Well, I also read novels and non fiction and at the moment, the non fiction
is that book you heard about on Democracy Now, Spain In Our Hearts. So I'm
spending a lot of time in the late 1930's, reading about individuals who
chose to fight for their ideals in a country, far from home. Of course the
fiction varies, but right now, it's The Golden Age by Gor Vidal. This is
because David Swanson from World Without War, mentioned this book in one of
his essays about why Japan really attacked Pearl Harbor. This is a novel,
based on reality, I gather, because a lot of the other things I've been
reading in it, are things I know to be true. But it's history told through
characters, some of whom are fictional, and some of whom are real. So I've
chosen to bury myself in history, even though I have Matt Taibbi's latest
book about Trump on my sd card. And because I actually bought that damn
second generation stream, much of my time, effort and anxiety, have been
focused on learning to do the things that I bought it for, all of which, are
things I don't know how to do or are really hard to do when you're old and
can't remember shit! And now, after a week, I realized that there's
something wrong with the connection for the external speaker which is why
neither of my 2 alternative speakers work with it, so I need to send it back
to the person who sold it to me to be fixed. Therefore, I'm not spending all
of my time thinking about Mr. Trump and the Republicans. Nevertheless, he's
cutting federal employees, aside from the military and our spies. If he can
privatize NPR completely, and get rid of the Endowment for the Arts and the
Endowment for the Humanities, is our NLS program for the blind and
physically handicapped far behind? They're planning to turn medicaid into
block grants. God help poor people living in the South and the midwestern
states.Well, there's New Jersey too. Its governor is a Trump supporter. We
can continue to read our books until one day, when they're no longer there
for us.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Monday, January 23, 2017 9:26 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Revolt Is the Only Barrier to a Fascist
America
Miriam and All,
For better or for worse, I live in two worlds.
One is the world of the Dreamer, the Optimist. The other is the world of
the Realist, the Pragmatic.
I absolutely never allow these two worlds to cross paths. When life gets
too complicated, or too stressful, I flip an internal switch and bop on over
to the Dreamer/Optimist world.
Many years back, I lived, ate, slept and breathed only in a Realists World.
Those were the years I spent in the NFB and the Democratic Party. Mornings
I put together my weekly radio program. Then, after a full day running my
food service, I spent evenings calling people, urging them to roll up their
sleeves, then gathering material for our organizations NewsLine. Then even
that was not enough. I moved my family back to Seattle and took a job
teaching food service to blind students. From my office I ran the state
organization. One fine day my wife ran off with her girl friend.
Several things struck me. First, I had lost my marriage. Second, I was
suddenly a single working blind man with three children. Third, all my
efforts had not made much of a dent in improving the lives of blind people.
And fourth, I was not happy.
If I were a believer I would have said that God gave me a second chance.
When I was fortunate enough to hear Cathy say, "yes" when I asked her to
marry me, I swore to myself that I would make some drastic changes in my
life. That is when I discovered that I could move between worlds.
The trick is to not spend too much time in one world or the other.
Today, for example, I checked in early to catch up on the Trump news.
Very depressing. So off we went to work with a client. During the drive we
listened to a few chapters of a novel.
Then while Cathy did some grocery shopping, I listened to an account of
President Jackson and the butchery of the Indigenous Americans.
Reading about the underhanded dealings by our White Racist government of the
1830's, gave me some balance regarding today's crop of Bastards. Then back
to the escape novel. Now I am putting the finishing touches on this
Friday's Jefferson Council of the Blind meeting. Then it will be time to
settle down next to Cathy and listen to more of our current novel, while she
plays her video golf and I attempt to keep from snoring too loudly.
And finally, off to bed to snuggle with the person who gives the real
meaning to my existence.
Sheer happiness!
Carl Jarvis
On 1/23/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
My problem is, I'm a realist which means, I guess, I'm not anpopulism.
optamist, and although I can appreciate beautiful dreams, I can't
bring myself to believe in them, which is why I never followed any
religion, and why I can't submit to political ideologies.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Monday, January 23, 2017 1:33 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Revolt Is the Only Barrier to a Fascist
America
Miriam,
When we've been fed fluff and lies for such a long time, reality is scary.
