My point is that we only go back to our own conquest of America,
painting our pretty pictures of our Glorious Land from those days
forward. But the America before our People came crashing and bashing
their way across from Sea to Shining Sea, were People with different
values. They also beat back even earlier Americans, who had also
carved their homes from the Wilderness.
Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Hilary Clinton and all the Machine
Politicians need to revisit their American History.
Carl Jarvis
On 9/29/15, Carl Jarvis <carjar82@gmail.com> wrote:
> Christians versus Muslims versus Atheists versus Agnostics...
> None of it is American. Apple Pie, Peanut Butter and Jam Sandwiches,
> Soda Pop and Big Macs. None of it is American.
> Try instead, The Great Spirit, Maize, Tobacco, Roast Bison and Elk
> Steaks. Now we're getting closer to America. Black hair, Copper
> Skin, Deer Skin Clothing, Bear Skin Rugs. And fish for the taking
> from the clear, sparkling streams. America, the Land of Plenty.
> America, a Time before Time mattered. A Land of People satisfying
> their human needs rather than slaving to enrich the gold and silver of
> the White Man from over the Great Waters.
> America, a Land of People. A Land void of the likes of Donald Trump
> and Ben Carson and Hilary Clinton.
>
> Carl Jarvis
>
> On 9/29/15, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
>>
>> Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
>> Home > What Trump and Carson Get Wrong: Islam Is as American as Apple Pie
>> ________________________________________
>> What Trump and Carson Get Wrong: Islam Is as American as Apple Pie
>> By Joshua Holland [1] / The Nation [2]
>> September 28, 2015
>> Not content with alienating single women, Latinos and the LGBT
>> community, the two front-runners for the Republican nomination indulged
>> in
>> some naked Islamophobia this past week.
>> Donald Trump told an audience member at one of his events that he'd "look
>> into" either expelling America's Muslim population, or the existence of
>> Jihadi training camps on US soil, depending on how charitably one viewed
>> the
>> exchange.
>> Then Ben Carson appeared on Meet The Press, where he told Chuck Todd that
>> Islam was inconsistent with the Constitution and said that he "would not
>> advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation."
>> This kind of bigotry won't hurt these candidates in the primary. A YouGov
>> poll earlier this year found that only one in five Americans-and one in
>> seven Republicans-held a positive view of Islam. And according to Public
>> Policy polling, only half of Iowa Republicans "think the religion of
>> Islam
>> should even be legal in the United States." Ben Carson reportedly saw his
>> donations spike after his interview with Todd.
>> But this kind of callous disregard for a minority that's faced serious
>> discrimination-and no small amount of violence-should hurt. The
>> candidates
>> reinforced a central tenet-perhaps the central tenet-of anti-Muslim
>> bigotry:
>> That Islam is an inherently foreign religion that's incompatible with US
>> citizenship. This view is common among shouty people who protest outside
>> mosques and politicians who push those Constitutionally sketchy bans on
>> "Sharia law."
>> In that sense, claims that Barack Obama is a crypto-Muslim are really a
>> proxy for the belief that he was born in Kenya and is ineligble to be
>> president. A poll earlier this month found that 66 percent of Trump's
>> supporters said Obama is a Muslim and 61 percent thought he was born
>> overseas. (Perhaps we shouldn't give Trump, an avowed "birther", the
>> benefit
>> of the doubt in his exchange with that guy in the audience.)
>> It's a belief based on the kind of widely debunked "history" peddled by
>> David Barton, a popular figure on the tea party circuit who claims that
>> the
>> United States is a "Christian nation" founded by men whose theology
>> resembled Mike Huckabee's.
>> But while Muslims are a small minority, Islam is just as American as
>> Christianity. It's true that a significant share of Muslims living in the
>> U.S. today were born abroad, but it's also true that from the very
>> beginning, Islam has always been part of the social fabric of this
>> country.
>> In fact, it's possible that Muslims got here before the first Christians.
>> According to the PBS special, some historians believe that Muslims first
>> arrived in the Americas in the early 14th century, after being expelled
>> from
>> Spain. Others say that Christopher Columbus referred to a book written by
>> Portuguese Muslims who had navigated to the "New World" in the 12th
>> century
>> during his 1492 voyage.
>> Those are controversial claims. But it's clear that Muslims arrived here
>> in
>> significant numbers in the 16th century, along with large-scale European
>> colonization. Some came voluntarily, but many more were brought here
>> forcibly to work as slaves.
>>
>> According to the Encyclopedia of Religion in the South, 10-15 percent of
>> all
>> slaves were Muslims, many of whom were "literate and highly educated,"
>> and
>> "kept the spirit of Islam burning even while enslaved."
>> Several Muslims fought for America's independence with distinction under
>> George Washington. Greg Considine, a sociologist at Rice University,
>> wrote
>> for the Huffington Post that one soldier believed to have been a Muslim,
>> Peter Buckminster, "etched his name into American history at the Battle
>> of
>> Bunker Hill by firing the shot which killed Great Britain's Major General
>> John Pitcairn." Muslim-Americans fought in the War of 1812, in the Civil
>> War
>> and in every major conflict since.
>> From the 1870s until 1924, when the United States severely restricted
>> most
>> non-white immigration, new arrivals from the Middle East-mostly from
>> Syria
>> and Lebanon-swelled the Muslim population. Their descendants have been
>> Americans for many generations.
>> Thirty years later, when the US once again opened its doors to new
>> immigrants, a new wave of Muslim immigrants arrived here from Africa,
>> Asia
>> and the Middle East.
>> At around that time, the rise of the African-American Muslim Nationalist
>> Movement led to huge numbers of new converts. According to Gallup, 35
>> percent of Muslims in America today are black-the largest group within
>> the
>> most ethnically diverse faith in the United States.
>>
>> Estimates vary widely, but there are somewhere between one and six
>> million
>> muslims in the United States. According to a 2004 survey by Zogby
>> International, they tend to "have a favorable outlook on life in America,
>> and wish to be a part of the mainstream." Almost six in 10 hold at least
>> an
>> undergraduate degree, making them the most educated faith group in this
>> country. Many work in professional fields. America's Muslim community is
>> believed to be the wealthiest in the world. They have high rates of civic
>> participation, and there's no evidence that they embrace extremism at a
>> higher rate than Christians or Jews.
>> According to Gallup, Muslim women are among the most educated in the
>> country, and work outside the home at a slightly higher rate than
>> American
>> women as a whole. One in three have a professional job. The gender
>> pay-gap
>> among American Muslims is smaller that that of any other group.
>> The Pew report prompted Bret Stephens and Joseph Rago to write in The
>> Wall
>> Street Journal that "America's Muslims tend to be role models both as
>> Americans and as Muslims." But to varying degrees, they have always faced
>> discrimination and persecution at the hands of America's Christian
>> majority.
>> Muslim slaves were often forced to practice their religion in secrecy.
>> Many
>> were forcibly converted to Christianity. In his book, The Crescent
>> Obscured:
>> The United States and the Muslim World, 1776-1815, historian Robert
>> Allison
>> notes that some anti-Federalists at the Constitutional Convention of 1787
>> didn't want to include religious liberty in the Bill of Rights because it
>> would protect the Islamic faith-an argument echoed today by people like
>> Ben
>> Carson, or Representative Jodi Hice (R-Georgia), who wrote that Islam "is
>> a
>> complete geo-political structure and, as such, does not deserve First
>> Amendment protection."
>> Sadly, Islamophobia isn't just a problem on the right. In the Yougov poll
>> cited above, 43 percent of Democrats said they held an unfavorable view
>> of
>> Islam, and Pew found that "a majority of Muslims say a friend or family
>> member has suffered discrimination since the September 11 attacks."
>> Casual
>> Islamophobia is often tolerated in a way that bigotry toward other
>> minorities is not.
>> It's time for this to stop. After 400 years in the Americas, and having
>> helped build and defend this country, we need to accept that American
>> Muslims are just as American-and just as loyal-as anyone else.
>> Joshua Holland is Senior Digital Producer at BillMoyers.com [3], and host
>> of
>> Politics and Reality Radio [4]. He's the author of The 15 Biggest Lies
>> About
>> the Economy [5]. Drop him an email [6] or follow him on Twitter [7].
>> Share on Facebook Share
>> Share on Twitter Tweet
>> Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@alternet.org'. [8]
>> [9]
>> ________________________________________
>> Source URL:
>> http://www.alternet.org/belief/alternet-comics-brian-mcfadden-martin-shkreli
>> s-free-market-pharmacy
>> Links:
>> [1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/joshua-holland
>> [2] http://www.thenation.com
>> [3] http://billmoyers.com
>> [4] http://alternetradio.podbean.com
>> [5] http://www.powells.com/partner/32513/biblio/9780470643921
>> [6] mailto: joshua.holland@alternet.org
>> [7] http://twitter.com/JoshuaHol
>> [8] mailto:corrections@alternet.org?Subject=Typo on What Trump and Carson
>> Get Wrong: Islam Is as American as Apple Pie
>> [9] http://www.alternet.org/
>> [10] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
>>
>> Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
>> Home > What Trump and Carson Get Wrong: Islam Is as American as Apple Pie
>>
>> What Trump and Carson Get Wrong: Islam Is as American as Apple Pie
>> By Joshua Holland [1] / The Nation [2]
>> September 28, 2015
>> Not content with alienating single women, Latinos and the LGBT community,
>> the two front-runners for the Republican nomination indulged in some
>> naked
>> Islamophobia this past week.
>> Donald Trump told an audience member at one of his events that he'd "look
>> into" either expelling America's Muslim population, or the existence of
>> Jihadi training camps on US soil, depending on how charitably one viewed
>> the
>> exchange.
>> Then Ben Carson appeared on Meet The Press, where he told Chuck Todd that
>> Islam was inconsistent with the Constitution and said that he "would not
>> advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation."
>> This kind of bigotry won't hurt these candidates in the primary. A YouGov
>> poll earlier this year found that only one in five Americans-and one in
>> seven Republicans-held a positive view of Islam. And according to Public
>> Policy polling, only half of Iowa Republicans "think the religion of
>> Islam
>> should even be legal in the United States." Ben Carson reportedly saw his
>> donations spike after his interview with Todd.
>> But this kind of callous disregard for a minority that's faced serious
>> discrimination-and no small amount of violence-should hurt. The
>> candidates
>> reinforced a central tenet-perhaps the central tenet-of anti-Muslim
>> bigotry:
>> That Islam is an inherently foreign religion that's incompatible with US
>> citizenship. This view is common among shouty people who protest outside
>> mosques and politicians who push those Constitutionally sketchy bans on
>> "Sharia law."
>> In that sense, claims that Barack Obama is a crypto-Muslim are really a
>> proxy for the belief that he was born in Kenya and is ineligble to be
>> president. A poll earlier this month found that 66 percent of Trump's
>> supporters said Obama is a Muslim and 61 percent thought he was born
>> overseas. (Perhaps we shouldn't give Trump, an avowed "birther", the
>> benefit
>> of the doubt in his exchange with that guy in the audience.)
>> It's a belief based on the kind of widely debunked "history" peddled by
>> David Barton, a popular figure on the tea party circuit who claims that
>> the
>> United States is a "Christian nation" founded by men whose theology
>> resembled Mike Huckabee's.
>> But while Muslims are a small minority, Islam is just as American as
>> Christianity. It's true that a significant share of Muslims living in the
>> U.S. today were born abroad, but it's also true that from the very
>> beginning, Islam has always been part of the social fabric of this
>> country.
>> In fact, it's possible that Muslims got here before the first Christians.
>> According to the PBS special, some historians believe that Muslims first
>> arrived in the Americas in the early 14th century, after being expelled
>> from
>> Spain. Others say that Christopher Columbus referred to a book written by
>> Portuguese Muslims who had navigated to the "New World" in the 12th
>> century
>> during his 1492 voyage.
>> Those are controversial claims. But it's clear that Muslims arrived here
>> in
>> significant numbers in the 16th century, along with large-scale European
>> colonization. Some came voluntarily, but many more were brought here
>> forcibly to work as slaves.
>> According to the Encyclopedia of Religion in the South, 10-15 percent of
>> all
>> slaves were Muslims, many of whom were "literate and highly educated,"
>> and
>> "kept the spirit of Islam burning even while enslaved."
>> Several Muslims fought for America's independence with distinction under
>> George Washington. Greg Considine, a sociologist at Rice University,
>> wrote
>> for the Huffington Post that one soldier believed to have been a Muslim,
>> Peter Buckminster, "etched his name into American history at the Battle
>> of
>> Bunker Hill by firing the shot which killed Great Britain's Major General
>> John Pitcairn." Muslim-Americans fought in the War of 1812, in the Civil
>> War
>> and in every major conflict since.
>> From the 1870s until 1924, when the United States severely restricted
>> most
>> non-white immigration, new arrivals from the Middle East-mostly from
>> Syria
>> and Lebanon-swelled the Muslim population. Their descendants have been
>> Americans for many generations.
>> Thirty years later, when the US once again opened its doors to new
>> immigrants, a new wave of Muslim immigrants arrived here from Africa,
>> Asia
>> and the Middle East.
>> At around that time, the rise of the African-American Muslim Nationalist
>> Movement led to huge numbers of new converts. According to Gallup, 35
>> percent of Muslims in America today are black-the largest group within
>> the
>> most ethnically diverse faith in the United States.
>> Estimates vary widely, but there are somewhere between one and six
>> million
>> muslims in the United States. According to a 2004 survey by Zogby
>> International, they tend to "have a favorable outlook on life in America,
>> and wish to be a part of the mainstream." Almost six in 10 hold at least
>> an
>> undergraduate degree, making them the most educated faith group in this
>> country. Many work in professional fields. America's Muslim community is
>> believed to be the wealthiest in the world. They have high rates of civic
>> participation, and there's no evidence that they embrace extremism at a
>> higher rate than Christians or Jews.
>> According to Gallup, Muslim women are among the most educated in the
>> country, and work outside the home at a slightly higher rate than
>> American
>> women as a whole. One in three have a professional job. The gender
>> pay-gap
>> among American Muslims is smaller that that of any other group.
>> The Pew report prompted Bret Stephens and Joseph Rago to write in The
>> Wall
>> Street Journal that "America's Muslims tend to be role models both as
>> Americans and as Muslims." But to varying degrees, they have always faced
>> discrimination and persecution at the hands of America's Christian
>> majority.
>> Muslim slaves were often forced to practice their religion in secrecy.
>> Many
>> were forcibly converted to Christianity. In his book, The Crescent
>> Obscured:
>> The United States and the Muslim World, 1776-1815, historian Robert
>> Allison
>> notes that some anti-Federalists at the Constitutional Convention of 1787
>> didn't want to include religious liberty in the Bill of Rights because it
>> would protect the Islamic faith-an argument echoed today by people like
>> Ben
>> Carson, or Representative Jodi Hice (R-Georgia), who wrote that Islam "is
>> a
>> complete geo-political structure and, as such, does not deserve First
>> Amendment protection."
>> Sadly, Islamophobia isn't just a problem on the right. In the Yougov poll
>> cited above, 43 percent of Democrats said they held an unfavorable view
>> of
>> Islam, and Pew found that "a majority of Muslims say a friend or family
>> member has suffered discrimination since the September 11 attacks."
>> Casual
>> Islamophobia is often tolerated in a way that bigotry toward other
>> minorities is not.
>> It's time for this to stop. After 400 years in the Americas, and having
>> helped build and defend this country, we need to accept that American
>> Muslims are just as American-and just as loyal-as anyone else.
>> Joshua Holland is Senior Digital Producer at BillMoyers.com [3], and host
>> of
>> Politics and Reality Radio [4]. He's the author of The 15 Biggest Lies
>> About
>> the Economy [5]. Drop him an email [6] or follow him on Twitter [7].
>> Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
>> Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
>> Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@alternet.org'. [8]
>> Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.[9]
>>
>> Source URL:
>> http://www.alternet.org/belief/alternet-comics-brian-mcfadden-martin-shkreli
>> s-free-market-pharmacy
>> Links:
>> [1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/joshua-holland
>> [2] http://www.thenation.com
>> [3] http://billmoyers.com
>> [4] http://alternetradio.podbean.com
>> [5] http://www.powells.com/partner/32513/biblio/9780470643921
>> [6] mailto: joshua.holland@alternet.org
>> [7] http://twitter.com/JoshuaHol
>> [8] mailto:corrections@alternet.org?Subject=Typo on What Trump and Carson
>> Get Wrong: Islam Is as American as Apple Pie
>> [9] http://www.alternet.org/
>> [10] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
>>
>>
>>
>
Tuesday, September 29, 2015
Friday, September 25, 2015
Re: [blind-democracy] Ben Carson, Bigot
If we agree that Ben Carson is a bigot, then are we saying that all
Christians are bigots?
I put distance between myself and the democratic party because I could
no longer subscribe to their basic platform. I left Christianity
because I could no longer accept the myth of an Almighty Creator. Is
it possible to belong to a group of folks who proclaim that there is a
God, and that this God is a God of Love? And that He has sent His Son
to Save us from our Sins? And could we condemn war and violence and
still enter into any House of Worship and give thanks? Is that
possible, considering that the entire belief in an Almighty Creator is
for the purpose of controlling Believers.
It's time, if we are going to survive as a Species, for us to call God
out and declare Him to be a relic of the past. If we are to become
responsible for our own selves, then God and any other form of
Dictator can not be tolerated.
I have sent this idea forward to God, but so far He is not inclined to
respond. Too busy overseeing His religious Wars, I suppose.
Carl Jarvis
On 9/24/15, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
> I'm particularly atuned to what Coates writes here because I'm currently
> reading Operation Troy by NYT reporter Scott Shane. The book is about the
> American Muslim whom Obama assasinated with a drone a few years back,.
> Jeremy Scahill also wrote about this case in Dirty Wars. But Shane's book
> is even more detailed. The book is too complicated to write about but what
> is clear from it is the same point that Coates makes heere. Christianity is
> complex, interpreted and practised differently by different people and so
> is
> Islam. By the way, Operation Troy is on Bookshare.
> Miriam
>
>
> Coates writes: "Christianity has repeatedly been employed to sanctify our
> most shameful acts. One might counter that Christianity has also been
> employed to inspire our most honorable acts. But this is a level of
> complexity that Carson's ilk do not grant to Islam."
>
> Republican presidential hopeful Ben Carson. (photo: Cliff Owen/Corbis)
>
>
> Ben Carson, Bigot
> By Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic
> 24 September 15
>
> Yesterday presidential candidate Ben Carson was asked if he could ever
> support a Muslim president. Carson, channeling a significant portion of the
> American electorate, said that he "would not advocate that we put a Muslim
> in charge of this nation." This proclamation is presently receiving the
> rebuke that it deserves, though it could stand for even more, if only
> because of its ugly sanctimony.
> Ben Carson is a Christian-a fact he shares in common with all our greatest
> domestic terrorists and self-styled Indian-killers. From slave-holding to
> ethnic cleansing, Christianity has repeatedly been employed to sanctify our
> most shameful acts. One might counter that Christianity has also been
> employed to inspire our most honorable acts. But this is a level of
> complexity that Carson's ilk do not grant to Islam. To Carson, Islam is
> terror and nothing else.
> Christians, fully conscious of their own pedigree, need not completely
> renounce their faith, nor repudiate their scripture. (If a man seeks to
> plunder you, Dr. Seuss will suffice for showing cause.) But you would think
> a wise Christian would be more humble. Carson is neither humble nor wise.
> Carson is a bigot playing to a base that considers bigotry to be a feature,
> not a bug.
> Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not
> valid.
>
> Republican presidential hopeful Ben Carson. (photo: Cliff Owen/Corbis)
> http://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2015/09/ben-carson-bigot/406390/http://www.
> theatlantic.com/notes/2015/09/ben-carson-bigot/406390/
> Ben Carson, Bigot
> By Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic
> 24 September 15
> esterday presidential candidate Ben Carson was asked if he could ever
> support a Muslim president. Carson, channeling a significant portion of the
> American electorate, said that he "would not advocate that we put a Muslim
> in charge of this nation." This proclamation is presently receiving the
> rebuke that it deserves, though it could stand for even more, if only
> because of its ugly sanctimony.
> Ben Carson is a Christian-a fact he shares in common with all our greatest
> domestic terrorists and self-styled Indian-killers. From slave-holding to
> ethnic cleansing, Christianity has repeatedly been employed to sanctify our
> most shameful acts. One might counter that Christianity has also been
> employed to inspire our most honorable acts. But this is a level of
> complexity that Carson's ilk do not grant to Islam. To Carson, Islam is
> terror and nothing else.
> Christians, fully conscious of their own pedigree, need not completely
> renounce their faith, nor repudiate their scripture. (If a man seeks to
> plunder you, Dr. Seuss will suffice for showing cause.) But you would think
> a wise Christian would be more humble. Carson is neither humble nor wise.
> Carson is a bigot playing to a base that considers bigotry to be a feature,
> not a bug.
> http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
> http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
>
>
>
Christians are bigots?
I put distance between myself and the democratic party because I could
no longer subscribe to their basic platform. I left Christianity
because I could no longer accept the myth of an Almighty Creator. Is
it possible to belong to a group of folks who proclaim that there is a
God, and that this God is a God of Love? And that He has sent His Son
to Save us from our Sins? And could we condemn war and violence and
still enter into any House of Worship and give thanks? Is that
possible, considering that the entire belief in an Almighty Creator is
for the purpose of controlling Believers.
It's time, if we are going to survive as a Species, for us to call God
out and declare Him to be a relic of the past. If we are to become
responsible for our own selves, then God and any other form of
Dictator can not be tolerated.
I have sent this idea forward to God, but so far He is not inclined to
respond. Too busy overseeing His religious Wars, I suppose.
Carl Jarvis
On 9/24/15, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
> I'm particularly atuned to what Coates writes here because I'm currently
> reading Operation Troy by NYT reporter Scott Shane. The book is about the
> American Muslim whom Obama assasinated with a drone a few years back,.
> Jeremy Scahill also wrote about this case in Dirty Wars. But Shane's book
> is even more detailed. The book is too complicated to write about but what
> is clear from it is the same point that Coates makes heere. Christianity is
> complex, interpreted and practised differently by different people and so
> is
> Islam. By the way, Operation Troy is on Bookshare.
> Miriam
>
>
> Coates writes: "Christianity has repeatedly been employed to sanctify our
> most shameful acts. One might counter that Christianity has also been
> employed to inspire our most honorable acts. But this is a level of
> complexity that Carson's ilk do not grant to Islam."
>
> Republican presidential hopeful Ben Carson. (photo: Cliff Owen/Corbis)
>
>
> Ben Carson, Bigot
> By Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic
> 24 September 15
>
> Yesterday presidential candidate Ben Carson was asked if he could ever
> support a Muslim president. Carson, channeling a significant portion of the
> American electorate, said that he "would not advocate that we put a Muslim
> in charge of this nation." This proclamation is presently receiving the
> rebuke that it deserves, though it could stand for even more, if only
> because of its ugly sanctimony.
> Ben Carson is a Christian-a fact he shares in common with all our greatest
> domestic terrorists and self-styled Indian-killers. From slave-holding to
> ethnic cleansing, Christianity has repeatedly been employed to sanctify our
> most shameful acts. One might counter that Christianity has also been
> employed to inspire our most honorable acts. But this is a level of
> complexity that Carson's ilk do not grant to Islam. To Carson, Islam is
> terror and nothing else.
> Christians, fully conscious of their own pedigree, need not completely
> renounce their faith, nor repudiate their scripture. (If a man seeks to
> plunder you, Dr. Seuss will suffice for showing cause.) But you would think
> a wise Christian would be more humble. Carson is neither humble nor wise.
> Carson is a bigot playing to a base that considers bigotry to be a feature,
> not a bug.
> Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not
> valid.
>
> Republican presidential hopeful Ben Carson. (photo: Cliff Owen/Corbis)
> http://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2015/09/ben-carson-bigot/406390/http://www.
> theatlantic.com/notes/2015/09/ben-carson-bigot/406390/
> Ben Carson, Bigot
> By Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic
> 24 September 15
> esterday presidential candidate Ben Carson was asked if he could ever
> support a Muslim president. Carson, channeling a significant portion of the
> American electorate, said that he "would not advocate that we put a Muslim
> in charge of this nation." This proclamation is presently receiving the
> rebuke that it deserves, though it could stand for even more, if only
> because of its ugly sanctimony.
> Ben Carson is a Christian-a fact he shares in common with all our greatest
> domestic terrorists and self-styled Indian-killers. From slave-holding to
> ethnic cleansing, Christianity has repeatedly been employed to sanctify our
> most shameful acts. One might counter that Christianity has also been
> employed to inspire our most honorable acts. But this is a level of
> complexity that Carson's ilk do not grant to Islam. To Carson, Islam is
> terror and nothing else.
> Christians, fully conscious of their own pedigree, need not completely
> renounce their faith, nor repudiate their scripture. (If a man seeks to
> plunder you, Dr. Seuss will suffice for showing cause.) But you would think
> a wise Christian would be more humble. Carson is neither humble nor wise.
> Carson is a bigot playing to a base that considers bigotry to be a feature,
> not a bug.
> http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
> http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
>
>
>
Re: [blind-democracy] Why Do We Care Whose Side the Pope Is On?
