How Long ?
I just read where the local "progressive" talk radio station folded after one year.They will now do conservative talk radio, but in the spirit of "centrism" is inviting liberals to call in. This is the second one to go down in five years. Good riddance.If I never have to listen to Ed Shultz or Thom Hartman or Rachael Maddow again it would be swell. My question is:
How long will "pro choice progressives" support Democratic Party Health Care Reform that restricts abortion rights? How long will "progressives" support reform that is nothing but a huge profit windfall for Insurance Corporations just so Obama can "pass a bill"? How long will union workers who got Obama and Democrats elected continue to watch their own health plans, which they spent decades negotiating for, attacked as "cadillac plans"? How long will labor watch the Employee free Choice Act be held hostage? How long will liberals watch Obama throw the Honduran leader Manuel Zelaya under the bus, or the Palestinian people (Goldstone report, settlement building etc..)? How long will progressive peace activists watch as Obama escalates in Afghanistan? How long will progressive environmentalists watch as the USA renegs at Copenhagen on CO2 reduction? How long will liberals keep hoping for change as Wall Street cleans up and unemployment keeps rising? Homes keep foreclosing? Schools keep crumbling? How long will liberals keep building prisons to put black and brown people in? How long will black and brown people support these liberals? How long will they keep building weapons systems or coal fired energy plants from their mountain top removal? How long will they support charter schools and corporate education?
The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind.You say you want a revolution? Don't you know it's gonna be alright!
Another good reason to be a radical is the hate people like Richard Nixon and Roy Coen had for us.I saw the Frost-Nixon movie and re-watched Angels in America and both those filthy parasites had contempt for liberals but saved their true venom for socialists.Because we actually mean something.
posted by troutsky @ 10:20 PM
14 comments
14 Comments:
"… we (socialists) actually mean something."
Oh, yeah, what pray tell? I have been reading this blog for several years and get more confused and put off by the jargon, esoteric references and righteousness every time. For a political agenda that supposedly represents the common man more than democracy, you certainly come off like elitists in your own little war room, no matter how many times you say you care or much you claim to mean. Maybe if folks knew without guessing what your "something" actually "means."
One of socialists' biggest problems is the ambiguity of the word in the minds of the very people they cannot recruit. It varies from vampires leeching off the national blood to gulags full of everything but socialists. Perhaps a rebranding campaign would help if using the capitalist ruse is not to abhorent?
...Richard Nixon and Roy Coen ...had contempt for liberals but saved their true venom for socialists.
I beg to differ. Any liberal who wouldn't work with them was branded as a "socialist."
Of course, I also think Yodood has a point - your frustration often sounds like contempt to me.
[Ha! I just got it! Yo, Dude! Clever.]
Further to the discussion of "place" in your previous entry, you might be interested in my latest:
http://iamyouasheisme.wordpress.com/2009/11/16/sugar-tapping-into-the-bit-stream/
Vampires leeching off the national blood? Shades of Spengler's criticism of democracy which he felt would always be corrupted by graft.
We mean that when you look at this recession and bore down a little you see that the upper middle class isn't doing badly at all. Unemployment is a little elevated but not bad and Larry Summers will make sure their position in the market is made whole.
Meanwhile the shift in wealth from the lower quartiles upward accelerates and those people have no power to stop it. The either join the tea baggers or A.C.O.R.N. and if you chose the latter then Glenn Beck will make sure some pithy little video kills your funding and makes you persona non grata.
So the goal is to give people power, exercise it in a way that has broad benefits and see that people kick in in proportion to what they take out.
We have a real douche running for Ted Kennedy's senate seat. He is a part owner of the Celtics and he was a partner with Mitt Romney in Bain Capital, a notorious private equity firm.
They were specialists in buying companies, stripping them and leaving them with nothing but the leveraged debt while Bain got all the skim. So this stiff is talking about job creation because his audience doesn't know what the slash and burn function of a private equity firm is.
There are so many ways to convince folks that the people who created this mess are their salvation rather than having them understand they have to seize their own power.
Yodood. It's super simple, I just don't explain it well perhaps. Politically it is about participatory, some might say direct, democracy.Lots of different consensus building and majoritarian systems working together.
Economically, everyone owns ( or no one owns!) and manages all the activity of production collectively.No more surplus value going to one group.
The fact that the term is ambiguous is no accident but culture jamming and production are high on my list.
Lichanos, Greg: In that the "common man" is oppressed I try to be compassionate but I refuse to condescend to the point where they are free of criticism. They still have agency and must pull themselves away from the NFL or NASCAR and pay attention. Shit is getting serious. Can ignorance be so relative that there is no difference between knowledge and lie, fact and myth? I hope not.
Are liberals "the common man"? I don't think Trout is drawing that conclusion. The progressives he's referencing are limousine liberals...progressives with an education and often money that cling to and take advantage of the rhetoric of hope and change in order to not have to actually change much in the way of their lifestyles...in other words conscious and wanton contempt for the globally poor, the environment, etc. or it only registers on a subconscious level and so they ignore the cognitive dissonance and keep on plugging away for Obama, hope and all their illusions. Either way, contempt is what I feel, not frustration.
I think we all (Yodood, Lichanos, Trout, Duck, Beak, Kultur and I) are going to keep talking until real scary crises of the economy, the environment or something else makes all of this irrelevant.
What are your programs Yodood? Lichanos? Do tell. If they are more effective or hopeful, then tell us so we can be work in the right direction. What should I be reading, doing, struggling for? I'm being serious. I would like to know how things can be improved.
If there's a better way forward than socialism, tell me please. I'm a teacher and I don't want to be mis-educating my students if there are better alternatives.