Building an United Front is certainly a long way down a rocky road.
This thing we call The United States of America, this Oligarchy, has
been in control and manipulating our minds since its inception. We
have been trained very carefully to not trust one another, to protect
our little groups against the bigger evil, to accept that a better
life is one of wealth, to believe that leaders are chosen from among
the financially successful.
All that and so much more demonstrates just how far we are from any
sort of united front. But why should that slow us down from promoting
our ideas, and presenting the issues we feel must be addressed? I
remember so clearly, my dad and his friends sitting around discussing
together how the world was going to be once Communism came into power.
The fact that it never came to pass did not alter my Dad's efforts.
In staying true to his beliefs, his love of his fellow Man, his
insight and commitment to a world where we all shared together, my dad
was a far richer and far greater man than all of our so called Leaders.
Carl Jarvis
On 1/23/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I read Chris Hedges this morning, and he scares the hell out of me.and cities.
In case you haven't noticed, Americans who are not part of the 1%, or
the 10%, or whatever, aren't united. We're not even united on this
little email list in terms of how we perceive our current reality. So
how are all of us to be organized to change things?
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl ;
Jarvis
Sent: Monday, January 23, 2017 11:16 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Cc: Harry Whiting
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Revolt Is the Only Barrier to a
Fascist America
Rosa Luxemburg understood that,
"unless we first address the most pressing economic and physical
needs of the destitute we will never gain credibility or build a
resistance movement."
Chris Hedges is always worth reading. Agree or disagree, his
thoughts are well worth considering. Personally, I believe that we,
the Working Class, are on the outside without a single bit of control
over where the Ship of State is heading. Today, more than ever we
must turn upstream and work to unite, to join together to resist what
is surely going to be an oppressive Ruling Class.
Carl Jarvis
On 1/23/17, M Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Truthdig
Revolt Is the Only Barrier to a Fascist America
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/revolt_is_the_only_barrier_to_a_
f
a
scist_
america_20170122/
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Posted on Jan 22, 2017
By Chris Hedges
On the verge: Donald Trump waits to assume power at the kickoff of
the inauguration process in Washington on Friday. (Patrick Semansky
/ AP
(http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/APTOPIX-Trump-Inauguration/4
a
9
b82d9c
63646b5983b49bdaf4122d4/1/1) )
This is a transcript of a talk Chris Hedges gave at the Inaugurate
the Resistance rally in Washington, D.C., on Saturday.
The ruling elites, terrified by the mobilization of the left in the
1960s, or by what [political scientist] Samuel P. Huntington
(https://thewire.in/27279/to-the-american-establishment-mass-mobilis
a t ions-a re-an-excess-of-democracy/ ) called Americas excess of
democracy, built counter-institutions to delegitimize and
marginalize critics of corporate capitalism and imperialism. They
bought the allegiances of the two main political parties. They
imposed obedience to the neoliberal ideology
(https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/15/neoliberalism-ideolog
y
- proble m-george-monbiot ) within academia and the press. This
campaign, laid out by Lewis Powell
(http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_extremist_legacy_of_the_pow
e
l
l_2016
0814 ) in his 1971 memorandum titled Attack on American Free
Enterprise System, was the blueprint for the creeping corporate
coup détat that 45 years later is complete.
The destruction of democratic institutions, places where the citizen
has agency and a voice, is far graver than the ascendancy to the
White House of the demagogue Donald Trump. The coup destroyed our
two-party system. It destroyed labor unions. It destroyed public
education. It destroyed the judiciary. It destroyed the press. It
destroyed academia. It destroyed consumer and environmental
protection. It destroyed our industrial base. It destroyed
communities
fascism.And it destroyed the lives of tens of millions of Americans noincarceration.
longer able to find work that provides a living wage, cursed to live
in chronic poverty or locked in cages in our monstrous system of
mass
This coup also destroyed the credibility of liberal democracy.