Skimming through this article, I notice quotes by both George Will and
Pope Francis. Lots of space is now being given to what people of high
status are thinking. Not that the Pope thinks as much of himself as
does George Will. But this is the rub. Why should I care what either
of these men think. Am I supposed to be taking one side or the other?
How about me deciding what I think, and then taking appropriate
action?
It's not to say that what George Will and Pope Francis have to say
should be ignored.
Certainly our own beliefs are shaped by the thinking and opinions and
beliefs of all sorts of folk, starting with our mothers. But why
don't we see headlines that say, "Working men and women think America
needs a redistribution of its wealth"? Or, "American Working Class
will stop producing unless serious steps are taken right now, to end
pollution".
You see, while I am interested in what Pope Francis and George Will
think, I'm far more involved in what the American Working Class
thinks...and what it ultimately does.
Carl Jarvis
On 9/24/15, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
>
> Taibbi writes: "Much in the way Mormons believe Jesus will ultimately
> return
> to earth and settle in Missouri, conservatives have long accepted that the
> pope should be a secret American who believes in free enterprise, cries
> during Band of Brothers and would build his home in the United States if he
> had it to do all over again."
>
> Pope Francis departs the Vatican's diplomatic mission in Washington, D.C.,
> on September 23rd, 2015. (photo: Cliff Owen/Corbis)
>
>
> Why Do We Care Whose Side the Pope Is On?
> By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
> 24 September 15
>
> So the pope is here. His arrival has spawned a Drake/Meek Mill-style diss
> battle within the pundit class, pitting conservatives bemoaning the pope's
> false prophecy against liberals swooning over his platitudinous
> anti-capitalism.
> It's like the Colts-Jets game from Monday night. I can't decide which side
> I
> want to lose more.
> It's been a long time since the left and right in America have had had a
> real fight for primacy in the religious space. For almost a generation now
> liberals have mostly conceded the very word faith, letting Republicans
> smother and monopolize the term like overprotective parents.
> Overt religiosity is the norm on the GOP side, with God-stalking nutballs
> like Michele Bachmann or Ben Carson perennially front and center.
> Meanwhile,
> the closest thing to a famed religious liberal that America has seen over
> the span of many decades was probably Susan Sarandon's nun character in
> Dead
> Man Walking, an anti-capital punishment parable whose religious message
> wasn't believable even though it was a true story.
> But now the script has flipped. The Republican frontrunner is Donald Trump,
> a man who is worse at naming Bible verses than Sarah Palin is at naming
> Supreme Court cases. And this week's arrival of the world's most famous
> religious leader is being celebrated in the lefty press like the premiere
> of
> Fahrenheit 911.
> Pope Francis won over urban liberals through writings like his 184-page
> encyclical on climate change, which described the earth as an "immense pile
> of filth." Raised in Peronist Argentina, he also talks with varying degrees
> of vagueness about the "perverse" inequities of global capitalism,
> complaining for instance that a two-point drop in the stock market makes
> the
> news, while nobody notices when a homeless person dies of exposure.
> This past weekend's column by George Will perfectly expresses the sense of
> abject betrayal conservatives feel at a pope allowing himself to be
> appropriated by the global left, when he could be just railing against
> abortion and moral relativism like his recent predecessors.
> You can always tell how mad George Will is by how much alliteration he
> uses.
> "Pope Francis's Fact-Free Flamboyance" predictably seethes from the start:
> "Pope Francis embodies sanctity but comes trailing clouds of sanctimony.
> With a convert's indiscriminate zeal, he embraces ideas impeccably
> fashionable, demonstrably false, and deeply reactionary. They would
> devastate the poor on whose behalf he purports to speak."
> The notion that Will is upset with this pope on behalf of the poor is
> hilarious, but understandable. Conservatives loved the pre-Francis Catholic
> strategy for dealing with the poor. First, you create lots of cheap
> third-world factory labor by discouraging contraception. Then you give lip
> service to alleviating poverty by pushing a program of strictly voluntary
> charitable donations.
> That Catholic Church has always been a great ally to the industrialist
> aristocrats George Will represents. So it's not surprising he's not feeling
> this whole "we need to reform capitalism" thing.
> But conservatives feel betrayed on another level. Much in the way Mormons
> believe Jesus will ultimately return to earth and settle in Missouri,
> conservatives have long accepted that the pope should be a secret American
> who believes in free enterprise, cries during Band of Brothers and would
> build his home in the United States if he had it to do all over again.
> Thus a lot of the criticism from the right this week implies that this pope
> is insufficiently worshipful of America and Americans. They think his lack
> of reverence for God's chosen symbol of the miracle of capitalist
> production
> traitorous, and moreover they're offended that he doesn't seem to think
> Americans are the best and most generous people on earth. Pollution and
> greed aside, doesn't this pope know that some of us claim hundreds of
> dollars a year in charitable deductions?
> "Does this pope understand America?" moaned Brian Kilmeade on Fox and
> Friends. "He's talking about the greed of America, but does he understand
> what the capital of America has done for charitable causes?"
> Will put it best, noting that what the pope fails to recognize about us
> Americans is that our greed and selfishness are actually our best
> qualities.
> "He stands against. the spontaneous creativity of open societies in which
> people and their desires are not problems but precious resources," Will
> wrote. "Americans cannot simultaneously honor him and celebrate their
> nation's premises."
> For his offenses, Pope Francis has earned himself a ticket onto the
> ever-expanding enemies list of the American political right, joining Black
> Lives Matter, Mexican immigrants, Muslims, feminists, Hollywood actors,
> college lit professors, Occupy Wall Street, whales, the French, Bill Maher,
> Canada, Sesame Street and other such undesirables.
> "Pure Marxism," cried Rush Limbaugh about the pope's ideas.
> "Hand-selected by the New World Order. The same people who gave us Obama
> gave us this pope," cried Michael Savage.
> "Part of the globalist plan to destroy the world," chimed in Alex Jones.
> But for all of the right's sourpussing, the papal Beatlemania on the other
> side has been just as revealing.
> The commercial media is of course doing its thing, making the pope's
> arrival
> into the Biggest Live Coverage Event of all time. This whole-week
> Popetacular will be like a baby-down-a-well story times a Kursk rescue
> times
> a presidential inauguration. Atheists are advised to keep their TVs off.
> Even Donald Trump will be a footnote to reporters while His Holiness is in
> the country. (Although, humorously, Trump's biographer Michael D'Antonio
> squirmed into the headlines this week by comparing Trump to the pope.
> "They're both completely authentic guys," he said.)
> But it's the defenses of the pope by left-leaning media that are really
> striking. A spate of articles in traditionally liberal newspapers and
> websites has appeared, each praising the pope and appropriating him as one
> of their own.
> Should you, the progressive, embrace the head of one of the most socially
> conservative organizations on earth? "Yes. Yes, you should," says Jack
> Jenkins at ThinkProgress. "Especially if you want legislative action on
> immigration reform, climate change, or income inequality."
> Mary Elizabeth Williams at Salon took particular issue with George Will's
> broadside against Francis, which I get. But beyond that she went after Will
> for misrepresenting Catholic values, which may tilt blue-state:
> "I find it interesting when conservative guys like Will lose their minds
> over the idea of someone with a fair degree of authority on the subject of
> Catholicism - like, say, a pope - pointing out the actual stated values of
> one of the richest and most powerful religions in the world. Values that
> include, uh oh, charity, humility and non-materialism."
> Suzy Khimm at the the New Republic pointed out several of the more
> transparent attempts to turn Francis into a Democratic-leaning hero. She
> cited the liberal-backed American Bridge project, which is releasing a
> report that will "reveal how the Republican Party is opposed and actively
> working against Pope Francis's priorities on many issues." This comes on
> the
> heels of another report arguing that the Koch Brothers are "on the wrong
> side of the Holy Father."
> All this stuff is a drag. The American left is always at its most
> unlikeable
> when it's being pious. And that's just the secular,
> hey-that-joke-isn't-funny kind of piety. If we have to add actual religious
> piety to the equation, we're suddenly taking a lot of the charm out of not
> being a Republican. Watching progressives fawn over a pope is depressing
> and
> makes me want to go watch a Cheech and Chong movie.
> I was raised Catholic. To me the Church is just a giant evil transnational
> corporation operating on a dreary business model, one that nurtures
> debilitating guilt feelings in its followers and then offers to make them
> go
> away temporarily in exchange for donations. I realize the Church does some
> nice things with the money it raises and that other people have a different
> opinion, but this is my experience.
> And this pope, for all his good qualities, is to me a modern version of an
> old religious scam. In Tsarist Russia you'd have some wizened starets show
> up at an aristocrat's estate in rags and preach to the ladies of the house
> about the evils of wealth in exchange for wine, pastries and a few nights
> in
> a feather bed.
> This version is a pope arriving in America with a gazillion-member
> entourage
> to reassure young professionals in New York how right they are about
> climate
> change and income inequality. He says a lot of very vague things about the
> wrongs of society that everyone is sure coincide with their own opinions.
> George Will is right when he says Francis speaks "in the intellectual tone
> of a fortune cookie," saying things like, "People occasionally forgive, but
> nature never does."
> Meanwhile Francis chugs along as the head of one of the most socially
> regressive organizations on earth, doing nothing to take on the Church's
> indefensible stances on things like birth control, gay rights,
> discrimination against women, celibacy and countless other issues. He
> claims
> the moral authority to reform global capitalism, but he's somehow not ready
> to tell teenagers it's OK to masturbate, which seems bizarre.
> People have such impassioned political fights over the pope because
> everyone
> wants the endorsement of the guy closest to God. But what if he's not
> closer
> to God, and is just a guy in a funny hat? Doesn't that make all this fuss
> and controversy ridiculous? It seems strange that it's the year 2015, and
> we
> still can't say that out loud.
> Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not
> valid.
>
> Pope Francis departs the Vatican's diplomatic mission in Washington, D.C.,
> on September 23rd, 2015. (photo: Cliff Owen/Corbis)
> http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/why-do-we-care-whose-side-the-pope
> -is-on-20150923 -
> ixzz3mfaTNbLahttp://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/why-do-we-care-whose-
> side-the-pope-is-on-20150923 - ixzz3mfaTNbLa
> Why Do We Care Whose Side the Pope Is On?
> By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
> 24 September 15
> o the pope is here. His arrival has spawned a Drake/Meek Mill-style diss
> battle within the pundit class, pitting conservatives bemoaning the pope's
> false prophecy against liberals swooning over his platitudinous
> anti-capitalism.
> It's like the Colts-Jets game from Monday night. I can't decide which side
> I
> want to lose more.
> It's been a long time since the left and right in America have had had a
> real fight for primacy in the religious space. For almost a generation now
> liberals have mostly conceded the very word faith, letting Republicans
> smother and monopolize the term like overprotective parents.
> Overt religiosity is the norm on the GOP side, with God-stalking nutballs
> like Michele Bachmann or Ben Carson perennially front and center.
> Meanwhile,
> the closest thing to a famed religious liberal that America has seen over
> the span of many decades was probably Susan Sarandon's nun character in
> Dead
> Man Walking, an anti-capital punishment parable whose religious message
> wasn't believable even though it was a true story.
> But now the script has flipped. The Republican frontrunner is Donald Trump,
> a man who is worse at naming Bible verses than Sarah Palin is at naming
> Supreme Court cases. And this week's arrival of the world's most famous
> religious leader is being celebrated in the lefty press like the premiere
> of
> Fahrenheit 911.
> Pope Francis won over urban liberals through writings like his 184-page
> encyclical on climate change, which described the earth as an "immense pile
> of filth." Raised in Peronist Argentina, he also talks with varying degrees
> of vagueness about the "perverse" inequities of global capitalism,
> complaining for instance that a two-point drop in the stock market makes
> the
> news, while nobody notices when a homeless person dies of exposure.
> This past weekend's column by George Will perfectly expresses the sense of
> abject betrayal conservatives feel at a pope allowing himself to be
> appropriated by the global left, when he could be just railing against
> abortion and moral relativism like his recent predecessors.
> You can always tell how mad George Will is by how much alliteration he
> uses.
> "Pope Francis's Fact-Free Flamboyance" predictably seethes from the start:
> "Pope Francis embodies sanctity but comes trailing clouds of sanctimony.
> With a convert's indiscriminate zeal, he embraces ideas impeccably
> fashionable, demonstrably false, and deeply reactionary. They would
> devastate the poor on whose behalf he purports to speak."
> The notion that Will is upset with this pope on behalf of the poor is
> hilarious, but understandable. Conservatives loved the pre-Francis Catholic
> strategy for dealing with the poor. First, you create lots of cheap
> third-world factory labor by discouraging contraception. Then you give lip
> service to alleviating poverty by pushing a program of strictly voluntary
> charitable donations.
> That Catholic Church has always been a great ally to the industrialist
> aristocrats George Will represents. So it's not surprising he's not feeling
> this whole "we need to reform capitalism" thing.
> But conservatives feel betrayed on another level. Much in the way Mormons
> believe Jesus will ultimately return to earth and settle in Missouri,
> conservatives have long accepted that the pope should be a secret American
> who believes in free enterprise, cries during Band of Brothers and would
> build his home in the United States if he had it to do all over again.
> Thus a lot of the criticism from the right this week implies that this pope
> is insufficiently worshipful of America and Americans. They think his lack
> of reverence for God's chosen symbol of the miracle of capitalist
> production
> traitorous, and moreover they're offended that he doesn't seem to think
> Americans are the best and most generous people on earth. Pollution and
> greed aside, doesn't this pope know that some of us claim hundreds of
> dollars a year in charitable deductions?
> "Does this pope understand America?" moaned Brian Kilmeade on Fox and
> Friends. "He's talking about the greed of America, but does he understand
> what the capital of America has done for charitable causes?"
> Will put it best, noting that what the pope fails to recognize about us
> Americans is that our greed and selfishness are actually our best
> qualities.
> "He stands against. the spontaneous creativity of open societies in which
> people and their desires are not problems but precious resources," Will
> wrote. "Americans cannot simultaneously honor him and celebrate their
> nation's premises."
> For his offenses, Pope Francis has earned himself a ticket onto the
> ever-expanding enemies list of the American political right, joining Black
> Lives Matter, Mexican immigrants, Muslims, feminists, Hollywood actors,
> college lit professors, Occupy Wall Street, whales, the French, Bill Maher,
> Canada, Sesame Street and other such undesirables.
> "Pure Marxism," cried Rush Limbaugh about the pope's ideas.
> "Hand-selected by the New World Order. The same people who gave us Obama
> gave us this pope," cried Michael Savage.
> "Part of the globalist plan to destroy the world," chimed in Alex Jones.
> But for all of the right's sourpussing, the papal Beatlemania on the other
> side has been just as revealing.
> The commercial media is of course doing its thing, making the pope's
> arrival
> into the Biggest Live Coverage Event of all time. This whole-week
> Popetacular will be like a baby-down-a-well story times a Kursk rescue
> times
> a presidential inauguration. Atheists are advised to keep their TVs off.
> Even Donald Trump will be a footnote to reporters while His Holiness is in
> the country. (Although, humorously, Trump's biographer Michael D'Antonio
> squirmed into the headlines this week by comparing Trump to the pope.
> "They're both completely authentic guys," he said.)
> But it's the defenses of the pope by left-leaning media that are really
> striking. A spate of articles in traditionally liberal newspapers and
> websites has appeared, each praising the pope and appropriating him as one
> of their own.
> Should you, the progressive, embrace the head of one of the most socially
> conservative organizations on earth? "Yes. Yes, you should," says Jack
> Jenkins at ThinkProgress. "Especially if you want legislative action on
> immigration reform, climate change, or income inequality."
> Mary Elizabeth Williams at Salon took particular issue with George Will's
> broadside against Francis, which I get. But beyond that she went after Will
> for misrepresenting Catholic values, which may tilt blue-state:
> "I find it interesting when conservative guys like Will lose their minds
> over the idea of someone with a fair degree of authority on the subject of
> Catholicism - like, say, a pope - pointing out the actual stated values of
> one of the richest and most powerful religions in the world. Values that
> include, uh oh, charity, humility and non-materialism."
> Suzy Khimm at the the New Republic pointed out several of the more
> transparent attempts to turn Francis into a Democratic-leaning hero. She
> cited the liberal-backed American Bridge project, which is releasing a
> report that will "reveal how the Republican Party is opposed and actively
> working against Pope Francis's priorities on many issues." This comes on
> the
> heels of another report arguing that the Koch Brothers are "on the wrong
> side of the Holy Father."
> All this stuff is a drag. The American left is always at its most
> unlikeable
> when it's being pious. And that's just the secular,
> hey-that-joke-isn't-funny kind of piety. If we have to add actual religious
> piety to the equation, we're suddenly taking a lot of the charm out of not
> being a Republican. Watching progressives fawn over a pope is depressing
> and
> makes me want to go watch a Cheech and Chong movie.
> I was raised Catholic. To me the Church is just a giant evil transnational
> corporation operating on a dreary business model, one that nurtures
> debilitating guilt feelings in its followers and then offers to make them
> go
> away temporarily in exchange for donations. I realize the Church does some
> nice things with the money it raises and that other people have a different
> opinion, but this is my experience.
> And this pope, for all his good qualities, is to me a modern version of an
> old religious scam. In Tsarist Russia you'd have some wizened starets show
> up at an aristocrat's estate in rags and preach to the ladies of the house
> about the evils of wealth in exchange for wine, pastries and a few nights
> in
> a feather bed.
> This version is a pope arriving in America with a gazillion-member
> entourage
> to reassure young professionals in New York how right they are about
> climate
> change and income inequality. He says a lot of very vague things about the
> wrongs of society that everyone is sure coincide with their own opinions.
> George Will is right when he says Francis speaks "in the intellectual tone
> of a fortune cookie," saying things like, "People occasionally forgive, but
> nature never does."
> Meanwhile Francis chugs along as the head of one of the most socially
> regressive organizations on earth, doing nothing to take on the Church's
> indefensible stances on things like birth control, gay rights,
> discrimination against women, celibacy and countless other issues. He
> claims
> the moral authority to reform global capitalism, but he's somehow not ready
> to tell teenagers it's OK to masturbate, which seems bizarre.
> People have such impassioned political fights over the pope because
> everyone
> wants the endorsement of the guy closest to God. But what if he's not
> closer
> to God, and is just a guy in a funny hat? Doesn't that make all this fuss
> and controversy ridiculous? It seems strange that it's the year 2015, and
> we
> still can't say that out loud.
> http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
> http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
>
>
>
Pope Francis. Lots of space is now being given to what people of high
status are thinking. Not that the Pope thinks as much of himself as
does George Will. But this is the rub. Why should I care what either
of these men think. Am I supposed to be taking one side or the other?
How about me deciding what I think, and then taking appropriate
action?
It's not to say that what George Will and Pope Francis have to say
should be ignored.
Certainly our own beliefs are shaped by the thinking and opinions and
beliefs of all sorts of folk, starting with our mothers. But why
don't we see headlines that say, "Working men and women think America
needs a redistribution of its wealth"? Or, "American Working Class
will stop producing unless serious steps are taken right now, to end
pollution".
You see, while I am interested in what Pope Francis and George Will
think, I'm far more involved in what the American Working Class
thinks...and what it ultimately does.
Carl Jarvis
On 9/24/15, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
>
> Taibbi writes: "Much in the way Mormons believe Jesus will ultimately
> return
> to earth and settle in Missouri, conservatives have long accepted that the
> pope should be a secret American who believes in free enterprise, cries
> during Band of Brothers and would build his home in the United States if he
> had it to do all over again."
>
> Pope Francis departs the Vatican's diplomatic mission in Washington, D.C.,
> on September 23rd, 2015. (photo: Cliff Owen/Corbis)
>
>
> Why Do We Care Whose Side the Pope Is On?
> By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
> 24 September 15
>
> So the pope is here. His arrival has spawned a Drake/Meek Mill-style diss
> battle within the pundit class, pitting conservatives bemoaning the pope's
> false prophecy against liberals swooning over his platitudinous
> anti-capitalism.
> It's like the Colts-Jets game from Monday night. I can't decide which side
> I
> want to lose more.
> It's been a long time since the left and right in America have had had a
> real fight for primacy in the religious space. For almost a generation now
> liberals have mostly conceded the very word faith, letting Republicans
> smother and monopolize the term like overprotective parents.
> Overt religiosity is the norm on the GOP side, with God-stalking nutballs
> like Michele Bachmann or Ben Carson perennially front and center.
> Meanwhile,
> the closest thing to a famed religious liberal that America has seen over
> the span of many decades was probably Susan Sarandon's nun character in
> Dead
> Man Walking, an anti-capital punishment parable whose religious message
> wasn't believable even though it was a true story.
> But now the script has flipped. The Republican frontrunner is Donald Trump,
> a man who is worse at naming Bible verses than Sarah Palin is at naming
> Supreme Court cases. And this week's arrival of the world's most famous
> religious leader is being celebrated in the lefty press like the premiere
> of
> Fahrenheit 911.
> Pope Francis won over urban liberals through writings like his 184-page
> encyclical on climate change, which described the earth as an "immense pile
> of filth." Raised in Peronist Argentina, he also talks with varying degrees
> of vagueness about the "perverse" inequities of global capitalism,
> complaining for instance that a two-point drop in the stock market makes
> the
> news, while nobody notices when a homeless person dies of exposure.
> This past weekend's column by George Will perfectly expresses the sense of
> abject betrayal conservatives feel at a pope allowing himself to be
> appropriated by the global left, when he could be just railing against
> abortion and moral relativism like his recent predecessors.
> You can always tell how mad George Will is by how much alliteration he
> uses.
> "Pope Francis's Fact-Free Flamboyance" predictably seethes from the start:
> "Pope Francis embodies sanctity but comes trailing clouds of sanctimony.
> With a convert's indiscriminate zeal, he embraces ideas impeccably
> fashionable, demonstrably false, and deeply reactionary. They would
> devastate the poor on whose behalf he purports to speak."
> The notion that Will is upset with this pope on behalf of the poor is
> hilarious, but understandable. Conservatives loved the pre-Francis Catholic
> strategy for dealing with the poor. First, you create lots of cheap
> third-world factory labor by discouraging contraception. Then you give lip
> service to alleviating poverty by pushing a program of strictly voluntary
> charitable donations.
> That Catholic Church has always been a great ally to the industrialist
> aristocrats George Will represents. So it's not surprising he's not feeling
> this whole "we need to reform capitalism" thing.
> But conservatives feel betrayed on another level. Much in the way Mormons
> believe Jesus will ultimately return to earth and settle in Missouri,
> conservatives have long accepted that the pope should be a secret American
> who believes in free enterprise, cries during Band of Brothers and would
> build his home in the United States if he had it to do all over again.
> Thus a lot of the criticism from the right this week implies that this pope
> is insufficiently worshipful of America and Americans. They think his lack
> of reverence for God's chosen symbol of the miracle of capitalist
> production
> traitorous, and moreover they're offended that he doesn't seem to think
> Americans are the best and most generous people on earth. Pollution and
> greed aside, doesn't this pope know that some of us claim hundreds of
> dollars a year in charitable deductions?
> "Does this pope understand America?" moaned Brian Kilmeade on Fox and
> Friends. "He's talking about the greed of America, but does he understand
> what the capital of America has done for charitable causes?"
> Will put it best, noting that what the pope fails to recognize about us
> Americans is that our greed and selfishness are actually our best
> qualities.
> "He stands against. the spontaneous creativity of open societies in which
> people and their desires are not problems but precious resources," Will
> wrote. "Americans cannot simultaneously honor him and celebrate their
> nation's premises."
> For his offenses, Pope Francis has earned himself a ticket onto the
> ever-expanding enemies list of the American political right, joining Black
> Lives Matter, Mexican immigrants, Muslims, feminists, Hollywood actors,
> college lit professors, Occupy Wall Street, whales, the French, Bill Maher,
> Canada, Sesame Street and other such undesirables.
> "Pure Marxism," cried Rush Limbaugh about the pope's ideas.
> "Hand-selected by the New World Order. The same people who gave us Obama
> gave us this pope," cried Michael Savage.
> "Part of the globalist plan to destroy the world," chimed in Alex Jones.
> But for all of the right's sourpussing, the papal Beatlemania on the other
> side has been just as revealing.
> The commercial media is of course doing its thing, making the pope's
> arrival
> into the Biggest Live Coverage Event of all time. This whole-week
> Popetacular will be like a baby-down-a-well story times a Kursk rescue
> times
> a presidential inauguration. Atheists are advised to keep their TVs off.
> Even Donald Trump will be a footnote to reporters while His Holiness is in
> the country. (Although, humorously, Trump's biographer Michael D'Antonio
> squirmed into the headlines this week by comparing Trump to the pope.
> "They're both completely authentic guys," he said.)
> But it's the defenses of the pope by left-leaning media that are really
> striking. A spate of articles in traditionally liberal newspapers and
> websites has appeared, each praising the pope and appropriating him as one
> of their own.
> Should you, the progressive, embrace the head of one of the most socially
> conservative organizations on earth? "Yes. Yes, you should," says Jack
> Jenkins at ThinkProgress. "Especially if you want legislative action on
> immigration reform, climate change, or income inequality."
