Optimist Shmoptimist! Life is exciting. It is also dismal,
dangerous, comforting, and on and on. But at my age and increasing
limitations to my former activities, I'm confined, and for the most
part contented, to being a spectator. But of course I am not a silent
spectator. As long as my finger work, and my mental faculties stir, I
will continue to crank out my opinions.
Life should be an exciting experience. Why else would we want to hang around?
As for why we differ in our approaches? Well Miriam, I never gave it
any thought before now. I just accepted that you are an opinionated
person, who lives in a different stream of events that have given
shape to your beliefs. And frankly, I enjoy and learn from your
posts, especially your personal observations.
So if you would, I'd like your spin on the why of it. Off list, of
course. I promise not to breathe a word to anyone...other than Cathy.
Carl Jarvis
You are truly a congenital optimist. You use the adjective, "exciting",
along with "dangerous". If I'd made the statement, I'd have said,
"horrifying and dangerous". I do have an analysis of why we approach things
so differently, and if you're ever curious, I'll tell you. But it isn't for
a public list.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Tuesday, December 17, 2019 10:20 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Hope Lies in the Streets
A voice in the Wilderness...the midnight cry.
But will anyone listen? Can our cluttered minds hear the warning?
Only time will tell.
And by the way, does anyone doubt that we are now living in histories most
exciting, and dangerous days?
Carl Jarvis
On 12/16/19, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hope Lies in the Streets
Mr. Fish / Truthdig
Global finance capital has seized control of the economies of most
nation-states. The citizens watch, helplessly, as money and goods are
transferred with little regulation across borders. They watch as jobs
in manufacturing and the professions are shipped to regions of the
global south where most workers are paid a dollar or less an hour and
receive no benefits. They watch as the taxes of the rich and
corporations are slashed, often to zero. They watch as austerity
programs dismantle or privatize utilities and basic social services,
jacking up fees to consumers. They watch as chronic unemployment and
underemployment devastate workers, especially the young. They watch as
wages stagnate or decline, leaving working men and women with
unsustainable debts. This economic tyranny lies at the root of the
unrest in Hong Kong, India, Chile, France, Iran, Iraq and Lebanon as
well as the rise of right-wing demagogues and false prophets such as
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, President Donald Trump and
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
It does not matter whether liberals or conservatives, Tories or
Labour, Republicans or Democrats are in power. Finance capital is
impervious to political control. The newly defeated Labour Party in
Britain, by adopting a Brexit-neutral stance in the election, badly
misread the zeitgeist. Yes, its leader, Jeremy Corbyn, had to contend
with hysterical warnings of economic collapse and endured a smear
campaign—amplified by a media mouthing the accusations of his Tory
opponents—that included claims he was a threat to national security
and an anti-Semite, but his and Labour’s failure to appreciate how
desperate workers were for a solution, even one growing out of magical
thinking about the promise of Brexit, was a mistake. Brexit is not a
realistic alternative to economic tyranny. But it at least offers a
hope, however unfounded, of shattering the bonds of corporate power.
It posits itself as a weapon in the war between the insiders and the
outsiders.
That this desperate hope by the outsiders is peddled by con artists
and charlatans such as Johnson and Trump is part of the sickness of
our age, an echo of the economic distortions and right-wing populism
that saw fascists rise to power in Italy and Germany in the first part of
the 20th century.
Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Citibank, Exxon Mobile, Walmart, Apple
and Amazon are the modern versions of the East India Company or La
Compagnie Française de l’Orient et de la Chine. These and others among
today’s global corporations, with the assistance of the World Bank,
the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund, have
created unassailable monopolies and effectively hollowed out many
nation-states, both physically and culturally. Forlorn, derelict urban
wastelands, populated by the bitterly dispossessed, are as common in
France or Britain as they are in America’s Rust Belt. Governments,
captive to corporate control, have been prostituted to transfer wealth
upward, swell corporate profits and crush dissent at the expense of
democracy.
The decay and rupture of the social bonds that once held our societies
together have unleashed the dark pathologies of opioid, alcohol and
gambling addictions and led to an explosion of hate crimes and mass
shootings, along with suicide. Social control provided by work, civic
and political participation—bonds that integrated us into our
communities and gave us a sense of place, dignity and agency—has been
handed over to a heavily militarized police, a massive prison system
and a judicial system complicit in abolishing basic rights, including
due process and privacy.
So, to steal a line from Vladimir Lenin, what is to be done? Can a
reformist political candidate, a Bernie Sanders or perhaps an
Elizabeth Warren—although I question the authenticity of Warren—defeat
Trump and the retrograde forces that empower him? Or will the U.S.
reformers suffer Corbyn’s fate? In short, can the system be reformed
from the inside? Or will we have to take to the streets, as the people
are doing in Chile, Lebanon, France, Hong Kong and elsewhere, to
demand the overthrow of corporate rule?
The left, even under Corbyn, is not ready to speak in revolutionary
language. Revolutionary rhetoric within the political system has been
adopted by the neofascists and the hard right. The Brexit debate is
about blowing up the system, not working within it. Those who support
Brexit and Johnson will, like those who support Trump, be betrayed.
But the language employed by Johnson and Trump is about destruction,
and this yearning for destruction runs deep among the working class.
The tragedy is that by backing these demagogues the public is complicit in
its own enslavement.
Extinction Rebellion, which I support, is attempting to counter this
corporate assault and the consequent ecocide with revolutionary
language and sustained civil disobedience designed to make governance
impossible. I hope Extinction Rebellion will gain enough popular
support to raise a strong barrier before the corporate state starts
employing the brute force outlined in Operation Yellowhammer, the
six-page British government plan that calls for the possible
deployment of 50,000 regular and reserved troops and
10,000
riot police to cope with the unrest that might be caused by food and
medical shortages following Britain’s departure from the European
Union.
