asleep to believe it."
Until Lakoff and others begin to include necessary severe criticism and blame of Democrats, as the OTHER wing of the Sociopathic, Parasitic Corporate Ruling Class, they will continue to be half-blind.
And half-blind "leaders" are no leaders at all.
Not one word on dismantling the police state or reigning in the MIC. Not one f*cking word. Why? Are civil liberties not important? Is offering help, assistance and a hand-up to the rest of the world instead of a baseball bat to-the-head, not preferable? As the authors said, "no one succeeds on their own". That includes America. Oh. I forgot! They're members of that half of the Killing Machine known as the Democrats.
" This is why America has been traditionally a beacon to the world". Does Mr. Jackoff er I mean Lakoff really believe this BS! American foreign policy has been a domestic con and a nightmare to the world.
Can't someone come up with an idea that has a snowball's chance in hell of actually working? All I'm seeing this morning between things like this and the Grieder piece are dewy, hopeless visions of some giant awakening of the cowed, broke, dumb and alienated population suddenly emerging from their corn syrup cocoons as enlightened, civically-minded butterflies. It's magical thinking and it's a waste of everyone's time.
Let's have more like the Monsanto ballot initiative article yesterday, where a chink is found in the armor of the oligarchy and we make some real difference.
what a strange article...is this all that sells, now?
simply revamp old, deceptive cliches about the United States, a la Hedges, where we discuss, in great depth and detail, the alleged historical psychology of the United Statesian, without ever addressing the land theft and violent oppression that shaped, and continues to shape, their privatized world...
then, a la so many, spout a bunch of 'we shoulds' without ever addressing why we already don't...a corrupted government and an utter lack of either resource, or recourse...
what value is such tripe? no mention of the physical reality that drives our economics: the murder of dissent to the theft of resources, and the resulting deprivation of said resources to any and all unless paid...the forced competition for ownership of property and access to resources, which leaves neither time nor space for ecological regard, and the resulting devastation of our natural world...
the only way to take control of the situation is to, literally, take control...take it away from those currently holding...do it by withdrawing from the financial and legal systems of obligation we have allowed to be created...then turn everything off, and learn to live again...
take back the land, take back your life...
Global Start Date: September 22, 2012...Congress will not help you...far from it...it is up to you and your neighbors, now...
We're starting on Bilbo and Frodo's Birthday?!?
I'm in. ;)
CAUTION: democratic party hacks at work.
Mind the BS.
"Democracy, in the American tradition, has been defined by a simple morality: We Americans care about our fellow citizens, we act on that care and build trust, and we do our best not just for ourselves, our families, and our friends and neighbors, but for our country, for each other, for people we have never seen and never will see."
What have the authors been smoking? Is this some new conservative revisionism?
Americans subscribe to the "last man standing" ideology, emblazoned on so many t-shirts as "He who dies with the most toys wins" and "Second place is first-place loser" among countless others.
One has to be asleep to believe in the "American Dream".
I try, Lord knows I try, to find something positive to say about Lakoff, but I just can't.
Some of the things he and Smith call for are good, but they are so airy and disconnected from reality for the most part that they can't be called "proposals".
There is no single "America Dream". (The term didn't exist before 1931.) Lakoff and Smith are defining the American Dream, after the fact, to their own perceived political imperatives. Isn't that kind of...dishonest?
The most glaring failure of the essay is the absence of any mention of the issue of climate change. Ignoring it won't make it go away. How about proposals to reduce greenhouse emissions, reduce energy consumption, etc. Instead, we get ancient stuff about our "wealth" in minerals, land, forest...This essay could have been written 50 years ago.
As other commenters have pointed out, there is nothing about the Empire and not one remark about the MIC and its role in bringing war and destruction to the world.
Maybe we should look at the "infrastructure" and alter it to meet the needs of a nation facing catastrophic climate change and the necessity of developing a post-petroleum society, rather than pulling out the old, "We need to rebuild the infrastructure" divorced from specifics of current reality.
These guys are living in the past and refusing to face the world as it is, despite some of the good (though vague) things they have to say.
Finally, a minor point. Lakoff (or someone) seems to feel that including "expert" sounding terms is always required to...I don't really know why...to give weight to an essay? Actually, it gives a sort of twittishness to an article. "Biconceptuals"...what malarky. Maybe they are "conceptuals" whereas others are "half-conceptuals". Give it a break.
Thanks for this summing-up of the general comments consensus, Arry.
I fully concur. However well-intended the authors are, their analysis is curiously ethereal and abstract, and avoids or ignores the harsh realities and dynamics of politics, economics, and power.
Usually there are one or two commenters who find Lakoff somehow insightful and relevant, but for the reasons you provide this article is a clunker-- like Sirota's incoherent rant about third parties published here yesterday.
So either they're not around, or couldn't find redeeming qualities to tout.
Perhaps the missing link will turn out to be "transconceptuals".
By the way-- are all the enumerated points in the article listed as number one-- i.e. "1."-- on purpose, or is it just a formatting error?
Thanks OS.
"transconceptuals"...there you go.