> Mary Elizabeth Williams at Salon took particular issue with George Will's
> broadside against Francis, which I get. But beyond that she went after Will
> for misrepresenting Catholic values, which may tilt blue-state:
> "I find it interesting when conservative guys like Will lose their minds
> over the idea of someone with a fair degree of authority on the subject of
> Catholicism - like, say, a pope - pointing out the actual stated values of
> one of the richest and most powerful religions in the world. Values that
> include, uh oh, charity, humility and non-materialism."
> Suzy Khimm at the the New Republic pointed out several of the more
> transparent attempts to turn Francis into a Democratic-leaning hero. She
> cited the liberal-backed American Bridge project, which is releasing a
> report that will "reveal how the Republican Party is opposed and actively
> working against Pope Francis's priorities on many issues." This comes on
> the
> heels of another report arguing that the Koch Brothers are "on the wrong
> side of the Holy Father."
> All this stuff is a drag. The American left is always at its most
> unlikeable
> when it's being pious. And that's just the secular,
> hey-that-joke-isn't-funny kind of piety. If we have to add actual religious
> piety to the equation, we're suddenly taking a lot of the charm out of not
> being a Republican. Watching progressives fawn over a pope is depressing
> and
> makes me want to go watch a Cheech and Chong movie.
> I was raised Catholic. To me the Church is just a giant evil transnational
> corporation operating on a dreary business model, one that nurtures
> debilitating guilt feelings in its followers and then offers to make them
> go
> away temporarily in exchange for donations. I realize the Church does some
> nice things with the money it raises and that other people have a different
> opinion, but this is my experience.
> And this pope, for all his good qualities, is to me a modern version of an
> old religious scam. In Tsarist Russia you'd have some wizened starets show
> up at an aristocrat's estate in rags and preach to the ladies of the house
> about the evils of wealth in exchange for wine, pastries and a few nights
> in
> a feather bed.
> This version is a pope arriving in America with a gazillion-member
> entourage
> to reassure young professionals in New York how right they are about
> climate
> change and income inequality. He says a lot of very vague things about the
> wrongs of society that everyone is sure coincide with their own opinions.
> George Will is right when he says Francis speaks "in the intellectual tone
> of a fortune cookie," saying things like, "People occasionally forgive, but
> nature never does."
> Meanwhile Francis chugs along as the head of one of the most socially
> regressive organizations on earth, doing nothing to take on the Church's
> indefensible stances on things like birth control, gay rights,
> discrimination against women, celibacy and countless other issues. He
> claims
> the moral authority to reform global capitalism, but he's somehow not ready
> to tell teenagers it's OK to masturbate, which seems bizarre.
> People have such impassioned political fights over the pope because
> everyone
> wants the endorsement of the guy closest to God. But what if he's not
> closer
> to God, and is just a guy in a funny hat? Doesn't that make all this fuss
> and controversy ridiculous? It seems strange that it's the year 2015, and
> we
> still can't say that out loud.
> Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not
> valid.
>
> Pope Francis departs the Vatican's diplomatic mission in Washington, D.C.,
> on September 23rd, 2015. (photo: Cliff Owen/Corbis)
> http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/why-do-we-care-whose-side-the-pope
> -is-on-20150923 -
> ixzz3mfaTNbLahttp://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/why-do-we-care-whose-
> side-the-pope-is-on-20150923 - ixzz3mfaTNbLa
> Why Do We Care Whose Side the Pope Is On?
> By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
> 24 September 15
> o the pope is here. His arrival has spawned a Drake/Meek Mill-style diss
> battle within the pundit class, pitting conservatives bemoaning the pope's
> false prophecy against liberals swooning over his platitudinous
> anti-capitalism.
> It's like the Colts-Jets game from Monday night. I can't decide which side
> I
> want to lose more.
> It's been a long time since the left and right in America have had had a
> real fight for primacy in the religious space. For almost a generation now
> liberals have mostly conceded the very word faith, letting Republicans
> smother and monopolize the term like overprotective parents.
> Overt religiosity is the norm on the GOP side, with God-stalking nutballs
> like Michele Bachmann or Ben Carson perennially front and center.
> Meanwhile,
> the closest thing to a famed religious liberal that America has seen over
> the span of many decades was probably Susan Sarandon's nun character in
> Dead
> Man Walking, an anti-capital punishment parable whose religious message
> wasn't believable even though it was a true story.
> But now the script has flipped. The Republican frontrunner is Donald Trump,
> a man who is worse at naming Bible verses than Sarah Palin is at naming
> Supreme Court cases. And this week's arrival of the world's most famous
> religious leader is being celebrated in the lefty press like the premiere
> of
> Fahrenheit 911.
> Pope Francis won over urban liberals through writings like his 184-page
> encyclical on climate change, which described the earth as an "immense pile
> of filth." Raised in Peronist Argentina, he also talks with varying degrees
> of vagueness about the "perverse" inequities of global capitalism,
> complaining for instance that a two-point drop in the stock market makes
> the
> news, while nobody notices when a homeless person dies of exposure.
> This past weekend's column by George Will perfectly expresses the sense of
> abject betrayal conservatives feel at a pope allowing himself to be
> appropriated by the global left, when he could be just railing against
> abortion and moral relativism like his recent predecessors.
> You can always tell how mad George Will is by how much alliteration he
> uses.
> "Pope Francis's Fact-Free Flamboyance" predictably seethes from the start:
> "Pope Francis embodies sanctity but comes trailing clouds of sanctimony.
> With a convert's indiscriminate zeal, he embraces ideas impeccably
> fashionable, demonstrably false, and deeply reactionary. They would
> devastate the poor on whose behalf he purports to speak."
> The notion that Will is upset with this pope on behalf of the poor is
> hilarious, but understandable. Conservatives loved the pre-Francis Catholic
> strategy for dealing with the poor. First, you create lots of cheap
> third-world factory labor by discouraging contraception. Then you give lip
> service to alleviating poverty by pushing a program of strictly voluntary
> charitable donations.
> That Catholic Church has always been a great ally to the industrialist
> aristocrats George Will represents. So it's not surprising he's not feeling
> this whole "we need to reform capitalism" thing.
> But conservatives feel betrayed on another level. Much in the way Mormons
> believe Jesus will ultimately return to earth and settle in Missouri,
> conservatives have long accepted that the pope should be a secret American
> who believes in free enterprise, cries during Band of Brothers and would
> build his home in the United States if he had it to do all over again.
> Thus a lot of the criticism from the right this week implies that this pope
> is insufficiently worshipful of America and Americans. They think his lack
> of reverence for God's chosen symbol of the miracle of capitalist
> production
> traitorous, and moreover they're offended that he doesn't seem to think
> Americans are the best and most generous people on earth. Pollution and
> greed aside, doesn't this pope know that some of us claim hundreds of
> dollars a year in charitable deductions?
> "Does this pope understand America?" moaned Brian Kilmeade on Fox and
> Friends. "He's talking about the greed of America, but does he understand
> what the capital of America has done for charitable causes?"
> Will put it best, noting that what the pope fails to recognize about us
> Americans is that our greed and selfishness are actually our best
> qualities.
> "He stands against. the spontaneous creativity of open societies in which
> people and their desires are not problems but precious resources," Will
> wrote. "Americans cannot simultaneously honor him and celebrate their
> nation's premises."
> For his offenses, Pope Francis has earned himself a ticket onto the
> ever-expanding enemies list of the American political right, joining Black
> Lives Matter, Mexican immigrants, Muslims, feminists, Hollywood actors,
> college lit professors, Occupy Wall Street, whales, the French, Bill Maher,
> Canada, Sesame Street and other such undesirables.
> "Pure Marxism," cried Rush Limbaugh about the pope's ideas.
> "Hand-selected by the New World Order. The same people who gave us Obama
> gave us this pope," cried Michael Savage.
> "Part of the globalist plan to destroy the world," chimed in Alex Jones.
> But for all of the right's sourpussing, the papal Beatlemania on the other
> side has been just as revealing.
> The commercial media is of course doing its thing, making the pope's
> arrival
> into the Biggest Live Coverage Event of all time. This whole-week
> Popetacular will be like a baby-down-a-well story times a Kursk rescue
> times
> a presidential inauguration. Atheists are advised to keep their TVs off.
> Even Donald Trump will be a footnote to reporters while His Holiness is in
> the country. (Although, humorously, Trump's biographer Michael D'Antonio
> squirmed into the headlines this week by comparing Trump to the pope.
> "They're both completely authentic guys," he said.)
> But it's the defenses of the pope by left-leaning media that are really
> striking. A spate of articles in traditionally liberal newspapers and
> websites has appeared, each praising the pope and appropriating him as one
> of their own.
> Should you, the progressive, embrace the head of one of the most socially
> conservative organizations on earth? "Yes. Yes, you should," says Jack
> Jenkins at ThinkProgress. "Especially if you want legislative action on
> immigration reform, climate change, or income inequality."
> Mary Elizabeth Williams at Salon took particular issue with George Will's
> broadside against Francis, which I get. But beyond that she went after Will
> for misrepresenting Catholic values, which may tilt blue-state:
> "I find it interesting when conservative guys like Will lose their minds
> over the idea of someone with a fair degree of authority on the subject of
> Catholicism - like, say, a pope - pointing out the actual stated values of
> one of the richest and most powerful religions in the world. Values that
> include, uh oh, charity, humility and non-materialism."
> Suzy Khimm at the the New Republic pointed out several of the more
> transparent attempts to turn Francis into a Democratic-leaning hero. She
> cited the liberal-backed American Bridge project, which is releasing a
> report that will "reveal how the Republican Party is opposed and actively
> working against Pope Francis's priorities on many issues." This comes on
> the
> heels of another report arguing that the Koch Brothers are "on the wrong
> side of the Holy Father."
> All this stuff is a drag. The American left is always at its most
> unlikeable
> when it's being pious. And that's just the secular,
> hey-that-joke-isn't-funny kind of piety. If we have to add actual religious
> piety to the equation, we're suddenly taking a lot of the charm out of not
> being a Republican. Watching progressives fawn over a pope is depressing
> and
> makes me want to go watch a Cheech and Chong movie.
> I was raised Catholic. To me the Church is just a giant evil transnational
> corporation operating on a dreary business model, one that nurtures
> debilitating guilt feelings in its followers and then offers to make them
> go
> away temporarily in exchange for donations. I realize the Church does some
> nice things with the money it raises and that other people have a different
> opinion, but this is my experience.
> And this pope, for all his good qualities, is to me a modern version of an
> old religious scam. In Tsarist Russia you'd have some wizened starets show
> up at an aristocrat's estate in rags and preach to the ladies of the house
> about the evils of wealth in exchange for wine, pastries and a few nights
> in
> a feather bed.
> This version is a pope arriving in America with a gazillion-member
> entourage
> to reassure young professionals in New York how right they are about
> climate
> change and income inequality. He says a lot of very vague things about the
> wrongs of society that everyone is sure coincide with their own opinions.
> George Will is right when he says Francis speaks "in the intellectual tone
> of a fortune cookie," saying things like, "People occasionally forgive, but
> nature never does."
> Meanwhile Francis chugs along as the head of one of the most socially
> regressive organizations on earth, doing nothing to take on the Church's
> indefensible stances on things like birth control, gay rights,
> discrimination against women, celibacy and countless other issues. He
> claims
> the moral authority to reform global capitalism, but he's somehow not ready
> to tell teenagers it's OK to masturbate, which seems bizarre.
> People have such impassioned political fights over the pope because
> everyone
> wants the endorsement of the guy closest to God. But what if he's not
> closer
> to God, and is just a guy in a funny hat? Doesn't that make all this fuss
> and controversy ridiculous? It seems strange that it's the year 2015, and
> we
> still can't say that out loud.
> http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
> http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
>
>
>
HAPPENING IN 3 HOURS:
I was looking at this post when the radio announced that Boehner would
be leaving congress at the end of October. Before anyone cheers, we
might want to consider the reasons and the future Speaker of the
House. Boehners resignation certainly is not coming from pressure on
his Left. Frankly, I doubt Boehner would resign unless he knew that
he was losing his power base. My prediction, and fortunately I'm
usually wrong, but my prediction is that we are in for a battle royal
in the House, and the new Speaker could well make Boehner look human.
Carl Jarvis
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "JUST-LEAKED@dccc.org" <dccc@dccc.org>
Date: Fri, 25 Sep 2015 10:52:53 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: HAPPENING IN 3 HOURS:
To: carjar82@gmail.com
BREAKING: Boehner holds secret meeting to decide shutdown plan
This morning, Boehner will determine the future of our country. He'll
decide whether to shut down the government.
TELL BOEHNER: Grow a spine, stand up to the radicals in your party,
and STOP a shutdown.
NAME: Carl Jarvis
Petition Signature: SIGN ON >>
http://links.e.dccc.org/ctt?kn=13&ms=MjM1OTQ2MzcS1&r=MTM1NDAwNDExMzA1S0&b=2&j=NjQyNTk4MzA0S0&mt=1&rt=0
Sign Your Name >>
http://links.e.dccc.org/ctt?kn=31&ms=MjM1OTQ2MzcS1&r=MTM1NDAwNDExMzA1S0&b=2&j=NjQyNTk4MzA0S0&mt=1&rt=0
At 9 a.m., Boehner and Republican lawmakers plan to meet in the
basement of the Capitol to decide on a shutdown strategy.
Here's the bottom line: Shutting down the government is reckless. It
could cost our economy billions.
ADD YOUR NAME: Tell Boehner not to play politics with a government
shutdown. >> http://links.e.dccc.org/ctt?kn=35&ms=MjM1OTQ2MzcS1&r=MTM1NDAwNDExMzA1S0&b=2&j=NjQyNTk4MzA0S0&mt=1&rt=0
Thanks,
DCCC
This message was emailed to: carjar82@gmail.com
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Paid for by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
430 South Capitol Street, S.E. Washington, D.C. 20003
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Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.
be leaving congress at the end of October. Before anyone cheers, we
might want to consider the reasons and the future Speaker of the
House. Boehners resignation certainly is not coming from pressure on
his Left. Frankly, I doubt Boehner would resign unless he knew that
he was losing his power base. My prediction, and fortunately I'm
usually wrong, but my prediction is that we are in for a battle royal
in the House, and the new Speaker could well make Boehner look human.
Carl Jarvis
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "JUST-LEAKED@dccc.org" <dccc@dccc.org>
Date: Fri, 25 Sep 2015 10:52:53 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: HAPPENING IN 3 HOURS:
To: carjar82@gmail.com
BREAKING: Boehner holds secret meeting to decide shutdown plan
This morning, Boehner will determine the future of our country. He'll
decide whether to shut down the government.
TELL BOEHNER: Grow a spine, stand up to the radicals in your party,
and STOP a shutdown.
NAME: Carl Jarvis
Petition Signature: SIGN ON >>
http://links.e.dccc.org/ctt?kn=13&ms=MjM1OTQ2MzcS1&r=MTM1NDAwNDExMzA1S0&b=2&j=NjQyNTk4MzA0S0&mt=1&rt=0
Sign Your Name >>
http://links.e.dccc.org/ctt?kn=31&ms=MjM1OTQ2MzcS1&r=MTM1NDAwNDExMzA1S0&b=2&j=NjQyNTk4MzA0S0&mt=1&rt=0
At 9 a.m., Boehner and Republican lawmakers plan to meet in the
basement of the Capitol to decide on a shutdown strategy.
Here's the bottom line: Shutting down the government is reckless. It
could cost our economy billions.
ADD YOUR NAME: Tell Boehner not to play politics with a government
shutdown. >> http://links.e.dccc.org/ctt?kn=35&ms=MjM1OTQ2MzcS1&r=MTM1NDAwNDExMzA1S0&b=2&j=NjQyNTk4MzA0S0&mt=1&rt=0
Thanks,
DCCC
This message was emailed to: carjar82@gmail.com
To unsubscribe from this email list, please paste this URL into your
browser: http://action.dccc.org/page/s/dccc-e-mail-options?m=23594637&r=MTM1NDAwNDExMzA1S0&j=NjQyNTk4MzA0S0&l=4144997&e=carjar82@gmail.com
Paid for by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
430 South Capitol Street, S.E. Washington, D.C. 20003
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Thursday, September 24, 2015
Re: [blind-democracy] Re: What It Means to Be a Socialist
In religion we begin with an absolute. The Great Pooh Pah
The Great Pooh Paw has laid it on our hearts, or on lost clay/golden
tablets, His Absolute Word. From there we build outward, proving over
and over His Greatness through His very own Word. And for many of us,
that is enough.
But others of us are curious by Nature. We begin with a known, like
why does the tide rise and fall. We set aside all preconceived
notions, such as our belief that it is due to the Great Pooh Paw.
Through trial and error we finally prove beyond any serious doubt,
that the tides are reacting to the movement of the Moon. And through
this trial and error method we learned that our Earth was not the
center of the universe. We proved that huge distances exist between
the billions of Suns. We built up a vast warehouse of information
from which we could draw in our further explorations. All of this was
due to our open-minded approach. But of course we are mere Mortals.
We began to understand that this gathered knowledge could be very
useful in controlling other people. From our dabbling, we learned
that figures may not lie, but liars sure can figure...and manipulate
figures.
Because we have come to Worship the Almighty Dollar over Human Needs,
we can buy any scientific conclusion we want.
If we were able to stay true to our approach we would challenge all
conclusions, demanding step by step proof of their validity.
However, since we have been conditioned over thousands of years to
accept absolutes, like the existence of the Great Pooh Paw, we simply
accept the word from some Mighty Authority, and turn our attention to
defending it rather than giving it a close examination.
If we could step back and apply scientific methodology to any of our
religions, or if we did so to our wonderful Corporate Capitalism, we
would soon begin to unravel the fundamental lie in both.
But we will only be objective to that with which we disagree, choosing
to defend our own beliefs. And in that, we are doomed.
Carl Jarvis
On 9/23/15, Roger Loran Bailey <dmarc-noreply@freelists.org> wrote:
> When theories in these cases are not supported they are dropped too.
> There is a difference from the hard sciences though. In cases like
> astronomy, physics, chemistry or biology. the point of the science is to
> determine what is true, that is, the nature of the universe. Applying
> the discoveries that are arrived at by this scientific method is usually
> called technology. In scientific socialism it works a bit differently,
> but it is still a matter of applying scientific method. You might say
> that the science and the technology are combined. The main difference is
> that a purpose is explicated. In the other sciences there is purpose to
> the investigations too, but it is not necessarily explicit. The purpose
> of investigations in chemistry, for example, are usually the profit of
> chemical companies or pharmaceutical companies or something similar. In
> scientific socialism the purpose is to bring about a world in which
> humanity can relate to each other as equals who collectively determine
> their future for the collective good of all, a world society where
> everyone is free as possible by being collectively free. The process of
> achieving this is scientific in that it requires recognition of the real
> world and the real situation at all times. It requires a study of
> history and an examination of how historical social and economic systems
> arose and how they fell. It requires examination of the current
> situation and how it relates to historical situations that were similar.
> By considering the real world, both historically and current, theories
> are developed about how to change the current situation into a more
> favorable situation. Then the theory is applied and in part it is likely
> to be successful and in part it is likely to fail. But then it becomes a
> part of the history that must be studied. Again, there are just too many
> variables to get the theory exactly right before applying it. That is,
> no action is going to turn out exactly the way we want it to turn out.
> If it did then we could accomplish our ultimate goal instantly. But
> since it doesn't we have to examine where we went wrong and apply the
> lessons we learn to future actions. Now, that is not even the slightest
> bit like a religious cult. In a religious cult the nature of reality is
> irrelevant. All proclamations are claimed to be revealed truth rather
> than something that has to be found out by observation.
>
> On 9/23/2015 9:47 AM, Miriam Vieni wrote:
>> I do understand your explanations. It isn't that I don't understand what
>> you're describing. It's that I don't think that it's the only, nor the
>> most
>> realistic way to conceptualize the proper political response for us in
>> this
>> time and place. I know that you see the theory as being science. But it
>> isn't like the physical sciences. Physical science is exact. Theorems are
>> tested and when they're not supported by data, they're dropped. But in
>> the
>> case of the social sciences, people follow a variety of theories and they
>> adhere to them regardless of the data. They explain why the theories are
>> correct and why they seem not to apply, but that the theories actdually
>> do
>> apply. Each of the socialist and communist groups seem to me, like
>> religious
>> cults. I realize that this idea horrifies you. But the slavish adherence
>> to
>> a set of beliefs and the faith that things will work as outlined by those
>> beliefs, and that there is absolutely no compromise, is like religion.
>>
>> Miriam
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: blind-democracy-bounce@freelists.org
>> [mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@freelists.org] On Behalf Of Roger Loran
>> Bailey (Redacted sender "rogerbailey81" for DMARC)
>> Sent: Tuesday, September 22, 2015 10:41 PM
>> To: blind-democracy@freelists.org
>> Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: What It Means to Be a Socialist
>>
>> Ah, the frustration of having to explain the same thing over and over
>> again!
>> It is not a matter of manipulating the workers. It is a matter of
>> providing
>> leadership when the revolution comes. As I have explained before, social
>> and
>> economic forces lead to periodic crises that are usually called
>> revolution.
>> That happens whether we like it or not and it does not always result in
>> an
>> advantage for the working class. There is a necessity to join with the
>> working class to manipulate the revolution to try to ensure that it
>> results
>> in the best deal for the majority of humanity as possible. Again, it is
>> like
>> being behind the wheel of a car hurtling down the highway when the brakes
>> completely fail. You can either sit back and let whatever will happen to
>> just happen or you can steer. Steering will not necessarily get you the
>> exact results you want, but I would suggest steering anyway. And no, it
>> doesn't work like clockwork. As I have explained over and over there are
>> just too many variables to keep track of. Approaching the matter with a
>> scientific perspective does help steer the calamity in the direction that
>> is
>> desired, but it is not guaranteed that you will get exactly what you
>> want.
>> If you do not apply scientific principles, though, and if you do not work
>> hard to steer it is pretty much guaranteed that you will end up in
>> disaster.
>> And again, what happened to the Russian revolution has been analyzed and
>> I
>> have explained that over and over too. In order to get socialism out of
>> capitalism when capitalism collapses capitalism really should have
>> reached
>> its productive limits. In 1917 Russia was not the preferred place to have
>> a
>> socialist revolution. Germany or England would have been better. In
>> Russia
>> capitalism was still rather primitive and a lot of feudal relations
>> still
>> existed in full force. But, again, we do not get to choose where a
>> revolution breaks out. We have to take it wherever it happens. One did
>> break
>> out in Russia and a vanguard party did exist to take advantage of that
>> revolution. The trouble is that with a less than fully developed
>> productive
>> capacity and what with an ensuing civil war there were severe shortages
>> of
>> material goods to be distributed. Someone has to do the distribution.
>> When
>> there are shortages of everything, of course, the ones in charge of
>> distribution are going to ensure that they get enough of what they are
>> distributing.
>> That is what allowed for the establishment of a privileged bureaucracy.
>> It was also responsible for the NEP which was a significant step
>> backward.
>> It was a necessary evil, but it was still an evil. All of this set the
>> stage
>> for a takeover by Stalin. In the future if a revolution breaks out in an
>> economic situation like that one then steps can be taken to avoid a new
>> Stalin coming to power. Whatever the economic situation, though, we will
>> still have no power to determine where there will be a revolution nor
>> when.
>> Despite your claims that I am proposing that we have such fine control
>> over
>> these things we simply do not. If we could actually account for all the
>> variables such that it could work as a clockwork process that was
>> completely
>> predictable then certainly we could bypass revolution altogether.
>> Revolution
>> results in destruction and in people getting killed and in suffering. If
>> we
>> could avoid that and still liberate humanity then we most certainly
>> would,
>> but we just do not have that kind of fine control. Trotsky was once asked
>> if
>> all the death and destruction was really worth it for what he was
>> participating in building. He answered that the question was
>> teleological.
>> Back when I first read that I did not understand what this had to do with
>> teleology.
>> Now I understand completely. His point was that the death and destruction
>> was going to happen anyway with or without him and his political
>> movement.
>> It was his political movement that played a big part in ameliorating it.
>> But
>> to bring it back to the question of whether the workers should support a
>> bourgeois party, that is class collaboration and it does not ameliorate
>> suffering. It just perpetuates it and when the shit hits the fan it will
>> lead to a revolutionary defeat of the working class.
>>
>> On 9/22/2015 9:59 PM, Miriam Vieni wrote:
>>> OK. Now that you've explained the "outside the box", I believe I
>>> understand and it scares the hell out of me. You're talking about
>>> training an elite cadre who will then go out and propagandize and
>>> manipulate the masses, for their own good, of course, so that
>>> hopefully, when the time is right and there is what the elite cadre
>>> defines as a real revolution, the masses will be properly trained as
>>> to how to behave. And the assumption is that these people who have
>>> become the elite, have studied, and are now a ruling class, will be a
>>> ruling class only so long as their expertise is needed. They won't use
>>> their power and knowledge on their own behalf. They will be altruistic
>>> and true socialists, and they will work solely for the common good.