The violent suppression of protesters in France, Chile, Iraq, Iran,
Lebanon, India and Hong Kong is already underway, a window into what
may be coming to England, the United States and other countries that
attempt to throw off the yoke of corporate oppression.
The corporate state loathes the political left, but the American
political left, by agreeing to operate within the constrained and
largely rigged electoral system, is easily neutered, as liberalism was
this year in Britain and was in 2016—and will be in 2020—in the United
States. America’s Democratic Party leadership, as hostile to its
progressive candidates as many in the Labour Party hierarchy in
Britain were to Corbyn, employed a series of measures to prevent
Sanders from obtaining the nomination in 2016.
They included a superdelegates scheme, the use of hundreds of millions
of dollars in corporate money, iron control of the Democratic National
Committee and blocking those registered as independents from voting in
Democratic primaries. Politicians such as Sanders and Corbyn are
easily dispatched.
But while the corporate state detests political mavericks such as
Sanders and Corbyn, it both hates and fears the revolutionary left.
The revolutionary left speaks an unvarnished truth about corporate
power and calls out the entire political ruling class for its
complicity. It is not interested in accommodation. It seeks to disrupt
and paralyze the corporate state. When many thousands, as in Hong
Kong, take to the streets shouting slogans like “There are no rioters,
only a tyrannical regime” and “It was you who taught me that peaceful
marches are useless,” the corporate ruling elites begin to worry. This
is why populist leaders, including Eric Drouet of the gilets jaunes,
or yellow vests, in France, are arrested. It is why Roger Hallam, the
co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, spent six weeks in jail this fall
in Britain. It is why Edward Leung is serving a six-year prison
sentence on charges of rioting and assaulting a police officer during
the 2016 Fishball Revolution in Hong Kong. Revolutionaries refuse to
play by the rules.
These global revolutionary movements embody a resurrection of the
concept of the common good, the belief that a society should be
structured around caring for all its members, especially the most
vulnerable. They are forces of solidarity, even community. They
understand, as the economist Karl Polanyi wrote, that there are two
kinds of freedoms. There are the bad freedoms to exploit those around
us and extract huge profits without regard to the common good. And
there are the good freedoms—freedom of conscience, freedom of speech,
freedom of meeting, freedom of association, freedom to choose one’s
job—that the bad freedoms destroy. The bad freedoms, championed by an
atomized, hyper-individualistic consumer culture, which kneels before
the cult of the self, have triumphed. The death grip of the ruling
elites was illustrated in recent days in Madrid, where world leaders
refused during COP25—the United Nations’ conference on climate
change—to take meaningful action to halt the climate emergency, an
existential threat to humankind.
The bankrupt ideologies of globalization and neoliberalism, formulated
and used to justify the consolidation of wealth and power as well as
the ecocide that is devastating the planet, have, however, lost their
credibility.
Neoliberalism, the idea that once regulations on corporations and
trade barriers are lifted and taxes slashed, a society will prosper,
was always an absurdity. None of its promises could be defended by the
history and theory of economics. Concentrating wealth in the hands of
a global oligarchic elite—eight families now hold as much wealth as 50
percent of the world’s population—while demolishing government
controls and regulations, sending production to the global south,
privatizing public services and destroying labor unions does not
distribute wealth. Allowing global speculators to use money lent to
them by the government at virtually zero percent interest to buy back
their stock does not distribute wealth. Permitting corporations to
engage in structured asset destruction through inflation, to strip
assets through mergers and acquisitions, to raise the levels of debt
incumbency to enforce debt peonage on the public, to engage in
corporate fraud that includes the dispossession of assets, does not
distribute wealth. The raiding of pension funds, credit and stock
manipulations and looting the U.S. Treasury when the bubbles and Ponzi
schemes evaporate does not distribute wealth. Such actions funnel
wealth to those at the top. They create enormous income inequality and
monopoly power. They fuel discontent and political extremism. They
make the planet uninhabitable for most species. They destroy democracy.
But economic rationality was never the point. The point was the
restoration of class power. Neoliberalism transforms freedom for the
many into freedom for the few. The idiocy of the intellectual gurus
who sold us this ideology—Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek and Ayn
Rand—should have exposed the con from the beginning, but they were
given ample platforms, while their critics, the old Keynesians, were
pushed out and silenced. Freedom became equated with freedom of market
forces to do anything the capitalists wanted.
And that freedom doomed us and looks set to doom the ecosystem on
which we depend for life. Karl Marx in volume one of “Capital”
explained over a century ago how freedom of the market always results in
social inequality.
The loss of credibility of the reigning ideology has led the ruling
elites to forge an alliance with right-wing, neofascist demagogues
such as Trump and Johnson who employ the tropes of racism,
Islamophobia, homophobia, bigotry and misogyny to channel the public’s
growing rage and frustration away from the corporate elites and toward
the vulnerable. These demagogues accelerate the pillage. They
accelerate the hatred, racism and violence that act as a diversion.
And they accelerate the social unrest that becomes the excuse for the
imposition of tyranny. Hope lies in the streets. Millions of people in
Hong Kong, India, Chile, France, Iran, Iraq and Lebanon understand. It
is time to join them.
Chris Hedges
Columnist
Chris Hedges is a Truthdig columnist, a Pulitzer Prize-winning
journalist, a New York Times best-selling author, a professor in the
college degree program offered to New Jersey state prisoners by
Rutgers… Chris Hedges
