"The problem is capitalism. And this is the beast we are called to
fight and slay."
Great article!
Thinking of the collapse around us makes me think of my uncle Francis,
digging sewer ditches for a living. One day his boss ordered him into
a ditch that was about twelve feet deep. It was pouring down rain.
But Francis went into the ditch because if he "chose" not to go, he'd
be out of work. As he worked, the sides of the ditch began to slough
off and soon he was ankle deep in muck. Water continued to fill the
soupy mess until he was knee deep in the mire. He later told us that
it was as if everything let go at once. The sides came sliding onto
him, and he had nowhere to turn. Fortunately for uncle Francis, two
fellows had come to the edge of the ditch to check on his progress.
They leaped into the mush and frantically probed until they found him.
Francis had been lucky. He had bent forward and had a small pocket of
air beneath his face. Francis never entered another sewer ditch to
his dying day.
But that's what is happening to the Working Class here in America.
The walls, the ceiling, even the floors are caving in around us.
Where to turn to stop the crash. Overwhelmed. We are currently semi
immobilized.
The mistake the Ruling Billionaires make is in believing that they are
going to stay on top. If they could read their history books they
would discover that they are following a dangerous pattern. Violence
only begets violence. The oppressed always rise up. Rather than
learning to play nice, and to share, the Ruling Class is setting
itself up for one Hell of a slaughter. Sadly, many of our friends
will also be hurt. But I see nothing that tells me that those who
hold the money bags will loosen the tie strings and share even a
little.
Carl Jarvis
On 12/3/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
U.S. Elections: A Poor Substitute For Democracy
By Paul Street, truthdig.com
December 2nd, 2017
The passivity of the American populace in the face of the endlessly
outrageous presidency of Donald Trump is chilling to behold. There were
some
meaningful outbursts of mass anger over and against his patently
discriminatory travel ban and against early Trump-led Republican efforts to
throw millions of Americans off health insurance. Beyond those early
protests, however, it's been abject surrender for the most part.
There were no mass protests when President Trump embraced and advanced the
greenhouse gassing-to-death of life on earth by pulling the United States
out of the Paris Climate Accord or when Trump approved the ecocidal,
planet-cooking Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines.
No mass marches rocked the nation when Trump advance-pardoned a convicted
racist and fascist county sheriff (Joe Arpaio) who created deadly open-air
"concentration camps" (Arpaio's own proud term) to detain suspected
undocumented immigrants of Latino background.
The streets stayed silent when Trump defended neo-Nazis and other vicious
white nationalists, offering them dog-whistle encouragement after they
marched and killed in defense of Confederate (slave power) war statues.
Nobody marched on the White House when Trump threatened genocidal and
thermonuclear war ("fire and fury") on North Korea, putting millions of
lives at risk on and around the Korean Peninsula.
Trump's remaking of the federal bench in the image of the hard-right
Federalist Society has yet to elicit significant mass protest. The same
goes
for Trump's brazen killing of thousands of civilians in Iraq and Syria, his
support for Saudi Arabia's U.S.-equipped devastation of Yemen, his epic
bungling of Puerto Rican disaster relief, and the numerous insults he
hurled
at Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria.
Trump's moronic and arch-nativist wall to be built on the southern U.S.
border has failed to spark mass resistance. Neither has his push for an
openly plutocratic tax cut that will make the already obscenely
hyper-opulent U.S. superrich even more grotesquely wealthy-this even as the
top 10th of the upper 1 percent in the U.S. already possesses as much
wealth
as the bottom 90 percent, and half the U.S. population is poor or near
poor.
The passivity of the citizenry in the face of all this and more is
particularly chilling when seen against the progressive, social-democratic
and left-leaning profile of majority U.S. public opinion. As the
left-liberal magazine In These Times reported three days before Trump's
inauguration, a "broad consensus . has emerged in the United States around
progressive policies." The progressive consensus, author Theo Anderson
noted, "cuts across economic and social issues and includes even
traditional
culture-war flashpoints. On most policy questions, polling shows that about
three-fifths or more of the public prefers progressive positions." The
nation's all-too-silent progressive majority supports federally funded
universal national health insurance, progressive taxation, collective
bargaining rights, campaign finance reform, a higher minimum wage, free
child care, legalized marijuana, abortion rights, LGBT rights, and a shift
from fossil fuels to renewable energy.