>>> And all this working for candidates in the meantime, putting them on
>>> the ballot and voting for them is just sort of a game, a warm up for
>>> real life when the revolution really comes. And this is all very
>>> scientific. If we follow the steps as outlined by Marx or Engels or
>> whoever, it will all work like clockwork. Only, so far in real life, it
>> hasn't worked out that way, has it?
>>> The revolutions in Russia and China somehow became corrupted by real
>>> human beings and outside forces and greed and people's lust for
>>> power,etc. Given the nature of America, its history, its racism, the
>>> religiosity of its people, its military might, the influence of
>>> corporate powerand the degredation of the environment, I have grave
>>> doubts that the theory you propound will play itsself out as you
>>> describe. I know that you think that if I truly understood what you
>>> are telling me, I would, of course, see the truth of it. I can see that
>>> it
>> is a beautiful, internally consistent theory.
>>> But so far, the data don't always support it because human behavior
>>> can't be analyzed in the same ways that the physical world can be.
>>>
>>> Miriam
>>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: blind-democracy-bounce@freelists.org
>>> [mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@freelists.org] On Behalf Of Roger Loran
>>> Bailey (Redacted sender "rogerbailey81" for DMARC)
>>> Sent: Tuesday, September 22, 2015 8:44 PM
>>> To: blind-democracy@freelists.org
>>> Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: What It Means to Be a Socialist
>>>
>>> Miriam, you don't sound harsh. You sound clueless. There are crises
>>> and there are crises. The kind of crisis I am talking about is a
>>> revolutionary situation. What you describe as a crisis - and I don't
>>> really deny that it is some kind of crisis - is the kind of economic
>>> situation that pushes social forces towards a revolutionary situation.
>>> It is not a smooth and direct process though. If it was we could
>>> predict with some precision exactly when the revolution would occur
>>> and possibly even bypass revolution at all. The false solutions that
>>> many people are arriving at that you describe are examples of what I
>>> have explained before as the dangers of fascism in an approaching
>>> revolutionary situation. That danger is especially a possibility when
>>> there is not a revolutionary vanguard that has successfully prepared.
>>> Again, the apparent quiescent phases of the class struggle are times
>>> in which a revolutionary party has three main jobs. The two that are
>>> most frequently stated publicly are propaganda and agitation. The
>>> other is internal and so does not get that much attention on the
>>> outside. That internal task is the training of a revolutionary
>>> leadership. Yes, when you join the party you do find yourself
>>> attending classes. The classes are for inculcating a good theoretical
>>> foundation though. Theory must be combined with practice and so the
>>> party member also participates in workers struggles on picket lines,
>>> in marches and demonstrations and in organizing. In external relations
>>> the party engages in propaganda and that is mostly designed to
>>> recruit. Agitation is to encourage workers to be militant and to fight
>>> back against the assaults they must endure. It may take only one spark
>>> to start a prairie fire, but it is hard to tell which spark it will
>>> be. You can walk through a prairie waving your sparkler and not start
>>> a fire, but if you keep it up then eventually you will have a
>>> conflagration. It is necessary to use theory to determine which
>>> struggles are the most likely to be the spark and to deploy forces to
>>> take advantage of that situation and to encourage and to help
>>> organize. If you read the party press and take note of which struggles
>>> are being covered it is those that are being concentrated on at any
>>> given time. Now, despite that I have repeatedly explained, you still
>>> do not understand the point in running candidates who will not win.
>>> Let me go through this again. The point of fielding a candidate is not
>>> to get elected even though under other conditions that might be a
>>> goal. The point is to use the election campaign as another vehicle for
>>> propaganda and agitation. An electoral campaign tends to get broader
>> attention and so it leans more toward propagandizing than toward
>> agitation,
>> but any opportunities it presents for both should be taken advantage of.
>>> Furthermore, if our candidates do happen to get elected that comrade's
>>> job would not then be to administer the bourgeois state. That is the
>>> trap the social democrats fell into. That is, those who work within
>>> the system to change the system are doomed to be changed by the system
>>> instead. The social democrats have been changed by it so much that
>>> they are, for the most part, socialist only in name. It is more
>>> accurate to call them bourgeois liberals who think they can reform
>> capitalism to make it some how a nicer capitalism.
>>> There are few social democrats who still have the perspective of
>>> putting an end to capitalism. When the revolutionary socialist is
>>> elected to a post in the bourgeois state his or her job is to decline
>>> to administer that state, but instead to use the post to conduct more
>>> agitation. If any revolutionary socialist does get elected that means
>>> that there is a revolutionary or pretty near revolutionary situation
>>> anyway. Of course, if a revolutionary socialist was actually elected
>>> to, say, the presidency he or she would likely be impeached in short
>>> order, but that itself would be a really big agitational opportunity.
>>> So when you say that we have had no success in the past fifty years or
>>> more you mean no effect in the bourgeois reformist sense. As I have
>>> said before, you have been imprisoned in that bourgeois liberal box
>>> for so long that not only do you not think outside the box, but you
>>> can't quite understand that there is an outside to the box to think
>>> outside of. Consider this though. If we have never had an effect then
>>> how
>> do you explain Cuba?
>>> On 9/22/2015 4:40 PM, Miriam Vieni wrote:
>>>> OK. So a lot of industrial workers are aware of the party. But we're
>>>> in a crisis now! Working and poor people have been especially feeling
>>>> that crisis since 2008 and it's getting worse. People don't have
>>>> places to live and they don't have enough to eat. And a lot of those
>>>> people think that Donald Trump or Ted Cruz or Hillary Clinton is the
>>>> answer. A lot of those people don't think that there's a political
>>>> solution, but they think that getting rid of immigrants and all
>>>> Muslims might help them out. The SWP is quietly, slowly working away,
>>>> and there is a select few that know about them and understand their
>>>> program. In the meantime, the TPPP is about to come into being with
>>>> even more jobs gone and more regulations gone and higher medication
>>>> prices on the way and more desperate people joining the armed
>>>> services in order to earn a salary and more killing going on. What
>>>> kind of a crisis do you have in mind? Sorry, I don't mean to sound so
>>>> harsh, but this talk of how the people who truly understand are
>>>> preparing for the
>>> real crisis and the real revolution, distresses me.
>>>> Miriam
>>>>
>>>> -----Original Message-----
>>>> From: blind-democracy-bounce@freelists.org
>>>> [mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@freelists.org] On Behalf Of Roger
>>>> Loran Bailey (Redacted sender "rogerbailey81" for DMARC)
>>>> Sent: Tuesday, September 22, 2015 3:18 PM
>>>> To: blind-democracy@freelists.org
>>>> Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: What It Means to Be a Socialist
>>>>
>>>> No, if your only source of information is the bourgeois and liberal
>>>> news outlets then, indeed, you don't know it exists, but if you keep
>>>> abreast of the left press and if you are an industrial worker it is
>>>> kind of hard to miss it. It is true that a lot of industrial workers
>>>> have a hard time sorting out the various left tendencies - it was
>>>> always frustrating for me when the coal miners I was reaching out to
>>>> confused the SWP with the Revolutionary Communist Party or the
>>>> Communist Labor Party - but they are well aware of the SWP anyway.
>>>> And, again, if you think the party is accomplishing nothing you are
>>>> still unaware of what it is trying to accomplish. The real test of
>>>> what is being accomplished will only be realized when a major crisis
>>>> of capitalism is in progress. In the meantime the task of the party
>>>> is to
>>> prepare for that event.
>>>> On 9/22/2015 3:02 PM, Miriam Vieni wrote:
>>>>> I figured it was older than 50 years. But it proves my point. It
>>>>> runs candidates that don't even get on the ballots of many states.
>>>>> It has conferences and it organizes, and it has publications, and
>>>>> its candidates and positions are unknown and unappreciated by a
>>>>> majority of people. Hardly anyone, except a tiny minority of
>>>>> adherents, knows it exists. So while it can feel very satisfying to
>>>>> be part of it and work for its goals, it isn't reaching enough people
>>>>> to
>> make real change.
>>>>> Miriam
>>>>>
>>>>> -----Original Message-----
>>>>> From: blind-democracy-bounce@freelists.org
>>>>> [mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@freelists.org] On Behalf Of Roger
>>>>> Loran Bailey (Redacted sender "rogerbailey81" for DMARC)
>>>>> Sent: Tuesday, September 22, 2015 2:20 PM
>>>>> To: blind-democracy@freelists.org
>>>>> Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: What It Means to Be a Socialist
>>>>>
>>>>> The Socialist Workers Party was founded in 1938 when the Left
>>>>> Opposition in the Socialist Party - which had entered some years
>>>>> before with the dissolution of the Communist League of America into
>>>>> the Socialist Party
>>>>> - fused with the Workers Party. It has been running candidates ever
>>>>> since that 1938 founding.
>>>>>
>>>>> On 9/22/2015 9:40 AM, Miriam Vieni wrote:
>>>>>> Bob,
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I think they're both right. I think that Hedges is right ethically
>>>>>> and, perhaps, in the long run. But in practical terms, in this real
>>>>>> world, I think Kaufman is right. The fact is that thousands and
>>>>>> thousands of people are listening to Sanders. That's why I
>>>>>> contributed money to his campaign, because I wanted his message to
>>>>>> be heard and it will only be heard if he works through one of the
>>>>>> two corporate parties. Chris Hedges, on the other hand, gave that
>>>>>> speech to the Green Party. I am contributing a little money each
>>>>>> month to the Green Party because I would like them to be able to
>>>>>> attract more people. But Chris Hedges speaks only to the Left. And
>>>>>> Green Party candidates do not have audiences of thousands and
>>>>>> thousands of people
>>>> hearing them.
>>>>>> The Socialist Workers' Party has been quietly organizing and having
>>>>>> candidates forever, at least for the past 50 years which is all I
>>>>>> know about, but longer than that, and they don't even get on the
>> ballot.
>>>>>> Ask anyone in the street who Jill Stein is and they'll look at you
>>>>>> blankly. I don't care how correct one's political theory is or how
>>>>>> true his message, if it doesn't reach masses of people and isn't
>>>>>> embraced
>>>>> by them, it means nothing at all in terms of real change.
>>>>>> Miriam
>>>>>>
>>>>>> -----Original Message-----
>>>>>> From: blind-democracy-bounce@freelists.org
>>>>>> [mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@freelists.org] On Behalf Of Bob
>>>>>> Hachey
>>>>>> Sent: Tuesday, September 22, 2015 9:09 AM
>>>>>> To: blind-democracy@freelists.org
>>>>>> Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: What It Means to Be a Socialist
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Hi Miriam,
>>>>>> Wise words here from Mr. Hedges.
>>>>>> I am wrestling in my mind. In this corner we have Chris Hedges and
>>>>>> his definition of a socialist. He argues that Sanders is not a good
>>>>>> choice for a leader because he enables the military industrial
>>>>>> complex and other corporates.
>>>>>> In the opposing corner, we have William Kaufman arguing that the
>>>>>> left needs to relax and support Bernie Sanders.
>>>>>> Seems I'm waffling back and forth between those two sides. No doubt
>>>>>> that sanders had done a good job identifying the scourge of income
>>>>>> inequality and that he has pulled Clinton slightly to the left.
>>>>>> AT this point in time, I'd say my heart is with Hedges and my head
>>>>>> is sort of with Kaufman. My heart is more committed to Hedges than
>>>>>> my head is to Kaufman.
>>>>>> IS that trying to have it both ways? If so, then you may lable me
>>>>>> guilty as charged.
>>>>>> Bob Hachey
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>
>
>
The Great Pooh Paw has laid it on our hearts, or on lost clay/golden
tablets, His Absolute Word. From there we build outward, proving over
and over His Greatness through His very own Word. And for many of us,
that is enough.
But others of us are curious by Nature. We begin with a known, like
why does the tide rise and fall. We set aside all preconceived
notions, such as our belief that it is due to the Great Pooh Paw.
Through trial and error we finally prove beyond any serious doubt,
that the tides are reacting to the movement of the Moon. And through
this trial and error method we learned that our Earth was not the
center of the universe. We proved that huge distances exist between
the billions of Suns. We built up a vast warehouse of information
from which we could draw in our further explorations. All of this was
due to our open-minded approach. But of course we are mere Mortals.
We began to understand that this gathered knowledge could be very
useful in controlling other people. From our dabbling, we learned
that figures may not lie, but liars sure can figure...and manipulate
figures.
Because we have come to Worship the Almighty Dollar over Human Needs,
we can buy any scientific conclusion we want.
If we were able to stay true to our approach we would challenge all
conclusions, demanding step by step proof of their validity.
However, since we have been conditioned over thousands of years to
accept absolutes, like the existence of the Great Pooh Paw, we simply
accept the word from some Mighty Authority, and turn our attention to
defending it rather than giving it a close examination.
If we could step back and apply scientific methodology to any of our
religions, or if we did so to our wonderful Corporate Capitalism, we
would soon begin to unravel the fundamental lie in both.
But we will only be objective to that with which we disagree, choosing
to defend our own beliefs. And in that, we are doomed.
Carl Jarvis
On 9/23/15, Roger Loran Bailey <dmarc-noreply@freelists.org> wrote:
> When theories in these cases are not supported they are dropped too.
> There is a difference from the hard sciences though. In cases like
> astronomy, physics, chemistry or biology. the point of the science is to
> determine what is true, that is, the nature of the universe. Applying
> the discoveries that are arrived at by this scientific method is usually
> called technology. In scientific socialism it works a bit differently,
> but it is still a matter of applying scientific method. You might say
> that the science and the technology are combined. The main difference is
> that a purpose is explicated. In the other sciences there is purpose to
> the investigations too, but it is not necessarily explicit. The purpose
> of investigations in chemistry, for example, are usually the profit of
> chemical companies or pharmaceutical companies or something similar. In
> scientific socialism the purpose is to bring about a world in which
> humanity can relate to each other as equals who collectively determine
> their future for the collective good of all, a world society where
> everyone is free as possible by being collectively free. The process of
> achieving this is scientific in that it requires recognition of the real
> world and the real situation at all times. It requires a study of
> history and an examination of how historical social and economic systems
> arose and how they fell. It requires examination of the current
> situation and how it relates to historical situations that were similar.
> By considering the real world, both historically and current, theories
> are developed about how to change the current situation into a more
> favorable situation. Then the theory is applied and in part it is likely
> to be successful and in part it is likely to fail. But then it becomes a
> part of the history that must be studied. Again, there are just too many
> variables to get the theory exactly right before applying it. That is,
> no action is going to turn out exactly the way we want it to turn out.
> If it did then we could accomplish our ultimate goal instantly. But
> since it doesn't we have to examine where we went wrong and apply the
> lessons we learn to future actions. Now, that is not even the slightest
> bit like a religious cult. In a religious cult the nature of reality is
> irrelevant. All proclamations are claimed to be revealed truth rather
> than something that has to be found out by observation.
>
> On 9/23/2015 9:47 AM, Miriam Vieni wrote:
>> I do understand your explanations. It isn't that I don't understand what
>> you're describing. It's that I don't think that it's the only, nor the
>> most
>> realistic way to conceptualize the proper political response for us in
>> this
>> time and place. I know that you see the theory as being science. But it
>> isn't like the physical sciences. Physical science is exact. Theorems are
>> tested and when they're not supported by data, they're dropped. But in
>> the
>> case of the social sciences, people follow a variety of theories and they
>> adhere to them regardless of the data. They explain why the theories are
>> correct and why they seem not to apply, but that the theories actdually
>> do
>> apply. Each of the socialist and communist groups seem to me, like
>> religious
>> cults. I realize that this idea horrifies you. But the slavish adherence
>> to
>> a set of beliefs and the faith that things will work as outlined by those
>> beliefs, and that there is absolutely no compromise, is like religion.
>>
>> Miriam
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: blind-democracy-bounce@freelists.org
>> [mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@freelists.org] On Behalf Of Roger Loran
>> Bailey (Redacted sender "rogerbailey81" for DMARC)
>> Sent: Tuesday, September 22, 2015 10:41 PM
>> To: blind-democracy@freelists.org
>> Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: What It Means to Be a Socialist
>>
>> Ah, the frustration of having to explain the same thing over and over
>> again!
>> It is not a matter of manipulating the workers. It is a matter of
>> providing
>> leadership when the revolution comes. As I have explained before, social
>> and
>> economic forces lead to periodic crises that are usually called
>> revolution.
>> That happens whether we like it or not and it does not always result in
>> an
>> advantage for the working class. There is a necessity to join with the
>> working class to manipulate the revolution to try to ensure that it
>> results
>> in the best deal for the majority of humanity as possible. Again, it is
>> like
>> being behind the wheel of a car hurtling down the highway when the brakes
>> completely fail. You can either sit back and let whatever will happen to
>> just happen or you can steer. Steering will not necessarily get you the
>> exact results you want, but I would suggest steering anyway. And no, it
>> doesn't work like clockwork. As I have explained over and over there are
>> just too many variables to keep track of. Approaching the matter with a
>> scientific perspective does help steer the calamity in the direction that
>> is
>> desired, but it is not guaranteed that you will get exactly what you
>> want.
>> If you do not apply scientific principles, though, and if you do not work
>> hard to steer it is pretty much guaranteed that you will end up in
>> disaster.
>> And again, what happened to the Russian revolution has been analyzed and
>> I
>> have explained that over and over too. In order to get socialism out of
>> capitalism when capitalism collapses capitalism really should have
>> reached
>> its productive limits. In 1917 Russia was not the preferred place to have
>> a
>> socialist revolution. Germany or England would have been better. In
>> Russia
>> capitalism was still rather primitive and a lot of feudal relations
>> still
>> existed in full force. But, again, we do not get to choose where a
>> revolution breaks out. We have to take it wherever it happens. One did
>> break
>> out in Russia and a vanguard party did exist to take advantage of that
>> revolution. The trouble is that with a less than fully developed
>> productive
>> capacity and what with an ensuing civil war there were severe shortages
>> of
>> material goods to be distributed. Someone has to do the distribution.
>> When
>> there are shortages of everything, of course, the ones in charge of
>> distribution are going to ensure that they get enough of what they are
>> distributing.
>> That is what allowed for the establishment of a privileged bureaucracy.
>> It was also responsible for the NEP which was a significant step
>> backward.
>> It was a necessary evil, but it was still an evil. All of this set the
>> stage
>> for a takeover by Stalin. In the future if a revolution breaks out in an
>> economic situation like that one then steps can be taken to avoid a new
>> Stalin coming to power. Whatever the economic situation, though, we will
>> still have no power to determine where there will be a revolution nor
>> when.
>> Despite your claims that I am proposing that we have such fine control
>> over
>> these things we simply do not. If we could actually account for all the
>> variables such that it could work as a clockwork process that was
>> completely
>> predictable then certainly we could bypass revolution altogether.
>> Revolution
>> results in destruction and in people getting killed and in suffering. If
>> we
>> could avoid that and still liberate humanity then we most certainly
>> would,
>> but we just do not have that kind of fine control. Trotsky was once asked
>> if
>> all the death and destruction was really worth it for what he was
>> participating in building. He answered that the question was
>> teleological.
>> Back when I first read that I did not understand what this had to do with
>> teleology.
>> Now I understand completely. His point was that the death and destruction
>> was going to happen anyway with or without him and his political
>> movement.
>> It was his political movement that played a big part in ameliorating it.
>> But
>> to bring it back to the question of whether the workers should support a
>> bourgeois party, that is class collaboration and it does not ameliorate
>> suffering. It just perpetuates it and when the shit hits the fan it will
>> lead to a revolutionary defeat of the working class.
>>
>> On 9/22/2015 9:59 PM, Miriam Vieni wrote:
>>> OK. Now that you've explained the "outside the box", I believe I
>>> understand and it scares the hell out of me. You're talking about
>>> training an elite cadre who will then go out and propagandize and
>>> manipulate the masses, for their own good, of course, so that
>>> hopefully, when the time is right and there is what the elite cadre
>>> defines as a real revolution, the masses will be properly trained as
>>> to how to behave. And the assumption is that these people who have
>>> become the elite, have studied, and are now a ruling class, will be a
>>> ruling class only so long as their expertise is needed. They won't use
>>> their power and knowledge on their own behalf. They will be altruistic
>>> and true socialists, and they will work solely for the common good.
>>> And all this working for candidates in the meantime, putting them on
>>> the ballot and voting for them is just sort of a game, a warm up for
>>> real life when the revolution really comes. And this is all very
>>> scientific. If we follow the steps as outlined by Marx or Engels or
>> whoever, it will all work like clockwork. Only, so far in real life, it
>> hasn't worked out that way, has it?
>>> The revolutions in Russia and China somehow became corrupted by real
>>> human beings and outside forces and greed and people's lust for
>>> power,etc. Given the nature of America, its history, its racism, the
>>> religiosity of its people, its military might, the influence of
>>> corporate powerand the degredation of the environment, I have grave
>>> doubts that the theory you propound will play itsself out as you
>>> describe. I know that you think that if I truly understood what you
>>> are telling me, I would, of course, see the truth of it. I can see that
>>> it
>> is a beautiful, internally consistent theory.
>>> But so far, the data don't always support it because human behavior
>>> can't be analyzed in the same ways that the physical world can be.
>>>
>>> Miriam
>>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: blind-democracy-bounce@freelists.org
>>> [mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@freelists.org] On Behalf Of Roger Loran
>>> Bailey (Redacted sender "rogerbailey81" for DMARC)
>>> Sent: Tuesday, September 22, 2015 8:44 PM
>>> To: blind-democracy@freelists.org
>>> Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: What It Means to Be a Socialist
>>>
>>> Miriam, you don't sound harsh. You sound clueless. There are crises
>>> and there are crises. The kind of crisis I am talking about is a
>>> revolutionary situation. What you describe as a crisis - and I don't
>>> really deny that it is some kind of crisis - is the kind of economic
>>> situation that pushes social forces towards a revolutionary situation.
>>> It is not a smooth and direct process though. If it was we could
>>> predict with some precision exactly when the revolution would occur
>>> and possibly even bypass revolution at all. The false solutions that
>>> many people are arriving at that you describe are examples of what I
>>> have explained before as the dangers of fascism in an approaching
>>> revolutionary situation. That danger is especially a possibility when
>>> there is not a revolutionary vanguard that has successfully prepared.
>>> Again, the apparent quiescent phases of the class struggle are times
>>> in which a revolutionary party has three main jobs. The two that are
>>> most frequently stated publicly are propaganda and agitation. The
>>> other is internal and so does not get that much attention on the
>>> outside. That internal task is the training of a revolutionary
>>> leadership. Yes, when you join the party you do find yourself
>>> attending classes. The classes are for inculcating a good theoretical
>>> foundation though. Theory must be combined with practice and so the
>>> party member also participates in workers struggles on picket lines,
>>> in marches and demonstrations and in organizing. In external relations
>>> the party engages in propaganda and that is mostly designed to
>>> recruit. Agitation is to encourage workers to be militant and to fight
>>> back against the assaults they must endure. It may take only one spark
>>> to start a prairie fire, but it is hard to tell which spark it will
>>> be. You can walk through a prairie waving your sparkler and not start
>>> a fire, but if you keep it up then eventually you will have a
>>> conflagration. It is necessary to use theory to determine which
>>> struggles are the most likely to be the spark and to deploy forces to
>>> take advantage of that situation and to encourage and to help
>>> organize. If you read the party press and take note of which struggles
>>> are being covered it is those that are being concentrated on at any
>>> given time. Now, despite that I have repeatedly explained, you still
>>> do not understand the point in running candidates who will not win.
>>> Let me go through this again. The point of fielding a candidate is not
>>> to get elected even though under other conditions that might be a
>>> goal. The point is to use the election campaign as another vehicle for
>>> propaganda and agitation. An electoral campaign tends to get broader
>> attention and so it leans more toward propagandizing than toward
>> agitation,
>> but any opportunities it presents for both should be taken advantage of.
>>> Furthermore, if our candidates do happen to get elected that comrade's
>>> job would not then be to administer the bourgeois state. That is the
>>> trap the social democrats fell into. That is, those who work within
>>> the system to change the system are doomed to be changed by the system
>>> instead. The social democrats have been changed by it so much that
>>> they are, for the most part, socialist only in name. It is more
>>> accurate to call them bourgeois liberals who think they can reform
>> capitalism to make it some how a nicer capitalism.
>>> There are few social democrats who still have the perspective of
>>> putting an end to capitalism. When the revolutionary socialist is
>>> elected to a post in the bourgeois state his or her job is to decline
>>> to administer that state, but instead to use the post to conduct more
>>> agitation. If any revolutionary socialist does get elected that means
>>> that there is a revolutionary or pretty near revolutionary situation
>>> anyway. Of course, if a revolutionary socialist was actually elected
>>> to, say, the presidency he or she would likely be impeached in short
>>> order, but that itself would be a really big agitational opportunity.
>>> So when you say that we have had no success in the past fifty years or
>>> more you mean no effect in the bourgeois reformist sense. As I have
>>> said before, you have been imprisoned in that bourgeois liberal box
>>> for so long that not only do you not think outside the box, but you
>>> can't quite understand that there is an outside to the box to think
>>> outside of. Consider this though. If we have never had an effect then
>>> how
>> do you explain Cuba?