"By the way-- are all the enumerated points in the article listed as number one-- i.e. "1."-- on purpose, or is it just a formatting error?"
Probably a formatting error, or maybe Lakoff and Smith are radical anti-hierarchists? :-)
I also was raised in this country, and believed in the fairy tale, that was the American dream.
I came of age and reason somewhere around 1967 and saw the lie first hand and the carnage created.
What I see now is Amerika, embracing: pre-emptive strikes on other nations, use of torture and rendition, stripping civil liberties and hard fought rights from our citizens and a host of other transgressions.
Maybe I should have studied Civics with a little more, vigor in public schools.
It's time to remember that dreams are just, dreams and fire up the pipe and nod back into the slumber.
"1,2,3,4.........what are we fighting for, don't ask me cause I try to give a damn....next stop looks like Iran!" Holy shit........@ least I read Orwell.
Democracy comes from the people, not from sold out politicians.
Direct democracy
You scoff at Lakoff's values, but what are yours, he asked hopefully, but expecting little but nihilism in this sump.
Nonsense. Drivel.
Great article with some great points.
BUT.....
...you guys forgot to add "and Democrats" after every "Republicans" in the article.
"The democracy of care, shared responsibility, and trust is the democracy of the American Dream. The “democracy” of no care, no shared responsibility, and no trust has produced the American Nightmare that so many of our citizens are living through".
In contrast, Americans have knowingly and/or unwittingly isolated themselves in their own comfort boxes , complete with American Idol and Casey Anthony re-runs. Not unlike a totalitarian state where no one shares in the public and voices are stifled out of fear.
Where are the rallies in Washington? Where are the general strikes. The absence of the public sphere is only symptomatic of a sinking ship.
Watching the Debt Ceiling debate every night on Cable as surely made our Democracy an open book and a lot of ugliness to boot. We are in a financial mess because we have a leaderless Government and our industries have left the United States. Our Government has let a huge amount of our companies make their products overseas. Zippers, Cars, Steel, Ship Building need I go on, and without any monetary penalties. None.
Now with our divided Government we are being scammed on a contrived circus of immaturity like none other.
We are arguing nonsense when we need job creation not public food fights about who is right or wrong.
We need to get up off the canvas and start creating instead of posturing as sports teams do. Millions of humans all over the World are watching us daily and must be very unimpressed.
Jobs, Jobs, Jobs, not words, words and more words.
The American citizens are waiting for Congress to act like grownups now. We sent you to Washington to do the right thing for all of us and our future.
No matter Right, Left, Middle or neutral get the job done.
The "framing" within this article makes me want to spit.
Repeatedly, we are LED to associate "the right" with "republicans" in this game-playing maneuver of an article.
Yes, the enclosed list of things we need to do to re-public-ize this nation sounds good, but underlying it is a message of our need to be compliant to one arm of the corruption. Not one word of criticism for the corrupt corporate democrats who are, as a party, working diligently in league with the republicans to enact the worst forms of privatization which this article's authors PRETEND to be criticizing.
Also, the line about "Only a free people can take up the task..." smacks of Capitalistic propagandizing and stands out in vivid contrast to what is supposed to be the overall message of this suspect article.
In essence, it seems the authors are arguing for the "american dream" as being possible only in shared responsible actions while they promote the lie of freedom and ignore the complicity of the democrats.
These are intelligent men?
In what way?
p.s. That picture accompanying this mind game is a perfect example of how lost they are. Pick a road, any road. There is no way of telling where you will end up with these two, or three, or four,....
"The only question is whether you have paid your fair share for we all have given you"
Sounds like rabid, unreserved, radical left wing socialisticital class warfare-ey talk. That's why I love it.
I could only stand to read the first half of the comments, it was so depressing reading person after person after person who didn't--and doesn't--get it.
Lakoff hasn't been talking about what we have to accomplish tomorrow; he's talking about how we have to speak to convince people who don't already agree with us. In fact he's not just talking about it he's modeling the behavior. If you don't see that, you're left with--what? Despair, like manysummits? Anger and a feeling of betrayal because the article writer is not telling you how we can miraculously win overnight, like Souixrose? or the feeling of rage that is so strong you can't see how anything will satisfy except beating fists and bats against bodies and buildings, like, well, like most of the rest of the posts I read before I gave up?
Please, people, learn psychology. Something non-ossified. Ron Kurtz, Body-Centered Psychotherapy. Wilhelm Reich, though he's hard to read, so maybe the first part only of Saharasia by James DeMeo. Jung. ( " ) (the video 'Matter of Heart', Moore and Gilette (men) or Marion Woodman (women), Marie-Louise von Franz). Bodynamics, Rosen method.... lots of choices, many ways in.
Learn about symbols (Jung, etc.) and then maybe you'll begin to understand about their manipulation by the right. We have to get serious about strategy and
making changes, long term and immediate.
Read Lakoff's books--Don't Think of an Elephant, The Political Mind... small words, simple, declarative sentences. You'll like them. Maybe then we can have an intelligent discussion.
