What gets to me is that when people are forced into certain actions by
the system under which they exist and they have little or no choice but
to take those actions it is called human nature. What is human nature
anyway? I am sure that humans do have certain instincts just like any
other animal, but most of what is called human nature has very little to
do with that. Put humans in a situation in which they depend upon
cooperating with each other for survival and you see them doing so. They
cooperate in procuring food, shelter and other necessities and what is a
acquired is acquired for the use of the whole community and not kept by
certain individuals for themselves. That is a mode of economics so
pervasive both geographically and historically that it probably is a
matter of human nature. If it was not human nature to cooperate then
human civilization could never have developed in the first place. We
would still just be lone animals wandering in the wilderness providing
for our individual selves and only coming together for mating. I rarely
hear anyone say that mutual cooperation is human nature though. But put
humans in a social order that has existed for only a small fraction of
the time that humans have ever existed, an order in which people are
forced to compete and step on others in order to ensure their own
survival or to even become comfortable and that behavior is constantly
called human nature. At the least it is social myopia. But it is an
attitude that is encouraged by the very few who benefit the most from
such a social order. Keep people thinking that such behavior is the
natural order of things and keep them telling each other that it is and
it is a lot easier to control them.
___
Neil deGrasse Tyson
“God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance.”
― Neil DeGrasse Tyson
On 3/25/2020 5:28 PM, Carl Jarvis wrote:
And, as the old song said, "You gotta accent the positive, eliminate
the negative, latch onto the affirmative, and don't mess with mister
in between".
Of course the question could be, how much has been a change of
Communism or Socialism or Capitalism, and how much is due to how these
forms have been presented to us?
As a child, the history books always presented the USA as a democratic
Republic, or just as a Republic. But in truth it has always been an
Oligarchy.
Of course that Oligarchy has modified. What was originally a
government of White Males, mostly owners of vast lands and great
individual wealth, has been modified to include a smattering of non
whites, a number of women, and corporate persons.
But the Private Club has been maintained down trhrough the IUnion's
history. Just as violant and ruthless as it was when the first colony
was settled. Some insist that it is "Human Nature". Perhaps, but
it's a Human Nature that carried over from those old, Survival of the
Fittest days, and like other human practices it can be modified and
even eliminated.
Anyway, Capitalism, along with our definitions of all other social
systems, only changes as the mixture of those in power changes.
Carl Jarvis
On 3/25/20, miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Carl,
That's true. And what is most depressing, is that if you take any model,
given human nature, the ideal which might have influenced that model to
begin with, will most probably be degraded. The capitalism that we have now
is not the model that we learned about in school. The socialism that we've
seen practiced in Russia, China, even Cuba, is not how Communism is supposed
to work according to Marx. The state is supposed to wither away. But given
circumstances and human nature, it never did. Or, look at the Catholic
Church. I know the Church is not something that either of us aspire to, but
think about how it's supposed to work, and then think about all those
priests molesting children. So when you talk about how the working class
should rise up and prevent politicians and corporations from stealing from
it, it's important to remember that the working class is composed of human
beings with the same capacity for good and evil as the wealthy elites or the
church hierarchy.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Wednesday, March 25, 2020 4:02 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: The Demise of Bernie Sanders
Miriam,
Understood. But in agreeing that it does make a difference in who is in
office, it is only a slight difference within the allowed boundaries.
Bernie Sanders, while no Radical, was too Progressive for the Establishment
to accept. Like Ralph Nader or Henry Wallace, the Ruling Class felt
threatened. Joe Biden does not threaten the Ruling Class. In fact, the
Ruling Class has worked very well with Joe, as vice president.
The Working Class has allowed itself to be reduced to the level of
on-lookers. Organized Labor has been thoroughly trashed and either bought
off, or ignored. While some resistance still flares up, for the most part
only the public employees unions still have any backbone.
So while the people elected do have some impact on my and my family's well
being, the USA continues unchecked on it's slide toward Third World Status.
Carl Jarvis
On 3/25/20, miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Carl,
I think that you're saying that Bernie Sanders was never a Communist.
