Get News & Views Updates
Most Popular This Week
Popular content
Today's Top News
Can a Movement Save the American Dream?
On October 3 activists from across the country will gather in Washington at the Take Back the American Dream conference, in the belief that only a citizens movement can save an American dream that grows ever more distant. In the face of a failed economy and a corrupted politics, the only hope for renewal is that citizens lead and politicians follow.
www.rebuildthedream.com/
The modern American dream was inspired by a growing middle class that was the triumph of democracy after World War II. Its promise was and is opportunity: that hard work can earn a good life—a good job with decent pay and security, a home in a safe neighborhood, affordable healthcare, a secure retirement, a good education for the kids. The promise always exceeded the performance—especially with regard to racial and ethnic minorities, immigrants and women—and America never did as well as Europe in lifting the poor from misery. But a broad middle class and a broadly shared prosperity at least provided the possibility of a way up.
Now that middle class is sinking, imperiled by an economy that does not work for working people. Twenty-five million Americans are in need of full-time work, wages are declining and one in six people lives in poverty, the highest level in fifty years.
Every element of the dream is imperiled. Wages for the 70 percent of Americans without a college education have declined dramatically over the past forty years, although CEO salaries and corporate profits soared. Corporations continue to ship good jobs abroad, while the few jobs created at home are disproportionately in the low-wage service sector. One in four homes is underwater, devastating what has been the largest single asset for most middle-class families. Healthcare costs are soaring, with nearly 50 million uninsured. Half of all Americans have no retirement plan at work, pensions are disappearing and even Social Security and Medicare are targeted for cuts. College debt now exceeds credit card debt, with defaults rising and more and more students priced out of higher education.
The economy works fabulously well for the few. The richest 1 percent capture nearly a quarter of the nation’s income and control about 40 percent of its wealth. They have pocketed almost all the rewards of the past decade’s economic growth. Tahrir Square erupted in revolution in January, but America actually suffers greater inequality than Egypt. Instead of an American dream, we have an American nightmare: a government, as Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz has written, of the top 1 percent, by the top 1 percent and for the top 1 percent.
This is not an accident; it is a defeat. It is the casualty of class warfare, waged and won, as Warren Buffett has noted, by the wealthiest few. Economists evoke globalization, technology and education as causal factors in our era’s extreme inequality. In fact, it results from policies that have weakened workers, liberated CEOs, starved social protections and savaged the middle class.
For more than thirty years, conservative ideas and corporate cronyism have consolidated their hold on both major political parties. Trade policy has been handed to the multinationals and the banks, which have not only transferred good jobs abroad but have given us a trade imbalance of more than $2 billion a day. Healthcare is dominated by drug companies and the insurance industry, creating a system that costs nearly twice as much per capita as the rest of the industrial world while delivering inferior care. Big Oil and King Coal exert a stranglehold on our energy policy, with the United States forfeiting the lead it once had in the green technologies that will be central to the markets of the future. Finance liberated itself from regulation, unleashing the Wall Street wilding that drove the economy over a cliff in 2008. The Pentagon’s budget is higher than it was during the cold war.
Hope Frustrated
The past three years provide an object lesson in the power of entrenched interests. Elected in the midst of the worst economic meltdown since the Great Depression, President Obama captured a majority of the vote (the first Democrat to do so since Jimmy Carter) with a mandate for change. In January 2009 Democrats held fifty-eight Senate seats and a large House majority led by the most progressive Speaker in history, Nancy Pelosi. Crisis, mandate, majority—all were in place for reform.
Obama put forth reforms in areas the country must address: healthcare, energy and finance. The president’s proposals were cautious, often pre-emptively compromised, but he had his head handed to him anyway. The economic recovery act was weakened, energy reform blocked, financial re-regulation neutered, healthcare deformed. Conservative obstruction and powerful corporate interests stymied change.
The failure fed voter skepticism about government. Washington bailed out Wall Street but did little for Main Street. It ran up deficits but failed to generate jobs. The White House embraced establishment calls for a premature turn to deficit reduction, distracting from the need for more federal action to stimulate economic recovery. Pollster Stanley Greenberg says voters “think that the game is rigged.” As he summarizes, they “see a nexus of money and power, greased by special interest lobbyists and large campaign donations…. They do not believe the fundamentals have really changed in Mr. Obama’s Washington.”