>>> On 9/22/2015 4:40 PM, Miriam Vieni wrote:
>>>> OK. So a lot of industrial workers are aware of the party. But we're
>>>> in a crisis now! Working and poor people have been especially feeling
>>>> that crisis since 2008 and it's getting worse. People don't have
>>>> places to live and they don't have enough to eat. And a lot of those
>>>> people think that Donald Trump or Ted Cruz or Hillary Clinton is the
>>>> answer. A lot of those people don't think that there's a political
>>>> solution, but they think that getting rid of immigrants and all
>>>> Muslims might help them out. The SWP is quietly, slowly working away,
>>>> and there is a select few that know about them and understand their
>>>> program. In the meantime, the TPPP is about to come into being with
>>>> even more jobs gone and more regulations gone and higher medication
>>>> prices on the way and more desperate people joining the armed
>>>> services in order to earn a salary and more killing going on. What
>>>> kind of a crisis do you have in mind? Sorry, I don't mean to sound so
>>>> harsh, but this talk of how the people who truly understand are
>>>> preparing for the
>>> real crisis and the real revolution, distresses me.
>>>> Miriam
>>>>
>>>> -----Original Message-----
>>>> From: blind-democracy-bounce@freelists.org
>>>> [mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@freelists.org] On Behalf Of Roger
>>>> Loran Bailey (Redacted sender "rogerbailey81" for DMARC)
>>>> Sent: Tuesday, September 22, 2015 3:18 PM
>>>> To: blind-democracy@freelists.org
>>>> Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: What It Means to Be a Socialist
>>>>
>>>> No, if your only source of information is the bourgeois and liberal
>>>> news outlets then, indeed, you don't know it exists, but if you keep
>>>> abreast of the left press and if you are an industrial worker it is
>>>> kind of hard to miss it. It is true that a lot of industrial workers
>>>> have a hard time sorting out the various left tendencies - it was
>>>> always frustrating for me when the coal miners I was reaching out to
>>>> confused the SWP with the Revolutionary Communist Party or the
>>>> Communist Labor Party - but they are well aware of the SWP anyway.
>>>> And, again, if you think the party is accomplishing nothing you are
>>>> still unaware of what it is trying to accomplish. The real test of
>>>> what is being accomplished will only be realized when a major crisis
>>>> of capitalism is in progress. In the meantime the task of the party
>>>> is to
>>> prepare for that event.
>>>> On 9/22/2015 3:02 PM, Miriam Vieni wrote:
>>>>> I figured it was older than 50 years. But it proves my point. It
>>>>> runs candidates that don't even get on the ballots of many states.
>>>>> It has conferences and it organizes, and it has publications, and
>>>>> its candidates and positions are unknown and unappreciated by a
>>>>> majority of people. Hardly anyone, except a tiny minority of
>>>>> adherents, knows it exists. So while it can feel very satisfying to
>>>>> be part of it and work for its goals, it isn't reaching enough people
>>>>> to
>> make real change.
>>>>> Miriam
>>>>>
>>>>> -----Original Message-----
>>>>> From: blind-democracy-bounce@freelists.org
>>>>> [mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@freelists.org] On Behalf Of Roger
>>>>> Loran Bailey (Redacted sender "rogerbailey81" for DMARC)
>>>>> Sent: Tuesday, September 22, 2015 2:20 PM
>>>>> To: blind-democracy@freelists.org
>>>>> Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: What It Means to Be a Socialist
>>>>>
>>>>> The Socialist Workers Party was founded in 1938 when the Left
>>>>> Opposition in the Socialist Party - which had entered some years
>>>>> before with the dissolution of the Communist League of America into
>>>>> the Socialist Party
>>>>> - fused with the Workers Party. It has been running candidates ever
>>>>> since that 1938 founding.
>>>>>
>>>>> On 9/22/2015 9:40 AM, Miriam Vieni wrote:
>>>>>> Bob,
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I think they're both right. I think that Hedges is right ethically
>>>>>> and, perhaps, in the long run. But in practical terms, in this real
>>>>>> world, I think Kaufman is right. The fact is that thousands and
>>>>>> thousands of people are listening to Sanders. That's why I
>>>>>> contributed money to his campaign, because I wanted his message to
>>>>>> be heard and it will only be heard if he works through one of the
>>>>>> two corporate parties. Chris Hedges, on the other hand, gave that
>>>>>> speech to the Green Party. I am contributing a little money each
>>>>>> month to the Green Party because I would like them to be able to
>>>>>> attract more people. But Chris Hedges speaks only to the Left. And
>>>>>> Green Party candidates do not have audiences of thousands and
>>>>>> thousands of people
>>>> hearing them.
>>>>>> The Socialist Workers' Party has been quietly organizing and having
>>>>>> candidates forever, at least for the past 50 years which is all I
>>>>>> know about, but longer than that, and they don't even get on the
>> ballot.
>>>>>> Ask anyone in the street who Jill Stein is and they'll look at you
>>>>>> blankly. I don't care how correct one's political theory is or how
>>>>>> true his message, if it doesn't reach masses of people and isn't
>>>>>> embraced
>>>>> by them, it means nothing at all in terms of real change.
>>>>>> Miriam
>>>>>>
>>>>>> -----Original Message-----
>>>>>> From: blind-democracy-bounce@freelists.org
>>>>>> [mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@freelists.org] On Behalf Of Bob
>>>>>> Hachey
>>>>>> Sent: Tuesday, September 22, 2015 9:09 AM
>>>>>> To: blind-democracy@freelists.org
>>>>>> Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: What It Means to Be a Socialist
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Hi Miriam,
>>>>>> Wise words here from Mr. Hedges.
>>>>>> I am wrestling in my mind. In this corner we have Chris Hedges and
>>>>>> his definition of a socialist. He argues that Sanders is not a good
>>>>>> choice for a leader because he enables the military industrial
>>>>>> complex and other corporates.
>>>>>> In the opposing corner, we have William Kaufman arguing that the
>>>>>> left needs to relax and support Bernie Sanders.
>>>>>> Seems I'm waffling back and forth between those two sides. No doubt
>>>>>> that sanders had done a good job identifying the scourge of income
>>>>>> inequality and that he has pulled Clinton slightly to the left.
>>>>>> AT this point in time, I'd say my heart is with Hedges and my head
>>>>>> is sort of with Kaufman. My heart is more committed to Hedges than
>>>>>> my head is to Kaufman.
>>>>>> IS that trying to have it both ways? If so, then you may lable me
>>>>>> guilty as charged.
>>>>>> Bob Hachey
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>
>
>
Wednesday, September 23, 2015
Re: [blind-democracy] Re: What It Means to Be a Socialist
On 9/22/15, Roger Loran Bailey <dmarc-noreply@freelists.org> wrote:
> The Socialist Workers Party was founded in 1938 when the Left Opposition
> in the Socialist Party - which had entered some years before with the
> dissolution of the Communist League of America into the Socialist Party
> - fused with the Workers Party. It has been running candidates ever
> since that 1938 founding.
>
> On 9/22/2015 9:40 AM, Miriam Vieni wrote:
>> Bob,
>>
>> I think they're both right. I think that Hedges is right ethically and,
>> perhaps, in the long run. But in practical terms, in this real world, I
>> think Kaufman is right. The fact is that thousands and thousands of
>> people
>> are listening to Sanders. That's why I contributed money to his campaign,
>> because I wanted his message to be heard and it will only be heard if he
>> works through one of the two corporate parties. Chris Hedges, on the
>> other
>> hand, gave that speech to the Green Party. I am contributing a little
>> money
>> each month to the Green Party because I would like them to be able to
>> attract more people. But Chris Hedges speaks only to the Left. And Green
>> Party candidates do not have audiences of thousands and thousands of
>> people
>> hearing them. The Socialist Workers' Party has been quietly organizing
>> and
>> having candidates forever, at least for the past 50 years which is all I
>> know about, but longer than that, and they don't even get on the ballot.
>> Ask
>> anyone in the street who Jill Stein is and they'll look at you blankly. I
>> don't care how correct one's political theory is or how true his message,
>> if
>> it doesn't reach masses of people and isn't embraced by them, it means
>> nothing at all in terms of real change.
>>
>> Miriam
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: blind-democracy-bounce@freelists.org
>> [mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@freelists.org] On Behalf Of Bob Hachey
>> Sent: Tuesday, September 22, 2015 9:09 AM
>> To: blind-democracy@freelists.org
>> Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: What It Means to Be a Socialist
>>
>> Hi Miriam,
>> Wise words here from Mr. Hedges.
>> I am wrestling in my mind. In this corner we have Chris Hedges and his
>> definition of a socialist. He argues that Sanders is not a good choice for
>> a
>> leader because he enables the military industrial complex and other
>> corporates.
>> In the opposing corner, we have William Kaufman arguing that the left
>> needs
>> to relax and support Bernie Sanders.
>> Seems I'm waffling back and forth between those two sides. No doubt that
>> sanders had done a good job identifying the scourge of income inequality
>> and
>> that he has pulled Clinton slightly to the left.
>> AT this point in time, I'd say my heart is with Hedges and my head is
>> sort
>> of with Kaufman. My heart is more committed to Hedges than my head is to
>> Kaufman.
>> IS that trying to have it both ways? If so, then you may lable me guilty
>> as
>> charged.
>> Bob Hachey
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>
The bigger issue for me is the need to affix labels to what we stand
for, rather than to simply demonstrate through our actions and
proclamations.
Once we have a label, say Baptist, then a bunch of us gather and
discuss what being a Baptist is all about. Some of us agree that in
order to be real Baptists, we must be dunked in a pool of water. Soon
there are a few who believe the real way to baptize a person is to
dunk them three times backward. So we form the Southern Baptists.
And another group form the Reformed Baptists. And another bunch
splinter off and become the Reformed Open Bible Baptists, showing the
world that other so called Baptists don't bother to open their Bibles.
And so it is with our political divisions.
As Marx and Engels explored and defined a new social order, communism
was a very fine word. And until this new thinking threatened
Capitalism, it was used to define people who believed in putting the
people first and sharing for the good of the all. But the threat
caused governments such as England and the USA to create sinister,
evil undercurrents to define the word. Some folks decided that they
were no longer Communists. They were actually Socialists. And some
became Socialist Workers, while others became the Socialist Labor
Party. Each group defined itself in order to demonstrate how correct
they were. And in the eye of the growing Capitalist Empire, no one
cared. Most people still believed that anything left of Ronald Reagan
was suspect, and at least deep Pink.
In church, we put up a Cross and we worshipped it. In government, we
put up a Flag and worshipped it. Each sub division puts up its own
banner and sings its praise, and defends it to the death. And now we
must walk carefully and speak properly about such divisions as Black
Rights, Gay Rights, and even Animal Rights. And each group gathers
around their leaders and decide just why they are the most important
of all...except the animals.
And when the dust has settled and all the weapons are broken and
tossed aside, nothing will have changed.
Until we are all able to embrace one another within our individual
differences, and respect one another for our differences, and lean
upon one another despite our differences, we will be doomed to repeat
our errors again and again.
Labels are a major stumbling block. We don't need them in order to
tell ourselves apart. Labels pull us apart when we so desperately
need to find ways of drawing together.
Carl Jarvis
> The Socialist Workers Party was founded in 1938 when the Left Opposition
> in the Socialist Party - which had entered some years before with the
> dissolution of the Communist League of America into the Socialist Party
> - fused with the Workers Party. It has been running candidates ever
> since that 1938 founding.
>
> On 9/22/2015 9:40 AM, Miriam Vieni wrote:
>> Bob,
>>
>> I think they're both right. I think that Hedges is right ethically and,
>> perhaps, in the long run. But in practical terms, in this real world, I
>> think Kaufman is right. The fact is that thousands and thousands of
>> people
>> are listening to Sanders. That's why I contributed money to his campaign,
>> because I wanted his message to be heard and it will only be heard if he
>> works through one of the two corporate parties. Chris Hedges, on the
>> other
>> hand, gave that speech to the Green Party. I am contributing a little
>> money
>> each month to the Green Party because I would like them to be able to
>> attract more people. But Chris Hedges speaks only to the Left. And Green
>> Party candidates do not have audiences of thousands and thousands of
>> people
>> hearing them. The Socialist Workers' Party has been quietly organizing
>> and
>> having candidates forever, at least for the past 50 years which is all I
>> know about, but longer than that, and they don't even get on the ballot.
>> Ask
>> anyone in the street who Jill Stein is and they'll look at you blankly. I
>> don't care how correct one's political theory is or how true his message,
>> if
>> it doesn't reach masses of people and isn't embraced by them, it means
>> nothing at all in terms of real change.
>>
>> Miriam
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: blind-democracy-bounce@freelists.org
>> [mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@freelists.org] On Behalf Of Bob Hachey
>> Sent: Tuesday, September 22, 2015 9:09 AM
>> To: blind-democracy@freelists.org
>> Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: What It Means to Be a Socialist
>>
>> Hi Miriam,
>> Wise words here from Mr. Hedges.
>> I am wrestling in my mind. In this corner we have Chris Hedges and his
>> definition of a socialist. He argues that Sanders is not a good choice for
>> a
>> leader because he enables the military industrial complex and other
>> corporates.
>> In the opposing corner, we have William Kaufman arguing that the left
>> needs
>> to relax and support Bernie Sanders.
>> Seems I'm waffling back and forth between those two sides. No doubt that
>> sanders had done a good job identifying the scourge of income inequality
>> and
>> that he has pulled Clinton slightly to the left.
>> AT this point in time, I'd say my heart is with Hedges and my head is
>> sort
>> of with Kaufman. My heart is more committed to Hedges than my head is to
>> Kaufman.
>> IS that trying to have it both ways? If so, then you may lable me guilty
>> as
>> charged.
>> Bob Hachey
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>
The bigger issue for me is the need to affix labels to what we stand
for, rather than to simply demonstrate through our actions and
proclamations.
Once we have a label, say Baptist, then a bunch of us gather and
discuss what being a Baptist is all about. Some of us agree that in
order to be real Baptists, we must be dunked in a pool of water. Soon
there are a few who believe the real way to baptize a person is to
dunk them three times backward. So we form the Southern Baptists.
And another group form the Reformed Baptists. And another bunch
splinter off and become the Reformed Open Bible Baptists, showing the
world that other so called Baptists don't bother to open their Bibles.
And so it is with our political divisions.
As Marx and Engels explored and defined a new social order, communism
was a very fine word. And until this new thinking threatened
Capitalism, it was used to define people who believed in putting the
people first and sharing for the good of the all. But the threat
caused governments such as England and the USA to create sinister,
evil undercurrents to define the word. Some folks decided that they
were no longer Communists. They were actually Socialists. And some
became Socialist Workers, while others became the Socialist Labor
Party. Each group defined itself in order to demonstrate how correct
they were. And in the eye of the growing Capitalist Empire, no one
cared. Most people still believed that anything left of Ronald Reagan
was suspect, and at least deep Pink.
In church, we put up a Cross and we worshipped it. In government, we
put up a Flag and worshipped it. Each sub division puts up its own
banner and sings its praise, and defends it to the death. And now we
must walk carefully and speak properly about such divisions as Black
Rights, Gay Rights, and even Animal Rights. And each group gathers
around their leaders and decide just why they are the most important
of all...except the animals.
And when the dust has settled and all the weapons are broken and
tossed aside, nothing will have changed.
Until we are all able to embrace one another within our individual
differences, and respect one another for our differences, and lean
upon one another despite our differences, we will be doomed to repeat
our errors again and again.
Labels are a major stumbling block. We don't need them in order to
tell ourselves apart. Labels pull us apart when we so desperately
need to find ways of drawing together.
Carl Jarvis
Monday, September 21, 2015
[blind-democracy] The Far Left Needs to Relax a Little and Support Bernie Sanders
Very well said. This article addresses many of the complaints of
those Purists who would refuse to vote for Jesus Christ, if he were
running for office, because he drinks wine. Either we get on board,
supporting broad redistribution of this nation's wealth, and give new
dignity to the Working Class, or we sit, like Mugwumps of bygone
years, and watch as our Land is handed over to the Rulers of the
Empire.
Especially, I point to the following words of Bernie Sanders:
"Let me tell you something that no other candidate for president will tell
you. And that is [that] no matter who is elected to be president, that
person will not be able to address the enormous problems facing the working
families of our country. They will not be able to succeed because the power
of corporate America, the power of Wall Street, the power of campaign donors
is so great that no president alone can stand up to them. That is the truth.
People may be uncomfortable about hearing it, but that is the reality. And
that is why what this campaign is about is saying loudly and clearly: It is
not just about electing Bernie Sanders for president, it is about creating a
grassroots political movement in this country."
Carl Jarvis
On 9/20/15, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
> Here's an article that pretty much explains my position.
> Miriam
> The Far Left Needs to Relax a Little and Support Bernie Sanders
> http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_far_left_needs_to_stop_worrying_and_
> support_bernie_sanders_20150919/
> Posted on Sep 19, 2015
> By William Kaufman, CounterPunch
>
> A crowd listens to Sen. Bernie Sanders at a town hall meeting in
> Phoenix
> in July. (Gage Skidmore / CC BY-SA 2.0)
> This piece originated at CounterPunch. It appears here with the kind
> permission of the author.
> In this presidential summer of our discontent, the radical left has been
> fighting hard—not chiefly against capitalism and its galloping calamities,
> it seems, but against . . . Bernie Sanders. Scarcely a day passes without
> an
> ominous recitation of Sanders's manifold political shortcomings—Sanders
> exposés (read examples here, here, here and here) seem to have become a
> thriving cottage industry for the far-left commentariat.
> It should come as a startling revelation to no one that Sanders is not and
> has never aspired to be the next Lenin or Trotsky or even Bob Avakian. We
> readily concede that his record will not pass every litmus test of
> anti-imperialist and revolutionary probity—no need to belabor this point
> any
> further. But then what are we to make of Syriza, Podemos, Jeremy Corbyn, or
> even Jill Stein—and other assorted leftish flavors du jour—all of them
> seemingly quite palatable to these same ideological arbiters of the radical
> left? These other examples and Sanders are cut from essentially the same
> political cloth: left social democrats or democratic socialists inclined to
> challenge entrenched corporate interests through established political
> institutions rather than overthrowing them from without. Then why the
> radical cheers (however mixed and muted in some cases) for these other
> leftish types and jeers for Sanders, even though they all represent
> essentially the same political impulse?
> The answer lies in a hallowed, inviolable principle of the U.S. far left,
> in
> fact its most revered first commandment: thou shalt not support, endorse,
> or
> even smile at a Democrat. This prohibition is not merely a mindless
> ideological reflex—it arises from the hard truth that the national
> Democratic Party is as much a subsidiary of the corporate class as the GOP.
> Obama's crass subservience to the interests of the one percent has erased
> any doubts about this institutional fealty except among hardened
> neoliberals, tribal Democrats, and the entire on-air lineup of MSNBC. And
> there is no doubt that past left-talking presidential primary challengers
> such as Jackson and Kucinich have functioned more as safety valves than
> catalysts for popular unrest, dissipating it and re-channeling it into the
> manageable confines of the two-party arena of mock combats. The question,
> then, is this: Is there something different about the Sanders campaign that
> warrants support from radicals who have rightly spurned previous forays
> into
> the Democratic Party?
> This key question immediately begs another, even more fundamental one: How
> to awaken tens of millions of people from the entrapments of mass hypnosis,
> prostration, and indifference and into the first halting steps toward
> recognition and self-emancipation? The quandary is as old as the parable of
> Plato's cave—that mythic netherworld of darkness and illusion inhabited by
> us fallible mortals. The solution—the way out of the cave into the
> liberating light of knowledge—is as stubbornly elusive now as it was then.
> But simply naming the problem of the "false consciousness" that stymies the
> oppressed—as endlessly and vehemently reiterated by the legions of the far
> left for a small eternity—does not by itself yield a solution, as the long
> history of leftist impotence and isolation attests. It is understandably
> frustrating for the leftist sects and sages to have all the answers except
> that most important one: how to lead the "masses" out of the darkness of
> ignorance and ideological deception into enlightenment. The leftist
> groups—with their obscure tomes of theory, their blogs, their conferences
> and meetings, their tinker-toy bureaucracies, their streams of manifestoes
> and critiques, their insular feuds and splits and fiery excoriations of
> left, right, and center—are self-declared leaders without followers,
> generals with an invincible plan for battle who lack only one small detail:
> an army.
> Ten parts bellowing grandiosity to zero parts real influence, the far left
> fails a litmus test more important than any it applies to Bernie Sanders:
> Marx's call not merely to interpret the world but to change it. So we must
> ask: at this moment of gathering darkness for our species and planet, in
> this pivotal presidential campaign season, who is making greater strides
> toward triggering the mass enlightenment that is the key to empowering the
> oppressed: Sanders or his left critics? If politics is the art of
> communication, then Sanders must be judged the winner, hands down.
> In fact, the Sanders campaign represents a breakthrough for progressive
> "messaging" of remarkable scope and impact. Sanders, with his calls for
> political revolution against the billionaire class, is not just another
> standard-issue, forked-tongue, feel-your-pain Democrat; at each MSM-covered
> appearance he blasts out piercing alarms about the radical inequities and
> irrationalities of the status quo, along with sorely needed
> solutions—primal
> truths that would otherwise lie dormant and buried in the scattered
> isolated
> islets of far-leftdom.
> To dismiss these crucial inroads into mass consciousness as mere diversion,
> to deride his proposals as milquetoast Keynesian stopgap, betrays the old
> far-left allergy to the complexity and cacophony of the large stage of
> life,
> a debilitating preference for the safety and certitude of the tiny left
> echo
> chamber. Sanders's campaign, whatever its flaws, is thrusting front and
> center to a mass audience a whole series of principled, critical demands
> and
> issues (many of which overlap with those raised in splendid isolation by
> Jill Stein and the Green Party), the realization of which would markedly
> advance the material well-being and future prospects of ordinary Americans:
> $15 an hour minimum wage; union card check to expand organizing rights;
> improved Medicare for all; expansion (not retrenchment) of Social Security;
> revamped progressive taxation to reduce income inequality; a Wall Street
> transaction tax; a rapid transition to renewable energy to combat climate
> change; opposition to the ecocidal, neo-fascist TPP, NAFTA, and WTO; an end
> to the militarization of local police forces; cracking down on hate groups;
> free tuition at all public universities and colleges to alleviate student
> debt peonage; paid family leave; and so on. If realized in the aggregate,
> these demands would challenge the neoliberal logic of the prevailing order.
>
> As a tactical matter, then, the Sanders upsurge is an invaluable tool for
> the mass dissemination of left themes and solutions right now—a priceless
> benefit that far outweighs the realpolitik lapses that preoccupy the
> left-echo-chamber Sanders refuseniks. Now notice that I just used the word
> tactical. Allow me to explain. Whatever the rough spots in Sanders's
> progressive resume, especially on foreign policy, it remains a stubborn
> tactical reality (and perhaps I will also be forgiven for using the word
> reality) that it is only through the vehicle of the his presidential
> campaign as a Democrat that these kinds of progressive issues and solutions
> can flood the airwaves and touch the tens of millions of desperate but
> ill-informed Americans who most need to think and hear about them—in most
> cases, for the first time. This is the unique and irreplaceable value of
> the
> Sanders candidacy: it is strewing seeds of mass consciousness around issues
> of class and inequality and the environment in a way that no other person
> or
> party could accomplish right now. Radicals need to ask themselves: How is
> that a bad thing?
> Whatever the outcome of Sanders's campaign, the sheer scope of the audience
> for his progressive checklist, his slashing denunciations of the economic
> and political tyranny of the billionaire class, are green shoots in an
> otherwise barren political landscape—and who knows how they might flourish
> in the future? This is a major breakthrough that has the potential, in
> countless molecular ways, to burst through the Democratic institutional
> framework in which it is now embedded—and, by the way, Sanders would not be
> commanding that mass audience were it not in that framework: hence the
> Sanders Paradox. To be sure, it's an inconvenient paradox for inveterate
> anti-Democrats of the left, but one to be acknowledged and exploited rather
> than condemned or ignored. The near-zero collective political IQ of the
> country urgently needs raising by any means possible and necessary, and
> sooner rather than later, given the catastrophes that are bearing down on
> us. We can't afford to disdain any advances right now, no matter how messy
> or divergent from our ideal scenarios.
> Yes, we urgently need an independent activist left party, one that can have
> a real impact. We also need socialism now, drastic carbon reductions and
> crash investment in renewable energy ten years ago, and so on. But the
> realization of those all imperatives presupposes the power of an aroused
> citizenry armed with at least a rudimentary understanding of the major
> issues. That is, most assuredly, not the American electorate as of 2015—not
> by a long shot. Buffeted by outsourcing, unemployment, underemployment,
> consumer and student debt peonage, underwater mortgages, and the rolling
> thunder of environmental/climate/resource crisis, the mass of Americans
> still lead lives of quiet desperation—and it remains mostly quiet because
> they are diverted from their gnawing anxieties and uncertainties by the
> toxic glitter of corporate culture, a ceaselessly dripping toxin that
> mollifies, numbs, and stupefies. In the words of Robert Crumb,
> What we kids didn't understand was that we were living in a commercial,
> commodity culture. Everything in our environment had been bought and sold.
> As middle class Americans, we basically grew up on a movie set. The
> conscious values that are pushed are only part of the picture. The medium
> itself plays a much bigger part than anyone realizes: the creation of
> illusion. We are living surrounded by illusion, by professionally created
> fairy tales. We barely have contact with the real world.
