No idea as to how to do it, but along with down sizing our
bureaucracies, we need to down size our world population. We might
sustain 3 or at top, 4 billion people. But even then it would take
serious conservation to rebuild the fast disappearing plant and animal
life that we must have if we are not going to join the endangered
species.
My grandfolks had an acre and a quarter on the outskirts of Spokane.
Half the land was given over to Grandpa's nursery stock, and the other
half was in truck garden, chicken barn and yard, pig pen and a barn
for the cow and feed. On this land grandpa and grandma raised 6
children. During the "bad" days of WW I, the Great Flu Epidemic,
President Herbert Hoover and the early years of the Great Depression,
they ate well and stayed dry and warm. Grandpa worked as a box car
repairman for the Northern Pacific railroad, and tended his nursery,
bringing in enough money to pay for the necessities that could not be
grown or milked, like cloth for sewing clothes, and shoes.
The Spokane valley had a huge aqua fir, and not many people. Grandpa
sank a well and never ran out of water. When they first bought the
place, grandpa had an old horse and a buckboard. He would load up the
older children and head into town once a month, buying 50 and 100
pound sacks of flour, sugar, and grain for the animals.
Today the water is nearly sucked dry, and what is there is no longer
safe to drink. The small charming farm towns are sprawling cities.
With cars replacing horses, the young folks dash here and there, often
wandering miles from home. Crime has risen to a point where folks
actually have to lock their doors at night! Drugs and the internet
are growing addictions. Trash is strewn about the countryside and
never picked up.
Too many people, and not enough love on which to raise them.
Carl Jarvis
On 1/3/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I had a thought this morning. Any system, given human nature, can run
amuck.
Every system needs to be regulated, watched, pruned, and get small. When
people complain about government, what they're actually complaining about
is
huge bureaucratic structures that are impersonal and do not take individual
needs into account. Any system can become autocratic and impersonal and
serve the people in powerful leadership positions. Richard Wolfe is right.
We need small cooperatives, owned and run by workers. And there's nothing
wrong with small family run farms or little grocery stores. One of the
things that was most wrong about that community medicaid system that I had
to fight my way out of, was its huge, complicated ingterlocking
bureaucracies. The same problem causes the long delays in the V A for
treatment for our veterans.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Tuesday, January 03, 2017 11:47 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Trump support grows while Democrats face,
divisions, fights
It is a strange sort of an article for the Militant.
My attention was caught by the remark, "Nobody knows, nor can know, how
this
financial crisis will unfold," Socialist Workers Party National Secretary
Jack Barnes wrote in 2008.
Strange, strange talk. How this financial crisis unfolds is exactly like
it
has unfolded over and over again under Capitalism. Whether the economy is
going up or down, the Captains of Industry manage to rake in profits. But
capitalism, especially this corporate capitalism, behaves like a smooth
flat
stone sailing across the water.
It rises and sails ahead, then dropping to slide along the water's surface,
only to skip forward again, and so on until suddenly, for no apparent
reason, it drops beneath the surface of the water.
Sure, we don't know exactly when Capitalism will skip its last skip and
drop
beneath the surface of the water, but we can say with total assurance that
there will come that day, when for no visible reason, Capitalism will fall
to the bottom, taking with it all it has stolen and horded away.
The skipping stone depends for its progress, upon the strength of the arm
that released it. Capitalism depends upon the strength of those workers
who
supply it. While the stone and while capitalism are skipping along, they
seem as though they could go on forever. But when both have used up the
energy required to propel them, they will disappear out of sight.
Carl Jarvis
On 1/3/17, Roger Loran Bailey <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I am not sure I see the point of this article.off.
http://themilitant.com/2017/8102/810203.html
The Militant (logo)
Vol. 81/No. 2 January 9, 2017
(front page)
Trump support grows while Democrats face
divisions, fights
BY MAGGIE TROWE
Since his election, Donald Trump has broadened his support based on
appeals to the working class as he continues to assemble a Republican
administration. The Democratic Party, on the other hand, is
splintered, facing a fight for leadership and perspectives. As Trump
prepares to take power, millions of workers are engaged in a broad
discussion of how to go forward as the bosses and their government
place the burden of the continuing capitalist crisis on their backs.