The economic calamity, and bipartisan collusion with Wall Street, set the stage for citizen protest. With Democrats in control of Washington, the right appealed to popular anger, most notably through the much-hyped Tea Party. Contrary to initial reports, it was composed not of independents but of right-wing activists, many initially driven by racial resentment. Its members tend to be older, whiter and more affluent than the general population. Its grassroots energy was bolstered by lavishly funded Astroturf organizations like Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks, backed in part by the billionaire Koch brothers.
The Tea Partiers used the spectacle of corrupted politics to make a conservative case: Washington doesn’t work for you; get your money back. Its leaders often sounded populist themes, as Sarah Palin did at a Tea Party rally this past summer: “The permanent political class—they’re doing just fine…. They derive power and their wealth from their access to our money—to taxpayer dollars. They use it to bail out their friends on Wall Street and their corporate cronies, and to reward campaign contributors, and to buy votes via earmarks…. And there is a name for this: it’s called corporate crony capitalism.” It’s a hoary flimflam: the Tea Party’s agenda belies the populist rhetoric. The current GOP House majority, allegedly dominated by the Tea Party, champions the same elite policies that helped create the mess: lower taxes on the wealthy, rollback of basic services, assault on unions, corporate trade, Big Oil energy, financial deregulation. The only difference is their ambition: GOP zealots would roll back not simply Obama’s reforms but the Great Society, the New Deal—indeed, much of the twentieth century. Not surprisingly, those goals have little appeal to the vast majority of Americans.
Waiting for Lefty?
So where was protest on the left? Historically, whenever America has reached this extreme of what Citigroup analysts dubbed “plutonomy,” popular mass movements have arisen to champion economic justice. Populist movements of the late nineteenth century confronted the robber barons. The Socialist and Communist parties and Huey Long’s Share Our Wealth movement grew threatening enough to goad Franklin Roosevelt into the second New Deal, including Social Security; the Wagner Act, recognizing the right of workers to organize; and much more. And in more prosperous times, the civil rights movement forced the end of apartheid in the American South; the anti–Vietnam War movement drove Lyndon Johnson out of office; and the women’s, gay rights, consumer and environmental movements all helped to make America better. More recently, the movement against the war in Iraq helped sweep Democrats into power in 2006 and 2008.
Progressives did organize demonstrations in the wake of the economic collapse. Groups like National People’s Action sought to defend homeowners against foreclosure and led protests against big banks. The broad We Are One coalition, anchored by labor unions, sponsored a national march for jobs in the run-up to the 2010 elections. But these and other efforts received shamefully little mainstream press and generated little momentum. Significant progressive attention and resources were committed to helping pass the Obama reform agenda. Support for the president muted many critics, particularly among African-Americans, whose economic losses were the most devastating.
The sweeping GOP victories last year shattered that complacency. Despite continued mass unemployment, Republicans have dominated the debate about who will pay to clean up the mess left by Wall Street’s excesses—and what kind of economy will emerge out of the ditch. Their assault sparked a vigorous progressive response.
When teachers, students and firefighters joined union members in Wisconsin to defend worker rights and oppose the assault on schools and public services, the mass demonstrations electrified progressives and captured national attention. When House Republicans passed a budget that would have ended Medicare as we know it while cutting taxes on the wealthy, angry citizens filled Congressional town halls across the country.
The American Dream Movement
Wisconsin provided inspiration for the effort by Van Jones and others to launch the American Dream Movement. Jones, the founder of Green For All, joined MoveOn.org, the Center for Community Change, the Campaign for America’s Future and dozens of unions and other progressive organizations to build an initiative that many activists can affiliate with and help to define.
Just as the Tea Party provided an umbrella for conservative groups with disparate agendas, ranging from small-government purists to Christian fundamentalists to Citizens Council racists, so the American Dream Movement hopes to provide an umbrella and help mobilize energy for widespread progressive organizing efforts that are virtually invisible nationally. But unlike the Tea Party, the American Dream Movement is championing concerns that have broad popular support.