> The result is a woefully detached and undereducated populace, in most of
> its
> leisure hours transfixed before glowing rectangles. Walk down the street of
> any average American town or city (not Berkeley or Seattle or Brooklyn) and
> ask people if they know who Bernie Sanders is, much less Jill Stein, or
> even
> who the vice president is or what the three branches of government are.
> Then
> ask them if they've ever heard about anthropogenic global warming. You'll
> get a surprising number of blank stares, because an alarmingly large
> percentage of Americans spend most of their waking hours either (a) at
> work;
> (b) watching the NFL, professional wrestling, NASCAR, "reality" TV shows,
> or
> cotton-candy dramas and comedies; (c) surfing the Internet (and mostly not
> for news); or (d) chasing down sales at Wal-Mart or Sam's Club to try to
> make ends meet. As for civic engagement, the closest most Americans come is
> when they wait in line at the DMV, pay their taxes, get stopped by the
> police, or watch Judge Judy. And the small percentage who do take in a bit
> of news are getting hosed with a steady stream of lies from the Fox News
> Channel, MSNBC, CNN, or the happy talk crew on the late local news.
> So this is the audience the left must address: not the doughty,
> battle-ready
> proletariat of far-left daydreams, but the massively depoliticized and
> demoralized casualties of the culture industry and neoliberal piracy. In
> the
> face of the major inroads Sanders is making against this mass reign of
> indifference and ignorance, urging the virtues of an independent left party
> and movement as an alternative is like urging the virtues of fusion energy
> over solar panels—a great-sounding idea, but one that has no purchase on
> reality for the foreseeable future. The mass of Americans is not going to
> advance miraculously from widespread political nescience to applying for
> membership in the ISO in a single great leap. The far-left push for an
> independent "solution" is a practical nullity right now and will remain so
> for some time to come—and hence amounts to self-indulgent posturing in the
> face of the calamities looming on a near horizon. Blind to these tactical
> exigencies, Sanders's far-left detractors merely reinforce the political
> isolation that they seem to brandish as a badge of virtue; in reality it is
> a symptom of political debility, a fatal estrangement from the tactical
> challenges and possibilities of the moment.
> Lest some radical critics feel sullied by the intrusion of the word
> tactical, I must insist that there is no shame in leftists' thinking
> tactically at times—in fact, it is a necessity if we are to stay attuned to
> masses of people in a way that gives heft impact to any conceivable
> movement
> against the status quo. Here's an example of such a critical tactical
> consideration: At the height of the anti-Vietnam War movement in the late
> 1960s and early 1970s, I was part of a coalition that was mobilizing
> hundreds of thousands of people in the streets around the concrete (and
> principled!) slogan, "Out Now!", peaking in the April 1971 march on
> Washington DC that brought 1 million people to the nation's capital to
> demand an immediate end to the war. At that time a chorus of very
> "principled" far leftists scorned these powerful outpourings—which
> materially aided the besieged Vietnamese workers and peasants—because the
> key demand did not, in their view, go far enough or did not address an
> array
> of other issues: they argued that we should declaim "Victory to the NLF" or
> "Smash Imperialism" or "Defend the Rights of Palestinians" and so on. Now
> the tactical consideration was that pinning the actions to these far-flung
> ultimatist, simon-pure demands would have winnowed the million marchers to
> maybe five thousand, thus depriving the action of all material impact on
> the
> war while deepening the delusional self-regard of a few enraged
> middle-class
> radicals—and damn the Vietnamese workers and peasants in the process.
>
> So much for the general considerations that make at least some degree of
> critical support for the Sanders campaign a no-brainer for radicals hoping
> to make even minimal headway against the headwinds of mass ignorance and
> indifference. Now let's tick off a checklist of some of the most common
> far-left complaints about the Sanders campaign, along with brief rebuttals:
> Sanders is "sheepdogging" for the Democrats: This is self-fulfilling
> prophecy that presupposes that the mass of Americans are indeed sheep that
> can be easily herded into to this or that politician's pen. This argument
> would carry more weight if Sanders were merely feinting left, with vague
> Obama-esque marketing slogans. But clearly he is propounding a refreshingly
> frank and specific set of policies to reverse the ever-intensifying
> inequalities and injustices of the status quo, slashing with finely honed
> specifics against the abuses of the billionaire elite. Even if Sanders
> loses
> the nomination, the progressive issues and solutions he is purveying to a
> mass audience will embed firmly in popular political thought and action,
> making a future breakaway into political independence easier, not harder.
> Sanders has vowed to support whoever is nominated by the Democratic Party:
> This is really a corollary of the "sheepdogging" thesis, and the answer to
> it is simple: So what? A bald, rumpled seventy-three-year-old is commanding
> a mass audience not for sex appeal but for his passion and clarity on
> substance; he is galvanizing a huge groundswell of issue-focused voters and
> activists who would otherwise not be engaged in politics at all. A whole
> generation of voters will be more receptive to any future left
> campaigns—including independent ones—thanks to his exertions,
> notwithstanding any personal endorsements he makes a year from now.
> Sanders is not a "true" socialist: This is another "so what?" coupled to a
> "who cares?" Any of the 5,757 varieties of socialists ranging from Bernie
> Sanders to the Spartacists will tell you that they alone are the true
> socialists and that all the others are frauds. The Fox News Channel
> considers Obama a socialist; the Democratic Socialists of America would
> ridicule this foolishness, but they in turn would be called out as faux
> socialists by Trotskyist groups like the ISO and Socialist Alternative, who
> would in their turn be denounced as fraudulent by the ultra-Trot World
> Socialist Web Site (Socialist Equality Party), who would in yet another
> turn
> be reviled as mountebanks by the Mad Hatter-Trot Spartacists. Who, then,
> has
> unearthed the Holy Grail of "true" socialism? It's a hopeless, absurd
> quest,
> on a par with defining "God" or the meaning of being. We need only recall
> that the Bolsheviks, socialists who actually made a revolution rather than
> merely bloviating about it, deployed as their main agitational slogan not
> "socialism now" or "nationalize the means of production"—they reached the
> masses by advancing the very concrete "land, bread, and peace," sensibly
> grasping that desperate workers and peasants were more interested in
> tangibles than abstractions. This is a lesson well worth pondering for the
> armchair revolutionaries leading the charge against Sanders.
> Elections are a trap and diversion from real organizing: See once again the
> Bolsheviks, who regularly ran in election campaigns as a means of purveying
> their ideas—it worked pretty well for them. As long as elections are viewed
> as a tactic in a broader movement-building strategy, it is simply foolish
> to
> abstain from the reachout opportunities they afford. This leads to the next
> point:
> The Sanders campaign subtracts energy and resources from independent
> parties
> like the Greens: Supporting the Sanders campaign right now vs. building an
> independent party and movement is not a zero-sum game in which every dollar
> or ounce of energy devoted to the former is necessarily subtracted from the
> latter. Sanders is posing progressive and class-based issues with a
> boldness
> and bluntness and honesty that set him apart from past progressive
> Democratic primary aspirants. And no recent left-leaning Democratic
> presidential aspirant has sparked anything close to the firestorms of
> enthusiasm springing up around the Sanders campaign. This combination of
> mass momentum and programmatic boldness make the Sanders campaign a
> uniquely
> explosive force in American politics right now. If Sanders cannot win the
> nomination and endorses Clinton (or whomever) with the usual less-evil
> incantations, he will, by dint of the power of his campaign, have unleashed
> energies and insights into the political sphere that will have a life of
> their own well beyond his campaign and will redound to the benefit of
> future
> independent organizing efforts.
> Sanders cannot win the nomination or the general election: This is the most
> curious of the far-left objections to the Sanders campaign. Arun Gupta
> wrote
> a whole article for CounterPunch on just this issue. The entire essay
> traffics in MSM horse-race probabilities rather than political substance,
> as
> though Gupta were a hedge-fund manager assessing a possible investment
> rather than a radical seeking the most favorable vehicle for spreading his
> ideas. He adduces from various sources that (1) Sanders cannot win the
> nomination and (2) he cannot win the general election—a point that would
> seem to be moot in view of (1). He prophesies, "Simply put, you have a
> better chance of Jennifer Lawrence or Idris Elba calling you up and saying
> they want to be your friend with benefits than Bernie Sanders has of
> becoming the next president." But many of those who deride Sanders's
> chances
> will be supporting Jill Stein of the Green Party, whose likelihood of
> winning the general election is on a par with any of those critics winning
> both Powerball and Mega-Millions on the same day. Yet Jill Stein's
> statistical-hopelessness-unto absurdity will not deter the Bernie contras
> from touting Stein or some other quixotic lefty independent in the general
> election. So it appears the far-left deriders of Sanders's steep odds are
> not so averse to lost causes after all—purists in this as well, they simply
> prefer causes that are lost unto near-invisibility. And let's pose this
> question to those who argue from probability: What if the long shot Sanders
> comes through and wins the nomination and/or general election? Then what
> would you do?
> Sanders will not be able to implement his proposals even if elected because
> he will face opposition in the Congress and the Courts: Sanders himself is
> the first to acknowledge this point, which is based on a misunderstanding
> of
> his purpose in running—he is not presenting himself as a personal savior
> and
> cure-all for the world's ills; he expressly states his intention of using
> his campaign—and his nomination and election should they come to pass—of
> spurring the American people to organize to win these goals for themselves.
> As he stated in a campaign speech in Iowa last month:
> Let me tell you something that no other candidate for president will tell
> you. And that is [that] no matter who is elected to be president, that
> person will not be able to address the enormous problems facing the working
> families of our country. They will not be able to succeed because the power
> of corporate America, the power of Wall Street, the power of campaign
> donors
> is so great that no president alone can stand up to them. That is the
> truth.
> People may be uncomfortable about hearing it, but that is the reality. And
> that is why what this campaign is about is saying loudly and clearly: It is
> not just about electing Bernie Sanders for president, it is about creating
> a
> grassroots political movement in this country.
> The case for radical support for Sanders amounts to this: before we can
> arrive at point omega from point alpha, we have to traverse points beta,
> gamma, delta, and so on. There are no magic superleft flying machines that
> will propel us nonstop over all those intermediate steps from neoliberal
> despotism to radical democracy—we know this if we are organizing on the
> ground rather than theorizing in the clouds. The tempo of that journey will
> depend chiefly on advances in the consciousness of the masses, not advances
> in the vehemence of far-left declamation.
> Some leftists can fantasize that they are doing a great service to humanity
> by scoffing at the tactical tradeoffs that are essential to building a
> truly
> massive, powerful grassroots movement—but in so doing, they're merely
> isolating themselves even further from the arenas of real political work
> and
> potential mass outreach, like a swami meditating in a cave. Such radicals
> remind me of the holy men described by Swami Vivekananda:
> The highest men are calm, silent and unknown. They are the men who really
> know the power of thought; they are sure that, even if they go into a cave
> and close the door and simply think five true thoughts and then pass away,
> these five thoughts of theirs will live through eternity. . . . These
> Sâttvika men are too near the Lord to be active and to fight, to be
> working,
> struggling, preaching and doing good, as they say, here on earth to
> humanity.
> The hour is late. We face planetary emergencies of unprecedented gravity.
> Some reputable scientists say that it might be too late to avert them.
> Plato's vision of humanity trapped in the dark cave—our cave of collective
> ignorance—is no mere parable: it a prophecy turned all too real. We must
> nevertheless choose to act as though there is a way out, even if we suspect
> that our choice is more an affirmation of faith than of reason. The Sanders
> campaign has mustered enough of an audience to bolster that fragile belief.
> It is not a panacea—it is a tentative first step of hope that Americans can
> be roused in sufficient numbers to help save humanity from itself. No
> person
> of conscience should refuse to join in that step and push it as far as it
> can go.
> William Kaufman is a writer and editor who lives in New York City. He can
> be
> reached at kman484@earthlink.net.
>
>
>
> http://www.truthdig.com/ http://www.truthdig.com/
> The Far Left Needs to Relax a Little and Support Bernie Sanders
> http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_far_left_needs_to_stop_worrying_and_
> support_bernie_sanders_20150919/
> Posted on Sep 19, 2015
> By William Kaufman, CounterPunch
>
> A crowd listens to Sen. Bernie Sanders at a town hall meeting in Phoenix in
> July. (Gage Skidmore / CC BY-SA 2.0)
> This piece originated at CounterPunch. It appears here with the kind
> permission of the author.
> In this presidential summer of our discontent, the radical left has been
> fighting hard—not chiefly against capitalism and its galloping calamities,
> it seems, but against . . . Bernie Sanders. Scarcely a day passes without
> an
> ominous recitation of Sanders's manifold political shortcomings—Sanders
> exposés (read examples here, here, here and here) seem to have become a
> thriving cottage industry for the far-left commentariat.
> It should come as a startling revelation to no one that Sanders is not and
> has never aspired to be the next Lenin or Trotsky or even Bob Avakian. We
> readily concede that his record will not pass every litmus test of
> anti-imperialist and revolutionary probity—no need to belabor this point
> any
> further. But then what are we to make of Syriza, Podemos, Jeremy Corbyn, or
> even Jill Stein—and other assorted leftish flavors du jour—all of them
> seemingly quite palatable to these same ideological arbiters of the radical
> left? These other examples and Sanders are cut from essentially the same
> political cloth: left social democrats or democratic socialists inclined to
> challenge entrenched corporate interests through established political
> institutions rather than overthrowing them from without. Then why the
> radical cheers (however mixed and muted in some cases) for these other
> leftish types and jeers for Sanders, even though they all represent
> essentially the same political impulse?
> The answer lies in a hallowed, inviolable principle of the U.S. far left,
> in
> fact its most revered first commandment: thou shalt not support, endorse,
> or
> even smile at a Democrat. This prohibition is not merely a mindless
> ideological reflex—it arises from the hard truth that the national
> Democratic Party is as much a subsidiary of the corporate class as the GOP.
> Obama's crass subservience to the interests of the one percent has erased
> any doubts about this institutional fealty except among hardened
> neoliberals, tribal Democrats, and the entire on-air lineup of MSNBC. And
> there is no doubt that past left-talking presidential primary challengers
> such as Jackson and Kucinich have functioned more as safety valves than
> catalysts for popular unrest, dissipating it and re-channeling it into the
> manageable confines of the two-party arena of mock combats. The question,
> then, is this: Is there something different about the Sanders campaign that
> warrants support from radicals who have rightly spurned previous forays
> into
> the Democratic Party?
> This key question immediately begs another, even more fundamental one: How
> to awaken tens of millions of people from the entrapments of mass hypnosis,
> prostration, and indifference and into the first halting steps toward
> recognition and self-emancipation? The quandary is as old as the parable of
> Plato's cave—that mythic netherworld of darkness and illusion inhabited by
> us fallible mortals. The solution—the way out of the cave into the
> liberating light of knowledge—is as stubbornly elusive now as it was then.
> But simply naming the problem of the "false consciousness" that stymies the
> oppressed—as endlessly and vehemently reiterated by the legions of the far
> left for a small eternity—does not by itself yield a solution, as the long
> history of leftist impotence and isolation attests. It is understandably
> frustrating for the leftist sects and sages to have all the answers except
> that most important one: how to lead the "masses" out of the darkness of
> ignorance and ideological deception into enlightenment. The leftist
> groups—with their obscure tomes of theory, their blogs, their conferences
> and meetings, their tinker-toy bureaucracies, their streams of manifestoes
> and critiques, their insular feuds and splits and fiery excoriations of
> left, right, and center—are self-declared leaders without followers,
> generals with an invincible plan for battle who lack only one small detail:
> an army.
> Ten parts bellowing grandiosity to zero parts real influence, the far left
> fails a litmus test more important than any it applies to Bernie Sanders:
> Marx's call not merely to interpret the world but to change it. So we must
> ask: at this moment of gathering darkness for our species and planet, in
> this pivotal presidential campaign season, who is making greater strides
> toward triggering the mass enlightenment that is the key to empowering the
> oppressed: Sanders or his left critics? If politics is the art of
> communication, then Sanders must be judged the winner, hands down.
> In fact, the Sanders campaign represents a breakthrough for progressive
> "messaging" of remarkable scope and impact. Sanders, with his calls for
> political revolution against the billionaire class, is not just another
> standard-issue, forked-tongue, feel-your-pain Democrat; at each MSM-covered
> appearance he blasts out piercing alarms about the radical inequities and
> irrationalities of the status quo, along with sorely needed
> solutions—primal
> truths that would otherwise lie dormant and buried in the scattered
> isolated
> islets of far-leftdom.
> To dismiss these crucial inroads into mass consciousness as mere diversion,
> to deride his proposals as milquetoast Keynesian stopgap, betrays the old
> far-left allergy to the complexity and cacophony of the large stage of
> life,
> a debilitating preference for the safety and certitude of the tiny left
> echo
> chamber. Sanders's campaign, whatever its flaws, is thrusting front and
> center to a mass audience a whole series of principled, critical demands
> and
> issues (many of which overlap with those raised in splendid isolation by
> Jill Stein and the Green Party), the realization of which would markedly
> advance the material well-being and future prospects of ordinary Americans:
> $15 an hour minimum wage; union card check to expand organizing rights;
> improved Medicare for all; expansion (not retrenchment) of Social Security;
> revamped progressive taxation to reduce income inequality; a Wall Street
> transaction tax; a rapid transition to renewable energy to combat climate
> change; opposition to the ecocidal, neo-fascist TPP, NAFTA, and WTO; an end
> to the militarization of local police forces; cracking down on hate groups;
> free tuition at all public universities and colleges to alleviate student
> debt peonage; paid family leave; and so on. If realized in the aggregate,
> these demands would challenge the neoliberal logic of the prevailing order.
>
> As a tactical matter, then, the Sanders upsurge is an invaluable tool for
> the mass dissemination of left themes and solutions right now—a priceless
> benefit that far outweighs the realpolitik lapses that preoccupy the
> left-echo-chamber Sanders refuseniks. Now notice that I just used the word
> tactical. Allow me to explain. Whatever the rough spots in Sanders's
> progressive resume, especially on foreign policy, it remains a stubborn
> tactical reality (and perhaps I will also be forgiven for using the word
> reality) that it is only through the vehicle of the his presidential
> campaign as a Democrat that these kinds of progressive issues and solutions
> can flood the airwaves and touch the tens of millions of desperate but
> ill-informed Americans who most need to think and hear about them—in most
> cases, for the first time. This is the unique and irreplaceable value of
> the
> Sanders candidacy: it is strewing seeds of mass consciousness around issues
> of class and inequality and the environment in a way that no other person
> or
> party could accomplish right now. Radicals need to ask themselves: How is
> that a bad thing?
> Whatever the outcome of Sanders's campaign, the sheer scope of the audience
> for his progressive checklist, his slashing denunciations of the economic
> and political tyranny of the billionaire class, are green shoots in an
> otherwise barren political landscape—and who knows how they might flourish
> in the future? This is a major breakthrough that has the potential, in
> countless molecular ways, to burst through the Democratic institutional
> framework in which it is now embedded—and, by the way, Sanders would not be
> commanding that mass audience were it not in that framework: hence the
> Sanders Paradox. To be sure, it's an inconvenient paradox for inveterate
> anti-Democrats of the left, but one to be acknowledged and exploited rather
> than condemned or ignored. The near-zero collective political IQ of the
> country urgently needs raising by any means possible and necessary, and
> sooner rather than later, given the catastrophes that are bearing down on
> us. We can't afford to disdain any advances right now, no matter how messy
> or divergent from our ideal scenarios.
> Yes, we urgently need an independent activist left party, one that can have
> a real impact. We also need socialism now, drastic carbon reductions and
> crash investment in renewable energy ten years ago, and so on. But the
> realization of those all imperatives presupposes the power of an aroused
> citizenry armed with at least a rudimentary understanding of the major
> issues. That is, most assuredly, not the American electorate as of 2015—not
> by a long shot. Buffeted by outsourcing, unemployment, underemployment,
> consumer and student debt peonage, underwater mortgages, and the rolling
> thunder of environmental/climate/resource crisis, the mass of Americans
> still lead lives of quiet desperation—and it remains mostly quiet because
> they are diverted from their gnawing anxieties and uncertainties by the
> toxic glitter of corporate culture, a ceaselessly dripping toxin that
> mollifies, numbs, and stupefies. In the words of Robert Crumb,
> What we kids didn't understand was that we were living in a commercial,
> commodity culture. Everything in our environment had been bought and sold.
> As middle class Americans, we basically grew up on a movie set. The
> conscious values that are pushed are only part of the picture. The medium
> itself plays a much bigger part than anyone realizes: the creation of
> illusion. We are living surrounded by illusion, by professionally created
> fairy tales. We barely have contact with the real world.
> The result is a woefully detached and undereducated populace, in most of
> its
> leisure hours transfixed before glowing rectangles. Walk down the street of
> any average American town or city (not Berkeley or Seattle or Brooklyn) and
> ask people if they know who Bernie Sanders is, much less Jill Stein, or
> even
> who the vice president is or what the three branches of government are.
> Then
> ask them if they've ever heard about anthropogenic global warming. You'll
> get a surprising number of blank stares, because an alarmingly large
> percentage of Americans spend most of their waking hours either (a) at
> work;
> (b) watching the NFL, professional wrestling, NASCAR, "reality" TV shows,
> or
> cotton-candy dramas and comedies; (c) surfing the Internet (and mostly not
> for news); or (d) chasing down sales at Wal-Mart or Sam's Club to try to
> make ends meet. As for civic engagement, the closest most Americans come is
> when they wait in line at the DMV, pay their taxes, get stopped by the
> police, or watch Judge Judy. And the small percentage who do take in a bit
> of news are getting hosed with a steady stream of lies from the Fox News
> Channel, MSNBC, CNN, or the happy talk crew on the late local news.
> So this is the audience the left must address: not the doughty,
> battle-ready
> proletariat of far-left daydreams, but the massively depoliticized and
> demoralized casualties of the culture industry and neoliberal piracy. In
> the
> face of the major inroads Sanders is making against this mass reign of
> indifference and ignorance, urging the virtues of an independent left party
> and movement as an alternative is like urging the virtues of fusion energy
> over solar panels—a great-sounding idea, but one that has no purchase on
> reality for the foreseeable future. The mass of Americans is not going to
> advance miraculously from widespread political nescience to applying for
> membership in the ISO in a single great leap. The far-left push for an
> independent "solution" is a practical nullity right now and will remain so
> for some time to come—and hence amounts to self-indulgent posturing in the
> face of the calamities looming on a near horizon. Blind to these tactical
> exigencies, Sanders's far-left detractors merely reinforce the political
> isolation that they seem to brandish as a badge of virtue; in reality it is
> a symptom of political debility, a fatal estrangement from the tactical
> challenges and possibilities of the moment.
> Lest some radical critics feel sullied by the intrusion of the word
> tactical, I must insist that there is no shame in leftists' thinking
> tactically at times—in fact, it is a necessity if we are to stay attuned to
> masses of people in a way that gives heft impact to any conceivable
> movement
> against the status quo. Here's an example of such a critical tactical
> consideration: At the height of the anti-Vietnam War movement in the late
> 1960s and early 1970s, I was part of a coalition that was mobilizing
> hundreds of thousands of people in the streets around the concrete (and
> principled!) slogan, "Out Now!", peaking in the April 1971 march on
> Washington DC that brought 1 million people to the nation's capital to
> demand an immediate end to the war. At that time a chorus of very
> "principled" far leftists scorned these powerful outpourings—which
> materially aided the besieged Vietnamese workers and peasants—because the
> key demand did not, in their view, go far enough or did not address an
> array
> of other issues: they argued that we should declaim "Victory to the NLF" or
> "Smash Imperialism" or "Defend the Rights of Palestinians" and so on. Now
> the tactical consideration was that pinning the actions to these far-flung
> ultimatist, simon-pure demands would have winnowed the million marchers to
> maybe five thousand, thus depriving the action of all material impact on
> the
> war while deepening the delusional self-regard of a few enraged
> middle-class
> radicals—and damn the Vietnamese workers and peasants in the process.
>
> So much for the general considerations that make at least some degree of
> critical support for the Sanders campaign a no-brainer for radicals hoping
> to make even minimal headway against the headwinds of mass ignorance and
> indifference. Now let's tick off a checklist of some of the most common
> far-left complaints about the Sanders campaign, along with brief rebuttals:
> Sanders is "sheepdogging" for the Democrats: This is self-fulfilling
> prophecy that presupposes that the mass of Americans are indeed sheep that
> can be easily herded into to this or that politician's pen. This argument
> would carry more weight if Sanders were merely feinting left, with vague
> Obama-esque marketing slogans. But clearly he is propounding a refreshingly
> frank and specific set of policies to reverse the ever-intensifying
> inequalities and injustices of the status quo, slashing with finely honed
> specifics against the abuses of the billionaire elite. Even if Sanders
> loses
> the nomination, the progressive issues and solutions he is purveying to a
> mass audience will embed firmly in popular political thought and action,
> making a future breakaway into political independence easier, not harder.
