Carl, not everyone is so lucky. Earlier this year two construction workers in
the South end of Boston were working in a ditch when it started to flood. They
started to get out of the ditch when their non-union foreman ordered them back
in, when they protested the Boston police officer that was working the
construction scene as a paid detail ($180 per hour) ordered them to follow the
orders with his hand on his pistol. That part the print media conveniently
didn't have print space to report but it did make it in the radio report. They
both drowned.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2016/10/21/boston-firefighters-launch-technical-rescue-construction-workers-south-end/E6Te4j7IhEEJdTM1JG418K/story.html
Frank
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Monday, December 4, 2017 11:36 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: U.S. Elections: A Poor Substitute For Democracy
"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.