As a first step, the initiative held more than 1,500 house parties across the country to help develop a “Contract for the American Dream.” More than 130,000 activists joined online and in person to define a reform agenda that challenges the limits of the current debate. It includes major initiatives for jobs and growth: a commitment to reinvest in our decrepit infrastructure and to recapture the lead in the green industrial revolution. It calls for repairing our basic social contract, with investment in education from preschool to affordable college, Medicare for all and protection of Social Security. It would make work pay, empowering employees to organize unions and championing a living wage. It advocates progressive tax reform and an end to America’s wars abroad to help get our domestic books in order. And it demands sweeping democratic reforms to curb the power of money politics and clean out the Washington swamp.
The first major mobilization took place in August, as various groups, led by unions and MoveOn, often under an American Dream banner, waged an aggressive Jobs, Not Cuts campaign in Congressional districts, with activists confronting legislators of both parties. The efforts received extensive local press attention—and jolted legislators, many of whom canceled town meetings to avoid embarrassment.
Under the aegis of ProgressiveCongress.org, leaders of the Congressional Progressive Caucus sponsored a Speakout for Good Jobs Now tour, holding town meetings and collecting stories of the unemployed in cities across the country. That culminated in a bold jobs agenda that they will champion. The protests—and the stalled economy—helped move President Obama to introduce his American Jobs Act in a speech before a joint session of Congress.
The onslaught of the right at the state and national levels, and the determination of predatory interests to sustain their privileges, will force numerous battles. An early test for the movement will be posed by the “supercommittee,” a gang of twelve legislators charged with carving $1.2 trillion or more from projected ten-year deficits and reporting back for an expedited vote before Christmas. The committee, bastard child of the debt-ceiling confrontation, revives the destructive focus on deficits amid mass unemployment. Obama continues to reach for the “grand bargain” he offered in the debt-ceiling negotiations last summer: he would trade cuts in Medicare and Medicaid in exchange for greater revenue achieved by hiking taxes on the rich and closing loopholes on corporations. This deal, championed under the banner of “shared sacrifice,” has broad establishment support and draws a revealing contrast with Republicans, who are staunch defenders of the privileged. But when the rewards of the economy are not shared, “shared sacrifice” involves what Martin Luther King Jr. used to call “ham and egg justice,” where the hen gives up an egg and the sow is asked for a leg. Progressives must demand that jobs remain the focus, not cuts. And the bill to pay for it should be sent to the banks that helped blow up the economy and to the wealthy who pocketed the rewards of growth, rather than the most vulnerable in society.
In November the referendum in Ohio on the rollback of worker rights will become a focal point of national mobilization. The Republican effort to curtail voter rights in thirty-eight states should spark student organizing and mass protest. The bank pressure to escape accountability for pervasive mortgage fraud and abuse, already confronted by the New Bottom Line coalition and other groups, will stoke public outrage. The drive of Big Oil to build a pipeline from Canada’s pollution-laden tar sands to the Gulf of Mexico has sparked unprecedented civil disobedience from environmentalists. Polls reveal increasing opposition to failed trade policies and the Pentagon’s effort to defend endless wars and bloated budgets.
The challenge for the American Dream Movement is to link these struggles and help raise the energy and the street heat. For this to happen, the movement has to challenge not just the extremism of the right but the failed dogmas of the establishment. It needs to take on conservatives in both parties.
A movement tells its story through the battles it fights, the tactics it employs, the messages it projects. The right has spent decades training the members of its choir. They know the gospel; they can sing the words to the songs. Progressives have done less well, particularly on core economic issues. Democratic presidents too often mislead, touting financial deregulation, corporate trade accords and capital gains tax cuts. A central task of the American Dream Movement—like the Populist movement of the late nineteenth century—will be popular education, convening the modern equivalent of barnyard gatherings, the next wave of teach-ins, to spread the word. Progressive leaders can help lay out now-excluded alternatives. No movement can grow unless citizens are convinced that there is a better way.
As Van Jones has argued, this requires a clear story, with a compelling cause, a threat, villains and heroes. The cause is to revive the American dream. The threat is clear. America’s democracy has been corrupted by big money and predatory corporate interests that threaten that dream. Big-money politics has purchased conservative support in both parties, with ruinous results. Our task is to clean up politics and rebuild an economy that works for working people. And that requires an independent people’s movement willing to challenge the reign of private interests. This can be done only by ordinary heroes—citizens who put aside their normal routines to save the American dream.