Those of who who are Tea Partiers trying to discredit good ideas, ignore this post. The rest of you, psssst, comere. Don't tell the others but these are really good ideas. They're how the Republicans have taken over the world. They're how we can take it back, maybe even in time to save it from climate catastrophe and global war over oil, water, coltan, food, and the rage that is building. OK, now act like we were just talking about girls or something. Go back to work and quietly, quietly, start learning.
Another, "You're just not evolved enough" post.
You apparently don't understand the points of some of the posts. They are actually quite thoughtful, but you have a blind spot for thoughtfulness that's not in your line.
I started "Don't Think of an Elephant"...couldn't finish it (small as it was). It diminishes perception of reality and human character unconscionably. I think we will have made a big step when we rise above such academic/marketing flatness and return to some basic human concepts like passion and community and courage.
I *know* what you and Lakoff think he is doing. (He had big part in giving us Obama, by the way...something quite predictable from the premises of his thinking.) Don't make him out as some deep-thinking guru. This article makes it quite clear that his efficacy in developing a new world is limited.
J4Zonian: You used a sleazy tactic to try to make an honest analysis of the author's blindspot about my alleged despair. Ridiculous. As I've stated before, Lakoff gets lost inside his own paradigm. He's so INTO framing that he can't see beyond his own frame, expressed through the idea that Democrats and Republicans play on different teams that hypothetically represent distinctly different motives, goals, and intentions. NOW when so much evidence exists to the contrary, there's Lakoff making it about the extreme right wing Repugs... with NARY a word for why and how it is that Democrats have gone along with every dastardly program.
Read what Jeff Cohen said on today's C.D listing. Perhaps since he used the football field as his metaphor, someone like you can "get" it.
Your seething, bumptious, overweening superciliousness and condescension is hilariously self-caricaturing, J4zonian.
The patronizing high dudgeon is so amusing that it almost cancels out its offensive presumptuousness.
I'm afraid you'll just have to write a sequel setting straight person after person after person who didn't--and doesn't--get your remedial lecture.
It would be wrong to say that Lakoff & Smith are out of touch with reality. Every one of their 8 points, each numbered 1, takes a grim fact about the present and wraps it up first in negation and then in the deontic modality. So: in every case, we must reverse the current situation, turn the tide Canute-like by a verbal act. Nothing to it.
Maybe this kind of talk makes them feel better, but its automatic character amounts to little more than a bleary affirmation of the realities they dream of erasing.
In the early 70's, I took a course on America during its first major Gilded Age. One of the assigned readings addressed the proposition that there have really been two major "revolutions" in America, and that the second one, the so-called "Capitalist Revolution," beginning more or less with the 1880 Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Supreme Court decision granting legal personhood status to business corporations, turned everything on its head through a radical shift of government purpose way from the public commonwealth toward private corporate gain. The idealized Jeffersonian republic (that turned a partially blind eye to the original sin of slavery) of independent yeoman farmers and small merchants governed by a natural aristocracy that spent its time studying the flora and fauna of Virginia went by the boards, effectively reduced to nostalgia for a time when corporations were barely visible to the new country's political class.
But since 1880, the fundamental contest in this nation has really been about who the true sovereign is, the "people" or the corporations and the private interests of those who control them. The theory and structure of our government, based in Enlightenment political ideas, did not much account for the potential power and influence of the modern large corporation having minimal national allegiances to anyone, although the Framers left several quotes clearly stating their wariness and distrust of the "money power." They knew that democracy was an experiment not guaranteed of perpetual success and a government founded on the people as sovereign could founder for many reasons, including ignorance, money, passivity, and war.
FDR was able to push back after a major economic calamity in finance capitalism in his day using Keynesian economic theory and in full confidence that there is such a thing as the public interest. Earlier, the Progressive movement achieved some successes against some major industrial abuses.
Today, we have "privatization" a word that has been around a long time (Goldwater wanted to privatize the Tennessee Valley Authority, but in 1964 that only marginalized him). A lot of water has passed under the bridge since 1964, most of it flowing steeply downhill as far as the public interest goes. Since the passage of national health care during the worst economic conditions since the Depression, the hard right, about 20 per cent of the electorate, has exploded with an anger so deep that it is prepared to take the country down if that will defeat any initiative in the name of the public interest. They are prepared to sit by while the Republican economic elites close the commons, even if they will pay a heavy penalty themselves. Whether or not they will succeed or instead tear the Republican Party to shreds, I guess we will see.
But the globals don't care. If the political situation here becomes too objectionable, meaning that the government might not give them almost any and everything they want, they will just leave. Financially, many already have. We are witnessing the final stages of the long Capitalist Revolution, a counterrevolution against democracy, a world where the government spends its time and energy begging favors of the globals. But not to worry, there is always trickle-down. Feel any better off?
lhhj: Thank you for the powerful post & information. I would add that there are astrological cycles of significance that have allowed power to shape these temporal ends; and as much as these stellar factors lent support to a capitalist/conservative ethos, the REVERSE holds sway beginning in 2020. If we live till 2025, and if the various wars, uprisings, and earth changes leave enough of a sentient humanity intact, 2025 will look like Day to this Dark Night of the collective human soul voyage.
That's a cosmic promise.