> Sanders has vowed to support whoever is nominated by the Democratic Party:
> This is really a corollary of the "sheepdogging" thesis, and the answer to
> it is simple: So what? A bald, rumpled seventy-three-year-old is commanding
> a mass audience not for sex appeal but for his passion and clarity on
> substance; he is galvanizing a huge groundswell of issue-focused voters and
> activists who would otherwise not be engaged in politics at all. A whole
> generation of voters will be more receptive to any future left
> campaigns—including independent ones—thanks to his exertions,
> notwithstanding any personal endorsements he makes a year from now.
> Sanders is not a "true" socialist: This is another "so what?" coupled to a
> "who cares?" Any of the 5,757 varieties of socialists ranging from Bernie
> Sanders to the Spartacists will tell you that they alone are the true
> socialists and that all the others are frauds. The Fox News Channel
> considers Obama a socialist; the Democratic Socialists of America would
> ridicule this foolishness, but they in turn would be called out as faux
> socialists by Trotskyist groups like the ISO and Socialist Alternative, who
> would in their turn be denounced as fraudulent by the ultra-Trot World
> Socialist Web Site (Socialist Equality Party), who would in yet another
> turn
> be reviled as mountebanks by the Mad Hatter-Trot Spartacists. Who, then,
> has
> unearthed the Holy Grail of "true" socialism? It's a hopeless, absurd
> quest,
> on a par with defining "God" or the meaning of being. We need only recall
> that the Bolsheviks, socialists who actually made a revolution rather than
> merely bloviating about it, deployed as their main agitational slogan not
> "socialism now" or "nationalize the means of production"—they reached the
> masses by advancing the very concrete "land, bread, and peace," sensibly
> grasping that desperate workers and peasants were more interested in
> tangibles than abstractions. This is a lesson well worth pondering for the
> armchair revolutionaries leading the charge against Sanders.
> Elections are a trap and diversion from real organizing: See once again the
> Bolsheviks, who regularly ran in election campaigns as a means of purveying
> their ideas—it worked pretty well for them. As long as elections are viewed
> as a tactic in a broader movement-building strategy, it is simply foolish
> to
> abstain from the reachout opportunities they afford. This leads to the next
> point:
> The Sanders campaign subtracts energy and resources from independent
> parties
> like the Greens: Supporting the Sanders campaign right now vs. building an
> independent party and movement is not a zero-sum game in which every dollar
> or ounce of energy devoted to the former is necessarily subtracted from the
> latter. Sanders is posing progressive and class-based issues with a
> boldness
> and bluntness and honesty that set him apart from past progressive
> Democratic primary aspirants. And no recent left-leaning Democratic
> presidential aspirant has sparked anything close to the firestorms of
> enthusiasm springing up around the Sanders campaign. This combination of
> mass momentum and programmatic boldness make the Sanders campaign a
> uniquely
> explosive force in American politics right now. If Sanders cannot win the
> nomination and endorses Clinton (or whomever) with the usual less-evil
> incantations, he will, by dint of the power of his campaign, have unleashed
> energies and insights into the political sphere that will have a life of
> their own well beyond his campaign and will redound to the benefit of
> future
> independent organizing efforts.
> Sanders cannot win the nomination or the general election: This is the most
> curious of the far-left objections to the Sanders campaign. Arun Gupta
> wrote
> a whole article for CounterPunch on just this issue. The entire essay
> traffics in MSM horse-race probabilities rather than political substance,
> as
> though Gupta were a hedge-fund manager assessing a possible investment
> rather than a radical seeking the most favorable vehicle for spreading his
> ideas. He adduces from various sources that (1) Sanders cannot win the
> nomination and (2) he cannot win the general election—a point that would
> seem to be moot in view of (1). He prophesies, "Simply put, you have a
> better chance of Jennifer Lawrence or Idris Elba calling you up and saying
> they want to be your friend with benefits than Bernie Sanders has of
> becoming the next president." But many of those who deride Sanders's
> chances
> will be supporting Jill Stein of the Green Party, whose likelihood of
> winning the general election is on a par with any of those critics winning
> both Powerball and Mega-Millions on the same day. Yet Jill Stein's
> statistical-hopelessness-unto absurdity will not deter the Bernie contras
> from touting Stein or some other quixotic lefty independent in the general
> election. So it appears the far-left deriders of Sanders's steep odds are
> not so averse to lost causes after all—purists in this as well, they simply
> prefer causes that are lost unto near-invisibility. And let's pose this
> question to those who argue from probability: What if the long shot Sanders
> comes through and wins the nomination and/or general election? Then what
> would you do?
> Sanders will not be able to implement his proposals even if elected because
> he will face opposition in the Congress and the Courts: Sanders himself is
> the first to acknowledge this point, which is based on a misunderstanding
> of
> his purpose in running—he is not presenting himself as a personal savior
> and
> cure-all for the world's ills; he expressly states his intention of using
> his campaign—and his nomination and election should they come to pass—of
> spurring the American people to organize to win these goals for themselves.
> As he stated in a campaign speech in Iowa last month:
> Let me tell you something that no other candidate for president will tell
> you. And that is [that] no matter who is elected to be president, that
> person will not be able to address the enormous problems facing the working
> families of our country. They will not be able to succeed because the power
> of corporate America, the power of Wall Street, the power of campaign
> donors
> is so great that no president alone can stand up to them. That is the
> truth.
> People may be uncomfortable about hearing it, but that is the reality. And
> that is why what this campaign is about is saying loudly and clearly: It is
> not just about electing Bernie Sanders for president, it is about creating
> a
> grassroots political movement in this country.
> The case for radical support for Sanders amounts to this: before we can
> arrive at point omega from point alpha, we have to traverse points beta,
> gamma, delta, and so on. There are no magic superleft flying machines that
> will propel us nonstop over all those intermediate steps from neoliberal
> despotism to radical democracy—we know this if we are organizing on the
> ground rather than theorizing in the clouds. The tempo of that journey will
> depend chiefly on advances in the consciousness of the masses, not advances
> in the vehemence of far-left declamation.
> Some leftists can fantasize that they are doing a great service to humanity
> by scoffing at the tactical tradeoffs that are essential to building a
> truly
> massive, powerful grassroots movement—but in so doing, they're merely
> isolating themselves even further from the arenas of real political work
> and
> potential mass outreach, like a swami meditating in a cave. Such radicals
> remind me of the holy men described by Swami Vivekananda:
> The highest men are calm, silent and unknown. They are the men who really
> know the power of thought; they are sure that, even if they go into a cave
> and close the door and simply think five true thoughts and then pass away,
> these five thoughts of theirs will live through eternity. . . . These
> Sâttvika men are too near the Lord to be active and to fight, to be
> working,
> struggling, preaching and doing good, as they say, here on earth to
> humanity.
> The hour is late. We face planetary emergencies of unprecedented gravity.
> Some reputable scientists say that it might be too late to avert them.
> Plato's vision of humanity trapped in the dark cave—our cave of collective
> ignorance—is no mere parable: it a prophecy turned all too real. We must
> nevertheless choose to act as though there is a way out, even if we suspect
> that our choice is more an affirmation of faith than of reason. The Sanders
> campaign has mustered enough of an audience to bolster that fragile belief.
> It is not a panacea—it is a tentative first step of hope that Americans can
> be roused in sufficient numbers to help save humanity from itself. No
> person
> of conscience should refuse to join in that step and push it as far as it
> can go.
> William Kaufman is a writer and editor who lives in New York City. He can
> be
> reached at kman484@earthlink.net.
> http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_global_warming_slowdown_is_an_illusi
> on_20150920/
> http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_global_warming_slowdown_is_an_illusi
> on_20150920/
> http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_global_warming_slowdown_is_an_illusi
> on_20150920/
> http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_far_left_needs_to_stop_worrying_and_
> support_bernie_sanders_20150919/
> http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_far_left_needs_to_stop_worrying_and_
> support_bernie_sanders_20150919/
> http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_far_left_needs_to_stop_worrying_and_
> support_bernie_sanders_20150919/
> http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/leaked_audit_reveals_many_seattl
> e_mortgages_are_void_20150919/
> http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/leaked_audit_reveals_many_seattl
> e_mortgages_are_void_20150919/
> http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/leaked_audit_reveals_many_seattl
> e_mortgages_are_void_20150919/
> http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/air_force_times_runs_veterans_ad
> _urging_drone_operators_20150919/
> http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/air_force_times_runs_veterans_ad
> _urging_drone_operators_20150919/
> http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/air_force_times_runs_veterans_ad
> _urging_drone_operators_20150919/ http://www.truthdig.com/
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those Purists who would refuse to vote for Jesus Christ, if he were
running for office, because he drinks wine. Either we get on board,
supporting broad redistribution of this nation's wealth, and give new
dignity to the Working Class, or we sit, like Mugwumps of bygone
years, and watch as our Land is handed over to the Rulers of the
Empire.
Especially, I point to the following words of Bernie Sanders:
"Let me tell you something that no other candidate for president will tell
you. And that is [that] no matter who is elected to be president, that
person will not be able to address the enormous problems facing the working
families of our country. They will not be able to succeed because the power
of corporate America, the power of Wall Street, the power of campaign donors
is so great that no president alone can stand up to them. That is the truth.
People may be uncomfortable about hearing it, but that is the reality. And
that is why what this campaign is about is saying loudly and clearly: It is
not just about electing Bernie Sanders for president, it is about creating a
grassroots political movement in this country."
Carl Jarvis
On 9/20/15, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
> Here's an article that pretty much explains my position.
> Miriam
> The Far Left Needs to Relax a Little and Support Bernie Sanders
> http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_far_left_needs_to_stop_worrying_and_
> support_bernie_sanders_20150919/
> Posted on Sep 19, 2015
> By William Kaufman, CounterPunch
>
> A crowd listens to Sen. Bernie Sanders at a town hall meeting in
> Phoenix
> in July. (Gage Skidmore / CC BY-SA 2.0)
> This piece originated at CounterPunch. It appears here with the kind
> permission of the author.
> In this presidential summer of our discontent, the radical left has been
> fighting hard—not chiefly against capitalism and its galloping calamities,
> it seems, but against . . . Bernie Sanders. Scarcely a day passes without
> an
> ominous recitation of Sanders's manifold political shortcomings—Sanders
> exposés (read examples here, here, here and here) seem to have become a
> thriving cottage industry for the far-left commentariat.
> It should come as a startling revelation to no one that Sanders is not and
> has never aspired to be the next Lenin or Trotsky or even Bob Avakian. We
> readily concede that his record will not pass every litmus test of
> anti-imperialist and revolutionary probity—no need to belabor this point
> any
> further. But then what are we to make of Syriza, Podemos, Jeremy Corbyn, or
> even Jill Stein—and other assorted leftish flavors du jour—all of them
> seemingly quite palatable to these same ideological arbiters of the radical
> left? These other examples and Sanders are cut from essentially the same
> political cloth: left social democrats or democratic socialists inclined to
> challenge entrenched corporate interests through established political
> institutions rather than overthrowing them from without. Then why the
> radical cheers (however mixed and muted in some cases) for these other
> leftish types and jeers for Sanders, even though they all represent
> essentially the same political impulse?
> The answer lies in a hallowed, inviolable principle of the U.S. far left,
> in
> fact its most revered first commandment: thou shalt not support, endorse,
> or
> even smile at a Democrat. This prohibition is not merely a mindless
> ideological reflex—it arises from the hard truth that the national
> Democratic Party is as much a subsidiary of the corporate class as the GOP.
> Obama's crass subservience to the interests of the one percent has erased
> any doubts about this institutional fealty except among hardened
> neoliberals, tribal Democrats, and the entire on-air lineup of MSNBC. And
> there is no doubt that past left-talking presidential primary challengers
> such as Jackson and Kucinich have functioned more as safety valves than
> catalysts for popular unrest, dissipating it and re-channeling it into the
> manageable confines of the two-party arena of mock combats. The question,
> then, is this: Is there something different about the Sanders campaign that
> warrants support from radicals who have rightly spurned previous forays
> into
> the Democratic Party?
> This key question immediately begs another, even more fundamental one: How
> to awaken tens of millions of people from the entrapments of mass hypnosis,
> prostration, and indifference and into the first halting steps toward
> recognition and self-emancipation? The quandary is as old as the parable of
> Plato's cave—that mythic netherworld of darkness and illusion inhabited by
> us fallible mortals. The solution—the way out of the cave into the
> liberating light of knowledge—is as stubbornly elusive now as it was then.
> But simply naming the problem of the "false consciousness" that stymies the
> oppressed—as endlessly and vehemently reiterated by the legions of the far
> left for a small eternity—does not by itself yield a solution, as the long
> history of leftist impotence and isolation attests. It is understandably
> frustrating for the leftist sects and sages to have all the answers except
> that most important one: how to lead the "masses" out of the darkness of
> ignorance and ideological deception into enlightenment. The leftist
> groups—with their obscure tomes of theory, their blogs, their conferences
> and meetings, their tinker-toy bureaucracies, their streams of manifestoes
> and critiques, their insular feuds and splits and fiery excoriations of
> left, right, and center—are self-declared leaders without followers,
> generals with an invincible plan for battle who lack only one small detail:
> an army.
> Ten parts bellowing grandiosity to zero parts real influence, the far left
> fails a litmus test more important than any it applies to Bernie Sanders:
> Marx's call not merely to interpret the world but to change it. So we must
> ask: at this moment of gathering darkness for our species and planet, in
> this pivotal presidential campaign season, who is making greater strides
> toward triggering the mass enlightenment that is the key to empowering the
> oppressed: Sanders or his left critics? If politics is the art of
> communication, then Sanders must be judged the winner, hands down.
> In fact, the Sanders campaign represents a breakthrough for progressive
> "messaging" of remarkable scope and impact. Sanders, with his calls for
> political revolution against the billionaire class, is not just another
> standard-issue, forked-tongue, feel-your-pain Democrat; at each MSM-covered
> appearance he blasts out piercing alarms about the radical inequities and
> irrationalities of the status quo, along with sorely needed
> solutions—primal
> truths that would otherwise lie dormant and buried in the scattered
> isolated
> islets of far-leftdom.
> To dismiss these crucial inroads into mass consciousness as mere diversion,
> to deride his proposals as milquetoast Keynesian stopgap, betrays the old
> far-left allergy to the complexity and cacophony of the large stage of
> life,
> a debilitating preference for the safety and certitude of the tiny left
> echo
> chamber. Sanders's campaign, whatever its flaws, is thrusting front and
> center to a mass audience a whole series of principled, critical demands
> and
> issues (many of which overlap with those raised in splendid isolation by
> Jill Stein and the Green Party), the realization of which would markedly
> advance the material well-being and future prospects of ordinary Americans:
> $15 an hour minimum wage; union card check to expand organizing rights;
> improved Medicare for all; expansion (not retrenchment) of Social Security;
> revamped progressive taxation to reduce income inequality; a Wall Street
> transaction tax; a rapid transition to renewable energy to combat climate
> change; opposition to the ecocidal, neo-fascist TPP, NAFTA, and WTO; an end
> to the militarization of local police forces; cracking down on hate groups;
> free tuition at all public universities and colleges to alleviate student
> debt peonage; paid family leave; and so on. If realized in the aggregate,
> these demands would challenge the neoliberal logic of the prevailing order.
>
> As a tactical matter, then, the Sanders upsurge is an invaluable tool for
> the mass dissemination of left themes and solutions right now—a priceless
> benefit that far outweighs the realpolitik lapses that preoccupy the
> left-echo-chamber Sanders refuseniks. Now notice that I just used the word
> tactical. Allow me to explain. Whatever the rough spots in Sanders's
> progressive resume, especially on foreign policy, it remains a stubborn
> tactical reality (and perhaps I will also be forgiven for using the word
> reality) that it is only through the vehicle of the his presidential
> campaign as a Democrat that these kinds of progressive issues and solutions
> can flood the airwaves and touch the tens of millions of desperate but
> ill-informed Americans who most need to think and hear about them—in most
> cases, for the first time. This is the unique and irreplaceable value of
> the
> Sanders candidacy: it is strewing seeds of mass consciousness around issues
> of class and inequality and the environment in a way that no other person
> or
> party could accomplish right now. Radicals need to ask themselves: How is
> that a bad thing?
> Whatever the outcome of Sanders's campaign, the sheer scope of the audience
> for his progressive checklist, his slashing denunciations of the economic
> and political tyranny of the billionaire class, are green shoots in an
> otherwise barren political landscape—and who knows how they might flourish
> in the future? This is a major breakthrough that has the potential, in
> countless molecular ways, to burst through the Democratic institutional
> framework in which it is now embedded—and, by the way, Sanders would not be
> commanding that mass audience were it not in that framework: hence the
> Sanders Paradox. To be sure, it's an inconvenient paradox for inveterate
> anti-Democrats of the left, but one to be acknowledged and exploited rather
> than condemned or ignored. The near-zero collective political IQ of the
> country urgently needs raising by any means possible and necessary, and
> sooner rather than later, given the catastrophes that are bearing down on
> us. We can't afford to disdain any advances right now, no matter how messy
> or divergent from our ideal scenarios.
> Yes, we urgently need an independent activist left party, one that can have
> a real impact. We also need socialism now, drastic carbon reductions and
> crash investment in renewable energy ten years ago, and so on. But the
> realization of those all imperatives presupposes the power of an aroused
> citizenry armed with at least a rudimentary understanding of the major
> issues. That is, most assuredly, not the American electorate as of 2015—not
> by a long shot. Buffeted by outsourcing, unemployment, underemployment,
> consumer and student debt peonage, underwater mortgages, and the rolling
> thunder of environmental/climate/resource crisis, the mass of Americans
> still lead lives of quiet desperation—and it remains mostly quiet because
> they are diverted from their gnawing anxieties and uncertainties by the
> toxic glitter of corporate culture, a ceaselessly dripping toxin that
> mollifies, numbs, and stupefies. In the words of Robert Crumb,
> What we kids didn't understand was that we were living in a commercial,
> commodity culture. Everything in our environment had been bought and sold.
> As middle class Americans, we basically grew up on a movie set. The
> conscious values that are pushed are only part of the picture. The medium
> itself plays a much bigger part than anyone realizes: the creation of
> illusion. We are living surrounded by illusion, by professionally created
> fairy tales. We barely have contact with the real world.
> The result is a woefully detached and undereducated populace, in most of
> its
> leisure hours transfixed before glowing rectangles. Walk down the street of
> any average American town or city (not Berkeley or Seattle or Brooklyn) and
> ask people if they know who Bernie Sanders is, much less Jill Stein, or
> even
> who the vice president is or what the three branches of government are.
> Then
> ask them if they've ever heard about anthropogenic global warming. You'll
> get a surprising number of blank stares, because an alarmingly large
> percentage of Americans spend most of their waking hours either (a) at
> work;
> (b) watching the NFL, professional wrestling, NASCAR, "reality" TV shows,
> or
> cotton-candy dramas and comedies; (c) surfing the Internet (and mostly not
> for news); or (d) chasing down sales at Wal-Mart or Sam's Club to try to
> make ends meet. As for civic engagement, the closest most Americans come is
> when they wait in line at the DMV, pay their taxes, get stopped by the
> police, or watch Judge Judy. And the small percentage who do take in a bit
> of news are getting hosed with a steady stream of lies from the Fox News
> Channel, MSNBC, CNN, or the happy talk crew on the late local news.
> So this is the audience the left must address: not the doughty,
> battle-ready
> proletariat of far-left daydreams, but the massively depoliticized and
> demoralized casualties of the culture industry and neoliberal piracy. In
> the
> face of the major inroads Sanders is making against this mass reign of
> indifference and ignorance, urging the virtues of an independent left party
> and movement as an alternative is like urging the virtues of fusion energy
> over solar panels—a great-sounding idea, but one that has no purchase on
> reality for the foreseeable future. The mass of Americans is not going to
> advance miraculously from widespread political nescience to applying for
> membership in the ISO in a single great leap. The far-left push for an
> independent "solution" is a practical nullity right now and will remain so
> for some time to come—and hence amounts to self-indulgent posturing in the
> face of the calamities looming on a near horizon. Blind to these tactical
> exigencies, Sanders's far-left detractors merely reinforce the political
> isolation that they seem to brandish as a badge of virtue; in reality it is
> a symptom of political debility, a fatal estrangement from the tactical
> challenges and possibilities of the moment.
> Lest some radical critics feel sullied by the intrusion of the word
> tactical, I must insist that there is no shame in leftists' thinking
> tactically at times—in fact, it is a necessity if we are to stay attuned to
> masses of people in a way that gives heft impact to any conceivable
> movement
> against the status quo. Here's an example of such a critical tactical
> consideration: At the height of the anti-Vietnam War movement in the late
> 1960s and early 1970s, I was part of a coalition that was mobilizing
> hundreds of thousands of people in the streets around the concrete (and
> principled!) slogan, "Out Now!", peaking in the April 1971 march on
> Washington DC that brought 1 million people to the nation's capital to
> demand an immediate end to the war. At that time a chorus of very
> "principled" far leftists scorned these powerful outpourings—which
> materially aided the besieged Vietnamese workers and peasants—because the
> key demand did not, in their view, go far enough or did not address an
> array
> of other issues: they argued that we should declaim "Victory to the NLF" or
> "Smash Imperialism" or "Defend the Rights of Palestinians" and so on. Now
> the tactical consideration was that pinning the actions to these far-flung
> ultimatist, simon-pure demands would have winnowed the million marchers to
> maybe five thousand, thus depriving the action of all material impact on
> the
> war while deepening the delusional self-regard of a few enraged
> middle-class
> radicals—and damn the Vietnamese workers and peasants in the process.
>
> So much for the general considerations that make at least some degree of
> critical support for the Sanders campaign a no-brainer for radicals hoping
> to make even minimal headway against the headwinds of mass ignorance and
> indifference. Now let's tick off a checklist of some of the most common
> far-left complaints about the Sanders campaign, along with brief rebuttals:
> Sanders is "sheepdogging" for the Democrats: This is self-fulfilling
> prophecy that presupposes that the mass of Americans are indeed sheep that
> can be easily herded into to this or that politician's pen. This argument
> would carry more weight if Sanders were merely feinting left, with vague
> Obama-esque marketing slogans. But clearly he is propounding a refreshingly
> frank and specific set of policies to reverse the ever-intensifying
> inequalities and injustices of the status quo, slashing with finely honed
> specifics against the abuses of the billionaire elite. Even if Sanders
> loses
> the nomination, the progressive issues and solutions he is purveying to a
> mass audience will embed firmly in popular political thought and action,
> making a future breakaway into political independence easier, not harder.
> Sanders has vowed to support whoever is nominated by the Democratic Party:
> This is really a corollary of the "sheepdogging" thesis, and the answer to
> it is simple: So what? A bald, rumpled seventy-three-year-old is commanding
> a mass audience not for sex appeal but for his passion and clarity on
> substance; he is galvanizing a huge groundswell of issue-focused voters and
> activists who would otherwise not be engaged in politics at all. A whole
> generation of voters will be more receptive to any future left
> campaigns—including independent ones—thanks to his exertions,
> notwithstanding any personal endorsements he makes a year from now.
> Sanders is not a "true" socialist: This is another "so what?" coupled to a
> "who cares?" Any of the 5,757 varieties of socialists ranging from Bernie
> Sanders to the Spartacists will tell you that they alone are the true
> socialists and that all the others are frauds. The Fox News Channel
> considers Obama a socialist; the Democratic Socialists of America would
> ridicule this foolishness, but they in turn would be called out as faux
> socialists by Trotskyist groups like the ISO and Socialist Alternative, who
> would in their turn be denounced as fraudulent by the ultra-Trot World
> Socialist Web Site (Socialist Equality Party), who would in yet another
> turn
> be reviled as mountebanks by the Mad Hatter-Trot Spartacists. Who, then,
> has
> unearthed the Holy Grail of "true" socialism? It's a hopeless, absurd
> quest,
> on a par with defining "God" or the meaning of being. We need only recall
> that the Bolsheviks, socialists who actually made a revolution rather than
> merely bloviating about it, deployed as their main agitational slogan not
> "socialism now" or "nationalize the means of production"—they reached the
> masses by advancing the very concrete "land, bread, and peace," sensibly
> grasping that desperate workers and peasants were more interested in
> tangibles than abstractions. This is a lesson well worth pondering for the
> armchair revolutionaries leading the charge against Sanders.
> Elections are a trap and diversion from real organizing: See once again the
> Bolsheviks, who regularly ran in election campaigns as a means of purveying
> their ideas—it worked pretty well for them. As long as elections are viewed
> as a tactic in a broader movement-building strategy, it is simply foolish
> to
> abstain from the reachout opportunities they afford. This leads to the next
> point:
> The Sanders campaign subtracts energy and resources from independent
> parties
> like the Greens: Supporting the Sanders campaign right now vs. building an
> independent party and movement is not a zero-sum game in which every dollar
> or ounce of energy devoted to the former is necessarily subtracted from the
> latter. Sanders is posing progressive and class-based issues with a
> boldness
> and bluntness and honesty that set him apart from past progressive
> Democratic primary aspirants. And no recent left-leaning Democratic
> presidential aspirant has sparked anything close to the firestorms of
> enthusiasm springing up around the Sanders campaign. This combination of
> mass momentum and programmatic boldness make the Sanders campaign a
> uniquely
> explosive force in American politics right now. If Sanders cannot win the
> nomination and endorses Clinton (or whomever) with the usual less-evil
> incantations, he will, by dint of the power of his campaign, have unleashed
> energies and insights into the political sphere that will have a life of
> their own well beyond his campaign and will redound to the benefit of
> future
> independent organizing efforts.