The Obama Question
Can the American Dream Movement, or any truly populist movement, build with Barack Obama in the White House? Disappointment in Obama has sparked a familiar debate among activists. Many fear doing anything that will weaken him further, given the calamity that would result if extremist Republicans take over the White House. Some call for primary challenges to the president; others argue it is time to abandon the Democratic Party altogether.
The test for a popular movement is independent energy and integrity. It has to defend working and poor people, skewering the destructive myths of the current debate, even if Obama recycles them. It has to give voice to the needs and the outrage of Americans. We need a movement prepared to sit in at the Justice Department when it fails to prosecute the pervasive fraud central to the financial collapse. A movement that marches 5,000 unemployed workers to Washington to demand work—and camps them in the Mall until action is taken.
In his Democratic National Convention speech in Chicago in 1996, the Rev. Jesse Jackson summarized the interaction between movements and presidents:
Progress comes through an enlightened president, in coalition with an energized people. In 1932, FDR did not run on a New Deal platform. The people mobilized around their economic plan, and FDR responded with the New Deal. FDR was the option. The people provided the answer. In 1960, neither Kennedy nor Nixon ran for president on the promise of a public accommodations bill. But Dr. King supported Kennedy. JFK was the best option. Desegregated public accommodations came from Greensboro and Birmingham, from the sit-ins and marches and street heat. From we, the people, in motion. In 1964, neither Goldwater nor Johnson campaigned on the Voting Rights Act. But Dr. King supported LBJ; he was the best option. We won voting rights on the bridge at Selma. We, the people, provided the answer.
King was a vocal critic of Kennedy and Johnson, and he led mass demonstrations protesting injustice. He saw no contradiction between mass protest and strategic voting—but the movement came first.
Can the American Dream Movement help galvanize protest that forces fundamental change? The gulf between Washington and the American people grows ever larger. Elements of a new direction—clean energy, ending the wars and investing at home; crafting a new manufacturing strategy and curbing Wall Street; progressive taxation, protecting Social Security and Medicare—have the support of the vast majority of Americans.
But Americans despair about whether anything will change. Most feel they are on their own and have no concept of how collective action might help. Most are isolated from democratic organizations or movements. They see a Washington dominated by insiders and corporate money—and their hopes have been dashed over the past three years.
The challenge is less to convince people of the need for reform than to give them hope that change is possible. That takes a movement. Now is the time to build one.
Comments
Note: Disqus 2012 is best viewed on an up to date browser. Click here for information. Instructions for how to sign up to comment can be viewed here. Our Comment Policy can be viewed here. Please follow the guidelines. Note to Readers: Spam Filter May Capture Legitimate Comments...
55 Comments so far
Show AllThe American Dream is a nightmare; it belongs to the dustbin of history.
"It's called the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe in it." George Carlin
HAHAHA! Too funny and too true.
Yes. Funny but no laughing matter, for The American Dream is the problem. American as in US American is a faulty and arrogant concept; a bad dream. It is enshrined as a premise in the political divide, which obviously shows that and until US people acknowledge this they are doomed to failure.
The only way out for 'Americans' is for them to acknowledge that all people who live on the continents of the Americas are Americans. The Apartheid and the Nazi regimes put themselves forward as the only ones that count in their areas of dwelling. Jews in Israel are doing the same in Israel. They and all like them were or are insane regimes.
The American Dream may have contributed to better economic equality for mostly white working people in the U.S., but it has also accelerated global warming.
If the American Dream continues to be based on forced extraction (theft) of natural resources by U.S. imperialism, and depends on slave labor, mostly outsourced to China, India, and other nations "of color", along with militaristic global hegemony, then it deserves to die.
Its really the amerikan nightmare; for all the above reasons ! And, yes, the suffering that amerikan imperialism causes IS its downfall ! But all this must and will, come to pass. What follows will depend on the people. Sooner or later they must join the world community in a peaceful, compassionate way !
The American Dream is not an imperialist garrison the planet the scheme. It stood for democracy and a progressive society, ending discrimination, bullying, domination, and the rest of the fascist litany. This is what the article is about.
Are we smart enough here at cd to hold two opposing ideas in our heads at the same time?
It is not "smart" to try to hold a fantasy and accurate perceptions of reality in your head that contradict that fantasy at the same time. Many are trying to do that, and then wondering why they are so frustrated. They are suffering from cognitive dissonance, much as the Whig apologists and followers were in the 1850's. It is unstable and cannot last, and can produce nothing of any value. Sooner or later one must either embrace the reality about the US and speak and think and act accordingly, or side with the ruling class and the fantasy about the "America dream."