Okay, Che,
Since you once left a comment on my blog I have to assume you know it exists, so that your asking me my "program" means you have yet to read much of it.
My program is offering food for thought from one who is learning to regain the personal responsibilities I abdicated when availing myself to those who would exploit such a desire for convenience for their own greedy profit. It is not an attempt to get a piece of the big pie, it is learning to bake my own cup cakes. It is not about over throwing the bakery, it is about making it unnecessary, as folks regain their integrity, responsibility for themselves and their kindred spirits. It is a long way back to the garden as we pick and choose among modern technologies for benign or beneficial qualities for all of life on Earth.
No class room, no lecture hall, just a place to read heretical ideas about renewing our relationship to the nature our civilization, we, have been raping, killing and commodifying more every day of the seventy-one years I've been alive.
"I am not selling bread, I am selling yeast."
word verification: fortheno - "republicans"
@Che:
I have little in the way of programs, and I'm happy to have you and Troutsky peddle yours with all the gusto you can muster. I'll keep critiquing.
As for what you should do, I'd say being a teacher is one of the most important jobs in society, and vastly underrated, so as long as you listen to your students, keep on at it...
I don't have much hope for big solutions - I'll take what little I can help bring about.
Ducky, Just when I thought American politics was as vacuous as you can get i read a piece about Italian politics! Sleaze and Spectacle are an art form!
Che Bob, Looked at causally our efforts can seem to have little effect, the status quo immutable and immovable. But dialectically, think of where we were, how many different forces are in play and how each "moment"offers totally new possibilities that wouldn't exist without those efforts.
it might take a deepening crisis but it might be a deepening understanding, some event we can't foresee.
Marx on "moments" from Grundrisse: "individual moments determine each other internally and search for each other externally" in a continuous process of conflictual transformation. ( sorry about the esoteric reference Greg.) We don't know where we are in that process. Could be a critical juncture!
Lichanos: critique at will.
Trout, so long as what your references express is coherent within the context of your post I can follow, but when all you write is the names of several references to represent their expressions in an argument, you guys might just as well be lawyers spouting Latin.
Just when I thought American politics was as vacuous as you can get i read a piece about Italian politics! Sleaze and Spectacle are an art form!
As I keep saying, if you think it can't get any worse, think again...
trout, you may be right about the situation in Italy but with the nation in full Sarah Palin mode right now you may have to reconsider.
Now, just what can you do when Sarah Palin is considered a legitimate political figure. And she is considered presidential in any number of circles.
It's too bad that we have to take the brunt for folks not knowing what socialism means when they don't seem to understand what capitalism means.
America is one big Seinfeld episode and without a medium that can talk to some basic truths we are in this spiral for good.
BREAKING NEWS: Tim Geithner was in charged when we overpaid AIG to cover their assets. This is really brilliant stuff. Not only does a lot of financial blame get shifted to the "liberal" (LMFAO) administration but you have Geithner in Treasury and his only talent is being able to play the yes man and take heat for the boys behind the scenes.
Che Bob is correct. This had to get really bad before folks get off their asses and stop watching Sarah Palin on Oprah.
Yodood
You have hit the nail on the head. The greatest problem with the left is that it allows political criminals like Ren and Che Bob into the mix.
Traditional Liberals were anticommunist. They understood that Communism in all forms was evil. Over time the Democratic Party was infiltrated by folks who really do not belong there such as Hayden, Kerry, Harkin and Harrington.
Many liberals who remained seriously anticommunist moved to the GOP where they are the Rudy Wing. I have always resided there as opposition to Communism is something I take seriously.
There is a profound difference between talking to a decent laborite and the soulless Che Sponge Bob. There is no dealing with Communists as they are evil to the core.
Communists are death cultists who are in fact more fundamentalist than Al Queda. Neverland unlike their faux utopias exist.
Communists are more elitist than the Board of Directors at a fortune 500 company. Communist treat the common man like domestic cattle. They are modern slavers and the flight of people away from their messes is a fact.
No doubt Kultur will spin the facts
into some amoral idiocy about false consciousness. If people vote with their own feet than they
are victims of propaganda. In elitist jargon that means "we know what is better for the working man than the working man himself".
It is truly frightening that Palin came within firing distance of the VP job, but you can blame Mr. integrity-experience-annoint-me-president McCain for that.
I think the worst of Palin is behind us. She has no chance for major office. Too divisive, even for the Republicans. She will continue to annoy and get rich as a media celebrity. The fact that she is popular with some political segments is not surprising, but they are a distinct minority.
Of course, who knows what other vapid Potemkin figures are lurking in the wings..?
I will break my custom of sedulously ignoring beakerkin's ravings:
Over time the Democratic Party was infiltrated by folks who really do not belong there such as Hayden, Kerry, Harkin and Harrington.
What the heck is he talking about here? Harrington - the socialist? Okay, I could see the argument there, but it's a little late. Tom Hayden? Does this guy think it's still 1968? Kerry????
Are you still reading Mad Magazine
Gomer Kerry was a fellow traveler and a front man for a Communist group VVAW. His peer Al Harington was a fake Airforce Officer who never set foot in Vietnam and hurt his back playing basketball in Hoboken. Did we mention Harrington was a Communist?
Did we mention Kerry perjured himself about fake trips to Cambodia on the Senate floor while trying to aid a Communist thug in Managua.
Hayden and Harkin's past speak for themselves.
Harrington the stooge should not have been allowed to infiltrate the Democratic party.
While you are at it compare Nixon's social policies with Lil Abner Clinton. You have zero grasp
of logic or history.
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