> Sanders cannot win the nomination or the general election: This is the most
> curious of the far-left objections to the Sanders campaign. Arun Gupta
> wrote
> a whole article for CounterPunch on just this issue. The entire essay
> traffics in MSM horse-race probabilities rather than political substance,
> as
> though Gupta were a hedge-fund manager assessing a possible investment
> rather than a radical seeking the most favorable vehicle for spreading his
> ideas. He adduces from various sources that (1) Sanders cannot win the
> nomination and (2) he cannot win the general election—a point that would
> seem to be moot in view of (1). He prophesies, "Simply put, you have a
> better chance of Jennifer Lawrence or Idris Elba calling you up and saying
> they want to be your friend with benefits than Bernie Sanders has of
> becoming the next president." But many of those who deride Sanders's
> chances
> will be supporting Jill Stein of the Green Party, whose likelihood of
> winning the general election is on a par with any of those critics winning
> both Powerball and Mega-Millions on the same day. Yet Jill Stein's
> statistical-hopelessness-unto absurdity will not deter the Bernie contras
> from touting Stein or some other quixotic lefty independent in the general
> election. So it appears the far-left deriders of Sanders's steep odds are
> not so averse to lost causes after all—purists in this as well, they simply
> prefer causes that are lost unto near-invisibility. And let's pose this
> question to those who argue from probability: What if the long shot Sanders
> comes through and wins the nomination and/or general election? Then what
> would you do?
> Sanders will not be able to implement his proposals even if elected because
> he will face opposition in the Congress and the Courts: Sanders himself is
> the first to acknowledge this point, which is based on a misunderstanding
> of
> his purpose in running—he is not presenting himself as a personal savior
> and
> cure-all for the world's ills; he expressly states his intention of using
> his campaign—and his nomination and election should they come to pass—of
> spurring the American people to organize to win these goals for themselves.
> As he stated in a campaign speech in Iowa last month:
> Let me tell you something that no other candidate for president will tell
> you. And that is [that] no matter who is elected to be president, that
> person will not be able to address the enormous problems facing the working
> families of our country. They will not be able to succeed because the power
> of corporate America, the power of Wall Street, the power of campaign
> donors
> is so great that no president alone can stand up to them. That is the
> truth.
> People may be uncomfortable about hearing it, but that is the reality. And
> that is why what this campaign is about is saying loudly and clearly: It is
> not just about electing Bernie Sanders for president, it is about creating
> a
> grassroots political movement in this country.
> The case for radical support for Sanders amounts to this: before we can
> arrive at point omega from point alpha, we have to traverse points beta,
> gamma, delta, and so on. There are no magic superleft flying machines that
> will propel us nonstop over all those intermediate steps from neoliberal
> despotism to radical democracy—we know this if we are organizing on the
> ground rather than theorizing in the clouds. The tempo of that journey will
> depend chiefly on advances in the consciousness of the masses, not advances
> in the vehemence of far-left declamation.
> Some leftists can fantasize that they are doing a great service to humanity
> by scoffing at the tactical tradeoffs that are essential to building a
> truly
> massive, powerful grassroots movement—but in so doing, they're merely
> isolating themselves even further from the arenas of real political work
> and
> potential mass outreach, like a swami meditating in a cave. Such radicals
> remind me of the holy men described by Swami Vivekananda:
> The highest men are calm, silent and unknown. They are the men who really
> know the power of thought; they are sure that, even if they go into a cave
> and close the door and simply think five true thoughts and then pass away,
> these five thoughts of theirs will live through eternity. . . . These
> Sâttvika men are too near the Lord to be active and to fight, to be
> working,
> struggling, preaching and doing good, as they say, here on earth to
> humanity.
> The hour is late. We face planetary emergencies of unprecedented gravity.
> Some reputable scientists say that it might be too late to avert them.
> Plato's vision of humanity trapped in the dark cave—our cave of collective
> ignorance—is no mere parable: it a prophecy turned all too real. We must
> nevertheless choose to act as though there is a way out, even if we suspect
> that our choice is more an affirmation of faith than of reason. The Sanders
> campaign has mustered enough of an audience to bolster that fragile belief.
> It is not a panacea—it is a tentative first step of hope that Americans can
> be roused in sufficient numbers to help save humanity from itself. No
> person
> of conscience should refuse to join in that step and push it as far as it
> can go.
> William Kaufman is a writer and editor who lives in New York City. He can
> be
> reached at kman484@earthlink.net.
>
>
>
> http://www.truthdig.com/ http://www.truthdig.com/
> The Far Left Needs to Relax a Little and Support Bernie Sanders
> http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_far_left_needs_to_stop_worrying_and_
> support_bernie_sanders_20150919/
> Posted on Sep 19, 2015
> By William Kaufman, CounterPunch
>
> A crowd listens to Sen. Bernie Sanders at a town hall meeting in Phoenix in
> July. (Gage Skidmore / CC BY-SA 2.0)
> This piece originated at CounterPunch. It appears here with the kind
> permission of the author.
> In this presidential summer of our discontent, the radical left has been
> fighting hard—not chiefly against capitalism and its galloping calamities,
> it seems, but against . . . Bernie Sanders. Scarcely a day passes without
> an
> ominous recitation of Sanders's manifold political shortcomings—Sanders
> exposés (read examples here, here, here and here) seem to have become a
> thriving cottage industry for the far-left commentariat.
> It should come as a startling revelation to no one that Sanders is not and
> has never aspired to be the next Lenin or Trotsky or even Bob Avakian. We
> readily concede that his record will not pass every litmus test of
> anti-imperialist and revolutionary probity—no need to belabor this point
> any
> further. But then what are we to make of Syriza, Podemos, Jeremy Corbyn, or
> even Jill Stein—and other assorted leftish flavors du jour—all of them
> seemingly quite palatable to these same ideological arbiters of the radical
> left? These other examples and Sanders are cut from essentially the same
> political cloth: left social democrats or democratic socialists inclined to
> challenge entrenched corporate interests through established political
> institutions rather than overthrowing them from without. Then why the
> radical cheers (however mixed and muted in some cases) for these other
> leftish types and jeers for Sanders, even though they all represent
> essentially the same political impulse?
> The answer lies in a hallowed, inviolable principle of the U.S. far left,
> in
> fact its most revered first commandment: thou shalt not support, endorse,
> or
> even smile at a Democrat. This prohibition is not merely a mindless
> ideological reflex—it arises from the hard truth that the national
> Democratic Party is as much a subsidiary of the corporate class as the GOP.
> Obama's crass subservience to the interests of the one percent has erased
> any doubts about this institutional fealty except among hardened
> neoliberals, tribal Democrats, and the entire on-air lineup of MSNBC. And
> there is no doubt that past left-talking presidential primary challengers
> such as Jackson and Kucinich have functioned more as safety valves than
> catalysts for popular unrest, dissipating it and re-channeling it into the
> manageable confines of the two-party arena of mock combats. The question,
> then, is this: Is there something different about the Sanders campaign that
> warrants support from radicals who have rightly spurned previous forays
> into
> the Democratic Party?
> This key question immediately begs another, even more fundamental one: How
> to awaken tens of millions of people from the entrapments of mass hypnosis,
> prostration, and indifference and into the first halting steps toward
> recognition and self-emancipation? The quandary is as old as the parable of
> Plato's cave—that mythic netherworld of darkness and illusion inhabited by
> us fallible mortals. The solution—the way out of the cave into the
> liberating light of knowledge—is as stubbornly elusive now as it was then.
> But simply naming the problem of the "false consciousness" that stymies the
> oppressed—as endlessly and vehemently reiterated by the legions of the far
> left for a small eternity—does not by itself yield a solution, as the long
> history of leftist impotence and isolation attests. It is understandably
> frustrating for the leftist sects and sages to have all the answers except
> that most important one: how to lead the "masses" out of the darkness of
> ignorance and ideological deception into enlightenment. The leftist
> groups—with their obscure tomes of theory, their blogs, their conferences
> and meetings, their tinker-toy bureaucracies, their streams of manifestoes
> and critiques, their insular feuds and splits and fiery excoriations of
> left, right, and center—are self-declared leaders without followers,
> generals with an invincible plan for battle who lack only one small detail:
> an army.
> Ten parts bellowing grandiosity to zero parts real influence, the far left
> fails a litmus test more important than any it applies to Bernie Sanders:
> Marx's call not merely to interpret the world but to change it. So we must
> ask: at this moment of gathering darkness for our species and planet, in
> this pivotal presidential campaign season, who is making greater strides
> toward triggering the mass enlightenment that is the key to empowering the
> oppressed: Sanders or his left critics? If politics is the art of
> communication, then Sanders must be judged the winner, hands down.
> In fact, the Sanders campaign represents a breakthrough for progressive
> "messaging" of remarkable scope and impact. Sanders, with his calls for
> political revolution against the billionaire class, is not just another
> standard-issue, forked-tongue, feel-your-pain Democrat; at each MSM-covered
> appearance he blasts out piercing alarms about the radical inequities and
> irrationalities of the status quo, along with sorely needed
> solutions—primal
> truths that would otherwise lie dormant and buried in the scattered
> isolated
> islets of far-leftdom.
> To dismiss these crucial inroads into mass consciousness as mere diversion,
> to deride his proposals as milquetoast Keynesian stopgap, betrays the old
> far-left allergy to the complexity and cacophony of the large stage of
> life,
> a debilitating preference for the safety and certitude of the tiny left
> echo
> chamber. Sanders's campaign, whatever its flaws, is thrusting front and
> center to a mass audience a whole series of principled, critical demands
> and
> issues (many of which overlap with those raised in splendid isolation by
> Jill Stein and the Green Party), the realization of which would markedly
> advance the material well-being and future prospects of ordinary Americans:
> $15 an hour minimum wage; union card check to expand organizing rights;
> improved Medicare for all; expansion (not retrenchment) of Social Security;
> revamped progressive taxation to reduce income inequality; a Wall Street
> transaction tax; a rapid transition to renewable energy to combat climate
> change; opposition to the ecocidal, neo-fascist TPP, NAFTA, and WTO; an end
> to the militarization of local police forces; cracking down on hate groups;
> free tuition at all public universities and colleges to alleviate student
> debt peonage; paid family leave; and so on. If realized in the aggregate,
> these demands would challenge the neoliberal logic of the prevailing order.
>
> As a tactical matter, then, the Sanders upsurge is an invaluable tool for
> the mass dissemination of left themes and solutions right now—a priceless
> benefit that far outweighs the realpolitik lapses that preoccupy the
> left-echo-chamber Sanders refuseniks. Now notice that I just used the word
> tactical. Allow me to explain. Whatever the rough spots in Sanders's
> progressive resume, especially on foreign policy, it remains a stubborn
> tactical reality (and perhaps I will also be forgiven for using the word
> reality) that it is only through the vehicle of the his presidential
> campaign as a Democrat that these kinds of progressive issues and solutions
> can flood the airwaves and touch the tens of millions of desperate but
> ill-informed Americans who most need to think and hear about them—in most
> cases, for the first time. This is the unique and irreplaceable value of
> the
> Sanders candidacy: it is strewing seeds of mass consciousness around issues
> of class and inequality and the environment in a way that no other person
> or
> party could accomplish right now. Radicals need to ask themselves: How is
> that a bad thing?
> Whatever the outcome of Sanders's campaign, the sheer scope of the audience
> for his progressive checklist, his slashing denunciations of the economic
> and political tyranny of the billionaire class, are green shoots in an
> otherwise barren political landscape—and who knows how they might flourish
> in the future? This is a major breakthrough that has the potential, in
> countless molecular ways, to burst through the Democratic institutional
> framework in which it is now embedded—and, by the way, Sanders would not be
> commanding that mass audience were it not in that framework: hence the
> Sanders Paradox. To be sure, it's an inconvenient paradox for inveterate
> anti-Democrats of the left, but one to be acknowledged and exploited rather
> than condemned or ignored. The near-zero collective political IQ of the
> country urgently needs raising by any means possible and necessary, and
> sooner rather than later, given the catastrophes that are bearing down on
> us. We can't afford to disdain any advances right now, no matter how messy
> or divergent from our ideal scenarios.
> Yes, we urgently need an independent activist left party, one that can have
> a real impact. We also need socialism now, drastic carbon reductions and
> crash investment in renewable energy ten years ago, and so on. But the
> realization of those all imperatives presupposes the power of an aroused
> citizenry armed with at least a rudimentary understanding of the major
> issues. That is, most assuredly, not the American electorate as of 2015—not
> by a long shot. Buffeted by outsourcing, unemployment, underemployment,
> consumer and student debt peonage, underwater mortgages, and the rolling
> thunder of environmental/climate/resource crisis, the mass of Americans
> still lead lives of quiet desperation—and it remains mostly quiet because
> they are diverted from their gnawing anxieties and uncertainties by the
> toxic glitter of corporate culture, a ceaselessly dripping toxin that
> mollifies, numbs, and stupefies. In the words of Robert Crumb,
> What we kids didn't understand was that we were living in a commercial,
> commodity culture. Everything in our environment had been bought and sold.
> As middle class Americans, we basically grew up on a movie set. The
> conscious values that are pushed are only part of the picture. The medium
> itself plays a much bigger part than anyone realizes: the creation of
> illusion. We are living surrounded by illusion, by professionally created
> fairy tales. We barely have contact with the real world.
> The result is a woefully detached and undereducated populace, in most of
> its
> leisure hours transfixed before glowing rectangles. Walk down the street of
> any average American town or city (not Berkeley or Seattle or Brooklyn) and
> ask people if they know who Bernie Sanders is, much less Jill Stein, or
> even
> who the vice president is or what the three branches of government are.
> Then
> ask them if they've ever heard about anthropogenic global warming. You'll
> get a surprising number of blank stares, because an alarmingly large
> percentage of Americans spend most of their waking hours either (a) at
> work;
> (b) watching the NFL, professional wrestling, NASCAR, "reality" TV shows,
> or
> cotton-candy dramas and comedies; (c) surfing the Internet (and mostly not
> for news); or (d) chasing down sales at Wal-Mart or Sam's Club to try to
> make ends meet. As for civic engagement, the closest most Americans come is
> when they wait in line at the DMV, pay their taxes, get stopped by the
> police, or watch Judge Judy. And the small percentage who do take in a bit
> of news are getting hosed with a steady stream of lies from the Fox News
> Channel, MSNBC, CNN, or the happy talk crew on the late local news.
> So this is the audience the left must address: not the doughty,
> battle-ready
> proletariat of far-left daydreams, but the massively depoliticized and
> demoralized casualties of the culture industry and neoliberal piracy. In
> the
> face of the major inroads Sanders is making against this mass reign of
> indifference and ignorance, urging the virtues of an independent left party
> and movement as an alternative is like urging the virtues of fusion energy
> over solar panels—a great-sounding idea, but one that has no purchase on
> reality for the foreseeable future. The mass of Americans is not going to
> advance miraculously from widespread political nescience to applying for
> membership in the ISO in a single great leap. The far-left push for an
> independent "solution" is a practical nullity right now and will remain so
> for some time to come—and hence amounts to self-indulgent posturing in the
> face of the calamities looming on a near horizon. Blind to these tactical
> exigencies, Sanders's far-left detractors merely reinforce the political
> isolation that they seem to brandish as a badge of virtue; in reality it is
> a symptom of political debility, a fatal estrangement from the tactical
> challenges and possibilities of the moment.
> Lest some radical critics feel sullied by the intrusion of the word
> tactical, I must insist that there is no shame in leftists' thinking
> tactically at times—in fact, it is a necessity if we are to stay attuned to
> masses of people in a way that gives heft impact to any conceivable
> movement
> against the status quo. Here's an example of such a critical tactical
> consideration: At the height of the anti-Vietnam War movement in the late
> 1960s and early 1970s, I was part of a coalition that was mobilizing
> hundreds of thousands of people in the streets around the concrete (and
> principled!) slogan, "Out Now!", peaking in the April 1971 march on
> Washington DC that brought 1 million people to the nation's capital to
> demand an immediate end to the war. At that time a chorus of very
> "principled" far leftists scorned these powerful outpourings—which
> materially aided the besieged Vietnamese workers and peasants—because the
> key demand did not, in their view, go far enough or did not address an
> array
> of other issues: they argued that we should declaim "Victory to the NLF" or
> "Smash Imperialism" or "Defend the Rights of Palestinians" and so on. Now
> the tactical consideration was that pinning the actions to these far-flung
> ultimatist, simon-pure demands would have winnowed the million marchers to
> maybe five thousand, thus depriving the action of all material impact on
> the
> war while deepening the delusional self-regard of a few enraged
> middle-class
> radicals—and damn the Vietnamese workers and peasants in the process.
>
> So much for the general considerations that make at least some degree of
> critical support for the Sanders campaign a no-brainer for radicals hoping
> to make even minimal headway against the headwinds of mass ignorance and
> indifference. Now let's tick off a checklist of some of the most common
> far-left complaints about the Sanders campaign, along with brief rebuttals:
> Sanders is "sheepdogging" for the Democrats: This is self-fulfilling
> prophecy that presupposes that the mass of Americans are indeed sheep that
> can be easily herded into to this or that politician's pen. This argument
> would carry more weight if Sanders were merely feinting left, with vague
> Obama-esque marketing slogans. But clearly he is propounding a refreshingly
> frank and specific set of policies to reverse the ever-intensifying
> inequalities and injustices of the status quo, slashing with finely honed
> specifics against the abuses of the billionaire elite. Even if Sanders
> loses
> the nomination, the progressive issues and solutions he is purveying to a
> mass audience will embed firmly in popular political thought and action,
> making a future breakaway into political independence easier, not harder.
> Sanders has vowed to support whoever is nominated by the Democratic Party:
> This is really a corollary of the "sheepdogging" thesis, and the answer to
> it is simple: So what? A bald, rumpled seventy-three-year-old is commanding
> a mass audience not for sex appeal but for his passion and clarity on
> substance; he is galvanizing a huge groundswell of issue-focused voters and
> activists who would otherwise not be engaged in politics at all. A whole
> generation of voters will be more receptive to any future left
> campaigns—including independent ones—thanks to his exertions,
> notwithstanding any personal endorsements he makes a year from now.
> Sanders is not a "true" socialist: This is another "so what?" coupled to a
> "who cares?" Any of the 5,757 varieties of socialists ranging from Bernie
> Sanders to the Spartacists will tell you that they alone are the true
> socialists and that all the others are frauds. The Fox News Channel
> considers Obama a socialist; the Democratic Socialists of America would
> ridicule this foolishness, but they in turn would be called out as faux
> socialists by Trotskyist groups like the ISO and Socialist Alternative, who
> would in their turn be denounced as fraudulent by the ultra-Trot World
> Socialist Web Site (Socialist Equality Party), who would in yet another
> turn
> be reviled as mountebanks by the Mad Hatter-Trot Spartacists. Who, then,
> has
> unearthed the Holy Grail of "true" socialism? It's a hopeless, absurd
> quest,
> on a par with defining "God" or the meaning of being. We need only recall
> that the Bolsheviks, socialists who actually made a revolution rather than
> merely bloviating about it, deployed as their main agitational slogan not
> "socialism now" or "nationalize the means of production"—they reached the
> masses by advancing the very concrete "land, bread, and peace," sensibly
> grasping that desperate workers and peasants were more interested in
> tangibles than abstractions. This is a lesson well worth pondering for the
> armchair revolutionaries leading the charge against Sanders.
> Elections are a trap and diversion from real organizing: See once again the
> Bolsheviks, who regularly ran in election campaigns as a means of purveying
> their ideas—it worked pretty well for them. As long as elections are viewed
> as a tactic in a broader movement-building strategy, it is simply foolish
> to
> abstain from the reachout opportunities they afford. This leads to the next
> point:
> The Sanders campaign subtracts energy and resources from independent
> parties
> like the Greens: Supporting the Sanders campaign right now vs. building an
> independent party and movement is not a zero-sum game in which every dollar
> or ounce of energy devoted to the former is necessarily subtracted from the
> latter. Sanders is posing progressive and class-based issues with a
> boldness
> and bluntness and honesty that set him apart from past progressive
> Democratic primary aspirants. And no recent left-leaning Democratic
> presidential aspirant has sparked anything close to the firestorms of
> enthusiasm springing up around the Sanders campaign. This combination of
> mass momentum and programmatic boldness make the Sanders campaign a
> uniquely
> explosive force in American politics right now. If Sanders cannot win the
> nomination and endorses Clinton (or whomever) with the usual less-evil
> incantations, he will, by dint of the power of his campaign, have unleashed
> energies and insights into the political sphere that will have a life of
> their own well beyond his campaign and will redound to the benefit of
> future
> independent organizing efforts.
> Sanders cannot win the nomination or the general election: This is the most
> curious of the far-left objections to the Sanders campaign. Arun Gupta
> wrote
> a whole article for CounterPunch on just this issue. The entire essay
> traffics in MSM horse-race probabilities rather than political substance,
> as
> though Gupta were a hedge-fund manager assessing a possible investment
> rather than a radical seeking the most favorable vehicle for spreading his
> ideas. He adduces from various sources that (1) Sanders cannot win the
> nomination and (2) he cannot win the general election—a point that would
> seem to be moot in view of (1). He prophesies, "Simply put, you have a
> better chance of Jennifer Lawrence or Idris Elba calling you up and saying
> they want to be your friend with benefits than Bernie Sanders has of
> becoming the next president." But many of those who deride Sanders's
> chances
> will be supporting Jill Stein of the Green Party, whose likelihood of
> winning the general election is on a par with any of those critics winning
> both Powerball and Mega-Millions on the same day. Yet Jill Stein's
> statistical-hopelessness-unto absurdity will not deter the Bernie contras
> from touting Stein or some other quixotic lefty independent in the general
> election. So it appears the far-left deriders of Sanders's steep odds are
> not so averse to lost causes after all—purists in this as well, they simply
> prefer causes that are lost unto near-invisibility. And let's pose this
> question to those who argue from probability: What if the long shot Sanders
> comes through and wins the nomination and/or general election? Then what
> would you do?
> Sanders will not be able to implement his proposals even if elected because
> he will face opposition in the Congress and the Courts: Sanders himself is
> the first to acknowledge this point, which is based on a misunderstanding
> of
> his purpose in running—he is not presenting himself as a personal savior
> and
> cure-all for the world's ills; he expressly states his intention of using
> his campaign—and his nomination and election should they come to pass—of
> spurring the American people to organize to win these goals for themselves.
> As he stated in a campaign speech in Iowa last month:
> Let me tell you something that no other candidate for president will tell
> you. And that is [that] no matter who is elected to be president, that
> person will not be able to address the enormous problems facing the working
> families of our country. They will not be able to succeed because the power
> of corporate America, the power of Wall Street, the power of campaign
> donors
> is so great that no president alone can stand up to them. That is the
> truth.
> People may be uncomfortable about hearing it, but that is the reality. And
> that is why what this campaign is about is saying loudly and clearly: It is
> not just about electing Bernie Sanders for president, it is about creating
> a
> grassroots political movement in this country.
> The case for radical support for Sanders amounts to this: before we can
> arrive at point omega from point alpha, we have to traverse points beta,
> gamma, delta, and so on. There are no magic superleft flying machines that
> will propel us nonstop over all those intermediate steps from neoliberal
> despotism to radical democracy—we know this if we are organizing on the
> ground rather than theorizing in the clouds. The tempo of that journey will
> depend chiefly on advances in the consciousness of the masses, not advances
> in the vehemence of far-left declamation.
> Some leftists can fantasize that they are doing a great service to humanity
> by scoffing at the tactical tradeoffs that are essential to building a
> truly
> massive, powerful grassroots movement—but in so doing, they're merely
> isolating themselves even further from the arenas of real political work
> and
> potential mass outreach, like a swami meditating in a cave. Such radicals
> remind me of the holy men described by Swami Vivekananda:
> The highest men are calm, silent and unknown. They are the men who really
> know the power of thought; they are sure that, even if they go into a cave
> and close the door and simply think five true thoughts and then pass away,
> these five thoughts of theirs will live through eternity. . . . These
> Sâttvika men are too near the Lord to be active and to fight, to be
> working,
> struggling, preaching and doing good, as they say, here on earth to
> humanity.
> The hour is late. We face planetary emergencies of unprecedented gravity.
> Some reputable scientists say that it might be too late to avert them.
> Plato's vision of humanity trapped in the dark cave—our cave of collective
> ignorance—is no mere parable: it a prophecy turned all too real. We must
> nevertheless choose to act as though there is a way out, even if we suspect
> that our choice is more an affirmation of faith than of reason. The Sanders
> campaign has mustered enough of an audience to bolster that fragile belief.
> It is not a panacea—it is a tentative first step of hope that Americans can
> be roused in sufficient numbers to help save humanity from itself. No
> person
> of conscience should refuse to join in that step and push it as far as it
> can go.
> William Kaufman is a writer and editor who lives in New York City. He can
> be
> reached at kman484@earthlink.net.
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