In other words, it is all an illusion.
"America" may have stood for "democracy and a progressive society, ending discrimination, bullying, domination, and the rest of the fascist litany" in your imagination, but to believe that requires us to completely ignore history and objective reality.
Wikipedia's entry for American Dream is illuminating. I think it is well worth the time to read the entry. Even MLK supported its basic tenets, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Dream
I remember what George Carlin said about the "American Dream:" "You have to be asleep to believe it."
The American Dream was Leave It To Beaver as far as i could tell.
I always thought it was based upon manifest destiny. Oh, i see she calls it the post WWII american dream. The cold war - after Europe was in ruins dream. The beginning of american empire and military industrial complex better dead than red, McCarthy dream.
I think that maybe was part of the spin of the times. Sort of like fallout shelters saving people from nuclear bombs.
the American Dream Movement...
those four words say it all...
the American Dream has always been bile, and must be excreted...
The usual drivel and Obama apology from Katrina vanden Heuvel. Why CD gives space to the Nation or it's obsolete antic's is beyond me.
Katrina should retire.
Agreed. The Nation actually used to be a meaningful publication. Then she took over and it became the Rachel Maddow show. I actually viewed most of the Nation's 911 panel discussion. It was like watching MSNBC pundits. In fact, one of the panelists from the Nation was an MSNBC guy.
Obama should give Katrina vanden Heuvel a job as head of the Department of Propaganda.
Excellent suggestion.......in fact, you may have stumbled onto the truth.
Good one!!
As described by the authors in paragraph 2, what they call the "American Dream" was an accident of history that depended upon the rise of the National Security & Warfare State for the benefits described. To mask what was occuring, various bribes were paid to mollify the public, the GI Bill being the most effective and best known example. The artificially induced "upward mobility" ended after about 20 years, followed first by stagnation and now decline to the economic state-of-affairs that existed in 1930, but with political control totally owned by the Merchants of Death and their Wall Street Money Power allies, who also control most information content through their Propaganda and Indoctrination Systems. If there was a Dream that became reality, it was that of the Elizabethan promoters of settlement and Imperial expansion in America, who envisioned a continent-wide English speaking Empire to complement the recent Union at home. The sun has yet to set on the global English-speaking Empire, but it must set if ANY dream based on freedom and a core of universal rights is to survive.
The 'Movement' happened back when Reagan was Prez-o-dent.
That's when the American Dream got shit-canned for all time!
The dream was beautiful, else we would not have bought it, but like many dreams it was not grounded in reality--in this case, ecological reality.
The authors have failed to understand or are being intentionally dishonest about the nature of corporate controlled electoral politics. All the rah rah rah around issues most progressives support isn't building independent political power.
Leaving the corporate parties is the first step toward legitimacy.
"Leaving the corporate parties is the first step toward legitimacy."
In the era prior to the advent of Mass Media, pre-WW2 essentially, such was the normal course of action fueled by activity at the local/state levels. With the infiltration of first radios and then TVs into the great majority of households, such is no longer the case as the "National Picture" displaced the local/state by design. It should also be noted that consolidation of media ownership was already being decried by the late 1920s most prominantly by the Progressive Historian Charles Beard, who highlighted that fact and the threat it posed in his widely read and utilized US History textbooks. What once empowered local and "third" patry politicing--the "stump speech" and local community events that often happened together--was atomized when families started to gather 'round their radio and TV to be "informed" of the news-of-the-day instead of discussing events at taverns, coffee shops and other communal settings that had been the norm for centuries. Today, the elite have just what they desired: a totally immobilized populace fighting over manufactured Wedge Issues instead of coalescing to fight for its interests while retaining some control over the political and electoral process. And to see us lamenting at our keyboards pleases the elite to no end.
Can a Movement save the American dream?
Maybe if they show up with guns
I think ezeflyer has had quite enough and has noted that the Propaganda System only takes note of citizen actions when they arrive with guns. But I'm sure his reason is more nuanced than my hypothesis. Perhaps he will enlighten us about this new rationale.