He most certainly was a member of the working class because his
parents were working class people living in Brooklyn. He was a
supporter of socialist governments throughout the world, as a young
man. He never formally joined the Democratic party and remains an
Independent to this day. His politics at this time are akin to those
of European Democratic Socialists or of FDR's administration. As for
having a dog in this fight, I think that the appropriate way to
describe that, is that you have no control over the government that is
supposed to represent you and there is no political party with power
in this country, that is representing your interests. But you and your
family certainly will be profoundly affected by which people are
elected to power and by the policies that they put into effect. It is,
(you should excuse the expression), Communist propaganda to say that
it makes no difference who gets elected if the people who are elected
are not socialists. There are differences among politicians. There are
different kinds of Democrats. You can hate the late stage capitalism
that is engulfing us. But to then refuse to see the differences, to
choose something good if it's there, to even choose the lesser of two
evils, is like choosing suicide for the people you care about. Within
the rotten system that we have, it matters which judges are appointed,
what kind of financial assistance legislation is passed, whether or
not abortion clinics are closed, whose vision for fighting the pandemic,
(regardless of how faulty the competing visions are), is adopted.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Wednesday, March 25, 2020 3:02 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: The Demise of Bernie Sanders
As I've said before, " I don't got no dog in this fight". The
political playing field has always been the property of the
Establishment, and you have to be a member in order to play. While
Bernie Sanders espoused his support for many of the issues near and
dear to the Working Class, he was never a Working Class Socialist.
Still, Bernie might have turned a corner or two, like a poor man's
FDR, but if he goes down, which appears to be where he is headed, and
he tosses his support behind Joe Biden, then his value to the Working
Class is done.
Carl Jarvis, sitting in the bleachers looking at the two teams of the
Establishment, and wondering what it matters as to who wins.
On 3/25/20, Roger Loran Bailey <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
https://socialistaction.org/2020/03/24/the-demise-of-bernie-sanders/
The Demise of Bernie Sanders
Socialist Action / 21 hours ago
(Photo by Scott Eisen/Getty Images)
By JEFF MACKLER
Bernie Sanders, face to face on March 16 with his often-proclaimed
“friend” Joe Biden, could only assert that “Joe,” voted for the 2003
Iraq War. True! Sanders scored a debater’s point that a well-scripted
and lying Biden brushed off in a few words. Sanders left it at that.
Television debates are rarely meant for historical clarification of
events long past, even if the subject is genocidal war.
Following Biden’s “mistaken” vote, the U.S. imperialist war machine
and its deadly sanctions murdered 1.5 million Iraqis. That, too,
Sanders left unmentioned. Nor did he note that Iraq’s President
Saddam Hussein never had “weapons of mass destruction” that he was
supposedly planning to unleash against the U.S. This demonizing and
manufactured pretext, deployed with the entire corporate media in
tow, was employed to launch the most intensive bombing in world history.
That the U.S. continues to occupy Iraq today also went unmentioned.
Biden, and indeed all the Democrats’ primary contest contenders,
supported that war which they now proclaim was a “mistake!”
Forgive me, readers, but if I, or any serious antiwar activist had
the opportunity to stand on the world stage at that moment, I/we
would have thoroughly shed Biden’s political blood and pilloried both
of capitalism’s parties of war, death and destruction.
And the Vietnam War that Sanders’ Democratic Party “friends” now
admit was also a “mistake?” Sanders declined to comment, not even to
make a debater’s point. The nature of this “mistake” has never been
seriously examined. Silence largely prevails! In truth, it was the
now undeniable fact that after ten years of genocidal slaughter –
replete with napalm carpet bombing, poison gas, agent orange
defoliation and indiscriminate terror bombing of civilian populations –
the U.S.
government lost! That was the mistake! After murdering four million
Vietnamese and countless tens of thousands of Cambodians, Laotians
and Thais, the imperialist war machine failed to impose U.S. rule. “We”
were forced to withdraw! No apologies for the genocide! The U.S. lost
in Vietnam because the courageous Vietnamese would not cease their
national liberation struggle, because the vast majority – 75 percent
of the American people – mobilized for a decade in unprecedented
numbers to demand “U.S. Out Now!” and because a demoralized U.S.
military felt a greater kinship with the Vietnamese people than they
did with the racist warmakers at home.
Sanders’ list of items to score points against Biden included the
latter’s support for the infamous and racist
mass-incarceration-oriented
1994 crime bill the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act.
The well-coached Biden blithely dodged that debaters point as well
while Sanders declined to drive his point home with an accounting of
the literal millions of poor and oppressed people who have been
herded into the nation’s racist, increasingly for-profit and
privatized prison-industrial complex.
Sanders stands mute on Cuba and Nicaragua
But Sanders silence was not matched by his repeated reference to his
“longtime friend Joe,” to whom he repeatedly pledged his support
should Biden win the Democratic Party nomination, an increasing
certainty at that point in the primaries.
The March 16 televised debate spectacle included Bernie Sanders
failure to counter Joseph Biden’s accusations that Sanders supported
the “authoritarian governments” of Cuba and the Sandinistas of
Nicaragua.
That the U.S. armed and financed the universally hated, corrupt,
Mafia-connected Fulgencio Batista dictatorship was not mentioned.