Trump's approval rating has risen to over 50 percent as he has agreed
to union contracts at some of his hotels, publicly engaged in
arm-twisting to force aerospace giants Lockheed and Boeing to slash
their bills to the government for F-35 warplanes and a new Air Force
One, and announced plans to dissolve his charitable foundation and put
family holdings in trusts.
Trump backed down his supposed buddy Russian President Vladimir Putin,
who said Dec. 22 he was thinking of building up Moscow's arsenal of
nuclear weapons. "The United States must greatly strengthen and expand
its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its
senses regarding nukes," Trump replied publicly. The next day Putin
backed
U.S. "consumer confidence" hit its highest point in more than 15
years, even though long-term participation in the workforce is the
lowest in modern history. "The gain in confidence was entirely due to
rising expectations" following Trump's election, Reuters said Dec. 27.
This puts wind in Trump's sails as he looks to confirm his cabinet
nominees and enact legislation after the inauguration Jan. 20.
He will face a fight. After the post-election hysteria around vote
recounts and an Electoral-College-coup attempt flopped, heterogeneous
elements in the Democratic Party are now planning to try and block his
administration at every turn. In response, he's looking to divide
Democrats and draw some of them toward him.
For example, he intervened in the sharp debate on U.S. policy around
the recent U.N. Security Council vote condemning Israeli settlements
on the Palestinian West Bank and East Jerusalem. As the Barack Obama
administration abstained, allowing passage of the vote Dec. 23, Trump
denounced the move. "At the U.N., things will be different after Jan.
20th," he tweeted.
New York Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer, his party's incoming Senate
leader, also denounced the administration vote, called it "extremely
frustrating, disappointing and confounding." Democratic senators from
West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Virginia, Maryland, Ohio, Oregon
and Delaware also opposed Obama's decision.
Foreign policy moves like this offer Trump opportunities to push forward.
With the Democratic Party in disarray after Hillary Clinton's defeat,
leaders of different currents within it, with their eyes on the 2018
Congressional elections, are scrambling to learn from the lessons of
her loss and take over.
In an op-ed piece in the Dec. 26 New York Times, David Paul Kuhn
disputed those who say Trump won because he galvanized support from
racist white workers.
The fact that the civil rights movement overthrew Jim Crow segregation
and changed social attitudes in the country forever was reflected in
the election of Obama. "Barack Obama won more support among white men
in 2008, including the working class, than any Democrat since 1980,"
Kuhn said.
"By 2016, Mr. Trump personified the vote against the status quo, one
still not working out for them," he said.
"[M]uch of the white working class decided that Mr. Trump could be a
jerk," Kuhn said, pointing to concern over his demeaning views on women.
"Absent any other champion, they supported the jerk they thought was
more on their side."
Sanders 'revolution'
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who had the Democratic nomination stolen
from him by the rigged Democratic super-delegate setup, is one of the
leading contenders to seize the leadership in the party. Asked by
talk-show host Conan O'Brien Nov. 29 if he would have beaten Trump,
Sanders said, "I wish to God that I had had that opportunity."
"The goal now is to mobilize millions of people around a progressive
agenda," Sanders said in a Democracy Now! interview released Dec. 26.
"It would be a tragic mistake to believe that everybody who voted for
Donald Trump is a 'deplorable.' They're not," Sanders said.
During her campaign, Clinton called workers who backed Trump
"deplorables," as well as "racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic,
Islamophobic."
The soon-to-be commander-in-chief of U.S. imperialism will face the
same intractable crisis of the capitalist system as his predecessors.
On a world scale, capitalism is in a long contraction of production,
trade and employment that no policies, including Trump's plans for tax
cuts, eased regulations and infrastructure spending, can change.
No solution to capitalist crisis
"Nobody knows, nor can know, how this financial crisis will unfold,"
Socialist Workers Party National Secretary Jack Barnes wrote in 2008,
as the "Great Recession" unfolded. "But it's not the result of
'mistaken policies.' It is a product of the workings of the laws of
capitalism itself. It's a consequence, not a cause, of finance
capital's development." Barnes' article is included in The Clintons'
Anti-Working-Class Record: Why Washington Fears Working People.
Since the 2008-09 crash, "there is a growing openness among working
people to talk and debate with each other about the broadest social
and political questions facing our class, our unions, and our allies,"
writes SWP leader Steve Clark in the book's introduction. "Workers
everywhere are looking for an explanation of capitalism's grinding and
destructive decline, and, even more importantly, how to chart a way
forward to combat its consequences."
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