The personna known here as "ezeflyer" has posted commentary from the first day CD initiated its comment function about 7 years-ago if I recall correctly, and I've been writing and reading along with him since. You, however, are a brand new persona with a rather dubious choice for your nom-de-plume. You have yet to earn the bonafides that ezeflyer has garnered over those years. Ezeflyer's rationale can be seen today in the situation that exists between the US Empire and Pakistan: The Empire would have invaded long ago except for Pakistan's possession of atomic weapons, which the Empire desperately wants to negate. The same is true regarding an armed citizenry's hypothetical ability to coerce its government, which is the power alloted to the citizenry via the 2nd amendment added to the very flawed 1787 constitution. Given the federal government's designs--Operation Northwoods--and actual behavior--2000 Judicial Coup installing BushCo and the latter's abetting of 911--the citizenry is actually remiss in its duty to retake the federal government from the usurpers.
Throughout history, fundamental freedoms/rights have been gained only at sword-point. I've written about the pros and cons of armed revolution on this forum many times trying to find a way to do away with the Barbarians without becoming just like them in the process. I currently favor the political process because it still has a chance, and because the other option's price is steep. Ezeflyer is suggesting that we too show up equiped like Rambo. And since the real enemy is the Merchants of Death/Wall Street, wresting the trillions they get from Uncle Sam yearly might just take a bit of forceful persuasion, and likely a lot more given its record of Barbarity.
Thank you karlof1. We might ask ourselves, who are the bigger idiots, the few with guns or the many who are convinced its useless and anti-progressive to take up guns to defend oneself from those few idiots with guns?
If these guys can't enlighten us, who can?:
1.”A free people ought to be armed.”
~George Washington
2.”To preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of people always possess arms, and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them…”
~Richard Henry Lee
3.”The right of self-defense is the first law of nature; in most governments it has been the study of rulers to confine this right within the narrowest possible limits. … and [when] the right of the people to keep and bear arms is, under any color or pretext whatsoever, prohibited, liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of destruction.”
~St. George Tucker
5.”Firearms are second only to the Constitution in importance; they are the peoples’ liberty’s teeth.”
~George Washington
6.”A woman who demands further gun control legislation is like a chicken who roots for Colonel Sanders.”
~Larry Elder
9.”By calling attention to ‘a well regulated militia,’ ‘the security of the nation,’ and the right of each citizen ‘to keep and bear arms,’ our founding fathers recognized the essentially civilian nature of our economy… The Second Amendment still remains an important declaration of our basic civilian-military relationships in which every citizen must be ready to participate in the defense of his country. For that reason I believe the Second Amendment will always be important.”
~John F. Kennedy
23.”A free people ought not only to be armed and disciplined, but they should have sufficient arms and ammunition to maintain a status of independence from any who might attempt to abuse them, which would include their own government.”
~George Washington
26.”The balance of power is the scale of peace. The same balance would be preserved were all the world not destitute of arms, for all would be alike; but since some will not, others dare not lay them aside … Horrid mischief would ensue were one half the world deprived of the use of them … the weak will become prey to the strong.”
~Thomas Paine
As you know, the geopolitical behavior of the federal government has changed little since 1942. And since it's the State you need to defend yourself against, fists and feet don't work too well, whereas firearms will.
It's been interesting watching "ezeflyer" change from someone who thought the solution for everything was "electing better Democrats" into someone who thinks the solution for everything involves "carrying guns."
FWIW.
the American Dream is a movement - a bowel movement.
Interesting that the website promoting this is a dot com, not an org.
Given all that is said, the tasks seem to be straightforward: (i) Criticize reactionary policies of Obama, but not run a candidate against him; vote for him; you really do not want a Rick Perry, Michelle Bachmann or even a Mitt Romney in your hands; (ii) fight clearly racist attacks of the Tea Party against Obama; criticizing and defnding him at the same time is possible! (iii) run for elections for national, state & local offices, you all progressives, who criticize Obama and the Democrats for not being progressive enough, instead of endlessly rehashing the ‘issues’ in the blogosphere; or, as they say , put yourself where your mouth implies you ought be; (iv) support the most progressive (this is a relative term, obviously) Democrat in Congressional elections in your locality when (iii) is not an option; both would strengthen the progressive caucus on Capitol Hill; (v) join the union where possible and work on changing the leadership that is unable to extricate itself from the Democratic Party influence (tall order, I admit); and (vi) use (iii), (iv) & (v) to build a grass root movement; depending on how well we do, we will then be ready to support, with consequence, a progressive candidate for the Presidency! And another thing: less fragmentation (i.e., niche politics), more coalitions on common issues, the better is the hope for building a longterm movement.