That revolutionary Cuba, under Fidel Castro, defeated and removed
that government and proceeded to conduct the largest land reform in
the modern era, nationalized capitalist property and used it for the
common good, that Cuba’s literacy campaign and free healthcare for
all system are the envy of the world’s people, were not mentioned by
the “democratic socialist” Bernie Sanders. Biden emerged unscathed
because Sanders accepted his “authoritarian” red-baiting without
question. He stood mute on national television while the imperialist
warmaker and Vice Presidential accomplice in Obama’s seven wars
pilloried him for refusing to denounce Cuba and Nicaragua. Sanders
was lost for words when Biden demanded that he renounce the
revolutions that removed these previous U.S. neo-colonies from
imperialist domination.
That Nicaragua’s U.S.-backed Anastasio Somoza dictatorship murdered
80,000 Nicaraguans in its final months in 1979 went unmentioned by
Sanders. That the U.S. invaded Cuba in 1961, introduced dengue
hemorrhagic fever in 1981, and then swine flu that devastated Cuba’s
pig population, and then a plague that devastated Cuba’s banana crop,
went unmentioned.
Sanders’ claimed longtime friend “Joe,” Obama’s anti-school-bussing,
anti-abortion, warmongering VP, was let off the hook, except for
Sanders’ staccato single-phrase recitation of Biden’s “voting record,”
which the lying Biden denied and the corporate media dismissed as
either irrelevant or long ago superseded by Biden’s more “progressive”
views today. Why dwell in the past?
Democrats and corporate media close ranks
There was no Sanders rage against the iron-disciplined Democratic
Party machine that united to defeat him in 19 of the past 24 primary
contests.
Gone in an instant were the likes of millionaire or billionaire
racists and warmongers Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Michael
Bloomberg, Tom Steyer and Elizabeth Warren. They had all been thrown
into the orchestrated charade to dilute and undermine Sanders’
potential, only to pull the plug when the time was right to clear the
way for a failing Biden to emerge unimpeded on center stage.
No rage against the kept corporate media that red-baited Sanders at
will in virtually every media outlet across the country. Indeed,
Biden, who repeatedly lied about his record with impunity at every
opportunity – fully cognizant that he had Sanders beaten – extended
the olive branch to his bewildered friend “Bernie,” so they could
unite against Donald Trump.
Said Biden a few days after the debate, “Let me say, especially to
the young voters who have been inspired by Senator Sanders: I hear
you. I know what’s at stake. I know what we have to do. Our goal as a
campaign and my goal as a candidate for president is to unify this
party and then to unify the nation.”
CNN and the New York Times, if not the entire “liberal” media cabal,
similarly switched gears to congratulate “Bernie” for raising
important issues while Sanders repeatedly consoled himself with
remarks to the effect that the trend showed that he had “won the
ideological debate”
while “losing the debate over electability.”
Sanders imminent withdrawal
The 1,991 delegates Sanders needs to win the Democrat’s nomination at
its summer convention are all but out of reach. Biden currently leads
in pledged delegates 1,132 to 817. Sanders’ fundraising efforts have
all but ceased. His aides daily proclaim that he is “assessing his
options.”
Some Sanders’ advisers indicated that he intended to stay in the race
to affect the Democratic Party platform at the national convention
and to continue his “political revolution.” Sanders did this after
losing to Hillary Clinton in the 2016 primary race. The Democratic
Party’s platform, adopted during its convention proceedings, is worth
less than the paper it is printed on. The real platform of the
Democrats, and the Republicans, is decided behind closed doors by the
direct representatives of the 0.1 percent, who daily hammer out
ruling class multi-trillion dollar budgets, trade agreements,
corporate and bank bailouts and imperialist war strategies. The
hodgepodge of delegates who are sequestered in small rooms during the
Democrats’ conventions decide nothing of substance.
Sanders’ chief campaign strategist, Faiz Shakir, stated that “Sanders
is focused on the government response to the coronavirus outbreak and
ensuring that we take care of working people and the most vulnerable.”
Ever playing the election time game of one-upping your opponent’s
proposals, Sanders is now calling for a $2,000 monthly payment to
every American until the end of the COVID-19 pandemic.” Needless to
say, Biden’s advisers will not be far behind Sanders’ paper
proposals, none of which will see the light of day.
Sanders is no socialist
Media red-baiting notwithstanding Bernie Sanders is not now and has
never been a socialist. During the 2015 primary contests and ever
since he has cast himself in the tradition of Democrat President
Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his “New Deal” politics that had the
effect of saving a failing Depression-era U.S. capitalism rather than
abolishing it. Roosevelt’s social reforms were aimed at countering
the deepening radicalization of U.S. workers, half of whom were
unemployed or barely employed part time. FDR’s limited social
measures notwithstanding, he transformed U.S. industry into a war
machine that had no rival on earth.