Self-identified liberals such as the Clintons and Barack Obama
mouthed the words of liberal democratic values while making war on
these values in the service of corporate power. The revolt we see
rippling across the country is a revolt not only against a corporate
system that has betrayed workers, but also, for many, liberal
democracy itself. This is very dangerous. It will allow the radical
right under a Trump administration to cement into place an
Americanized
sounds.industry.
Ignorance allied with power, James Baldwin
(http://www.biography.com/people/james-baldwin-9196635 ;) wrote, is
the most ferocious enemy justice can have.
It turns out, 45 years later, that those who truly hate us for our
freedoms are not the array of dehumanized enemies cooked up by the
war machinethe Vietnamese, Cambodians, Afghans, Iraqis, Iranians or
even the Taliban, al-Qaida and ISIS. They are the financiers,
bankers, politicians, public intellectuals and pundits, lawyers,
journalists and businesspeople cultivated in the elite universities
and business schools who sold us the utopian dream of neoliberalism.
We are entering the twilight phase of capitalism. Wealth is no
longer created by producing or manufacturing. It is created by
manipulating the prices of stocks and commodities and imposing a
crippling debt peonage on the public. Our casino capitalism has
merged with the gambling
The
entire system is parasitic. It is designed to prey on the
desperateyoung men and women burdened by student loans, underpaid
workers burdened by credit card debt and mortgages, towns and cities
forced to borrow to maintain municipal services.
Casino magnates such as Sheldon Adelson and hedge fund managers such
as Robert Mercer add nothing of value to society. They do not
generate money but instead redistribute it upwards to the 1 percent.
They use lobbyists and campaign contributions to built
monopoliesthis is how the drug company Mylan raised the price of an
EpiPen
(http://www.forbes.com/sites/emilywillingham/2016/08/21/why-did-myla
n
- hike-e pipen-prices-400-because-they-could/#9637a1f477af ) , used
to treat allergy reactions, from $57 in 2007 to about $500and to
rewrite laws and regulations. They have given themselves the legal
power to carry out a tax boycott, loot the U.S. Treasury, close
factories and send the jobs overseas, gut social service programs
and impose austerity. They have, at the same time, militarized our
police, built the most sophisticated security and surveillance
apparatus in human history and used judicial fiat to strip us of our
civil liberties.
They are ready should we rise up in defiance.
These mandarins are, if we speak in the language of God and country,
traitors. They are parasites. Financial speculation in 17th-century
England was a crime. Speculators were hanged. The heads of most of
[todays] banks and hedge funds and the executives of large
corporations, such as Walmart and Gap, that run sweatshop death
traps for impoverished workers overseas deserve prison far more than
most of the poor students of color I teach within the prison system,
people who never had a fair trial or a chance in life.
When a tiny cabal seizes powermonarchist, communist, fascist or
corporateit creates a mafia economy and a mafia state. Donald Trump
is not an anomaly. He is the grotesque visage of a collapsed
democracy. Trump and his coterie of billionaires, generals,
half-wits, Christian fascists, criminals, racists and deviants play
the role of the Snopes clan in some of William Faulkners novels.
The Snopeses filled the power vacuum of the decayed South and
ruthlessly seized control from the degenerated, former slave-holding
aristocratic elites. Flem Snopes and his extended familywhich
includes a killer, a pedophile, a bigamist, an arsonist, a mentally
disabled man who copulates with a cow, and a relative who sells
tickets to witness the bestialityare fictional representations of
the scum now elevated to the highest level of the federal government.
They embody the moral rot unleashed by unfettered capitalism.
The usual reference to amorality, while accurate, is not
sufficiently distinctive and by itself does not allow us to place
them, as they should be placed, in a historical moment, the critic
Irving Howe wrote of the Snopeses. Perhaps the most important thing
to be said is that they are what comes afterwards: the creatures
that emerge from the devastation, with the slime still upon their lips.