The changes you seek require the working class to have power. Voting is not a source of power, it merely reflects who has power. The problem is that we have no power, not that we do not know what to do if we had power. Thinking that partisan electoral politics represent any sort of path to power for the working class is delusional.
Building a grass roots movement in order to advance candidates in the electoral process is based on an illusion - that the lever in the voting both controls those who are in power. It does not. It is a way for them to control us, primarily a way to control our thinking by steering any and all organizational efforts back into a game that only those in power could ever win.
At least with a bachman or perry, what you see is what you get vs the mirage you get with mr hope and change.
Beaulieu, moonpie, readytotransform, Oikos:
Now that you've trashed Katrina van den Heuvel with a few disparaging sentences, please enlighten us as to what you find objectionable in the article she's written.
The following is the most forceful comment leveled at Obama since his innuaguration by these writers without mentioning his name: "But Americans despair about whether anything will change. Most feel they are on their own and have no concept of how collective action might help. Most are isolated from democratic organizations or movements. They see a Washington dominated by insiders and corporate money—and their hopes have been dashed over the past three years." Those words should have been writen in 2009, which is why many correctly slam the two authors. What most here want them to write is something that throws Obama under the bus where he belongs, which is something they cannot seem to do despite everything pointing to that need as they detail.
Let me answer for myself. The word "war" occurs eight times in this article but always in the context of the "bad guys" who have started them and never in the context of the "American Dream". That is a blatant falsification of history. The "American Dream" of having the highest living standard of any middle class on Earth has always been and still is a major contributor to our wars around the globe. The wars in Iraq and Libya were started not only because some powerful oil companies wanted their fingers on the oil of these countries but also because the overwhelming majority of our "middle class" wanted and still wants the cheapest possible gas for their cars. As Pogo would have it: "I have met the enemy and it is me". This article is a sad excuse of the pseudo-liberals/socialists for their abject failings to bring about a just society since the end, not of WWII, but of WWI. And during the "Great Depression" they fell for the ruse of FDR who had only one objective in mind, namely saving the capitalist state.
Unless people renounce both corrupt parties and begin building a third party from the ground up there is no hope of any real change. Too many liberals or progressives hang on to the democratic party which is part of the problem and not the solution.
It goes far beyond that. It is the system of partisan electoral politics, and holding that out as an avenue for a solution that is the problem, not which "choices" we have within that system.
To say that if only we had a different choice on the ballot, that then there could be real change is merely to say that if we could have real change then we could have real change. It is a fantasy, a weak and ineffective whimper in the dark.
The Democratic party, and the limited choices are an effect of who has power and who does not, not a cause of who has power.
No, there is no social justice movement that can "save the American dream." It is the American dream that is the problem.
The American dream is and always was an illusion, a lie. The American dream is directly oppositional to any and all movements for social justice. The two contradict one another.
time is here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF15w1PWBYI&feature=related
you can't save a dream.....
Ms. vanden Heuvel has Jesse Jackson stating in 1996 that:
"Progress comes through an enlightened president..."
Earlier in the week Amy Goodman asked Jackson on Democracy Now! what he thought of Nader's petition which calls for a progressive challenger to Obama in 2012. Jackson replied that he thinks that would be a bad idea because he still believes that there is hope that Obama will do the right thing. Reverend Jackson may wish to revisit his own words as he does not seem to comprehend that Obama is anything but an enlightened president. If only Rev. Jackson would not allow his apparent bias in favor of Obama's skin color to blind him in seeing that Obama is just as much of a corporate tool and warmonger as GW Bush was. Yet all one hears from the reverend is relatively tepid criticism of Obama as compared to how Jackson used to vociferously condemn the policies of George W. Bush.
If you want to see the American Dream writ large, look at Apple and Google. Young people with a great idea starting great companies and allowing and lots of extremely successful people to participate in that dream. I've gotten to share in Apple's success as a long time shareholder, I and my investment partner bought many thousands of shares at $7 when the company was thought by all to be doomed, except those of us who recognized a superior company with great ideas.