An October CNN poll showed that just a third (34 percent) of Americans
support Trump's tax cuts, whereas 52 percent oppose them and 14 percent are
unsure. Only 24 percent agree with Trump and his Republican allies that the
cuts will make families "better off if they are passed." An October CBS
pollfound that 58 percent of Americans believe the Trump tax "reform"
favors
the wealthy, with just 19 percent believing it "treats everyone equally"
and
a mere 18 percent agreeing that it "favors the middle-class."
Surely, this graphic chasm between majority citizen wishes and government
policy is the stuff revolutions, or at least great social protest and
resistance movements, are made of in nations claiming to be democracies,
yes? Not in the contemporary U.S., where the populace is staying off the
streets and out of social movements for the most part.
"We the people" have other, supposedly more urgent and meaningful things to
do with our lives than joining together to confront a corrupt and
sociopathic right-wing government that brazenly defies majority sentiment
by
pushing for an ever-increasing concentration of wealth, for more racist
mass
incarceration, for a deepening decimation of the public sector, for the
removal of millions of poor and sick people from health coverage, for the
right-wing takeover of the judiciary, for the shift of yet more taxpayer
money to the nation's giant war machine, and for the accelerated ruination
of livable ecology.
What gives? Part of the problem is that the disconnect between majority
opinion and policy is anything but novel. It's hardly restricted to the
Trump era. It's a long-standing and richly bipartisan phenomenon. As the
distinguished liberal political scientists Benjamin Page (Northwestern
University) and Marin Gilens (Princeton) show in their important new volume
"Democracy in America?":
[T]he best evidence indicates that the wishes of ordinary Americans
actually
have had little or no impact on the making of federal government policy.
Wealthy individuals and organized interest groups-especially business
corporations-have had much more political clout. When they are taken into
account, it becomes apparent that the general public has been virtually
powerless. . The will of majorities is often thwarted by the affluent and
the well-organized, who block popular policy proposals and enact special
favors for themselves. .
This is equally true regardless of which of the two dominant political
organizations hold nominal power in the executive and/or legislative
branches, as Page and Gilens show.
It's been going on for decades, and it has conditioned millions of
Americans
to give up on politics altogether. "Voters feel, rightly," Anderson wrote,
"that their voices don't count. They become more cynical and disengage."
It's nothing new.
Another and related factor is the dogged hold in U.S. political culture of
the notion that the time for meaningful popular say on matters of policy is
during the biennial elections that are sold to the populace as the only and
real politics that matter. Again and again, people are told that going into
a two-(capitalist-)ballot box for two minutes once every two or four years
is a great and glorious exercise in popular self-rule. "Rejoice, citizens,"
the U.S. wealth and power elite, its ubiquitous commercial media and its
many highly indoctrinated intellectuals tell the people, "you get/had your
participation on Election Day. Thank a military veteran."
Nine years ago, then-Vice President Dick Cheney had an interesting response
when ABC News' Martha Raddatz told him recent polls showed that two-thirds
of the U.S. populace thought the war in (on) Iraq was "not worth fighting."
Cheney smiled as he replied, "So?"
"So . you don't care what the American people think?" Raddatz pressed.
"No," Cheney elaborated. "I think you cannot be blown off course by the
fluctuations in public opinion polls."
Justifying Cheney's blunt remarks shortly afterward, White House
spokeswoman
Dana Perino was asked if the citizenry should have input on U.S. policy.
"You had your input," Perino proclaimed. "The American people have input
every four years, and that's the way our system is set up."
The great majority of Americans technically disagreed. Fully 94 percent of
U.S. citizens at the time said that government leaders should pay attention
to the views of the public between elections.
But so what? Telling pollsters you think something should be done is one
thing. Acting to bring it about is something else. After some early and
giant anti-war marches, the U.S. populace launched no serious great
rebellion against the Bush-Cheney regime and its monumentally illegal, mass
murderous invasion and occupation of Iraq. It fell back into the standard
time-staggered position of electoralist default. The citizenry qua
electorate tolerated the mind-boggling Iraq crime and many other Bush
administration transgressions, falling prey twice in a row to the
docility-inducing illusion of progressive change through presidential
elections. The spectacular, multicolor 2008 election pageant delivered a
culturally rebranded corporate state and empire, with Wall Street's
privileges intact and America's vast global military machine still set on
"Kill" under the "imperial grandmaster" and surveillance champion Barack
Obama.
Some political scientists argue that regular elections that generate
competitive contests for citizen votes are all that is required for a
nation
to be a democracy. They are dead wrong. "Elections alone," Page and Gilens
note, "do not guarantee democracy." That is an understatement.