With an estimated 60 million dead by the war’s end in 1945 and the
infrastructure of U.S. allies and enemies alike in ruins, the intact
U.S. industrial behemoth emerged as the sole world superpower. Three
quarters of a century later, war production stands at the center of U.S.
capitalism’s “stability.”
In a 2015 speech, Sanders stated that his politics “builds on what
Franklin Delano Roosevelt said when he fought for guaranteed economic
rights for all Americans.” In truth, the rights that workers won in
the 1930s and beyond emerged from pitched battles with the boss class
aimed at the unionization of capitalism’s major industries (See:
“Labor’s Giant Step: The First Twenty Years of the CIO: 1936–55” by
Art Preis, Pathfinder Press 1972).
Sanders: “I don’t believe the government should own the means of
production”
Sanders’ 2015 speech continued, “So the next time you hear me
attacked as a socialist, remember this. I don’t believe the
government should own the means of production, but I do believe that
the middle class and working families who produce the wealth of
America deserve a fair deal.
I believe in private companies that thrive and invest and grow in
America instead of shipping jobs and profits overseas.” (For the full
Sanders speech, see:
https://www.vox.com/2015/11/19/9762028/bernie-sanders-democratic-socialism).
Simply put, Sanders, in his own words is no socialist! There is no
socialism in the framework of a capitalist society where an elite
handful of multi-billionaires own and control more wealth than the
combined holding of the majority of the population. Sanders’
so-called democratic socialism consists in his campaign pledge to tax
the wealth of the super-rich at the rate of one percent, and impose
this tax only on their wealth that exceeds $32 million! Sanders
proclaims that under his policy “a married couple with $32.5 million
would pay a wealth tax of just $5,000.” Pocket change for
billionaires!! “There will always be billionaires in this country,”
Sanders promises the ruling class.
Sanders’ statement that “private companies that thrive and invest in
America” are welcome as opposed to those that “ship jobs and profits
overseas” is sheer demagoguery. Leaving aside that any
self-respecting capitalist enterprise that “thrives and grows” in the
U.S. or anywhere else in the world, does so at the expense of its
always exploited workers, no serious socialist advocates pitting
foreign workers against U.S. workers. We might add that even when
U.S. corporations return their production to the U.S. it is a
qualitatively new production based on state-of-the-art factories
where robots replace human beings en masse and wages remain at
near-poverty levels.
That’s the nature of the system that Sanders in incapable of addressing.
The entire complex of today’s globalized capitalism, without
exception, and in the context of ever-sharper and intensified
competition, is compelled to operate with the cheapest labor force
and raw materials obtainable, the least government restrictions and
the resulting highest profit rates possible. Those capitalists that
do otherwise are effectively, if not brutally driven from the
marketplace. These irrefutable fundamentals of capitalist production
everywhere are of no concern to Sanders, for whom the class struggle
is to be subordinated to his dreamlike fantasies where he promises
today’s trade unions that he personally – not a fighting working
class in alliance with the oppressed! – will “double union membership.”
Sanders will tour nation for Biden
Sanders and his “political revolution” are now dead in the water. His
multi-trillion-dollar paper proposals did have the effect of
inspiring a radicalizing generation with bleak future prospects to
question “the system” and to search for solutions that appear to
challenge the status quo. His use of the term “socialism,” however
much his politics have nothing to do with its liberating, humane and
majoritarian class content, served to open the minds of millions to
further investigation.
But like all “good Democrats,” Sanders will soon tour the nation on
behalf of a man whose policies he has long repudiated and whose
ingrained hatred of socialist revolution has been evidenced
throughout his career. Sanders proposed “solutions” were based on
herding the innocent, and the not so innocent groups on the left,
into the graveyard of the Democratic Party where the
“left/progressive” and right/centrist wings are indistinguishable
regarding which class shall rule society.
All are dedicated to the imperialist system and its wars against
working people at home and abroad. It has never been otherwise.
Indeed, Sanders and his supporters, the AOC gang included, supported
every Democratic Party candidate in the 2018 mid-term elections! They
are pledged to do the same in 2020 when Biden will undoubtedly be
presented as the latest of capitalism’s “lesser evils.”
For serious fighters today there is a serious alternative. It lies in
a commitment to organize and mobilize working people independently
and in opposition to the parties and polices of capitalism. It lies
in breaking with the two-party duopoly and fighting to re-build and
transform the present labor movement into fighting organs of struggle
on behalf of the vast majority. Start today by joining a
revolutionary socialist party that seeks to sink deep roots in all
the struggles of the oppressed and exploited!
Join Socialist Action! Donate to Socialist Action’s Jeff Mackler for
president in 2020 national campaign.
socialistaction@xxxxxxx
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March 24, 2020 in Uncategorized.
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___
Neil deGrasse Tyson
“God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance.”
― Neil DeGrasse Tyson