There's no exploitation involved anywhere in these tremendous success stories. I just don't understand the doom and gloom here. It looks like we Tea Partiers are going to succeed in rolling back the collectivist nightmare that this country was descending into and we'll make sure that great success stories like these will continue to be written! The American Dream is alive and well.
Anybody can participate now - look at Apple's app store. Now you don't need expensive distribution channels to get a great app out in the world. Look at http://ycombinator.com/ to see how much easier it is to start a company now. This is what having wealthy people like Paul Graham means - lots of capital available for up-and-comers to get started.
With all this good news, I may soon be able to retire my sig:
Atlas Shrugged was supposed to be a warning, NOT a newspaper!
>>There's no exploitation involved anywhere in these tremendous success stories. I just don't understand the doom and gloom here.
What on Earth are you talking about? There no exploitation involved?
Have you been reading the news relating to the working conditions of those that make the products for Apple in the factories in China?
They're actually making considerably above what they can make elsewhere in China. As usual, when a multi-national sets up shop in a less developed country, the wages start to rise.
As for the silly suicide stories - Foxconn employs 800,000 people. 17 suicides is actually far LESS than China's rate overall http://www.zdnet.com/blog/foremski/media-gets-its-facts-wrong-working-at-foxconn-significantly-cuts-suicide-risk/1356
"Although exact figures are hard to come by, even the most conservative estimate for China’s suicide rate is 14 per 100,000 per year (World Health Organization). In other words, Foxconn’s suicide epidemic is actually lower than China’s national average of suicides."
http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-and-dell-investigating-the-foxconn-working-conditions-2010-5:
"In fact, at 5.4 suicides per 100,000 people (400,000 people work at Foxconn), the Foxconn suicide rate is lower than it is in all 50 U.S. states."
I was curious about the validity of your statements and decided to do a little research. As I suspected, you are being less than truthful about what you have written. First of all, you never bothered to address GwNorth's point about the working conditions in that factory, deciding instead to focus upon the wages that these workers are paid. You then attempt to deflect the suicide stories by claiming that they are "silly". As this article points out, your claims are less than credible.
http://gizmodo.com/5542527/undercover-report-from-foxconns-hell-factory
A reporter who works for the Southern Weekly, which is a leading newspaper in China, went undercover to work at Foxconn's Shenzhen factory. He discovered that factory worker suicide attempts went from nine in one month with seven confirmed deaths to 30 new suicides a few months later. The article notes that the factory workers "worked all day long, stopping only to quickly eat or sleep." The reporter, Liu Zhi Yi, realized that the only escape for these factory workers was for them to end their life.
The only thing that Yi was required to sign when he began working there was an overtime working agreement that says the company is not responsible for their long hours of working. The article succinctly notes that "Foxconn really needs to be more human and be concerned about the health-mental and physical-of their workers, instead of treating them like dogs."
Here is a little suggestion, Mr. McSandberg1 [or is it JakeNewton?]. You may want to try pushing your propaganda and your right wing talking points at a web site where people are more willing to believe your nonsense as I strongly suspect that there are very few people here who are this gullible enough to buy what you are unsuccessfully attempting to peddle.
I somehow think this post is a little prank on the "naive" CD posters.
Yes, for geniuses the materialist dream is alive and well. Unfortunately for the rest of us unwashed masses, it seems ever receding--would the oceans yield us infinite amounts of sea food, the soils infinite amounts of produce, the earth's crust infinite amounts of cheap oil and copper, and so on. The idea that we all can have it all lacked any foundation in the ultimate reality--we live on a finite planet that gives not a fig for our dreams of its infinite bounty.
Our choice is either to reorder the dream into one that takes into acct the ecological realities or discovering that the growing slums of the mega cities around the world become not our night mare but our reality--it would seem that we in the west may have already started on that downward trajectory.
I am getting tired of the nonsensical idea of an "American Dream". If it means getting filthily rich it is a dream realized by only a few percent of the inhabitants of our nation. If it means having a decent middle class life then it is just as much a "West European Dream" as it is an "American Dream". It is sad to read a Katrina van den Heuvel posting, whose family hails from a country with perhaps a better dream than the "American Dream" namely the "Dutch Dream", peddle this abject nonsense. Having a decent life with decent health treatment without exploiting other nations which has made the "American Dream" possible in the first place is not a dream of any nation but is a "human dream". To hell with our idiotic exceptionalism.