"Democracy in America?" shows that majority opinion is trumped by a deadly
complex of forces in the U.S.: campaign finance, candidate selection,
lobbying and policy. Powerful and wealthy individuals, corporations and
interest groups set the agenda for the special primary-election influence
of
extreme party activists. We also have the disproportionately affluent,
white
and older composition of the active (voting) electorate, the manipulation
of
voter turnout, the widespread dissemination of "distracting, confusing,
misleading, and just plain false information," unrepresentative political
institutions (the Electoral College, the unelected Supreme Court, the
over-representation of the predominantly white rural population in the U.S.
Senate, and one-party rule in the House), constitutional and related
partisan gridlock, and the fragmentation of authority in government.
Mammon reigns. American "public" policy, Page and Gilens write, "reflects
the wishes of those with money, not the wishes of the millions of ordinary
citizens who turn out every two years to choose among the preapproved,
money-vetted candidates for federal office."
Page and Gilens leave out much that is central to the problem of how the
rich rule America. They say nothing about the rise of a lethal and
ubiquitous police, prison and surveillance state inside the U.S. (The story
of government repression of the Occupy Wall Street Movement, and of earlier
left and anti-plutocratic movements, is missing from their volume.) The
intimately related problem of the giant U.S. military state and global
empire (great forms of upward wealth distribution and authoritarian power)
is glaringly absent. The critical and ongoing historical roles of racial
and
ethnic division and "divide and rule" are barely touched upon. Also omitted
are the critical ideological and propagandistic, consent-manufacturing
roles
of the corporate media and the capture of the nation's educational system
by
the corporate and financial elite.
Another key omission in "Democracy in America?" is the workplace. As the
radical economist Richard Wolff reminds us, ordinary working-class and
working-age Americans spend most of their waking lives on the job, under
the
authoritarian and often despotic supervision of employers. Until its
workers
own, direct and structure their own workplaces as "associated producers,"
democratically determining the purpose and nature of their productive
activities and appropriating the surplus generated for themselves and the
broader common good, it is difficult to think of a society as meaningfully
democratic.
Capitalism and democracy have long stood in fundamental opposition to each
other-a problem that does not engage Page and Gilens.
Still, their book is a devastating indictment of the inner plutocratic
workings of an elections system that is falsely trumpeted as an unmatched
model of popular self-rule. If the book's findings were properly
appreciated, disseminated and discussed, Americans might focus less on
elections and candidates and more on building the kinds of great
grass-roots, sociopolitical movements that have shaken the nation to its
foundations and shifted its direction in the past. The Congress of
Industrial Organizations, the Southern Christian Leadership Council, the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the anti-Vietnam War
movement
hardly waited for election dates and the sympathy of politicians to change
things. They undertook powerful non-electoral direct actions like the
sit-down strike wave of 1936-37, the courageous lunch counter sit-ins and
Freedom Rides of 1960-62, and the many mass mobilizations for peace that
occurred in the 1960s and early '70s. Slaves and abolitionists didn't wait
for the 1864 presidential election to force President Lincoln's hand (along
with the Confederacy's early military victories in the Civil War) on
emancipation.
"The really critical thing," the great American radical historian Howard
Zinn noted after George W. Bush was first installed in the White House,
"isn't who's sitting in the White House, but who is sitting in-in the
streets, in the cafeterias, in the halls of government, in the factories."
As Zinn elaborated in an essay on and against the "Election Madness" he saw
"engulfing the entire society including the left" in the year of Obama's
ascendancy, an "election frenzy seizes the country every four years because
we have all been brought up to believe that voting is crucial in
determining
our destiny, that the most important act a citizen can engage in is to go
to
the polls. ." Zinn acknowledged that he probably would support one
major-party candidate over another "for two minutes-the amount of time it
takes to pull the lever down in the voting booth."
But then he said the same thing as Dick Cheney, but with a very different
meaning: So what? "Before and after those two minutes," Zinn wrote:
[O]ur time, our energy, should be spent in educating, agitating, organizing
our fellow citizens in the workplace, in the neighborhood, in the schools.
Our objective should be to build, painstakingly, patiently but
energetically, a movement that, when it reaches a certain critical mass,
would shake whoever is in the White House, in Congress, into changing
national policy on matters of war and social justice. . We should not
expect
that a victory at the ballot box in November will even begin to budge the
nation from its twin fundamental illnesses: capitalist greed and
militarism.
. Before [elections] . and after . we should be taking direct action
against
the obstacles to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. .