Let a world collapse, in the South or Russia, and there appear
figures of coarse ambition driving their way up from beneath the
social bottom, men to whom moral claims are not so much absurd as
incomprehensible, sons of bushwhackers or muzhiks drifting in from
nowhere and taking over through the sheer outrageousness of their
monolithic force, Howe wrote. They become presidents of local
banks and chairmen of party regional committees, and later, a trifle
slicked up, they muscle their way into Congress or the Politburo.
Scavengers without inhibition, they need not believe in the
crumbling official code of their society; they need only learn to
mimic its
serfs.
What comes next, history has shown, will not be pleasant. A corrupt
and inept ruling elite, backed by the organs of state security and
law enforcement, will unleash a naked kleptocracy. Workers will
become
The most benign dissent will be criminalized. The ravaging of the
ecosystem propels us towards extinction. Hate talk will call for
attacks against Muslims, undocumented workers, African-Americans,
feminists, intellectuals, artists and dissidents, all of whom will
be scapegoated for the countrys stagnation. Magical thinking will
dominate our airwaves and be taught in our public schools. Art and
culture will be degraded to nationalist kitsch. All the cultural and
intellectual disciplines that allow us to view the world from the
perspective of the other, that foster empathy, understanding and
compassion, will be replaced by a grotesque and cruel
hypermasculinity and hypermilitarism. Those in power will validate
racism, bigotry, misogyny and homophobia.
Our only hope now is an unwavering noncooperation with the systems
of corporate control. We must rebuild democratic institutions from
the ground up. We must not be seduced into trusting the power
elites, including the Democratic Party, whose seven leading
candidates to be the next chair of the Democratic National Committee
demonstrated the other night at George Washington University that
they have no interest in defying corporate power or backing democratic
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dakota_Access_Pipeline_protests ;) .resistance movement.We must also acknowledge our own failures on the left, our elitism,
arrogance and refusal to root our politics locally in our
communities. Rosa Luxemburg
(https://www.britannica.com/biography/Rosa-Luxemburg ;) understood
that unless we first address the most pressing economic and physical
needs of the destitute we will never gain credibility or build a
Revolt, she said, is achieved only by building genuine
relationships, including with people who do not think like us.
Revolt surges up from below, exemplified by the water protectors at
Standing Rock
we are victorious.from movements.
Politics is a game of fear. Those who do not have the ability to
make power elites afraid do not succeed. The movements that opened
up the democratic space in Americathe abolitionists, suffragists,
labor movement, communists, socialists, anarchists and civil rights
and labor movementsdeveloped a critical mass and militancy that
forced the centers of power to respond.
The
platitudes about justice, equality and democracy are just that. Only
when power is threatened does it react. Appealing to its better
nature is useless. It doesnt have one.
We once had within our capitalist democracy liberal institutionsthe
press, labor unions, third parties, civic and church groups, public
broadcasting, well-funded public universities and a liberal wing of
the Democratic Partythat were capable of responding to outside
pressure
They did so imperfectly. They provided only enough reforms to savepossible.
the capitalist system from widespread unrest or, with the breakdown
of capitalism in the 1930s, from revolution. They never addressed
white supremacy and institutional racism or the cruelty that is
endemic to capitalism. But they had the ability to ameliorate the
suffering of working men and women. This safety valve no longer
works. When reform becomes impossible, revolution becomes inevitable.
The days ahead will be dark and frightening. But as Immanuel Kant
reminded us, if justice perishes, human life on earth has lost its
meaning. We fight for the sacred. We fight for life. It is a fight
we must not lose. To be a bystander is to be complicit in radical evil.
Revolt is a political necessity. It is a moral imperative. It is a
defense of the sacred. It allows us to live in truth. It alone makes
hope
The moment we defy power, we are victorious. The moment we stand
alongside the oppressed, and accept being treated like the
oppressed, we are victorious. The moment we hold up a flickering
light in the darkness for others to see, we are victorious. The
moment we thwart the building of a pipeline or a fracking site, we
are victorious. And the moment those in power become frightened of us,
I do not know if we can build a better society. I do not even know
if we will survive as a species. But I do know these corporate
forces have us by the throat. And they have my children by the
throat. I do not fight fascists because I will win. I fight fascists
because they are fascists.
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