Historically, government, whether in the hands of Republicans or Democrats,
conservatives or liberals, has failed its responsibilities, until forced to
by direct action: sit-ins and Freedom Rides for the rights of black people,
strikes and boycotts for the rights of workers, mutinies and desertions of
soldiers in order to stop a war. Voting is easy and marginally useful, but
it is a poor substitute for democracy, which requires direct action by
concerned citizens.
This is why I resisted the temptation to be awestruck by the remarkable
outpouring of Americans who protested the inauguration of Donald Trump in
January. Cable news talking heads marveled at the marches, calling them the
"biggest social movement since the 1960s." But what were those massive but
polite, pink-hatted marches all about? While many of the chants and signs
heard and seen at the historic marches indicated policy concerns, the clear
and simple thing that had put millions in the streets was the awful man who
is now sitting in the White House. It was about an election outcome. The
new
president hadn't even made any policy yet. What he's actually done as
president has yet to generate protests remotely on the scale of the ones
sparked by the Awful One's entrance into the Oval Office.
Most of the millions who hit the streets to voice outrage against the
election of Trump would have stayed home if it had been the dismal
arch-corporatist and "lying neoliberal warmonger" Hillary Clinton being
inaugurated. And that is very telling. As Chris Hedges noted in the summer
of 2016:
The predatory financial institutions on Wall Street will trash the economy
and loot the U.S. Treasury on the way to another economic collapse whether
Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton is president. Poor, unarmed people of color
will be gunned down in the streets of our cities whether Donald Trump or
Hillary Clinton is president. The system of neo-slavery in our prisons,
where we keep poor men and poor women of color in cages because we have
taken from them the possibility of employment, education and dignity, will
be maintained whether Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton is president.
Millions
of undocumented people will be deported whether Donald Trump or Hillary
Clinton is president. Austerity programs will cut or abolish public
services, further decay the infrastructure and curtail social programs
whether Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton is president. Money will replace
the
vote whether Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton is president. And half the
country, which now lives in poverty, will remain in misery whether Donald
Trump or Hillary Clinton becomes president. This is not speculation. We
know
this because there has been total continuity on every issue, from trade
agreements to war to mass deportations, between the Bush administration and
the administration of Barack Obama. . The problem is not Donald Trump. The
problem is capitalism. And this is the beast we are called to fight and
slay. Until that is done, nothing of substance will change. . To reduce the
political debate, as [Bernie] Sanders and others are doing, to political
personalities is political infantilism. We have undergone a corporate coup.
Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton will not reverse this coup. They, like
Barack Obama, know where the centers of power lie. They serve these centers
of power.
The dysfunctional overfocus on who's sitting in the White House-yes, the
horrific Boss Tweet-is sustained between the quadrennial election
spectacles
by the cable news talking heads and the late-night comedians, for whom
Trump
is a gift that keeps on giving. It is fed by hopes for impeachment on
grounds of collusion with Russia in the subversion of our supposed great
democratic electoral process.
All the evils that Hedges mentions would survive the impeachment and
removal
of Trump. Nothing of substance would change.
Zinn and Hedges' wise words belong in the front of the minds of all
citizens
and workers who want to see democracy break out and take hold at long last
in the oligarchic United States. They help us keep our eyes on the real
prize: changing policy in a progressive direction and radically
restructuring society beneath and beyond the biennial and quadrennial
big-money, major-media, candidate-centered "electoral extravaganzas" (Noam
Chomsky) that are sold to us as politics, "the only politics that matters."
Zinn and Hedges' counsel also help keep us on guard against the parasitic
army of Democratic Party politicos who are constantly working to stick
their
poisonous claws into social movements. Beneath their deceptive language of
"resistance," the "progressive" politicos' underlying agenda is always to
channel genuine popular resistance into narrow get-out-the-vote efforts for
Democratic candidates. Their mission is to drown social movements in the
icy
waters of major-party political calculation and the endless dollar-drenched
and candidate-focused "Election Madness." (See anti-war activist and
attorney Phillip Crawford's remarkable account titled "Whatever Happened to
the Trump Resistance?" on how the Democratic Party front-group Indivisible
played this role earlier this year in Monterey County, Calif.). They are
snake oil salesmen hawking the false belief that we can win progressive
change by "turning out every two years to choose among the preapproved,
money-vetted candidates" (Page and Gilens).
The sooner we develop a different and more Zinnian politics-one concerned
less with who's sitting in the White House (and Congress and state
government) than with who's sitting in the streets, shop floors, offices,
halls of government-the sooner we'll have a chance of getting on the path
to
a decent and democratic future.
